French Feminism in an International Frame Author(S): Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak Source: Yale French Studies, No

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French Feminism in an International Frame Author(s): Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak Source: Yale French Studies, No. 62, Feminist Readings: French Texts/American Contexts (1981), pp. 154-184 Published by: Yale University Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2929898 . Accessed: 09/09/2013 00:03

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This content downloaded from 128.122.149.154 on Mon, 9 Sep 2013 00:03:19 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Gayatri ChakravortySpivak

FrenchFeminism in an InternationalFrame

A young Sudanese woman in the Faculty of Sociology at a Saudi Arabian Universitysaid to me, surprisingly:"I have writtena struc- turalfunctionalist dissertation on femalecircumcision in the Sudan." I was ready to forgivethe sexist term "female circumcision."We have learned to say "clitoridectomy"because othersmore acute than we have pointed out our mistake. But StructuralFunctionalism? Where "integration"is "social control [which] defines and enforces. .. a degree of solidarity"? Where "interaction,seen fromthe side of the economy,"is defined as "consist[ing]of thesupply of incomeand wealthapplied to purposes strengtheningthe persistenceof culturalpatterns?" 1 Structuralfunc- tionalism takes a "disinterested"stance on society as functioning structure.Its implicitinterest is to applaud a system-in this case sexual-because it functions.A descriptionsuch as the one below makes it difficultto creditthat this young Sudanese womanhad taken such an approach to clitoridectomy:

In Egypt it is only the clitoriswhich is amputated,and usuallynot completely. But in the Sudan, the operation consistsin the complete removalof all the externalgenital organs. They cut offthe clitoris,the twomajor outerlips (labia majora) and the two minorinner lips (labia minora).Then thewound is repaired. The outer opening of the vagina is the only portionleft intact, not however withouthaving ensured that, during the process of repairing,some narrowingof the opening is carried out witha few extra stitches.The resultis thaton the marriagenight it is necessaryto widen the externalopening by slittingone or bothends witha sharpscalpel or razorso thatthe male organcan be introduced.2

' Bert F. Hoselitz,"Development and theTheory of Social Systems,"in M. Stanley, ed., Social Development(New York: Basic Books, 1972), pp. 45, 45. I am gratefulto ProfessorMichael Ryan fordrawing my attentionto thisarticle. 2Nawal El Saadawi, The Hidden Face of Eve: Womenin theArab World(London: Zed Press, 1980), p. 5.

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In my Sudanese colleague's researchI found an allegoryof my own ideological victimage: The "choice" of EnglishHonors by an upper-classyoung woman in the Calcuttaof thefifties was itselfhighly overdetermined. Becoming a professorof Englishin the U.S. fittedin withthe "braindrain." In due course, a commitmentto feminismwas the best of a collectionof accessiblescenarios. The morphologyof a feministtheoretical practice came clear throughJacques Derrida's critiqueof phallocentrismand Luce Irigaray'sreading of Freud. (The stumbling"choice" of French avant-gardecriticism by an undistinguishedIvy League Ph.D. working in theMidwest is itselfnot without ideology-critical interest.) Predicta- bly, I began by identifyingthe "female academic" and feminismas such. Gradually I found that there was indeed an area of feminist scholarshipin the U.S. thatwas called "InternationalFeminism:" the arena usuallydefined as feminismin England,France, West Germany, Italy, and that part of the Third World most easily accessible to American interests:Latin America. When one attemptedto thinkof so-called Third World women in a broaderscope, one foundoneself caught,as my Sudanese colleague was caughtand held by Structural Functionalism,in a web of informationretrieval inspired at best by: "what can I do for them?" I sensed obscurelythat this articulation was partof theproblem. I re-articulatedthe question:What is theconstituency of an international feminism?The followingfragmentary and anecdotalpages approach the question. The complicityof a few French textsin that attempt could be part both of the problem-the "West" out to "know" the "East" determininga "westernizedEasterner's" symptomatic attempt to "know her own world"; or of somethinglike a solution,-reversing and displacing (if only by juxtaposing"some French texts" and a "certain Calcutta") the ironclad oppositionof West and East. As soon as I writethis, it seems a hopelesslyidealistic restatement of the problem. I am not in a positionof choice in thisdilemma. To begin with,an obstinatechildhood memory. I am walkingalone in mygrandfather's estate on theBihar-Bengal borderone winterafternoon in 1949. Two ancientwasherwomen are washingclothes in the river,beating the clotheson the stones. One

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This content downloaded from 128.122.149.154 on Mon, 9 Sep 2013 00:03:19 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Yale FrenchStudies accuses the otherof poachingon her partof the river.I can stillhear the cracked derisivevoice of the one accused: "You fool! Is thisyour river?The riverbelongs to theCompany!"-the East India Company, fromwhom India passed to Englandby theAct forthe Better Govern- mentof India (1858); England had transferredits charge to an Indian Governor-General in 1947. India would become an independent republic in 1950. For these witheredwomen, the land as soil and water to be used ratherthan a map to be learnedstill belonged, as it did one hundred and nineteenyears before that date, to the East India Company. I was precociousenough to knowthat the remark was incorrect.It has taken me thirty-oneyears and the experienceof confrontinga nearly inarticulable question to apprehend that their facts were wrongbut the factwas right.The Companydoes stillown the land. I shouldnot consequentlypatronize and romanticizethese women, nor yet entertaina nostalgia for being as they are. The academic feministmust learn to learn fromthem, to speak to them,to suspect that theiraccess to the politicaland sexual scene is not merelyto be correctedby our superiortheory and enlightenedcompassion. Is our insistence upon the especial beauty of the old necessarilyto be preferredto a carelessacknowledgment of themutability of sexuality? What of the fact that my distance fromthose two was, however micrologicallyyou definedclass, class-determinedand determining? How, then, can one learn fromand speak to the millionsof illi- terate rural and urban Indian women who live "in the pores of" capitalism,inaccessible to the capitalistdynamics that allow us our sharedchannels of communication,the definition of commonenemies? The pioneeringbooks thatbring First World feminists news fromthe Third World are writtenby privilegedinformants and can only be decipheredby a trainedreadership. The distancebetween "the infor- mant's world," her "own sense of the worldshe writesabout," and thatof the non-specialistfeminist is so greatthat, paradoxically, pace the subtletiesof reader-responsetheories, here the distinctionsmight easily be missed. This is not the tirednationalist claim thatonly a nativecan know the scene. The pointthat I am tryingto make is that,in orderto learn

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This content downloaded from 128.122.149.154 on Mon, 9 Sep 2013 00:03:19 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Gayatri ChakravortySpivak enough about ThirdWorld women and to develop a differentreader- ship, the immense heterogeneityof the field must be appreciated, and the FirstWorld feministmust learn to stop feelingprivileged as a woman. These concernswere well articulatedin myapproach to feminism when I came across Julia Kristeva'sAbout Chinese Women.3Here again I founda linkwith my own ideologicalvictimage, "naturaliza- tion" transformedinto privilege. Frenchtheorists such as Derrida, Lyotard,Deleuze, and the like, have at one timeor anotherbeen interestedin reachingout to all that is not the West, because theyhave, in one wayor another,questioned the millenniallycherished excellences of Westernmetaphysics: the sovereigntyof the subject's intention,the power of predicationand so on. There is a more or less vaguely articulatedconviction that these characteristicshad somethinglike a relationshipwith the morphologyof capital. The Frenchfeminist theory that makes itsway to us comes to a readershipmore or less familiarwith this enclave. During the 1970's, the prestigiousjournal Tel Quel-Kristeva is on the editorialcommittee-pursued an assiduousif somewhat eclec- tic interestin the matterof China.4 Before I considerthat interest as it is deployedin About ChineseWomen, let us look brieflyat thesolu- tion Kristevaoffers Frenchwomen in the firstpart of her book:

We cannot gain access to the temporalscene, i.e. to politicalaffairs, except by identifyingwith the values consideredto be masculine(dominance, superego, the endorsed communicativeword that institutesstable social exchange) ... [We must]achieve thisidentification in order to escape a smugpolymorphism where it is so easy and comfortablefor a woman here to remain;and by this identification[we must]gain entryto social experience.[We must]be waryfrom the firstof the premiumon narcissismthat such an integrationmay carry with it: to reject the validityof homologous woman, finallyvirile: and to act, on the socio-politico-historicalstage, as her negative:that is, to act firstwith all those who "swim againstthe tide," all those who refuse. .. But neitherto take the role of revolutionary(male or female): to refuseall roles . .. to summonthis timeless"truth"-formless, neithertrue nor false,echo of our pleasure,of our

3Julia Kristeva, About Chinese Women, tr. Anita Barrows (London: Marion Boyars, 1977). 4As is indicatedby PhilippeSollers, "On n'a encorerien vu," Tel Quel 85, Autumn 1980, this interesthas now been superseded.

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madness, of our pregnancies-into the orderof speech and social symbolism. But how? By listening;by recognizingthe unspokenin speech, even revolu- tionaryspeech; by callingattention at all timesto whateverremains unsatisfied, repressed,new, eccentric,incomprehensible, disturbing to thestatus quo (p. 38; italics mine).

This is a set of directivesfor class- and race-privilegedliterary women who can ignorethe seductiveeffects of identifyingwith the values of the otherside whilerejecting their validity;5 and, by identifyingthe politicalwith the temporaland linguistic,ignore as well the micrologyof political economy. To act with individualisticrather than systematicsubverters in order to summon timeless "truths" resemblesthe task of the literarycritic who explicatesthe secretsof the avant-gardeartist of westernEurope; the programof "symptomatic and semiotic reading"-here called "listening"-adds more detail to that literary-criticaltask.6 The end of thischapter reveals anotherline of thoughtactive in the groupI mentionabove: to bring togetherMarx and Freud: "An analystconscious of historyand politics?A politiciantuned into the unconscious?A womanperhaps ... (p. 38). Kristevais certainlyaware thatsuch a solutioncannot be offered to the nameless women of the Third World. Here is her opening descriptionof some womenin Huxian Square: "An enormouscrowd is sittingin the sun: theywait forus wordlessly,perfectly still. Calm eyes, not even curious,but slightlyamused or anxious: in any case, piercing,and certainof belongingto a communitywith which we will never have anythingto do" (p. 11). Her question,in theface of those silentwomen, is about her own identityrather than theirs:"Who is speaking,then, before the stareof the peasants at Huxian?" (p. 15). This too mightbe a characteristicof the groupof thinkersto whomI have, mostgenerally attached her. In spiteof theiroccasional interest in touchingthe otherof the West, of metaphysics,of capitalism,their repeated question is obsessivelyself-centered: if we are not what

5For an astute summaryand analysisof thisproblem in termsof electoralCom- munismand Social Democracy,see Adam Przeworski,"Social Democracyas a Histori- cal Phenomenon," New LeftReview 122, July-August,1980. 6For Kristeva'sargument that the literaryintellectual is the fulcrumof dissentsee "Un nouveau type d'intellectuel:le dissident,"Tel Quel 74, Winter1977.

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This content downloaded from 128.122.149.154 on Mon, 9 Sep 2013 00:03:19 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Gayatri ChakravortySpivak officialhistory and philosophysay we are, who then are we (not), how are we (not)? It is thereforenot surprisingthat, even as she leaves theincredibly detailed terrainof the problemof knowingwho she herselfis exactly the speaking,reading, listening "I" at thisparticular moment-she beginsto computethe realityof who "they"are in termsof millennia: "One thingis certain:a revolutionin the rulesof kinshiptook place in China, and can be tracedto sometimearound B.C. 1000" (p. 46). The sweepinghistoriographical scope is not internallyconsistent. Speaking of modem China, Kristeva asserts drastic socio-sexual structuralchanges throughlegislation in a briskreportorial tone that does not allow for irony(p. 118; p. 128). Yet, speakingof ancient China, she findstraces of an older matrilinealand matrilocalsociety (evidence for which is gleaned fromtwo books by Marcel Granet, datingfrom the twentiesand thirties,and based on "folkdance and legend" [p. 47]-and Levi-Strauss's general book on elementary structuresof kinship)lingering through the fierce Confucian tradition to thisvery day because, at first,it seems to be speculativelythe more elegant argument(p. 68). In ten pages this speculativeassumption has taken on psychologicalcausality (p. 78). In anotherseventy-odd pages, and alwayswith no encroachment of archival evidence, speculationhas become historicalfact: "The influenceof the powerfulsystem of matrilineardescent, and the Confucianismthat is so stronglyaffected by it, can hardlybe dis- counted" (p. 151). Should such a vigorousconclusion not call into questionthe authorityof thefollowing remark, used, it seems,because at thatpoint the authorneeds a way of valorizingthe womenof the countrysidetoday over the women of the cities: "An intenselife- experience has thrustthem froma patriarchalworld whichhadn't moved for millenniainto a modem universewhere theyare called upon to command" (p. 193; italic mine)? Where then are those matrilocalvestiges that kept up women's strengthall throughthose centuries?7

7JosephNeedham's attitudestoward the curious factof femininesymbolism in Taoism, as expressed in The Grand Titration:Science and Societyin East and West (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1969) is altogethertentative.

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It is this wishfuluse of historythat bringsKristeva close to the eighteenth-centurySinophiles whom she criticizesbecause "they deformedthose systemsin order to assimilatethem into theirown" (p. 53). In the verynext page, "the essentialproblem" of the inter- pretationof Chinese thought,defined (under cover of the self-depre- catoryquestion) as a species of differentialsemiotics: "The heterogeneityof thisLi [formand contentat once] defiessymbolism, and is actualized only by derivation,through a combinationof opposing signs (+ and -, earthand sky,etc.), all of whichare of equal value. In other words, there is no single isolatable symbolicprinciple to oppose itself and assert itselfas transcendentlaw." Even as the Western-trainedThird World feministdeplores the absence of the usual kindof textualanalysis and demonstration,she is treatedto the most stupendousgeneralizations about Chinese writing,a topos of that very eighteenthcentury that Kristeva scorns: "Not only has Chinese writingmaintained the memoryof matrilinearpre-history (collective and individual)in its architectonicof image, gesture,and sound; it has been able as well to integrateit into a logico-symbolic code capable of ensuringthe most direct,'reasonable,' legislating- even the most bureaucratic-communication:all the qualities that the West believes itselfunique in honouringand thatit attributesto the Father" (p. 57). Kristeva'stext seems to authorize,here and else- where, the definitionof the essentiallyfeminine and the essentially masculine as non-logical and logical. At any rate, this particular movementends withthe conclusionthat "the Chinesegive us a 'structuralist'or 'warring'(contradictory) portrait" (p. 57). Kristevaprefers this misty past to thepresent. Most of heraccount of the latteris dates, legislations,important people, importantplaces. There is no transitionbetween the two accounts.Reflecting a broader Westerncultural practice, the "classical" East is studiedwith primiti- vistic reverence, even as the "contemporary"East is treatedwith realpolitikalcontempt. On thebasis of evidencegleaned from lives of greatwomen included in translatedanthologies and thesesof the troisiemecycle ( take it that is what "thirdform thesis" [p. 91] indicates)and no primaryresearch; and an unquestioningacceptance of Freud's conclusionsabout the

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"pre-oedipal" stage, and no analyticexperience of Chinese women, Kristevamakes thisprediction: "If the question[of finding a channel forsexual energyin a socialistsociety through various forms of subli- mationoutside the family]should be asked one day, and ifthe analysis of Chinese traditionthat the Pi Lin Pi Kong [againstLin and Kong] Campaign seems to have undertakenis not interrupted,it's not alto- getherimpossible that China mayapproach it withmuch less prudish- ness and fetishisticneurosis than the ChristianWest has managed while clamouringfor 'sexual freedom"' (p. 90). Whetheror not the "ChristianWest" as a whole has been clamoringfor sexual freedom, the predictionabout China is of course a benevolentone; mypoint is that its provenanceis symptomaticof a colonialistbenevolence. The most troublingfeature of About Chinese Womenis that,in the contextof China, Kristevaseems to bluntthe fineedge of her approach to literature.She draws many conclusions about "the motherat the centre" in ancientChina from"all the manualsof the 'Art of the Bedchamber'-which date back to thefirst century A.D." and "a novel of the Qing Dynasty. . . The Dream of theRed Pavil- ion" (p. 61, 79). Let us forgetthat there is no attemptat textual analysis,not even in translation.We muststill ask, are thesemanuals representativeor marginal, "normal" or "perverse," have they a class fix?Further, is the relationshipbetween "literature and life" so unproblematicas to permitThe Dream to be describedas "an accurate portraitof noble families"because it "is currentlystudied in China as evidence of the insoluble linkbetween class struggleand intra/inter- familialattitudes?" (pp. 78-79). How may it differwhen a Chinese person witha "Chinese experience"studies it in Chinese,apparently in thisway? Is it only the West thatcan affordits protracteddebate over the representationalityof realism?Similar questions haunt the reader as Kristeva launches into a runningsummary of the female literatiof China since 150 A.D., in termsof dominantthemes. She offersthis impressionisticcomment on a poet who, we are told, is "among the greatest,not only in China, but in the literatureof the entire world" (p. 50): "Li Qingzhao breathesinto these universal traitsof Chinese poetrya musicalityrarely attained by otherpoets: the brilliantlyintertwined rhythms and alliterations,the shape of the

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This content downloaded from 128.122.149.154 on Mon, 9 Sep 2013 00:03:19 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Yale FrenchStudies charactersthemselves, create a languagewhere the least aural or visual element becomes the bearer of thissymbiosis between body, world, and sense, a language that one cannot label 'music' or 'meaning' because it is both at once." The poem is then"quoted" twice-first in Englishtranscription and literaltranslation, and nextin "a translation (from a French version by Philippe Sollers)." What would happen to Louise Labe in such a quick Chinese treatmentfor a Chinese audience with a vestigialsense of European cultureas a whole? What is one to make of the gap betweenthe last linesof the two translations:"This time/ how a singleword / sadnessis enough" and "this time one / word death won't be enough?" What would happen to "Absent thee fromfelicity awhile" in a correspondingly "free" Chinese version? As we come to the literaturesof modernChina, all the careful apologies of the openingof the book seem forgotten:"Let us examine the findingsof a few researcherson familypsychology or its repre- sentationin modem fiction,as a means of understandingthe forms these feudal/Confucianmores take in Chinese culturetoday" (p. 95). As faras I can tell,the author'ssource of literaryinformation-a few simple statistics-is a singlearticle by Ai-Li S. Chin, "FamilyRela- tions in Modem Chinese Fiction,"in M. Freedman,ed., Familyand Kinship in Chinese Society.8It seems startling,then, that it can be said with apparent ease: "Are these [mother-daughter]problems intensifiedby those passionate and archaicrivalries between women which,in the West, produce our Electras,who usurptheir mothers' roles by murderingthem in the names of theirfathers? Chinese litera- tureis not explicithere" (p. 146; italicsmine). This bringsus to a certainprincipled "anti-feminism" in Kristeva's book whichmay be relatedto whathas been called "the New Philo- sophy" in France.9 "The Electras- deprivedforever of theirhymens -militants in the cause of theirfathers, frigid with exaltation-are dramaticfigures where the social consensuscorners any womanwho

8StanfordUniv. Press, 1970. See Chinese Women,p. 98n, p. 145n. 9For a somewhatdated and dogmaticview of thismovement, see Michael Ryan and Spivak, "AnarchismRevisited: A New Philosophy?,"Diacritics 8, no. 2, Summer, 1978.

This content downloaded from 128.122.149.154 on Mon, 9 Sep 2013 00:03:19 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Gayatri ChakravortySpivak wants to escape her condition:nuns, 'revolutionaries,''feminists"' (p. 32). I thinksuch a sentimentrests upon certainunexamined questions: What is the relationshipbetween myth (the storyof Electra), the socio-literaryformulation of myths(Aeschylus's Oresteia, written fora civiccompetition with choruses, owned by richcitizens, playing with freelance troupes) and "the immutablestructures" of human behavior?What hiddenagenda does Freud's use of Greek mythto fix the father-daughterrelationship-specially at the end of "Analysis Terminable and Interminable"-contain? AlthoughKristeva some- times speaks in a tone reminiscentof Anti-Oedipus,she does not broach these questions,which are the basis of thatbook.'O This principled"anti-feminism," which puts its trust in the indivi- dualisticcritical avant-garde rather than anything that might call itself a revolutionarycollectivity is partof a generalintellectual backlash- represented,for instance, by Tel Quel's espousal of the Chinese past afterthe disappointmentwith the CommunistParty of France during the events of May 1968 and the movementtoward a Left Coalition throughthe early 1970's. The question of how to speak to the "faceless" womenof China cannot be asked withinsuch a partisanconflict. The question,even, of who speaks in frontof the mute and uncomprehendingwomen in Huxian Square must now be articulatedin sweepingmacrological terms.The real differencesbetween "our Indo-European,monothe- istic world . . . stillobviously in the lead" (p. 195) and the Chinese situation must be presentedas the fact that the "Chinese women whose ancestressesknew the secretsof the bedchamberbetter than anyone . . . are similarto the men" (p. 198). Thus when Chinese Communismattacks the tendencies-"pragmatic,materialistic, psy- chological"-that "are considered'feminine' by patriarchalsociety," it does not reallydo so; because in China the pre-patriarchalsociety has alwayslingered on, givingwomen access to real ratherthan repre- sentativepower. I have indicatedabove myreasons for thinking that the evidence forthis lingering maternal power, at least as offeredin

"The Standard Edition of the PsychologicalWorks of SigmundFreud (London: HogarthPress, 1964, vol. 23; Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari,Anti-Oedipus: Capita- lismand Schizophrenia,vol. 1, tr.Robert Hurley et al. (New York: VikingPress, 1972).

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This content downloaded from 128.122.149.154 on Mon, 9 Sep 2013 00:03:19 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Yale FrenchStudies this book, is extremelydubious. Yet that is, indeed, Kristeva's "reason" forsuggesting that in China the Party'ssuppression of the feminineis not reallya suppressionof the "feminine":"By addressing itselfthus to women, [the Party]appeals to theircapacity to assume the symbolicfunction (the structuralconstraint, the law of thesociety): a capacity which itselfhas a basis in tradition,since it includesthe worldprior to and behindthe scenes of Confucianism"(p. 199; italics mine). My final question about this macrologicalnostalgia for the pre- historyof the East is plaintiveand predictable:what about us? The "Indo-European" worldwhose "monotheism"supports the argument of the differencebetween China and theWest is not altogethermono- theistic.The splendid,decadent, multiple, oppressive, and morethan milennialpolytheistic tradition of India has to be writtenout of the Indo-European picturein order thatthis difference may stand. The fact that Kristevathus speaks for a generalizedWest is the "naturalizationtransformed into privilege"that I compared to my own ideological victimage.As she investigatesthe pre-Confuciantext of the modem Chinese woman,her own pre-historyin Bulgariais not even a shadow underthe harsh light of theParisian voice. I hold on to a solitarypassage:

For me-having been educated in a "popular democracy,"having benefited fromits advantagesand been subjectedto itscensorship, having left it inasmuch as it is possible to leave the worldof one's childhood,and probablynot without bearingits "birthmarks"-forme what seems to be "missing"in the systemis, indeed, the stubbornrefusal to admitanything is missing(p. 156).

Who is speakinghere? An effortto answerthat question might have revealed more about the mute women of Huxian Square, looking withqualified envy at "the incursionof the West."

I am suggesting,then, that a deliberateapplication of thedoctrines of FrenchHigh "Feminism"to a differentsituation of politicalspeci- fitymight misfire. If, however, InternationalFeminism is defined within a Western European context, the heterogeneitybecomes manageable. In our own situationas academicfeminists, we can begin

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This content downloaded from 128.122.149.154 on Mon, 9 Sep 2013 00:03:19 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Gayatri ChakravortySpivak thinkingof planninga class. What one does not knowcan be worked up. There are experts in the field. We can work by the practical assumptionthat thereis no serious communicationbarrier between themand us. No anguishover unchartedcontinents, no superstitious dread of makingfalse starts,no questionsto whichanswers may not at least be entertained. Withinsuch a context,after initial weeks attemptingto defineand name an "American" and an "English" feminism,one would get down to the question of what is specificabout Frenchfeminism. We shall consider the fact that the most accessible strand of French feminismis governedby a philosophythat argues the impossibility of answeringsuch a question. We now have the indispensabletextbook for this segment of the course: New French Feminism: An Anthology,edited by Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron."IIn the United States, French feminismor, more specifically,French feministtheory, has so far been of interestto a "radical" fringein French and Comparative Literaturedepartments rather than to the feministsin the field. A book such as thishas an interdisciplinaryaccessibility. This is somewhat unlike the case in England, whereMarxist feminism has used mainstream(or masculist)French "theory"-at least Althusserand Lacan-to explain the constitutionof the subject (of ideology or sexuality)-to produce a more specifically"feminist" critique of Marx's theoriesof ideologyand reproduction.'2 Because of a predominantly"literary" interest, the question in Frenchfeminist texts that seems mostrelevant and urgentis thatof a specificallyfeminine discourse. At the crossroadsof sexualityand ideology,woman standsconstituted (if that is theword) as object. As subject, woman mustlearn to "speak 'otherwise,"'or "make audible [what]. . . sufferssilently in theholes of discourse"(Xaviere Gauthier, p. 163). The relationshipbetween this project of "speaking"(writing) and

IIAmherst: Univ. of MassachusettsPress, 1980. In thispart of myessay, I have quoted liberallyfrom New FrenchFeminisms, giving the name of the authorof the particularpiece and the page number. 12J hope to presenta discussionof such an appropriationin a forthcomingbook on Deconstruction,Feminism, and Marxism.

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Kristeva's project of "listening"(reading) is clear. Such a writingis generallythough not invariablyattempted in feministfiction or fami- liar-essay-cum-prose-poemsuch as Cixous's Preparatifsde noces au delh de l'abtmeor Monique Wittig'sLesbian Body.13 As such it has strongties to the "evocative magic" of the prose poem endorsedby Baudelaire-the powerof indeterminatesuggestion rather than deter- minate referencethat could overwhelmand sabotage the signifying conventions.Baudelaire is not ofteninvoked by the Frenchtheorists of feministor revolutionarydiscourse. Is it because his practice remains caught withinthe gesturesof an embarrassinglymasculist decadence (linked to "highcapitalism" by WalterBenjamin, A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism?'4

The importantfigures for these theoristsremain Mallarme and Joyce.Julia Kristeva and Helene Cixous, the two feministdiscourse- theoristswho are mostheard in theU.S., do notdisavow this. Kristeva seems to suggest that if women can accede to the avant-gardein general, theywill fulfillthe possibilitiesof theirdiscourse (p. 166). Cixous privilegespoetry (for "the novelists[are] allies of representa- tion" [p. 250]) and suggeststhat a Kleist or a Rimbaud can speak as women do. Older feministwriters like Duras ("the rhetoricof women, one thatis anchoredin the organism,in the body" [p. 238] -rather than the mind, the place of the subject) or Sarraute are thereforerelated to the mainstreamavant-garde phenomenon of the nouveau roman. In a certain sense the definitivecharacteristic of the French feministproject of foundinga woman's discoursereflects a coalition with the continuingtradition of the French avant-garde.It can be referredto the debate about the politicalpotential of the avant-garde, between Expressionismand Realism.'5 It is also an activitythat is more politicallysignificant for the

13Irigaray, Ce sexe qui n'en estpas un (Paris: Minuit,1977); Cixous, Preparatifsde noces au deld de l'abime (Paris: des femmes,1978); Wittig,Lesbian Body, tr. David Le Vay (New York: WilliamMorrow, 1975). 14(London: New Left Books, 1973). 15Cf. Ernst Bloch, Aestheticsand Politics,tr. Ronald Taylor (London: New Left Books, 1977).

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This content downloaded from 128.122.149.154 on Mon, 9 Sep 2013 00:03:19 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Gayatri ChakravortySpivak producer/writerthan the consumer/reader.It is forthe writerrather thanthe readerthat Herbert Marcuse's words may have some validity: "There is the innerlink between dialectical thought and the effortof avant-gardeliterature: the effortto break thepower of factsover the word, and to speak a languagewhich is not thelanguage of thosewho establish, enforce and benefitfrom the facts."''6As even a quick glance at the longest entriesfor the late nineteenthand twentieth centuries in the PMLA bibliographieswill testify,the "political" energyof avant-gardeproduction, contained within the presentaca- demic system,leads to littlemore than the stockpilingof exegeses, restoringthose textsback to propositionaldiscourse. In fact,given thissituation, the power of a Les Guerilkresor a TellMe a Riddle (to mentiona non-Frenchtext)-distinguishing them from the "liberated texts"supposedly subverting "the traditional components of discourse," but in fact sharing"all the componentsof the most classic porno- graphicliterature" (Benolte Groult,p. 72)-is whatthey talk about, theirsubstantive revision of, ratherthan their apparent formal allegi- ance to, the European avant-garde.This differentialwill stubbornly remain in the most "deconstructive"of readings. The search for a discourseof woman is related not merelyto a literarybut also the philosophicalavant-garde which I mentioned withreference to About ChineseWomen. The itineraryof thisgroup is set out in JacquesDerrida's "The Ends of Man." 17Louis Althusser launched a challenge against Sartre's theoryof humanisticpractice and his anthropologisticreading of Marx withhis own "Feuerbach's 'PhilosophicalManifesto"' in 1960.18 Althusser'sposition was scientific anti-humanism.The challengein Frenchphilosophy described by Derrida in his essay (whichmakes a pointof beingwritten in 1968), again largelyin termsof Sartre and his anthropologisticreading of Heidegger, can be called an anti-scientificanti-humanism. (Sartre does not remainthe buttof the attackfor long. An echo of theimpor- tance of Sartreas thechief philosopher of French humanism, however,

16Reason and Revolution:Hegel and the Rise of Social Theory(Boston: Beacon Press, 1960), p. x. '7Tr. Edouard Morot-Siret al., Philosophyand PhenomenologicalResearch, 30, no. 1, September, 1969. '8In For Marx, tr. Ben Brewster(New York: Vintage, 1970).

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This content downloaded from 128.122.149.154 on Mon, 9 Sep 2013 00:03:19 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Yale FrenchStudies is heard in Michele Le Doeuff's "Simone de Beauvoir and Existen- tialism,"presented on theoccasion of thethirtieth anniversary of The Second Sex in New York.'9 Le Doeuff'sessay reminds us that,just as the currentanti-humanism move in French philosophywas "post- Sartrean" as well as "post-structuralist,"so also the discourse-theo- ristsin Frenchfeminism marked a rupture,precisely, from Simone de Beauvoir.) In "Ends of Man," Derrida is describinga trendin contemporary French philosophyrather than specificallyhis own thoughts,though he does hint how his own approach is distinctfrom the others'. "Man" in thispiece is neitherdistinguished from woman nor specifically inclusiveof her. "Man" is simplythe hero of philosophy:

There is [in existentialism]no interruptionin a metaphysicalfamiliarity which so naturallyrelates the we of the philosopherto "we-men,"the total horizon of humanity.Although the themeof historyis eminentlypresent .. . the history of the conceptof man is neverquestioned. Everything takes place as thoughthe sign "man" had no origin,no historical,cultural, linguistic limit (p. 35).

Any extendedconsideration of Derrida's descriptionwould locate the landmarktexts. Here sufficeit to pointat Jean-FrangoisLyotard's Economie libidinale,since it establishesan affinitywith the French feministuse of Marx.20 For Lyotard,the Freudianpluralization of "the groundsof man" is stillno more thana "politicaleconomy," plotted as it is in termsof investments(German Besetzung,English "cathexis," French investis- sement-providinga convenientanalogy) of the libido. In termsof a "libidinal" economy as such, when the "libidinal Marx" is taken withinthis "libidinal cartography" (p. 117) whatemerges is a powerful "literary-critical"exegesis under the governingallegory of the libido, cross-hatchedwith analogies between "a philosophyof aliena- tion and a psychoanalysisof the signifier"(p. 158), or "capitalist society" and "prostitution"(p. 169) whichhas, admittedly,very little to do with the micrologicaland shiftingspecificities of the class- struggleand itscomplicity with the economic text of the world-market.21

9Tr. Colin Gordon, FeministStudies 6, no. 2, Summer,1980. 20(Paris: Minuit), 1974, p. 10. 21 For a discussionof the lack of specificityin the privilegedmetaphorics of politi-

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I have alreadyspoken of the "New Philosophical"reaction to the possibilityof a Left Coalition in 1978. Withinthis capsule summary such a reaction can be called anti-humanist(against the privileged subject), anti-scientific(against psychoanalysis and Marxismas specific or "regional" practices) and anti-revolutionary(against collecti- vities). It is withinthis context of thedeconstruction of thegeneral sign of "man" as it existswithin the "metaphysical"tradition(a deconstruction that can "produce"-Derrida commentingon Blanchot-"'female element,' which does not signifyfemale person")22that the followingstatements by Kristeva about the specificsign "woman" should be read:

On a deeper level [thanadvertisements or slogansfor our demands],however, a woman cannot "be"; it is somethingwhich does not even belongin the orderof being. It followsthat a feministpractice can onlybe negative,at odds withwhat already exists.... In "woman" I see somethingthat cannot be represented, somethingabove and beyondnomenclatures and ideologies.... Certainfemi- nistdemands revive a kindof naive romanticism,a beliefin identity(the reverse of phallocentrism),if we compare them to the experienceof both poles of sexual differenceas is foundin theeconomy of Joycian or Artaudianprose.... I pay close attentionto the particularaspect of the work of the avant-garde which dissolvesidentity, even sexual identities;and in mytheoretical formula- tions I tryto go againstmetaphysical theories that censure what I just labeled a "woman"-that is what,I think,makes my research that of a woman(pp. 137-38).

I have already expressedmy dissatisfactionwith the presupposi- tion of the necessarilyrevolutionary potential of the avant-garde, literaryor philosophical. There is somethingeven faintlycomical about Joycerising above sexual identitiesand bequeathingthe proper mind-setto the women's movement.The point mightbe to remark how, even if one knowshow to undo identities,one does not necessarily escape the historicaldeterminations of sexism.23Yet it must cal economy,especially in some textsof Derrida, see Spivak, "Il fauts'y prendreen s'en prenanta elles," in Les finsde l'homme(Paris: Galilee, 1981). 22"The Law of Genre," Glyph7, 1980, p. 225. 23PercyShelley's treatmentof Harrietand Mary is a case in point;a "life" is not necessarily"outside the text."I have discussedthe question in greaterdetail in "Finding FeministReadings: Dante-Yeats" (forthcomingin Social Text)and "Displacementand the Discourse of Woman" (forthcomingin a collectionof the Center forTwentieth CenturyStudies at the Universityof Wisconsin-Milwaukee).

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This content downloaded from 128.122.149.154 on Mon, 9 Sep 2013 00:03:19 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Yale FrenchStudies also be acknowledgedthat there is in Kristeva'stext an implicitdouble programfor women whichwe encounterin the best of Frenchfemi- nism: againstsexism, where women uniteas a biologicallyoppressed caste; and for feminism,where humanbeings train to preparefor a transformationof consciousness. Withinthis group of male anti-humanistavant-garde philsophers, Derrida has most overtlyinvestigated the possibilitiesof "the name of woman" as a corollaryto the project of charging"the ends of man." In Of Grammatologyhe relatesthe privilegingof thesovereign subject not only with phonocentrism(primacy of voice-consciousness) and logocentrism(primacy of the word as law), but also with phallocentrism(primacy of the phallusas arbiterof [legal]identity).24 In textssuch as "La double seance" (the figureof the hymenas both inside and outside), Glas (the projectof philosophyas desirefor the mother),Eperons (woman as affirmativedeconstruction), "The Law of Genre" (the female element as double affirmation)and "Living On: Border Lines" (double invaginationas textualeffect) a certain textualityof woman is established. Helene Cixous is most directlyaware of this line of thoughtin Derrida. She mentionsDerrida's workwith approval in herinfluential "Laugh of the Medusa" (p. 258) and "Sorties" (p. 91). Especiallyin the latter,she uses the Derridianmethodology of reversingand dis- placinghierarchized binary oppositions. The textbegins with a series of these oppositionsand Cixous says of women: "she does not enter intothe oppositions,she is not coupledwith the father (who is coupled withthe son)." Later, Cixous deploysthe Derridian notion of restance (remains) or minimalidealization, giving to woman a dispersedand differentialidentity: "She does not exist,she maybe nonexistent;but there must be somethingof her" (p. 92).26 She relates man to his particular"torment, his desireto be (at) the origin"(p. 92). She uses

24Derrida,Of Grammatology,tr. Spivak (Baltimore:Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1976). 25"La double seance," La dissemination(Paris: Seuil, 1972); Glas (Paris: Galilee, 1976); "The Law of Genre" (op. cit.); "LivingOn: BorderLines," in Harold Bloom et al., Deconstruction& Criticism(New York: Seabury Press, 1979). 26Fora discussionof the importanceof restanceor minimalidealization in Derrida, see Spivak, "Revolutionsthat as Yet Have No Model: Derrida's LimitedInc.," forth- coming in Diacritics.

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This content downloaded from 128.122.149.154 on Mon, 9 Sep 2013 00:03:19 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Gayatri ChakravortySpivak the theme of socio-politicaland ideological "textuality"with a sure- ness of touch thatplaces her withinthe Derridian-Foucauldianprob- lematic: "men and women are caught in a networkof millenial culturaldeterminations of a complexitythat is practicallyunanalyz- able: we can no more talk about 'woman' than about 'man' without being caughtwithin an ideologicaltheater where the multiplication of representations,images, reflections, myths, identifications constantly transforms,deforms, alters each person's imaginaryorder and in advance, rendersall conceptualizationnull and void" (p. 96).27 "We can no more talkabout 'woman' thanabout 'man."' This sentimentis matched by the passage fromKristeva I quote above-to make my point that the decision not to search for a woman's identitybut to speculate about a woman'sdiscourse by way of thenegative is related to the deconstruction-ofman's insistenceupon his own identityas betrayed by existingmodels of discourse-launchedby mainstream French and anti-humanism. Cixous relatesthe idea of thisover-determined ideological theater to the impossibleheterogeneity of "each person's imaginaryorder." She is referringhere to the Lacanian notion of the "irremediably deceptive" Imaginary,a "basicallynarcissistic relation of the subject to his [sic] ego"; a relationshipto other subjects as my "counter- parts"; a relationshipto the world by way of ideologicalreflexes; a relationshipto meaning in termsof resemblanceand unity.28To change the stockof Imaginarycounterparts which provides the material forsublation into the symbolicdimension is an importantpart of the project for a woman's discourse: "Assumingthe real subjective position that correspondsto this discourseis anothermatter. One would cut throughall the heavy layersof ideologythat have borne

27Cf. Clement, "La Coupable," in La jeune nee (Paris: Union Gendrale d'Edi- tions, 1975), p. 15. This network-web-tissu-textis the untotalizableyet always grasped "subject" of "textuality."In Barthesit is the "writable,"where we are writteninto this fullertext. Dernda speaks of it mostcompellingly in "Ja, ou le faux-bond,"Digraphes 11, March, 1977. It is in these termsthat Foucault's notion of the micro physicsof power should be understood.It is a mistaketo thinkof such a thematicof textualityas a mere reductionof historyto language. 28J.Laplanche and J.-B. Pontalis, The Language of Psycho-Analysis,tr. Donald Nicholson-Smith(New York: Norton, 1973), p. 210. The gap betweenthis distilled definitionand its use in the feministcontext reminds us yetonce again thatthe use of a dictionaryhas its own attendantdangers.

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This content downloaded from 128.122.149.154 on Mon, 9 Sep 2013 00:03:19 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Yale FrenchStudies down since the beginningsof the familyand privateproperty: that can be done onlyin the imagination.And thatis preciselywhat femi- nistaction is all about: to changethe imaginaryin orderto be able to act on the real, to change the veryforms of language whichby its structureand historyhas been subject to a law that is patrilinear, thereforemasculine" (Catherine Clement, pp. 130-31).29 In the followingremark by AntoinetteFouque, the space between the "ideological" and the "symbolic"is markedby the Imaginaryorder: "Women cannot allow themselvesto deal with political problems while at the same timeblotting out the unconscious.If theydo, they become, at best, feministscapable of attackingpatriarchy on the ideological level but not on a symboliclevel" (p. 117). Now Cixous, as the mostDerridian of the French"anti-feminist" feminists,knows that the re-inscriptionof the Imaginarycannot be a project launched by a sovereignsubject; just as she knowsthat "it is impossible to definea femininepractice of writing,and this is an impossibilitythat will remain" (p. 253). Therefore,in Cixous the Imaginaryremains subjected to persistentalteration and the concept's grasp upon it remains always deferred.This is a classic argument withinthe Frenchanti-humanist deconstruction of the sovereigntyof the subject. It takes off fromFreud's suggestionthat the I (ego) constitutesitself in obligatorypursuit of the it (id): "I am" mustbe read as an anaseme of "whereit was thereshall I become" [wo es war soil ich werden]. Most obviously,of course, it relates to Lacan's admonition that the Symbolicorder's grasp upon the stuffof the Imaginaryis randomand pointillist:like buttonsin upholstery[points de capiton]. Yet, as Cixous beginsthe perorationof "The Laugh of the Medusa" she does take on Lacan. She questionsthe practiceof decipheringevery code as referringto the Name-of-the-Fatheror its alias, the mother-who-has-the-phallus:"And what about the libido? Haven't I read [Lacan's] the 'Significationof the Phallus.' . . .30 If the New Women, arrivingnow, dare to createoutside the theoretical,

29C16ment'suse of "imaginary"and "symbolic"here inclinestowards the collo- quial, perhaps because of situationalreasons. Clement is addressingirate feminists who are disaffectedfrom what theysee as Marxist-feministtheoreticism. 30Lacan, Ecrits,tr. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton,1977).

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This content downloaded from 128.122.149.154 on Mon, 9 Sep 2013 00:03:19 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Gayatri ChakravortySpivak they'recalled in by the cops of the Signifier,fingerprinted, remon- strated,and broughtinto the line of orderthat they are supposed to know; assigned by force of trickeryto a precise place in the chain that'salways formed for the benefitof a privileged'signifier.' We are re-memberedto the stringthat leads back, ifnot to the Name-of-the- Father, then,for a new twist,to the place of thephallic mother" (pp. 262-63).31 As she exposes thephallus to be the "privilegedsignifier," she takes her place withDerrida's critiqueof the Lacanian phallusas the "transcendentalsignifier" in "The Purveyorof Truth,"and with his articulationof the phallicmother as the limitof man's enterprise in Glas.32 I believe she is not speakingonly of orthodoxor neo-Freud- ian psychoanalysiswhen she writes:"Don't remainwithin the psycho- analyticenclosure" (p. 263). Indeed, the choice of theMedusa as her logo is a derisive takeoffon the notion that woman as object of knowledge or desire does not relate to the subject-objectbut to the eye-objectdialectic. When she writes:"You onlyhave to look at the Medusa straighton to see her" (p. 255), I believe she is rewritingthe arroganceof "you only have to go and look at the Berninistatue in Rome to understandimmediately she [St. Teresa] is coming."33For the passage is followed by an invocationof the male member in splendidisolation: "It's the jittersthat give them a hard-on!for themselves! They need to be afraidof us. Look at the tremblingPerseuses movingbackward toward us, clad in apotropes." The distancebetween a Cixous, sympatheticto thedeconstructive morphologyin particularand thereforecritical of Lacan's phallocentrismand a Kristeva, sympatheticto French anti-humanismin general, may be measured, only half fancifully,by a juxtaposition like the following.Kristeva: "In 'woman' I see somethingthat cannot be represented"; Cixous: "Men say there are two unrepresentable things:death and the femininesex" (p. 255). (In fact,Kristeva's association with Derridian thought dates back

31Cixous is referringto the two axes of the male subject: the Oedipal norm(dis- coveringthe Name-of-the-Father)and the fetishistdeviation (fetishizing the Mother as possessinga fantasmaticphallus). 32"ThePurveyor of Truth," tr. Willis Domingo et al., Yale FrenchStudies, 52, 1975. 33Lacan, "Dieu et la jouissance de femme,"in Encore: 1972-73 (Paris: Seuil, 1975), p. 70. Also cited in Stephen Heath's excellentessay "Difference,"Screen 19, no. 8, Autumn, 1978.

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This content downloaded from 128.122.149.154 on Mon, 9 Sep 2013 00:03:19 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Yale FrenchStudies to the sixties.Derrida was a regularcontributor to theearly Tel Quel. Her project, however, has been, not to deconstructthe origin,but rather to recuperate,archeologically and formulaically,what she locates as the potential originaryspace beforethe sign. Over the years,this space has acquirednames and inhabitantsrelated to specific ideological sets: geno-text,Mallarmean avant-garde, ancient Asiatic linguistics,the Platonic chora; and now the European High Art of Renaissance and Baroque, Christiantheology through the ages, and personal experience, as they cope with the mysteryof pregnancy- infancy.)34 Like Kristeva,Cixous also seems not to ask whatit means to say some "men," especiallyof the avant-garde,can be "women" in this special sense. In thisrespect, and in much of her argumentfor "bi- sexuality,"she is sometimesreminiscent of the Freud who silenced femalepsychoanalysts by callingthem as good as men.35The question of the political or historicaland indeed ideological differentialthat irreduciblyseparates the male fromthe female critic of phallocentrism is not asked.36 And, occasionallythe point of Derrida's insistence thatdeconstruction is not a negativemetaphysics and thatone cannot practicefree play is lost sightof: "To admit,"Cixous writes,"that to writeis preciselyto work(in) thebetween, questioning the process of the same and of the otherwithout which nothing lives, undoing the workof death-is firstto wantthe two [le deux]and both,the ensem- ble of the one and the othernot congealed in sequences of struggle and expulsionor some otherform of death,but dynamizedto infinity by an incessantprocess of exchangefrom one intothe otherdifferent subject" (p. 254). Much of Derrida's critiqueof humanism-phallocentrismis concernedwith a reminderof the limitsof deconstructive power as wellas withthe impossibilityof remainingin thein-between. Unless one is aware thatone cannotavoid takinga stand,unwitting

34"L'engendrementde la formule,"Tel Quel 37 & 38, Spring& Summer,1969; Revolutiondu langagepoitique (Paris: Seuil, 1974); "MotherhoodAccording to Bellini," Desire in Language: A SemioticApproach to Literatureand Art,tr. Thomas Gora et al. (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1980); "Hdrdthiquede l'amour," Tel Quel 74, Winter,1977. And passim. 35Cf.La jeune nee, p. 160. "Femininity,"Standard Edition, vol. 22, pp. 116-117. 36I attemptto discuss thisquestion in detail in "Displacementand the Discourse of Woman" (see n. 29).

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This content downloaded from 128.122.149.154 on Mon, 9 Sep 2013 00:03:19 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Gayatri ChakravortySpivak standsget taken. Further,"writing" in Derrida is notsimply identical withthe productionof prose and verse. It is thename of a "structure" which operates and fracturesknowing (epistemology), being (ontol- ogy), doing (practice), history,politics, economics, institutionsas such. It is a "structure"whose "origin" and "end" are necessarily provisionaland absent. "The essentialpredicates in a minimaldeter- mination of the classical concept of writing"are presented and contrastedto Derrida's use of "writing"in "SignatureEvent Con- text. 37 Because Cixous seems oftento identifythe Derridianmode of writingabout writingwith merelythe productionof prose and verse, a statementlike ". . . women are body. More body, hence more writing"(p. 257) remainsconfusing. In a course on InternationalFeminism, the questionof Cixous's faithfulnessto, or unquestioningacceptance of, Derrida, becomes quicklyirrelevant. It sufficeshere to point out thatthe sortof anti- feminismthat has its ties to anti-humanismunderstood as a critique of the name of man or of phallocentrismis to be distinguishedfrom the otherkinds of Frenchanti-feminism, some of whichthe editors of New FrenchFeminism mention on page 32. Of the manyvarieties, I would mentionthe party-lineanti-feminism with which Communist Parties associate themselves:"The 'new feminism'is currentlydevel- oping the thesis that no society,socialist or capitalist,is capable of favorablyresponding to the aspirationsof women.... If we direct againstmen the actionnecessary for women's progress, we condemn the greathopes of womento a dead end" (p. 128). Here the lessonof a double approach-against sexismand forfeminism-is suppressed. I feel some sympathywith Christine Delphy's remark,even as she calls for "a materialistanalysis of the oppressionof women," that "the existenceof thisMarxist line had the practicalconsequence of being a brake on the [women's]movement, and thisfact is obviously not accidental."38 Another varietyof anti-"feminism"that should be yet further distinguished:"The social mode of being of men and women and of women is in no way linkedwith their nature as males and femalesnor

37Tr. Samuel Weber and JeffreyMehlman, GlyphI, 1977, p. 181. 38"The Main Enemy," FeministIssues I, no. 1 (1980), pp. 24-25.

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withthe shape of theirsex organs" (p. 215; italicsmine). These are the "radical feminists"who are interestedin -shapinga feminist materialismand who are not programmaticallyor methodologically influencedby the critique of humanism.Unlike them, I certainly would not reject the searchfor a woman'sdiscourse out of hand. But I have, just as certainly,attended to the critiqueof such a searchas expressed by the "radical feminists":

The so-called explored language extolledby some womenwriters seems to be linked,if not in itscontent at least by its style,to a trendpropagated by literary schools governedby its male masters... . To advocate a directlanguage of the body is . . . not subversivebecause it is equivalentto denyingthe realityand the strengthof social mediations. . . thatoppress us in our bodies (p. 219).

It would be a mistake(at least forthose of us not directlyembroiled in the French field) to ignore these astute warnings,although we should, of course, pointout thatthe radicalfeminists' credo- "I will be neithera woman nor a man in the presenthistorical meaning: I shall be some Person in the body of a woman" (p. 226)-can, ifthe wonderfuldeconstructive potential of Personnein French(someone and, at the same time no one) is not attendedto, lead to the sortof obsession withone's properidentity as propertythat is both the self- dupingand the oppressivepower of humanism.This is particularlyso because, neitherin France nor in the U.S., apart fromthe curious example of Derrida, has mainstreamacademic anti-humanismhad much to do withthe practicalcritique of phallocentrismat all. In the U.S. the issue seems to be the indeterminacyof meaningand linguistic determination,in France the critiqueof identityand varietiesof micrologicaland genealogical analysesof the structuresof power. We should also be vigilant,it seems to me, against the sort of gallic attitudinizingthat has been a trendin Anglo-Americanliterary criticismsince the turnof the century.An American-style"French" feminist,eager to insertherself/himself into a Star Chamber,can at worstremind one of the tone of The SymbolistMovement in Litera- tureby ArthurSymons.39 It can emphasizeour own tendencyto offer

39London: Heinemann, 1899.

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This content downloaded from 128.122.149.154 on Mon, 9 Sep 2013 00:03:19 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Gayatri ChakravortySpivak grandiosesolutions with little political specificity, couched in thestra- tegic formof rhetoricalquestions.40 I can do no better than quote here part of the final exchange between CatherineClement and Helene Cixous in La jeune nee, an exchange thatis oftenforgotten:

H. The class struggleis thissort of enormousmachine whose systemis described by Marx and whichtherefore functions today. But its rhythmis not alwaysthe same, it is a rhythmthat is sometimesmost attenuated.

One can sense the frustrationin Clement'sresponse, which could be directedequally well at a Lyotardor all ofthe "poetic revolutionaries":

C. It can appear attenuated,especially if one is bludgeonedinto thinkingso. But thereis a considerablelag betweenthe realityof the class struggleand the way in whichit is lived mythically,especially by intellectualsfor whom it is hard to measure the realityof strugglesdirectly, because theyare in a positionwhere work on language and the imaginaryhas a primordialimportance and can put blinkerson them (pp. 292, 294-95).

Cixous answerswith a vague charge againstthe denial of poetryby advanced capitalism. In the long run, the most usefulthing that a trainingin French feminismcan give us is politicizedand criticalexamples of "Sympto- matic reading" not always followingthe reversal-displacementtech- nique of a deconstructivereading. The methodthat seemed recupera- tive when used to applaud the avant-gardeis productivelyconflictual when used to expose the rulingdiscourse. There are essays on Plato and Descartes in Irigaray'sSpeculum de l'autrefemme, where the analysisbrilliantly deploys the deconstructive themesof indeterminacy,critique of identity,and the absence of a totalizableanalytic foothold, from a feministpoint of view.4' There are also the analysesof mainlyeighteenth-century philosophical texts associated with work in progressat the feministphilosophy study groupat the women'sEcole Normaleat Fontenay-aux-Roses.There is the long runningcommentary, especially on Greek mythemes- markedby an absence of questioningthe historyof the sign"myth,"

40As revealed in ChineseWomen, pp. 200-01, or the juxtapositionof Cixous, To Live the Orange (Paris: Des femmes,1979), pp. 32-34 and p. 94. 41Speculum (Paris: Minuit, 1974).

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This content downloaded from 128.122.149.154 on Mon, 9 Sep 2013 00:03:19 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Yale FrenchStudies an absence, as I have argued in the case of About ChineseWomen, which in its turn marks a historico-geographicboundary-to be foundin La jeune nee. The readingsof Marx, generallyincidental to othertopics, suffer, as I have suggestedabove, froma lack of detailed awarenessof theMarxian text. The best readingsare of Freud. This is because Freud is at once themost powerful contemporary male philosopher of femalesexuality, and the inaugurator,in The Interpretation of Dreams, of the technique of "symptomaticreading." Irigaray's "La Tache aveugle d'un vieuxreve de symetrie"(Speculum) has justi- fiablybecome a classic. More detailed,more scholarly, more sophisti- cated in its methodology,and perhaps more perceptiveis Sarah Kofman's L 'enigmede la femme:la femmedans les textesde Freud.42 This book exposes, even if it does not theorizeupon, the possibilityof being a deconstructorof the metaphysicsof identity,and yet remainingcaught withina masculistideology; an awareness that I have found lacking in Kristeva and Cixous. Kofman commentson Freud's ideologicalbetrayal of hisown sympathyfor women's mutism. She reveals the curiousitinerary of Freud's progresstowards his final thoughtsupon female sexuality:three moments of the discoveryof woman as the strongersex-three subsequentlong movementsto sublate thatstrength into its unrecognizable contrary: the demonstra- tionthat woman is indeed theweaker sex. She deconstructsthe "fact" of penis-envythrough an analysisof the self-contradictoryversions of the pre-oedipal stage. How is a sex possible thatis despised by both sexes? This is the masculistenigma to whichFreud, like Oedipus, soughta solution.Like Oedipus's maskof blindness,biology, reduced to penis-envy,is Freud's screen-solution. Using Freud's own methodof oneirocritiqueto showits ideological limits, isolating seeminglymarginal moments to demonstratethe ethico-politicalagenda in Freud's attemptsat normalization,L'enigme de la femmeis a fineexample of Frenchfeminist critical practice of "symptomatic"-in this case deconstructive-reading.If we can move beyond the textsso far favoredby the French feministsand relate the morphologyof thiscritique with the "specificity"of other

42Paris:Galilee, 1980. A portionof thisbook has been publishedas "The Narcis- sisticWoman: Freud and Girard" in Diacritics10.3, Fall, 1980.

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This content downloaded from 128.122.149.154 on Mon, 9 Sep 2013 00:03:19 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Gayatri ChakravortySpivak discoursesthat spell out and establishthe power of thepatriarchy, we will indeed have gained an excellentstrategy for underminingthe masculistvanguard.43 This is no doubta benefitfor female academics, women who, by comparisonwith the world's women at large, are alreadyinfinitely privileged. And yet,since today the discourse of the world's privilegedsocieties dictates the configurationof the rest,this is not an inconsiderablegift, even in a classroom.

As soon as one steps out of the classroom,if indeed a "teacher" ever fullycan, the dangersrather than the benefitsof academicfemi- nism, French or otherwise, become more insistent.Institutional changes against sexism here or in France may mean nothingor, indirectly,further harm for women in the Third World.44This dis- continuityought to be recognized and worked at. Otherwise,the focusremains defined by the investigatoras subject.To bringus back to my initialconcerns, let me insistthat here, the differencebetween "French" and "Anglo-American"feminism is superficial.However unfeasibleand inefficientit maysound, I see no wayto avoid insisting thatthere has to be a simultaneousother focus: not merely who am I? but who is the otherwoman? How am I namingher? How does she name me? Is thispart of the problematicI discuss?Indeed, it is the absence of such unfeasiblebut crucial questions that makes the "colo- nized woman" as "subject" see the investigatorsas sweetand sympa- theticcreatures from another planet who are freeto come and go; or, depending on her own socializationin the colonizingcultures, see "feminism"as havinga vanguardistclass fix,the libertiesit fightsfor as luxuries,finally identifiable with "free sex" of one kindor another. Wrong,of course. My pointhas been thatthere is somethingequally wrong in our most sophisticatedresearch, our most benevolent impulses.

43J have attemptedto develop the implicationsof such a strategyin "Displace- mentand the Discourse of Woman" (see n. 23, 36). As the readermay have surmised, that piece is in manyways a companionto thisone. 44To take the simplestpossible Americanexamples, even such innocenttriumphs as the hiringof more tenuredwomen or addingfeminist sessions at a Conventionmight lead, since most U.S. universitieshave dubious investments,and most Convention hotelsuse ThirdWorld femalelabor in a mostoppressive way, to the increasingprole- tarianizationof the women of the less developed countries.

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"One of the areas of greatestverbal concentration among French feministsis the descriptionof women'spleasure" (New FrenchFemi- nisms, p. 37). Paradoxicallyenough, it is in thisseemingly esoteric area of concernthat I finda way of re-affirmingthe historicallydis- continuous yet common "object"-ificationof the sexed subject as woman. If it is indeed truethat the best of Frenchfeminism encourages us to thinkof a double effort(against sexism and for feminism,with the lines forevershifting), that double visionis needed in the considera- tion of women's reproductivefreedom as well. For to see women's liberationas identicalwith reproductive liberation is to make counter- sexism an end in itself,to see the establishmentof women'ssubject- statusas an unquestionedgood and indeednot to heed thebest lessons of French anti-humanism,which discloses the historicaldangers of a subjectivistnormativity; and it is also to legitimatethe view of culture as general exchange of women, constitutiveof kinshipstructures where wom-en'sobject-status is clearly seen as identifiedwith her reproductivefunction.45 The double vision that would affirmfeminism as well as undo sexism suspects a pre-comprehendedmove beforethe reproductive coupling of man and woman, beforethe closingof the circlewhose only productiveexcess is the child,and whose "outside" is the man's "active" life in society.It recognizesthat "naturehad programmed female sexual pleasure independentlyfrom the needs of production" (Evelyne Sullerot,p. 155). Male and femalesexuality are asymmetrical.Male orgasmicpleasure "normally" entails the male reproductiveact-semination. Female orgasmicpleasure (it is not, of course,the "same" pleasure, only called by the same name) does not entailany one componentof the heterogeneousfemale reproductive scenario: ovulation, fertiliza-

45Claude Levi-Strauss,"Structural Study of Myth,"in Myth:A Symposium,ed. Thomas A. Sebeck (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1958), p. 103. The classic defense,to be foundin StructuralistAnthropology, tr. Claire Jacobson Brooke Grundfest- Schoepf (New York: Basic Books, 1963), vol. 1, pp. 61-62, againstthe feministreali- zation that this was yet anotherelaboration of the objectificationof women, seems curiouslydisingenuous. For if women had indeed been symbolized,on thatlevel of generality,as usersof signsrather than as signs,the binaryopposition of exchangerand exchanged, foundingstructures of kinship,would collapse.

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This content downloaded from 128.122.149.154 on Mon, 9 Sep 2013 00:03:19 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Gayatri ChakravortySpivak tion,conception, gestation, birthing. The clitorisescapes reproductive framing.In legallydefining woman as object of exchange,passage, or possession in termsof reproduction,it is not only the womb thatis literally"appropriated"; it is the clitorisas the signifierof the sexed subject thatis effaced.All historicaland theoreticalinvestigation into the definitionof woman as legal object-in or out of marriage;or as politico-economicpassageway for property and legitimacywould fall within the investigationof the varietiesof the effacementof the clitoris. Psychologicalinvestigation in thisarea cannotonly confine itself to the effectof clitoridectomyon women. It would also ask whyand show how, since an at least symbolicclitoridectomy has alwaysbeen the "normal" accession to womanhood and the unacknowledged name of motherhood,it mightbe necessaryto plot out the entire geographyof femalesexuality in termsof the imaginedpossibility of the dismembermentof the phallus.The arena of researchhere is not merely remote and primitivesocieties; the (sex) objectificationof women by the elaborate attentionto theirskin and fagadeas represented by the immense complexityof the cosmetics,underwear, clothes, advertisement,women's magazine, and pornographynet- works, the double standard in the criteriaof men's and women's aging; the public versusprivate dimensions of menopauseas opposed to impotence,are all questionswithin this circuit. The pre-compre- hended suppression or effacementof the clitorisrelates to every move to definewoman as sex object, or as means or agentof reproduction-with no recourse to a subject-functionexcept in termsof those definitionsor as "imitators"of men. The woman's voice as Motheror Lover or Androgynehas some- timesbeen caughtby greatmale writers.The themeof woman's norm as clitorallyex-centric from the reproductiveorbit is beingdeveloped at presentin our esotericFrench group and in theliterature of thegay movement.There is a certainmelancholy exhilaration in workingout the patriarchalintricacy of Tiresias's standingas a prophet-master of ceremonies at the Oedipal scene-in termsof the theme of the femininenorm as the suppressionof the clitoris:"Being asked by Zeus and Hera to settlea disputeas to whichsex had more pleasure

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This content downloaded from 128.122.149.154 on Mon, 9 Sep 2013 00:03:19 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Yale FrenchStudies of love, he decided forthe female;Hera was angryand blindedhim, but Zeus recompensed him by givinghim long life and power of prophecy" (Oxford Classical Dictionary).46 AlthoughFrench feminism has not elaboratedthese possibilities, there is some sense of themin women as unlikeas Irigarayand the Questionsfiministes group. Irigaray: "In orderfor woman to arriveat the pointwhere she can enjoy herpleasure as a woman,a longdetour by the analysisof the varioussystems of oppressionwhich affect her is certainlynecessary. By claimingto resortto pleasure alone as the solutionto her problem,she runsthe riskof missingthe reconsidera- tion of a social practiceupon whichher pleasure depends" (p. 105). Questionsffiministes: "What we mustanswer is-not thefalse problem ... which consistsin measuringthe 'role' of biologicalfactors and the 'role' of social factorsin the behaviorof sexed individuals-but ratherthe followingquestions: (1) in whatway is the biologicalpoli- tical? In otherwords, what is thepolitical function of thebiological?" (p. 227). If an analysis of the suppressionof the clitorisin generalas the suppressionof woman-in-excessis liftedfrom the limitationsof the "French" contextand pursuedin all its "historical,""political," and "social" dimensions,then Questionsfi'ministes would not need to make a binaryopposition such as the following:"It is legitimateto expose the oppression,the mutilation,the 'functionalization'and the 'objectivation'of the femalebody, but it is also dangerousto put the female body at the centerof a searchfor female identity" (p. 218). It would be possible to suggestthat, the typologyof the subtractionor excision of the clitorisin order to determinea biologico-political femaleidentity is opposed, in discontinuousand indefinitelycontext- determinedways, by both the pointsof viewabove. It would also not be necessary,in order to share a detailed and ecstaticanalysis of motherhoodas "ultimateguarantee of sociality,"to attackfeminist collectivecommitments virulently: "A truefeminine innovation . .. is not possible beforematernity is clarified.... To bringthat about,

46For furtherironies of the prohibitionsassociated with Hera's pleasure, see C. Kerdnyi,Zeus and Hera: ArchetypalImage of Father,Husband, and Wife,tr. Chris- topher Holme (Princeton:Princeton Univ. Press, 1975), pp. 97, 113.

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This content downloaded from 128.122.149.154 on Mon, 9 Sep 2013 00:03:19 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Gayatri ChakravortySpivak however, we must stop makingfeminism a new religion,an enterprise or a sect."47 The double vision is not merelyto work againstsexism and for feminism.It is also to recognizethat, even as we reclaimthe excess of the clitoris,we cannot fullyescape the symmetryof the reproductive definition.One cannot writeoff what may be called a uterinesocial organization(the arrangementof the worldin termsof thereproduc- tion of futuregenerations, where the uterusis the chiefagent and means of production)in favor of a clitoral.The uterinesocial organization should,rather, be "situated"through the understanding that it has so farbeen establishedby excludinga clitoralsocial organization. (The restorationof a continuousbond betweenmother and daughter even afterthe "facts" of gestation,birthing, and sucklingis, indeed, of great importanceas a persistenteffort against the sexismof mil- lenia, an effortof repairingpsychological damage throughquestioning normsthat are supposedlyself-evident and descriptive.Yet, forthe sake of an affirmativefeminism, this too should be "situated": to establishhistorical continuity by sublatinga naturalor physiological link as an end in itselfis the idealistic subtextof the patriarchal project.) Investigationof the effacementof the clitoris-where cli- toridectomyis a metonymfor women's definitionas "legal object as subject of reproduction"-would persistentlyseek to de-normalize uterinesocial organization.At the moment,the factthat the entire complex networkof advanced capitalisteconomy hinges on home- buying, and that the philosophyof home-ownershipis intimately linkedto the sanctityof thenuclear family, shows how encompassingly the uterinenorm of womanhoodsupports the phallicnorm of capitalism. At the otherend of the spectrum,it is thisideologico-material repression of the clitorisas the signifierof the sexed subject that operates the specificoppression of women,as the lowestlevel of the cheap labor that the multi-nationalcorporations employ by remote controlin theextraction of absolutesurplus-value in theless developed countries.Whether the "social relationsof patriarchycan be mapped into the social relationscharacteristic of a mode of production"or whetherit is a "relativelyautonomous structure written into family "Un nouveau type d'intellectuel:le dissident,"p. 71.

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relations"; whetherthe familyis a place of the productionof sociali- zation or the constitutionof the subject of ideology; what such a heterogeneoussex-analysis would disclose is that the repressionof the clitorisin the generalor the narrowsense (the differencecannot be absolute) is presupposedby both patriarchyand family.48

I emphasize discontinuity,heterogeneity, and typologyas I speak of such a sex-analysis,because thiswork cannot by itselfobliterate the problemsof race and class. It willnot necessarily escape theinbuilt colonialismof FirstWorld feminismtoward the Third. It might,one hopes, promotea sense of our commonyet history-specific lot. It ties togetherthe terrifiedchild held down by her grandmotheras the blood runs down her groinand the "liberated"heterosexual woman who, in spite of Mary Jane Sherfeyand the famouspage 53 of Our Bodies, Ourselves, in bed with a casual lover-engaged, in other words, in the "freest"of "free" activities-confronts,at worst,the "shame" of admittingto the "abnormality"of herorgasm: at best,the acceptance of such a "special" need; and the radical feministwho, settingherself apart fromthe circle of reproduction,systematically discloses the beauty of the lesbian body; the dowriedbride-a body for burning-and the female wage-slave-a body for maximum exploitation.49There can be other lists; and each one will straddle and undo the ideological-materialopposition. For me it is the best giftof French feminism,that it cannot itselffully acknowledge, and thatwe mustwork at; here is a themethat can liberatemy colleague fromSudan, and a theme the old washerwomenby the riverwould understand.

48Feminismand Materialism:Women and Modes of Production,ed. Annette Kuhn and Ann Marie Wolpe (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978), pp. 49, 51. For an eloquent reverieon the ethicof penetrationas itdenies theclitoris see Irigaray, New French Feminism,p. 100. In "Displacement," I suggestthat such a gestureof penetrativeappropriation is not absentfrom Derrida's reach for the "name of women." 49Sherfey,The Natureand Evolutionof Female Sexuality(New York: Vintage, 1973); Our Bodies, Ourselves: A Book by and for Women (New York: Simon and Schuster,2nd edition, 1971).

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