Angel of Anarchy, Angel of Desire:

The Work of Kathy Acker

A Thesis

Submitted to the Faculty of Graduate Studies

University of Manitoba in Partial Fulfilment of the Requirement for the Degree of

Master of Arts

by

Tamara Steinbom

O July, 1997 National Library Bibliothèque nationale 1+1 of Canada du Canada Acquisitions and Acquisitions et Bibliographie Services services bibliographiques 395 Wellington Street 395. nre Wellington OnawaON KIAM OnawaON KlAW canada CMada

The author has granted a non- L'auteur a accordé une Licence non exclusive Licence dowing the exclusive permettant à la National Library of Canada to Bibliothèque nationale du Canada de reproduce, Ioan, distribute or sell reproduire, prêter, distribuer ou copies of this thesis in microfom, vendre des copies de cette thèse sous paper or electronic formats. la forme de microfiche/film, de reproduction sur papier ou sur format électronique.

The author retains ownership of the L'auteur conserve la propriété du copyright in this thesis. Neither the droit d'auteur qui protège cette thèse. thesis nor substantial extracts fiom it Ni la thèse ni des extraits substantiels may be printed or otherwise de celle-ci ne doivent être imprimés reproduced without the author's ou autrement reproduits sans son permission. autorisation. FACWLTY OF GRADUATE STUDIES +**++ COPYRIGHT PERMISSION PAGE

A Tbesis/Practicum submittcd ta the Faculty of Grndaate Studia of The University

of Manitoba in partial fulWiment of the nqainments of the degree

oi

)Ibsnu OF ~PTS

Taiara Steinborn 1997 (c)

Permission has been granted to the Library of The University of Manitoba to lend or seii copies of this thesis/pmcticum, to the Nationai Libmry of Canada to micronlm thu thais and to lend or sel1 copia of the fdm, and to Disseetioos Abstmcts International to pubüsh an abtract of this thesislpracticum.

The author reservu otber publication nghts, and neither this thaWpracticum nor extensive extracts fmm it may be printed or othernise repduced without the author's written permission. ABSTUACT

"Angel of Anarchy, Anqel of Desire: The Work of Kathy Acker," addresses the notion of the postmodern subject and its hiqhly contested place in the tventieth century, in light of poststructuralist and psychoanalytic theories of narrative, subjectivity and represeritation.

The importance of psychoanalysis in determininq the development of suk~ject.idet-&ity is cxylcrred ty ttieorist Julia Krhteva. Her study of the 'subject in process' dialoqizes the discourse of both postmodern and ferninist ethics, makinq xoom for new conceptualizations of gender identit y. Character development in the novels of Kathy Acker challenges traditional vievs of the Western unif ied subject and its evolution into a discursive site of theoretical debate. The psychoanalytic and poststructuralist theory of Julia Kristeva further refines this debate which ~cker'snovels Empire of the Senseless and In Memoriam to Identity open up. Kristevals notion of the 'subject in process' lends insight into Acker's desire to find revolutionary potential vithin the postmodern subject of her texts.

Throuqh the vork of both Acker and Kristeva, a nev ethics of the subject is offered, pushinq past the frustration and despair often encountered in postmodern fiction and theory. TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction: '~heUnfulfilled Subject of ~ostmodernism~1

Chapter one: "ituating Kathy ~cker!!8

Chaptex Two: "A Haunt inq Jouissance: Sliding int O Julia ris te va's Semiotic Playing ~ield"25

Chapter Three: "rash ~odies!!46

Conclus ion: fntroduct Ion:

The Unf ulf Ued subject of Postmodernism

In Modern French Philosophy, Vincent Descombes write s that "academic reallsm had failed to take into account the rivalry inherent in the very notion of the s~bject~~(23). This "rivalry" still exists in the tventieth century. Hov fulfilled are ve, as subjects, in our tventieth century culture? Are ve searchinq for a neu sense of teleological completion? Are we staring, faceless and poverless, into the chasm of

nihilism, of Jean Baudrillardls "simulacra?" Are we still struqqling to see ourvelves in the riumerous ideritities of the twentieth century cultural mat rix - the politically correct, the environmentauy friendly, feminist, generation-X slacker, technologically vise? The diversity of identit y

positions is overwhebing, and the tension stands high as ve vait for nev

theoretical twists to define our sense of beinq. At the same time, culture assumes an already understood definition of its 4postmodernist state:

vith its postmodern fashion, T.V., music, shopping malls, videos, and postmodern coffee to start your day. The concept of postmodernism has been introduced, studied, and packaqed for our consumption. Yet, in this contentious age, ve are still faced vith a culture at great odds with itself and possessinq a profound unfulfillment of identit y. In his article, "what is at Stake in this Debate on P ostmodernism,!! Warren Mont ag acknowledqes the radically divergent forces which make up the postmodern debate on the subject: "ither the subject is master of itself, its own thouqhts and actions or it has shply vanished into the pure systematicity of the historical present" (Kaplan

88). There are still disturbances in the manner in vhich ve unfold as Irdivlduals and in the vays in vhlch ve f orm ethical relations vith others. The hope for a dialroctic still plays itself out in moments of history - the unification of Germany, the formation of the United Nations at the end of

World War Tvo, the movement tovards de-seqregation in America. We bear vitness to tvo simultaneous desires -culture is busy vith a postmodern discourse of disenfranchisement vhile at the same time searching for some Eoundation for relationships betveen self and others. As we go on living and ushg each other, our happy endings beginning over and over again in a vicious, revolutionary questioning, the subject of this movement expresses itself in a ccrntinuous theatre of performative ene rgy.

In an attempt to shed light upon the cultural fix of the tventieth centuxy, this thesis vffl examine hov the epistemoloqical questioninq of tventieth century subjectivity concerns itself vith the relationship between theory and the postmodern text.Our examination of postmodern theory vill attempt to understand hou vriters explore these nev vays of thinking, and produce innovative models of writinq and creatinq Rmeaning." The notion of postmodern narrative is a useiul tool for vriters vho look back to history as veïl as forvard in a generation of limitless fiction. As Vincent Descombes concludes in his study on modern philosophy, the storyharrative of history never ends (186). Writers shov that a postmodern narrative is a vital vay of understanding the various existinq tensions vithin our culture. Descombes points out tvo vital characteristics to bear in mind in cominq to terms vith this narrative:

has alvays already bequn, and is alvays the story of a previous story; the referent of narrative discouise is never the crude fact, nor the dumb event, but other narratives, other stories, a great mumur of vords preceding, provoking, accompanying and f olloving the procession of vars, festivals, labours, time. is riever finished, for in principle the narrator addresses a Ustener, or 'narratee: vho may in his turn become the narrator, making the narration of which he has been the 'narratee' into the narrated of a fresh narration (186). Certainly modern-day fiction has seen a narrative play upon these Unes.

We vill see hov Aioerican vriter, Kathy Acker, investiqates this notion of narrative, as her texts txavel alonq a coaplex gradient of voices/narratives vhich include vorks such as Nathaniel ~avthorne%

Scarlet Letter, Erika Jong's Fear of Flyfng, Charles Dicken's Great Expectations and Antonin Artaud's poetry. This investigation hopes to reveal how certain texts reflect cultural assumptions, both historically and in the present. New fictions then display a desire to further challenge these representations, in a dynamic reassessment of our value systems.

Our vay into the analysis of the text vill be through the philosophical precepts which have informed Uterary productivity and have lead to our postmodern culture. The question stili remains vhether one can discuss postmodernism vithout essentializinq it, vithout trimming it down to a fev catch phrases used tocritique a text. For the purpose of this thesis, it vill be important to touch on some of the debates surrounding the term/movement in order to more effectively contextualize the nev vritinq. The purpose of this examination is to analyze notions of subjectivity which predicate the vriting and reading of a text. In chapter one, 1 wish to trace a movement £rom the subject borne of modernism to the present self- The movement from modernism to postmodernism includes a study of possibillties for the restructuring of an ethics for the subject, in pazticular the female subject.

As Chris Weedon suggests in Feminist Pzactice and Poststructuralist

Theory, literature has long been observed as a poverful articulation of cultural concerns: 'ln this process the reader is offezed subjectivity..." (171). 1 believe that Acker concerns herself vith the notion of vhen and how ve are to articulate Our postmodern culture. Her novels involve themselves in an examination of a subject borne out of the unified

European cultural heritage. Her characters find themselves in an America which is quickly losing hold of its influential and impressive European edifices, resulting in a narration vhich unfolds in despair and confusion.

Acker traces the actions and desires of her characters as they are t rapped betveen revolutionary potentfal and complete ethical chaos. Her vork fits in vith a movement in postmodern fiction vhich expresses hov

"our vays of understanding in the West have been and continue to be cornplicitous vith our vays of oppressing. These vriters have laid bare the vicious circles of intellectual imperialism and of liberal and humanist ideoloqyw(Jardine 24). The increased production of feminist theory coincides vith the vide reaching proliferation of postmodern theory in a manner which has caused some theorists to vonder at this coïncidence: "The f undamental concerns vith the proper relationship betveen sex and class, vith understanding sexuality and vith exploring ferninine creativity ail tend tovard the destruction of androcentric and heterosexist regimes, towards a chaiienginq of the vord 'humanc as applied to man's inventions" (Marks and de Courtivron 23). Nevertheless, critics still maintain the importance of fulîy analyzing f emale specificit y in polit ical, social and cultural discourse. Rose Braidotti observes that although these current critical tendencies seem to faïl under the same theoretical cmbrella, it may be more beneflclal t o approach the two concerns ln a dialectlcal manner, rather than to have the concerns of feminism dravn in under the "greaterN disocjurse of the philosophy of man (59). Braidotti asks, "vhy is it that as soori as fenriiriists began thhkinq out loud for themselves, male thinksrs took up the 'ferninine' as their ovn cause?" (59-60).

In Chapter Tvo, 1 vffl examine Julia Kristeva's psychoanalysis of the subject vhich 1s developed in her books, Powers of Horror and Desire in Language. Her vork on psychoanalysis derives from the theoretical formulations of Lacan and Freud, but evolves past these theorists in an attempt to elevate the notion of the subject beyond their rigid definitions. Kristeva desires to create a notion of the subject vhich has about it a sense of openness to the unaccountable. For our purpose, the relevance of this theory vill lie in the application of Kristeva's notion of the 'subject in processr to Kathy Ackez's texts. 1 vili shov hov this readinq of subjectivity can be traced through Acker's texts as she attempts to disturb and to penetrate the status quo, the linearity of thouqht, the transparency of codes, al1 in an attempt to re-open the question, %ho are ve?' Both Acker and Kristeva enter into an analysis of revolutionary lanquaqe and text. Poststructuralist thouqht has nuanced structuralism in its examination of language as the site for social and political orqan- ization as vell as the site for the construction of the subject. Jacques Derrida observes that

"everyday lanquaqen is not innocent or neutral. It is the languaqe of Western metaphysics, and it carries vith it not only a considerable number of presuppositions of ali types, but also presuppositions inseparable from metaphysics, which, althouqh ïittle attended to, are knotted into a system. (19) To Derrida's assertion, ve add Kristeva's studies in psychoanalysis vhich use the notion of language in determinhg the subject. Both Acker and Kristeva analyze language as a site vhich (per)forms a notion of the f ernale subject and which is also informed by various tensions.

The study of subject development in feminist theory, and certainly in psychoanalysis, subverts staid belief s about languaqe as a unitary concept, and thus effects the notion of qender dif ference, a contributing factor to the current strugqle with postmodern identity. At issue in this debate are notions such as essentialism and identity. The essentialist position, taken by theorists such as Helene Cixous and Luce Irigaray, seeks to extend legitimacy of vomen as subjects by 'baturaîizing" the notion of the female subject. The work of Julia Kristeva vil1 be compare vith that of Cùcous and Irigaray in order to better understand the vays in vhich essentialism creates a fixed identity. As Fay Weedon points out that "Itlhe political significance of decenterinq the subject and abandoning the belief in essential subjectivity is that it open= up subjectivity to changen (33). The tension betveen essentialism and post structuralist thouqht is an ongoing concern foz feminist theorists, such as Weedon, vho vish to avoid being svept under one defininq system of thought. Yet, they also recoqnize the necessity of establishing some form of communication/dialogue betveen the genders vhich goes beyond a polarization of lanquage as is presented in feminist theory such as that of Dale Spender. In criticizinq SpenderVsconcept of polarized languaqe constructivism, Moira Gatens notes:

If thought and reality are dependent on lanquaqe, and if it is men vho have produced and controlled language, vith women playing the part of mere consumers, then hou does the question of distinct male and female realities arise at au? If these realities are dependent upon humanly produced classificatory systems, and in patriarchy this production is restricted tomen, then women as consumers of this languaqe should be in perfect agreement with male thought and male- constructed reality. (77) Thw, vhile feminist thecrrists acknüvledqe a desire tu understand a wwaman-centeredn experience, they also recognize the need to analyze and cornes to terms vith the systems of representation.

The close of the tventieth century brings vith it an abundance of

information about %ho we are:! vith more Unes of inquiry developing continuously. What is increasing as vell are vhat Alice Jardine calls

"spectres of separati~m,~(57) vhich leave us, in academia in particular, dislocated from one another (vritinq articles, books etc. from increasingly smaïler cubicles/officesL Isolated, perfecting our

wholeriess, it tecornes more and more difficult to conriect vith "the other."

And, as Alice Jardine observes, Kristeva's studies show that "the other"

is most often the other sex (114). Although Shone de Beauvoir originany

made this connection in The Second Sex, years later Kristeva brinqs to it

an invigorating analysis of lanquage and a reconcept uaïization of

"thinking voman." Kristeva's hope for the 'subject in process' can be read in part as a desire to bridge some of these separations. She tries to

convey a desire to knov the other, and it is in this process that we may

hope to find a continuation of the discourse upon postmodern

subjectivity that reaches beyond the atomistic despair of our

information age. Chapter One

Sltuating Kathy Acker

1 am açainst the vord anti because it's a bit like atheist, as compared to believer. An atheist is 3ust as much of a religious man as the believer is. Marcel Duchamp

Postmodernism contests the notion of the modern subject born out of the rational and scientific humanist enterprise of the mid fifteenth

modern subject is author of her existence, proprietor of both body and mind. The fifteenth century vitnesses a shift in focus from the transcendental signifier Christianity to the notion the subject. Descartes' nov famous dictum, "1 think, therefore 1 am," creates a subject which becomes the epistemoloqical locus and reference point for ethical behaviour, creating a split betveen subject (1) and object (the vorld). A symbolic order fixed vithin "mankind's" mind instead of in the flesh of

Christ is born, creatinq a base for a universal mind cut off from its body, a rulinq consciousness which quickly becomes fixed and homogeneous.

Knowledge of the world is supplied by che knovledge within consciousness.

The assurnptlon of an existing metaphysical "Truth" of humanism is one which is related to the very being of subjectivity, an essence of being vhich exists prior to lanquage and the outside vorld. Central tothe hurnanist project lies the search for a common ethical, political and cultural basis upon vhich to establish "human relations," a basis taking the form of rational human behaviour. The great liberal humanist, John

Stuart Mill, states:

The only part of the conduct of anyone for vhich he is amenable to society is that vhich concerns others. In the part vhich merely concerns himself, . his independence is, of right, absolute. ovex bimself, over his ovn body and mind, the individual 1s soverelqn. (68-69; my emphasis)

Thè: hope for humanism vhich is evidenced in the vork of Hill 1s that it vu lead to an attainment of absolute freedom and riqhts for an individuals by elevating the rational subject above ail that vhich may conspire to influence it unconsciously. Liberal feminists vexe involved in the foundation of a rational being as veU, in that they aspired for vomen to be credited vith the same rationality. For Hary Wollstonecraft, the burden of proof lies upon vomen to show that they are as capable of rational thought and behaviour as men are. In fact, she admonishes men who believe vomen are "by nature virtuouswbecause "it is a farce to cau any being virtuous vhose virtues do not result from the exercise of its own reason" (Wollstonecraft 52). Wollstonecraft upholds reason as integral to the development of virtue in vomen, just as Miil upholds reason as a necessary component for the freedorn of mankind. It is assumed that ve are al1 capable of reason, and the exercise of this faculty gives us transcendence over "others."

The humanist project, for ail its good intentions, leads to a notion of consciousness vhich, in its wabsolutenriqht and knovledge, uses lan- guage as its transparent reflection. There is no site for political or social struggle, because humanist notions rely on an understood certaïnty of "good and badwhuman behaviour. This ideology leaves language, the word, dead. Ultimately, ft leaves human potential stunted and circumscribed to a preordained knovledge of oneself. Humans are superior and make the vorld they live in as the rnind imposes its distinctions of vhat is real and what is not real upon everything. Every- thing outside of this consciousness is objectified in direct relation to this centre. Thus, the separation of Tufrom the vorld is insured, doing violence to any sense of embodiment or otherness - the vorld, the body, nature and women. It follows that the modern subject of humanism creates a concept of clear, authoxial intent in Uterary productivity, one vhich is still perceived as a universal consciousness, the One vhich represents all of society.

If ve corne to face the self-referential modern subject, this "One," we are placed in the role of its mirror - ve are nothinq more than the flat surface upon vhich the modern subject sees itself and the vorld, in a medium vhich is removed £rom cultural, political and social involvement.

The modern work of art produced by this subject becomes an autonomous vork of unity, one not integrated into the world. The period of modernism in literature is characterized by texts vhose voices represent the Y or m yself'' self-consciousness of humanism, a self -same view of one- dimensional unity.

The text desires to laugh at itself. - Kristjana Gunnars Postmodernism and the experimental novel involve a risinq up against this autonomous subjecthork of art vhich displays a humanism contingent upon a split betveen a unified consciousness and heterogeneous forces. Postmodern texts attempt to question the ontological position of the subject as it evolves out of the modernist tradition and enters the playing field of the late twentieth century. As well, the modernist subject and its representations are questioned by postmodern theorists and writers concerned vith the relationship between the subject and its socio-political landscape and vith challenging the metaphysical prof undity of the humanist s ubject. In Hodern French Philosophy, Vincent Descombes points out-the iïiiport-ance of the relationship tetween the self and the ather brought on in phil~sophicalthought by the Hegelian dialectic:

Non-dialectical thinking vould hold to the opposltlon betveen the ratlonal and the inational, but any thinking vhich aspires to be dialectical must, by definition, induce in reason a movement tovards vhat is entirely foreign to it, tovards the other. (13) The Hegelian mode1 of communication is based upon an opposition which is meant to eventuaiïy move tovard meaning and a resolution of the opposition in a higher truth. Dialectical thought and action marks a profound break vith monological authorship and the formalisrn of the modern text. The concept of autborship as dialoqic is further advanced by Mikhail Bakhtin, vhose work on the dialogic introduces a cacophony of voiles and poetic laughter to the notion of a narrative: Laughter purifies from dogmatisrn, from the intolerant and the petrified; it liberates from fanaticism and pedantry, from fear and intimidation, f rom didacticism, naïveté and illusion, f rom the single meaning, the single level, £rom sentimentality. (123) The dialogical thinking and metanarrative questioning of postmodernism problematizes the singular referentiality of experience in a move tovards a more multifarious vay of approaching subjectivity.

As Linda Hutcheon states, these fictions "...offer fictive corporeality instead of abstractions, but at the same time, they do tend to fragment or at least to render unstable the traditional unified identity or subjectivity of chaxacter" (90). The ïnstability of unified identity derives f rom an 'lopenness of authorship to the listener," creating vhat

Bakhtin labels "nev f orms of speech and meaning" (Bakhtin 16).

In further questioning the apparent mastery of the modern subject, postmodern fictions set up subject representation in parodied Instances, subverthg the closure of fixed representatlon. The technique of pastiche is often employed to parody the apparent originary unity vhich human consciousness depends upon. Identity is anything but originary in such vorks. Rather, it is a made-up composite of bits and pieces, each destabilized and made questionable by its incomplete nature. In his book, Unconmon Cultures: Popular Culture and

Post-Modernism, Jim Collins identifies this layering as one of the most important di£f erences betveen postmodernism and modernism:

"...Ipostmodernists 1 replace "poeticg*styïization vith a bricolage of diverse forms of already vell-established aesthetic discourses. This process ... radically undermines the "purity" that defines...the Modernist periodl' (75).These texts also introduce that vhich cannot be accounted for by the unified humanist subject, ranqing from the unconscious to the absurd, thereby introducing the notion of a split subject. This is a subject which must not only confront itself as a vhole, but also as an other. It must also struggle vith the vorld vhich surrounds it as there is no escape £rom that vhich surrounds, that vhich creeps tovards and into this subject. Involvement vith the vorld marks a transition £rom the modernist text to a text reminiscent of th\?seventeenth-century literary genre vhich produced the carnival and dialvgic vork of Rabelais. Bakhtinls study of Rabelais and carnival laughter comes close to describing the subversive nature of postmodern techniques. Folloving

Bakhtin, Julia Kristeva pinpoints his study of carnival as having developed a notion of a dialoqic, revolutionary intertextuality (Desire

80). creathg, as Bakhtin sees it: "Such speech forms, llberated from noms, hierarchies, and prohibitions of established idiom ..." (187-188).

A vornan, especf ally if she bas the mfsf ortune of knovfng anything. shovld corceal it a3 vell as she can. - Jane Austen With the appearance of postmodern fiction by women ve encounter an increasing interrogation of the apparent ungendered neutrality informing the modern subject. This "nev fictionwis troubled by the supremacy of the male subject, and therefore examines the assumptions behind the male subject of humanism, the "authorship" of the modern text, and the resulting political implications for the female subject. No longer content vith the social dramas of Austen (despite the ironic present-day resurgence of her popularity in cinema), the female subject has travelled centuries to 'rest' vith uncertainty in the hands of contemporary vriters. With a delicious sense of stalwart impropriety and experhentalism, vriters such as Banana Yoshimoto and Lynn Tillman are telling stories meant to test the limits of vhat we knov, supplanting who we are and challenging our given belief in image and representation.

A certain understanding of postmodern theory, then, is necessary in contextualizing the vriting of Kathy Acker, vhose vork is an example of late tventieth century vriting that experiments vith the nev role of the female subject. Acker's novels can be seen as a crossover between current theoretical concerns and fiction. Her subjects are ieft to fend for thernselves in this murky battlefield of postmodern subjectivity, as

Acker tries tomake her vay through the playqround of liberal pluralism.

For this reason, her narratives are an appropriation and reshapinq of many exemplary voices, texts, and histories, in particular those of the avant-garde genre- She strives te stimulate the same revolutionary contestation as this genre has produced, but in nev vays, usinq both and old voices. For example, in an attempt to convey a notion of the avant-garde pertinent to post -modern culture, Acker examines 'punk. and it s rejection of traditional values.

Acker is intent upon vorkinq her vay throuqh the present discursive position of the female subject in Western capitalist society. As Linda

Hutcheon asserts, "[t)o reinsert the subject into the framevork of its parole and its siqnif ying activities (both conscious and unconscious) within an historical and social context is to beqin (tol force a redefinition not only of the subject but of history as vellw(159). As Acker questions the position of the subject in postmodern culture, her narrative structures itself as an experiment vhich examines the interplay betveen the world and the vord, hoping to effect change- Ir1 this ambiguous, messy in-betveen, vhere vorld and vcrrd, self and other collide,

Acker takes up the subject identity of characters such as teenaqe ruriaways, tattoo artists, poets, girl pirates, and other marginal figures.

The uncertainty of subject position is vtiere Acker develops the potential for a revoluticinary disturbance in the everydayness of the vorld. Julia

Kristeva says: "...the calling into question of lanquaqe and of the individual, vhich represents a microrevolution, is somethinq that affects the social fabric and can potentially challenge. ..the entire social framevork" (Kolocotroni 215). In examining the fringe dvellers of culture, Acker vishes to examine the heteroqeneity of subject positions. In lookinq at heteroqeneity, she questions the stasis of subject transformation vhich, for both Kristeva and Acker, is a necessary move towards change at a political and cult üral level.

Knock hard - lif e is deaf ! - MhiParent Contextuaily, Acker's vritinq coincides vith her earlier careers as a stripper and performance artist. In the late 60'9, these two careers describing Acker's performance and rritirig, art critic Sayre vonders: 'Who is this II'? What does she vant? If these are fantasies, what kind of psyche do they depict?" (81).Certainly vhen readinq the partially autobiographical Kathy Goes to Haïti, we sense that the motivation for her fiction at this time is exactly the question Who am I?". While working as a stripper in New York during the avant-garde scene of the late sixties, Acker also mixed in New York underground circles with a vild variety of arttstic personae such as Andy Warhol and

John Cage. Acker identifies the works of these artists as veU as those of

WiUiam Burroughs, Georges Bataille and Jean Genet as havinq influenced her own vritinq, primarily in the use of the body in performance and text.

Involving the notion of the body in her vork became, for Acker, a technique of revolt against the status quo of the clean, literary productivity of the 1960's- The performative aspect of poetry and art brings about a sense of an unfùred motility, or what Sayre calïs, in reference to Allen

Ginsberg's poetry performances, a %reath event," vhich sees the vriter/artist locate a becoming in the text/perf ormance.

Borrowing from her experience in performance, Acker brings a materiality back to the frame of the narrative by playing vith language in both the form and content of the text. She draws in her novels, includes maps, tattoos, and strange hieroqlyphic sidebars in a pastiched and unrecognizable form much like that of Robert Kroetsch's long poem, "Seed

Catalogue."

For critic Ellen Friedman, ...Acker, perhaps more directly than many other vow.en vriters, creates the ferninine texts hypothesized by Hélene Cixous in essays such as lVCastration or Decapitation?".,.Like Acker, Cixous feels that vomen must ovezthrov their education, the metalanguage of their culture, in order tu really speak...(39; my emphasis)

Friedman makes links betveen Acker and Cixous* "vritinq the body," a specifically feminine creative impulse vhich can be expressed in a move to subvert the phaiiologocentzism of language. Writinq the body" is meant to interrogate the loqic of sameness vhich is set up by the modern subject, the male body politic which ve see all around us. Both Héléne Cixous and

Luce Iriqaray criticize the phallologocentrism of psychoanalysis for assurnuig the a priori of the male subject in analysis. In extendinq female specificity beyond an economy of the male, universal subject, these theorists, vhile celebrating female difference, often run the risk of sounding utopian and idealistic. In desiring to expand upon this notion of

"voman," Erigaray insists "voman has sex organs just about everyvhere"

(1031, and that "voman holds the secretw(101). Developinq this secret,

Irigaray hopes for voman to "tacitly go on strike, avoid men long enouqh to learn to defend their desire..." (106). Some American feminist theorists also pursue the notion of the specificity of the female body and the absolute split betveen male and female experience. American vriter and critic, Adrisnne Rich, calls for us to examine "the miracle paradox of the female body and its spiritual and political meaninqs" to create a nev language for w omen (29 0). Experimental French-Canadian vriters Nicole

Brossard and Louky Bersianik's version of l'ecriture ferninine involves creating a parallel vornen's languaqe in literature throuqh play vith female eroticism and the French lanquage. Motivating these theorists is the desire to validate women's experience after centuries of their havinq been bypassed.

while Friedman sees Acker's fiction as a specific vriting through the female body, 1 see her writirrq as an interrogation of the blnary vhich such a position promotes. Essentiaiisrn - a subjectivity yursucd throuqh biologism - understands identity in a fixed, static vay, that is, as nature proclaims it. 1 vould propose that although Acker vrites through the body, she pursues a notion of a revolutionary subject vhich not only considers

how it is informed by the biology of the female body, but also looks at the language and cultural practices vhich inscribe thernselves upon this body.

In doing so, 1 am encourages by theorist GURye vho asserts that is qu(ssti~ri?blevhether fwomen's bodies1 can be disentangled from socio-

cultural representations of themw(103). Acker pursues a notion of materiality for women (addressing needs and capabilities vhich derive £rom bioloqical formation), in order to better understand hov vomen and men cari exist together in new ethical relations vithin society.

The wrk of Acker stands out against that of other contemporary vriters ptimarily in her rigorous interrogation of the fernale subject. The texts of novelists such as tiargaret ~tvood,for example, do not vork in the sanie medium as do Ackervs. Althouqh the vritinq of Atvood, among

others such as Marge Piercy, ALice Hunroe and Carol Shields, can be categorized as beinq equally involved with feminist concerns, 1 vould arque that this type of literature lacks the radical dismantling and examination of the subject as vitnessed in postmodern fictions such as

Acker's. As a result, postmoderri texts are often not only very difficult to read, but as Gai1 Scott finds: "We found ourselves constantly monitoring our lanquage ta be clear ...1s that why 1 resent the fictional representation of Atwood's Elizabeth as an ice-cold broad? My desire vould have been to have her captured in a process of becominq ..." (Spaces

Like Stairs 22). WhUe we can aften enter into a smooth and easy * enqagement vith an Atwood novel, the relationship betveen the reader and Acker's more scabrous texts is a brutal and bloody love-hate affair. Acker's texts are not alone in their difficulty. Novels such as Kristjana

Gunnarts The Provler, and Gai1 Scott's Hain Brides, employ techniques vhich displace the reader f rom her familiar position of "receiver," These novels emply metanarrative techniques which address the reader, boldly challenqinq the assumed meaning of the text to her face and hiding characters behind a dialectic enqagement vhich often misleads and confuses. As Penelope Engelbrecht tells us: Acker leaps from classical Latin poetry to Havthornevs Rev. Dimvit to a nev Story of O to outlining Dickens' Great Expectations pip-pop, and 1 perceive her Don Quixote casts a vavering shadov of s ordid, pallid postmodern malaise vhether f emale or male or then or nov. Don Quixote as first vritten by Cervantes vas, of course, initlally sequelized by a 'tplagiarist," a fact that I'm sure appeals to Kathy Acker's (recyclable/regurqitative) appropriative vision. (31-32)

It is as if ve are enqaginq in Freud's game of fort-da, zepulsed and horrified, ve desperately vant to throv the book against the vall, vhile holding on to it in fascinated need. Acker's texts all play vith Freud's idea of the Unheimlich, exploitinq the familiar comfort of heiWhome. The disturbing neatness of her female characters (sometimes ve can associate with them, more than not ve are mortified by their actions), plays on Freud's assertion that the unheimlich nature of vomen's bodies, in particular that of their genitals, causes qreat general discomf ort-

Freud varns that

often...male patients declare that they feel there is somethinq uncanny about the female qenitals. This unheimlich place, hovever, is the entrance to the - former Heia of aU human beinqs, t O the place vhere everyone dvelt once upon a the and in the beginning. (Freud 51) This Fmudian iraage ccrrtve y s an ht ertse rapugrtaricy and putrescent horribleriess, and this Unheimlich, combined vith unfamiliar narrative technique, makes Acker's novels a challenge to the easy representation of the world ve expect to see - the self-same ve seek through our mind's eye. Acker takes us back a fev steps and demands of the reader an involvement which quickly becomes painful and horrifying. We can compare her prose to the performance art of Karen Finley, vhich critic C. Carr describes as "...obscenity in its purest form - never just a Litany of four-letter expletives but an attempt to express emotions for vhich there are perhaps no vords. An attempt to approach the unspeakable"

(121). In fact, the unspeakalle emotions of these artists create vhat

Carr calls a "rude-girl netvork" that begins to provide for vomen the kind of context that the '2radition of f oul-mouthed visionaries" - of Céline, Genet, and Lenny Bruce - has for men (123). The postmodern 'rude -girl netvork' challenges the thematic and ofteri moralizinq realism of the early feminist texts of the seventies vhich often remain vithin the existent systems of representation. In her essay, 'Women's Tirne," Julia Kristeva sees this early femltiism as having

aspized t O gain a place in linear the as the the of project and history .... The political demands of vomen; the struqgles for equal pay for equal vork, for taking pover ùi social institutions on an equal footing vith men; the rejection, vhen necessary, of the attributes traditionally considered ferninine or materna1 in so far as they are deemed incompatible vith insertion in that history .- axe ail part of the logic of identification vith certain values...with the logical and ontological values of a rationaïity dominant in the nation-state. ('Women's Tirne" 193-1941

The more traditional texts of this genre vere an attempt at leveliïng the playirig field by inseztinq a voman's experience into the literary landscape, vithout examining that very landscape. Feminist theorists nov note hov such a po~ition,ultimately problematic, tends to overlook the

xemains intact. women, Acker's fictions corne across as excessively violent and pornoqraphic, claiming this salacious excess as their throbbing centre. In fact, readinq Acker's texts cornes close to the experience of readinq the sybaritic prose of Georges Bataille, vhose style Susan Suleiman likens to a kirid of literary pornography (118). In the early part of her writing career, Acker's texts appear as a mutation in a scene vhich still expected a much less obscure and vulgar prose style from its female vriters. For

Suleiman, Bataille's vork, as vell as that of other avant-garde vriters, generally employs a technique of providing vithin itself a commentary upon the productivity of excess vithin culture. By "duplicating" the same literary techniques, it is also the intention of Acker to include such commentary upon the repressive and hypocritical state of a culture vhich strives to suqar-coat itself in its apparent, pleasing homogeneity.

Like Bataille, Acker displays a sense of alienated avareness, a f creignness and suspicion of t otalitarianism reminiscent of avant - gardism. For Bataille:

[hlomogeneity siqnifies... the commensurabilit y of elements and the avareness of this commensurability: human relations are sustained by a reduction to fixed rules based on the consciousness of the possible identity of delineable persons and situations; in principle, ail violence is excluded £rom this course of existence. (wPsycholoqical"137-138)

Bataille laments the repression of heterogeneity for the sake of what he cal15 "the development of a serviîe humari species, fit only for the

fabrication, rational consumption, and conservation of products" ("Use

Valuew 97). At the sanie time, Bataille celebrates the intellectual process

which is able to produce "of its ovn accord its ovn vaste products, thus

liberating in a disordered vay the heteroqeneous excremental elementw (ibid.). Acker's ovn uncontroiled Uberation of the '%eteroqeneous,

excremental elementwcreates a text vhich reverbexates vith disgust and disillusionment at culture's grand spectacle of illusory prosperity. She uses unequivocal forms of violence to criticize the apparent notions of

social freedom sarictioried by liberal hurnariisrn, much ir. the same way Dada artist Marcel Duchamp combined ready-made, everyday objects in obscure

and absurd collages to challenge the apparent unity of status quo qood

taste. Similarly, the ready-made, instant gratification of pornoqraphic

interests is recombined, reassessed and served up in a problematic

manner that is meant to cause a moment of pause, of thouqht, and, for

Acker, of revolutionary anqer.

The people axe becoming a Knovir.and Judicious People, A£ fliction hath made them vise, nov Oppression maketh vise men mad. - William Walvyn It is in this poetic anger and hope that Acker's texts touch qround theoretically vith thosc of Julia Kristeva. The history of poetic text

(the avant-garde), is the genre vhich Kristeva f ocuses on in her examination of a revolutionary text. As we have seen, this tradition is important tc the understanding of Acker's search for a postmodern subject. Acker credits vriters such as Genet, Artaud-and Rimbaud vith presenting "the human heart naked so that our vorld, for a second, explodes into flames" (Acker, "A Fev Notesw 31). Both Acker and rist te va work their vay throuqh the avant-garde tradition of questioninq and despair, brinqing to it their ovn cornmitment to social and cultural engaqement. Acker does so in the conviction that "lbly using each other,

each other's texts, ve keep on living, imagining, making, fucking and ve

fight this society of death" (ibid.).

A postmodernism for Acker vould include the "fight," a radical rethinking of the siqnif ication process, of cultural enqaqement and of the system created out of the history of philosophical thouqht, a system vhich has created "womann as a masculine object of discourse. A postmodernism for Acker also includes the desire to mark the debate about discourse with an ethical concern for our future. For Acker, this involves a movement throuqh postmodern despair and nothinqness, vhich we see evolving from her earlier vorks primarily concerned vith vomen

(Blood and Guts in High School, Kathy Goes to Haiti), to concerns for hopeful and creative relations between al1 humans (Empire of the

The destabilization of "grand narratives" vhich postmodern discourse points tovards, leads to a problematization of foundational ethics. Discourse is becoming increasingly localized and relative, leaving us with an unaccountable feeling of ethical chaos. In the introduction to his book, The Postmodern Scene, Arthur Kroker asks: For vho can speak vith confidence of the future of a postmodern scene vhen vhat is truly fascinating is the thrill of catastrophe, and vhere vhat drives onvard economy, politics, culture, sex, and even eating is not the vin to accumulation or the search for lost coherencies, but just the opposite - the ecstatic implosion of postmodern culture into excess, vaste and disaccumulation. (il

Althouqh Kxoker is fascinated by the YhrU of catastroph-etand

"hplosion of postmodern culture," this scene also describes an horrific Such a crazed subject of our information-overload culture is seen in Don DeLino's novel, White Noise. DeLillo presents a vorld filled vith overvhehinq, meaninqless noise in vhich it becomes impossible to assert a subjectivity or relations vith others. There seems to be very littïe standing betveen this non-foundational subjectivity and the threat of fascism, such as ve see recreating 'human nature' accordinq to its shiftinq needs in George OrveU's seminal novel, 1984.

There seems to be little reason to behave one vay rather tharr another, compounding our difficulties in attemptinq to establish a postmodern ethics. While postmodern texts serve as s basis for the investigation of an etkics of the subject - hov ve read ourselves in twentieth century culture, what modes of production and activity inform

Our subjectivities, and how ve establish relations vith others - at the same time ve fear the brain rush which sends us hurtlirrq tovards a 'Baudrillardian end of the millennium simulacra.' In his study of postrnodernism and the avant-garde text, Henry Sayre makes an astute assessrnent of this "postmodern bind," pointing out that ve seem to be left hanging in a position of extreme tension betveen modernism and postmodernism:

There are, then, tvo separate poetics of the present - a largely modernist one vhich sees in the "present," in the immediacy of experience, something like an authentic wvholeness,u a sense of unity and completion that is the "endw of art, and another, postmodern one which defines the present as perpetuaiïy and inevitably in media res as part of an ongoing process, inevitably f ragmentaxy, incomplete, and rnultiplicitous. This vould be a straightforvard enough situation, except that for so many the recognition of the latter in no vay mitigates their nostalgia for the former. It is as if, having lost formalism, we necessarily long for its returri, as if, having lost the present - or, rather, the fullness of presence - ve are somehov ernbarrassed to admit it. (175)

A vhite spider rose £rom a black mesh; there were people vho loved..-differently. - H.D.

This vast landscape of pain and uqliness is, in its purest forai, a search for love - a different ethics. Acker holds up the relationship betveen Charles Baudelaire and Jeanne Duval as a mode1 of this kind of change. As Duval's face is taken over by smallpox, Baudelaire's love foz her increases, For Acker this is "...uqliness [vhichl changes through vorse ugliness, even destruction, into lovewt(''A Fev Notestw32). Acker's texts become uglier and uglier as she progresses throuqh these cruel stories.

Yet in this vorld vhich is replete vith every form of horrendous violence imaginable, there is still a careful poetic qesture signallinq for something else. Acker's use of lanquaqe triqgers a declaration of love as described by Barthes in A Lover's Discourse:

Languaqe is a skin: 1 rub my lanquage against the other. It is as if 1 had vords instead of fingers, or finqers at the tip of rny vords. Hy lanquage trembles vith desire. The emotion derives from a double contact: on the one hand, a vhole activity of discourse discreetly, indirectly f ocuses upon. a single siqnif ied, vhich is mI desire you," and releases, nourishes, ramifies it to the point of explosion (lanquage experiences orgasm upon touchinq itsslf); on the other hand, 1 envrap the other in my vords, 1 caress, brush against, talk up this contact, 1 extend myself to make the commentary to vhich 1 submit the relation endure. (73)

Acker's love for lanquage and its potential is obvious, Her desire for the other and a need to create a relationship vith it places the notion of postmodern cynicism and nihilism on trial, She calls lt a "search for centres:" "1 think the other choice is? other than destruction and nihilism, ske tells us, "to find vhat your value is ... People are searching for their ceriters...and in this searcti - ttiat's vheri someorie starts being interesting, and stops being Uke jellon (Juno and Vale 181). This is a

torturous, creepinq re-thinkinq and gesturing of the vord in search of a cautionaxy warninq before ve submit to Krokerls vision of a cultural nothinqness and isolation.

We sense in Acker's literary struqgle a criticism against the quick

fix "ismstl of this culture and the nihilistic impulse vhich takes over much of postmodern criticisrn, leading, in the end, to the decryinq of metaphysics altogethet. In Positions, Derrida declares that ultimately

even he does not believe that we vill be able to completely escape

metaphysics (17). In an interview with Edith Kurzveil, Julia Kristeva

cautions American poststructuralists vho too quickly treat the notions

of hist ory and ethics as Enlightenrnent deadvood:

We assume that there alvays is a sort of dialectic betveen the metaphysical postulates and something else, and this dialectic enables us to consider such fields as ethics and history. In America, the so-cailed deconstructionists think that, because ethics and history belong to metaphysics and because metaphysics is criticized by Heidegger or his French follovers, ethics and history no longer exist. (Kurzveil 148)

The commitment to change is the site upon which ~cker's postmodernism can be located - the commitment to find a postmodern subjectivity vhich practices a dialectic upon the seam, this scar vhich is

identity. Exploring this tension is the heart of her pro ject. Although

Ellen Friedman sees Acker's search as turning up "nothing," it vould be

unfair to even suggest a comparison betveen her vork of Refusal and

Kroker's pessimistic NO, or the slow brain-fade of DeLillo's White Noise. Chapter Tvo

A Haunt ing JouIss~C~:Sïiding int O Julia Krist eva's Semiotic Playing Field

But Plato, you make us shit; and so do you, Socrates, Epictetes, Epjcurus; and you, Kant, and you, Descartes, t00. Artaud Encroach: to intrude gradually, stealthily, insidiously Looni: to seem ominously close, to donilnate or overhang

The theory of meaning nov stands at a crossroad: either it will remain an attempt at f ormalizînq meaning-systems by increashg sophistication of the loqico-mathematical tools which enable it to formulate models on the basis of a conception (already rather dated) of meaning as the act of trariscendental ego, cut off from its body, its unconscious and also its history; or else it vill attune itself to the theory of the speakinq subject as a dlvided subject (conscious/unconscious) and go on to attempt to specify the types of operation characteristic of the tvo sides of this split, thtreby exposing them to those forces extraneous to the loqic of the systematic... (wSystemw28)

Julia Kristevals seminal analysis of linguistic systems and their zelationship to literature and art is a re-energized re-assessment of structuralism and f ormalism, deriving f rom her belief that wColur philosophies of languaqe, embodiments of the Idea, are nothing more than the thouqhts of archivists, archaeolo5ists, and necrophiliacs" (Revolution 13). Vieving lanquage as a closed-of f, unified entity, as the lovers of the old and the dead do, creates a subject vhich positions itself vis d vis this perceived statlc reallt y. rist te va investlqates a new dialectical system - one vhich subverts the monologisn of the current system, but vhich at the same the vorks to support the Law. She criticizes the linguistic systen for having @@ethicalfoundations Ivhichl belong to the past ..." (Desire 24). K~isteva'snev slqnifybg system goes beyond the established system of language to incorporate the play, pleasure and desire vhich Kristeva sees as missing in the structural approach t O languaqe.

A21 true language is incomprehensible. - Artaud In Revolution in Poetic Language, Kristeva attacks the €ormalista vhich underlies the structuralist notion of language and the subject, insistinq that

this thinking points to a truth, namely, that the kind of activity encouraqed and privileged by (capitaîist) society represses the process pervadinq the body and the subject, and that ve must therefore break out of our interpersonal and intersocial experience if ve are to gain access to what is repressed in the social mechanism: the generating of significance. (13)

Ir1 the late 1960'8, Kristeva took part in the Tel Quel group whose concerns included e-xploring the emergence of poststructuralism, avant- garde writinq and political leftism. During this time, she took part in a movement vhich mediated critics such as Bakhtin to the West- At the time of Tel Quel and the newly developing discussions concerning the subject, Kristeva began looking at the subject of structurallsm. Her theory began concentrating on the need nto 'dynamizer the structure by taking into . consideration the speaking subject and its unconscious experience on the one hand, and on the other, the pressures of other social structuresn("My

Wemory's Hyperbolem225). Taking the position of the subiect in poststructural thought into account, Kristeva vorks tovards-a new system of signification vhich shifts the focus from a unified, static mbject or ~tructure,to orbe which is replete vith multifarious drives, ir~troduclnga desirous body and its processes to the concept of the subject. Kristeva criticizes the transcendental subject of phenomenology for not venturing outside of the contained function of the symbolic. As a result, she devotes her studies In psychoanalysis t O the re-development of the "generating of significance," vhich shakes the subject loose from its f i~edposition in Enlightenment philosophy. She discovers that The process of signification 1s more than just a language," maintainhg that it also exhibits Yal complex array of nonlinguistic representations Ivhichl f oster the very practice of lanquaqe: drive, sensation, prelanquage, rhythm, melody, and so on" (Guberman 268). She applies the vork of ~reud and his theories of drives and sexuality to the Enlightenment project, thereby opening to language a discussion of the subject and its development. Kristeva picks up on the psychoanalytic notion of social, cultural and familial influences upon the subject, which Freud outlines in his notion of human sexual development during the Oedipal complex.

Does the mirror stage appear out of novhere3- Kristeva

Kristevals purpose is to establish the necessity of an anterior function to the post-Oedipal positioning of the subject. For her, the

*desire in languageCis traceable through this function, vhich she caUs the 'semiotic,' and, for the purpose of this thesis, is the key to the kunfulfi3hent' of the postmodern subject. It is a desire inscribing language t O grou, to move toward flux, change and a continual becoming, caused by a semiotic "distinctive mark, trace, index, the premonitory sign, the proof, engraved mark, imprint - in short, a distinctiveness admittinq of an uncertain and indeterminate articulation.,." (Desire 133). This direction în psychoanalytic thought, vith its focus on the unconscious, breaks vith the therapeutic, @'curingMnature of ego analysis which strives to recreate for the patient a sense of vholeness and unity.

Acknovledging a debt to both Freud and Lacan, Kristeva offers a

rereadinq of their studies in psychoanalysis in order to elabozate upon their 'speaking subject' for the purpose of creatinq her 'subject in process.' In introducinq the semiotic and its drives to the signifying

subject, she transforms Lacan's notion of the signifybg practice of languaqe in order to pursue a subject derfved not only of the symbolic but of something other vhich escapes meaninq. Lacan identifies lanquage as beinq essential to the symbolic stage, vhich is responsible for the establishment of the social funct ion and the realm of sigriif ication, and ttius responsible for psychic and material subject format ion. This function systematically creates the language processes vhich constitute the structure of society and the individual, as identity predication becomes the primary function of the Symbolic. Kristeva qualifies the notion of the progression into language and the symbolic order and the linquist ic communit ies, vhile challenqing the notion that this function is responsible for creating a determinate subject and community. In expository detail, Kristeva analyzes Lacan's theory of the symbolic in order to uncover the vay in vhich the apparent homogeneity of this stage creates an identification vith a sense of aut onomy vhich wseems''complete, providing an iilusory idea of kaving left the fragmented self behind. According to Lacan, the child enters the mirror stage at six to eighteen aionths, at which point it recognizes its autonomous self over the obj5ct in the mirror. Suddenly, this acquisition of the I/eye is filled vith symbolic importance. While the pre-Oedipal stage, th6 haginary, is a stage of undif ferentiated unifkatlm vith the

rnlother, the symbolîc cteates a spUt betveen the m/other and the child causing the child to see for itself. Also important is the assumption of a specific corporeality by the child. The child vill identify vith either the

body of the mother or father as it moves into the symbolic and assumes a position vis d vis the phallus,

Because she follovs human development through the psychoanalysis of Freud and Lacan, Kristeva is often criticized by feminist theorists vho believe she has fallen prey to the phallic structure of the Oedipal cornplex which, as the child stxuggles to become a signifyinq self, aims to

secure the other (voman) in signification. This criticism often involves a misreading of phallus as penis - as inherently, biologically male. Lacan himself equates 'the phallic terni" not only vith 'the pure and simple

erection," but also vith %he pure and simple raised stone tandl the human

body as erected" (Borch-Jacobsen 216).

As Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen points out in Lacant The Absolute Naster,

Ytlhe erection of the phallic statue properly belonqs to man, as homo erectus" (216). Naturauy, in contrast, the female sexual orqan, in its hidden folds cannot claim such upriqhtness, and furthennore, because

languaye identifies vhat it sees best, the phallus as penis has become

ovex-signified as the ruling order. But, most siqnificantly, ve can think

of the term phallic as it applies to bankind,' that is to Say, in its

dominance over all things. This authority/control in its absolute form, as

veïï as the lure of the ideal, unified image, is vhat cancerns Kristeva.

Kristeva's analysis picks up on the fact that ttie materna1 function is repressed in Lacan's narrative of the mirror stage. Accordinq to both

Lacan and Freud, the child's fear of castration acts as a rite of passage in which the child completely rejects al1 identification vith the mother, thus creating a conception of woman as 'lack of' and man as 'presence of.' Along vith this image of voman as lack cornes a proliferation of images vhich link voman vith lack of aorality, substance, inteqrity and physical and intellectual strength, toname but a feu examples. Thus, Lacan develops the symbolic in a manner vhich videns the gap betveen the male and f emale, a process which ends up privileqing male subject ident if icat ion.

So glister'd the dire Snake, and into f raud / &d Eve our credulous Mother, to the Tree / Of prohibition, root of al1 our voe-.. - Milton For an example of this phallic order of identification ve may turn to

John Milton's "Paradise Lost," a poem/vorld vithout a mother, vhere syrnbolic reasoning is made up of the 'voice of One' - God, the Father. As Eve identifies herself for the first the in a pool of vater, her response is to prefer her image to that of Adam, who beckons to her. In turninq back to her ovn image, she is cailed upon by the commanding Father: "Return fair Eve, / Whom fli'st thou? vhom thou flL'st, of hùa thou artw(IV, 481-2).

She yields to the voice of 'the ~aw'and exclaims "frorn that the see /

Hou beauty is exceUVdby manly grace / And visdom, vhich alone is truly fairn UV, 489 -90). She is instructed by Divine Lav to follov Adam, to forsake her ovn image and live forever in an Oedipal vorld of the Father's making - the first 'castratedrmother. Contemporary critical theory has witnessed a deconstruction of this archetype. In The Pleasure of the Text, Roland Barthes varns us of rnythifying the Oedipal narrative:

if it is true that every narrative, every unveiling of the truth is a staging of the (absent, hidden or hypostatized) father - vhich vould emlain the solidarity of narrative forms, of family structures, and of prohibitions of nudity, all collected in our culture in the myth of Noah's sons coverinq his nakedness. (4) And, as we see in Nicole SteUonls delightful poem, "Ev~,~the eterrial anguish of post-lapsarian life is a hellish experience of unfulfUent, vhere the mother (voman), is given the short end of the stick in the old farniliar triangle:

When 1 bit into that sveet apple 1 knev vhat 1 vas doing. 1 vasnet tricked by no snake. Adam kept pulling the "That vas my ribwshit 1 vas throuqh vith it. So 1 found an out. Anythinq had to be better Than pruning bushes and strokinq TVO enormous eqos. "The absence of God is hell," He said. I didn't ask the little prick to join me, But he did, Nov it is. (1-14) The riarrator in this poem, the subject, is forever frustrated, damned to alvays already exist in the fallen state. We are always positing our desires £rom this state, ve alvays deffne ourselves accordinq to the moment tefore the apple is bitten into - idyllic identification. In a move of absolute abrogation, Edenic vomb-like security is yanked avay by the religious law of the Father, coverinq up the nakedness of the flesh. It is in the expressive act of biting into the apple that Eve displays vhat

Hegel calls the "eternal irony of community," because she vill always remain an unfulfilled subject, in amused discord vith social standards.

Stripped and naked until this moment of transgression, desire and shame, lust and prohibition collide in "Paradise LostfWan example of the mythified Oedipal triangle vhich effectively strips woman forever after of her bioloqical body.

The poet is there...f orbidding any '1" to doze off... - Kristeva . The eye looking into the mirror sees an '1' vhich presents itself as a visual image of the unified body, a complete package, the %ounded 1" according to Kristeva. In this identification, Kristeva sees the symbolic as the "inevitable attribute of meaninq, sign, and the signified object for the consciousness of Husserl's transcendental eqon (Desire 134). Although Lacan presents a unified subject of the symbolic, Kristeva propounds that "ft lhe var is never over and the poet [eyel, shall continue indef iriitely t O measure hinise M... against the mirror imagen (Desire 133). For Lacan, as Borch-Jacobsen points out, The human subject has no interiority, no interior in vhich to store or Save for hinrself the so- calied unconscious representations... he is always already projected outside, into the openness of a public space" (149). Thus, ve have the identification vith vhat ve sec - the penis, and vhat ve do not - the vaqina. To this absolute exteriority, Kristeva introduces her analysis of the semiotic function which exists in "either a negative or surplus relationship to itw(Desire 133). Pre-verbal experience of the child's relationship to the mother's body and its rhythms vil1 crash f orvard into the symbolic as "lm lemories of bodily contact, warmth, and nourishment" (Desfre 2 81) to the point at vhich "we must xeckon vith the mother's desire..." (Desire 282). After the bizth, "itlhe imprint of an archaic moment, the threshold of space, the "choral' as primitive stability absorbing anaclitic facilitation, produces laughterw(Desfre 28 3). For Kristeva, the confrontation betveen the semiotic and the symbolic is unendinq, for "it is withiri our 'adult' discourse that these potential uteanings and topological latencies are at vorkn (Desire 291). Signification vffl become a struggle (the wound) upon the boundary betveen the two poles. When the symbolic tries to pass over it vil1 be challenqed by the violence of the çemiotic (the biological) and vice versa. with this 8hift of fwua in meaning from atzucturaUsm to a

signifying process vhich she calls 'signi fiance,' Kristeva directs her analysis to the elaboration upon vhat she terms "subject in processw,a subject vhich exists vithin the reah of the Law, but vil1 alvays remain in a state of flux, on trial, because of an otherness, an unaccountable

excess, vhich hovers close by, threatening identity. The subject vill create an identity based on the logic of the lanquaqe systems, but can

oscillate vildly tovards the diffezence vhich cornes of re jecting the Law: 1 shall cal1 signif ying practice the establishment and the countervailing of a siqn system. Establishinq a siqn system calls for the identity of a speakinq subject within a social framevork, vhich he recognizes as a basis for that identity. Countervailinq the siqn system is done by having the subject underqo an unsettlinq, questionable process; this indirectly challenges the social framevork vith which he had previously identified, and it thus coincides vith times of abrupt changes, renewal, or revolution in society. (Desire 18)

The interruption by the semiotic of the normative discourse creates "abrupt changes" in the czeation of the subject. It constitutes the pleasure of the autoerotic body, the mother's cleaved, desirous body, an anarchic, semiotic, t ransgressive quality vhich provides the destruction of the notion of the modernist subject as fixed and unitary, vhile insisting upon an embodied subject vhich is fully involved in history and culture. Kristeva aims to decenter the homoqeneity of the subject and elaborate the process of a speaking subject vhich will be forced to "tally vith its homogeneity..," (Desire 135). The given reason and unity of the humanist subject wiU be tom apart by the uneasy ambiguities developed in Kristevafs psychoanalytic theory.

First let's make a poem, vith blood,,, - Artaud For Kristeva, the repressed drives of the semiotic are articulated throuqh a poetic srblimation vithin literature, in order YtIo elucidate the htrinsic connection betveen literature and [to break1 up social concord: because it utters incest, poetic lanquage is linked vith 'evil'..."

(Desire 137). This poetic function is displayed by avant-garde texts, whose vriters are examples of 'subjects in process.' For Kristeva, the work of Artaud, Mallarmé and CPline for example, cornes up against the sign-s ystem text of t raditionalism, chaïïenging the teleoloqical quaiity and structure of the vritten vord. The poetic lanquage of these texts provides a materialization of the semiotic because it

postulatels l the hetezogeneity of biological operations in respect of signifyinq operations, and 1st udies 1 the dialectics of the former... (iti infrùrge[si the coile in the direction of alîoving the subject to get pleasure from it, renev it, even endanqer it ...("SystenW 30)

The revolutionary aspect of this poetic voice charges ahead into the apparent llnearity of textual history, creatlng a text vhere "the struggle betveen symbolic authority and the drive-based cal1 from an archaic mother is alvays present and is at the very heart of the creative process" (Boucquey îlî). Rather than f ocus upon the unification of subjectivit y through smooth, k/otherless' analysis of the Symbolic, Kristeva concontrates on borderline cases such as that of Artaud, vhich "constitute p: opitious qround for a sublimatinq discourse...rather than a scientific Ir rationalist onew(Powers 7). In Artaud's experience of poetic madness the electroshock which is administered to him cannot harness hic c'rives - throuqhout his life he becomes more and more delirious. Kristera desires to "lay bare, under the cunninq, orderly surface of civilizations, the nurturinq horror that they attend topushing aside by purifyinq, systematizing, and thinking..." (Povers 210). She maintains that it is in art and 'titerature that the ethlcs of trar~sqressionis best displayed. In her article, "Women and Society in Literature, or Reading Kristeva and Proust," Carol Hastrange10 %ovecredits Kristeva vith havinq established

a "delicate balance...betveen f orm and content, between linguistic and

social structures, and the vital bridge that she uses to connect the tvo

can be seen as one of the great strenqths of her approachw(264). This

crisis points t o the "double bindn of identity. In Desire in Language, Kristeva explores a subject vhich exists on the borders, taken to task by

the unaccountable, contaminant desize of the semiotic function. In Julia

Kristeva, Jonathan Lechte stresses that Kristeva strives ?or a kind of kquilibrium' betveen the semiotic and the symbolic, whereby n[mleaninq

and non-meaninq corne to exïst side by sideet(209). 1 think equilibrium can

be replaced vith tension and Kristeva's ovn te-, 'a6bivalence.' Because

she is not concerned with an absolute ndenaturinqn of the "other loqic,"

"lt lhe term dambivalence' lends itself perfectlywt O the notion of a "coexistence...of khe double of lived experience' ...and 'lived experience' itself ..."(Desire 89). Artaud, the borderline subject, is unable to reconcile "the double ofw and "the lived experience of Ufen that pushes him further and further into a state of psychosis, Because the danger of this psychosis always looms near, Kristeva recommends that

Eoln the basis of this fact...one must try not to deny these two aspects of Unquistic communication, the mastering aspect and the aspect that is more of the body and of the impulses, but to try... to find a proper articulation of those tvo impulses. (Baruch 117)

The tension between these tvo impulses is necessary in order to establish a subject in process vhich exists betveen extremes and resists containment vithin the trappings of complementarity or opposition.

As Davne McCance points out in Posts, to locate a clean bifurcation between the semiotic and the symbolic Ys to miss the ambivalence of Krist evagssignifying subject, its undecidable process betveen semiotic and synrbolic ..." (97). In fact, clean lines and scissions are abandoned for raised and indeteminate, scarred surfaces. The subject in process wavers somevhere around this uneven surface, somevhere betveen art and ethics, betveen life and death. McCance's careful exploration of Kristeva's ambivalence and signification reminds us of the challenge vhich Kristeva sets before the 'dissident' of postmodern theory: "[tlorn betveen being the guardian of the lav and that instance vhich disavovs the lav, hasngt philosophy turned avay from thought?" ("Nev Typen 300). McCance's reminder/remainder traces us back to Kristeva's ovn cont irtuous reminders of the hazy ambiguities and indistinctions entvined in her project, ail leading tovards a re-examination of 'thouqht:' In the subject in process ve encounter a "psychic structure much closer to vhat is seen nov as b~rderbe...~(Baruch 120). "It is poetic language that avakens our attention to this undecidable character..." (Desire 135). For this reason, it is not unsurprisïng that, vhen feminist theorists discuss French feminism, they often disreqard Kristeva or too easily cateqorize her work alongside that of Cixous and Irigaray.

American ferninists Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron, in their introduction to Nev French Feminisms, remark that these "French feminists" "attack vhere it hurts most. They poke fun at the male erect ion, the male preoccupation vith qetting it up, keepinq it up, and the ways in which the life and death of the penis are projected into other aspects of culture..." (36). Yet Kristeva's theory vaEies in subtle deqrees f rom that of other "French ferninists". Upon close reading one realizes that a theoretical concern for thouqht and care is voven throughout her w cirk, f olded uito the seaahs of all her argurerits.

~f men could see us as ve really are, they vould be a little amazed-- Charlotte Bront8 He lifts the Lid, there needs no more, He smelt it all the The before. As f rom vithin Pandora's Box, When Epimetheus opmdthe Locks, A sudden universal Crew Of humane Evils upvards flev- (Svift 81-86)

wumane evils" is Svift's poetic vay of saying the feculent stench of shit. This def ilement fioats upvards, outwards, encircling the narrator who is confronted by his ovn revulsion and horror. Imagine his repulsion as kie looks down at his lover's excremental left-ovexs, she vho is the most beautiful, the most undefiled of vomen. Suddenly faced vith the treacherous, interna1 rnessiness of this beautiful body, this voman is no longer the same abject of desire for the narrator. Her function has become hazy and blurred. Inside-out, the loqic of their relationship is turned on its head and Strephon runs £rom the room.

Svift exhibits wonderf ul fecundit y in his poetic analysis of the relationship betveen the lover and his beloved's scummy, unkempt boudoir, the 'nest of love.' The importance of the quotation from the poem lies both in its scatological element and in the horror felt by Strephon as he encounters this f oulness. "Excrement and its equivalents (decay, infection, disease, corpse, etc.) stand for the danger to identity that cornes from vithout: the ego threatened by the non-eqo, society threatened by its outside, life by death" (Povers 7 1).In Povers of Horror,

Kristeva analyzes the reaction of abjection such as've vitness in Strephon, a reaction that attosts to the desperate hold on ozder vhich the symbolic function provides. Once aqain ve are reminded of the tenuous ambiguity of subject boundaries. Strephon's lover has neqlected to pezform the normal rituab vhich vould spare him this reaction of revulsion. These rituals are meant to purify and cleanse, so as to keep abjection at bay and bodily functions clearly and specif icaUy classified. In this case, there is actual, loathsome residual evidence of the ineffectiveness of the ritual, a trace of the abject. There is not only the revealinq commode and its detritus, but also the remnants of her cosmetics, an incursion of items vhich othervise produce an hazmonious and aesthetically pleasing balance vhen on the face. Strephon is horrified at havinq to face this mess vhich is creephg its vay into his domain of ordezly images and sensations. His - .- mood quickly shifts from romantic and indulgent t O anqry and disappointed, marking Sviftls ironic tone tovards man and his pastoral notions of woman.

Bodily fluids force us t O recognize bodies as slashed open, gushing f orth, uncontained, contaminatinq. Unable to reconcile the animality of man with his spiritual side, the subject experiences cxisis as he is throvn into the world of the 'If and the 'not-1.' The abjected excrement lies hoverinq somevhere betveen Strephon and his lover, causing extreme urieasiness. In an astute, humorous assessment of these human teridencies, vriter Janet Frame reminds us of this double-edqed uneasiness (bath ridiculous and serious) in her novel, The Edge of the

Alphabet: "Man is the only species for vhom the disposal of waste is a burden, a task often il1 judged, costly, criminal - especially vhen he leaxns to include himself, living and dead, in the lïst of vaste products'l

(3). The excremental remindex/remainder that ve are aU mortal, too soon to be laid down into the earth again, is one vhich mankind abjects over and over. Artaud displays a perverse pleasure in playing vith the notion of death in his poetry, always feellr~qhimself nto be the hideous corridor of an impossible revulsionw(185). A blight on supreme human consciousness, death disturbs our hold on immortality. It certainly disturbes Anais Nin,

for, in imaqining kissinq Artaud, she vrites in her diary, Y loved his madness. 1 looked at his mouth, vith the edqes darkened by laudanum, a mouth 1 did not vant to kiss. To be kissed by Artaud vas to be dravn t owards death, towards insanity..." (229). Artaud's gaping mouth is an open vound defigurinq identity, it is the lover's unpaïnted, hagqard face from vhich Strephon recoils.

What Strephon experiences is a momentary unbalance, a hazy self- insecurity, a lfnarcissisticcrisisnt caused by confrontinq the abject. The stable narcissism, the "1 am," is throvn int O cataclyst ic exorbitance.

Eventually his narcissism VUagain set in, as, (in Kristeva's vords) "...a reqressiori to a position set back from the other, a return to a self- contemplative, conservative, self -suf ficient havenw(Povers 14). The ego becomes the centre again, the

agency of language since it is the "crovn" of rhythmic thrust, limiting structure, paternal lav abrading rhythm, destroyinq it to a large degree, but also bringinq it to liqht, out of its earthy revolutions, t O enunciate it self... (Desire 2 9 1 Kristeva states that the positing of this centre is vhere qr is bound to the suri!' and vhere 'solar mastery cuts off rhythm!' (ibid.).

Here k7heïe the Mother eats her Sons., - Kristeva

The abject confronts us, on the other hand, and this the within our persona1 archeoloqy, vith our earliest attempts to release the hold of materna1 entity even before ex-istinq outside of her...It is a violent, clumsy breakinq away, with the constant risk of fallinq b=ck under the svay of a pover as securing as it is stifling. (Povers 13)

Within our persona1 archeology the abject is the earliest sublimated object and appears "only vithin the qaps of secondary

repressionn (Povers 12). There is a repression even before the mirror

stage, prior to the division of subject from object, In Povers of Horror,

Kristeva entitles the section devoted to unravellinq the placement of

abjection "Before the Beginninq,w vhere the subject is "alvays already

haunted by the Other, to divide, re ject, repeat. Without one division, one

separation, one subject/object having been constituted (not yet, or no

longer yet)" (Povers 12). By insistinq upon abjection as prior to the mirror stage, Kristeva is able to concentrate on the relationship betveen

the abject and the maternal, bringinq out the complex relationship between the vriterhpeaker and mother in poetic languaqe. The confrontation vith the abjected m/other causes fear, "a fluid haze, an elusive clamminessw(Povers 6). Earlier, in Desire in Language, she has already insisted that lYnlo lanquage can sinq unless it confronts the

PhaUic Motherl' (Desire 191).

The relationship betveen the m/other and the subject/writer/artist is one based upon the abjected position of the m/other, "this other of the linguistic and/or social contractw(Desire 30). As stated earlier, the maternal authority of the PhaUic mother represents a disturbance to the

Symbolic in her semiotic relationship to the child and the requlation by the mother of the child's body. Here, abjection is necessary because of the threat of the mother's gapinq sex, which is seen as always ready to re -eriqulf the child into an indistinct vorld.

The raw, dissolving gesture,., - Artaud Céline vrites: Tou know, in Scriptures, it is vritten: qn the beqinning vas the Word.' No! In the beqinning vas emotion. The word came aftervarils ~CJreplace ernotim as the trot replaced the gallopm(Kristeva

us back, through rage, to a place vhich escapes naming, 'confrontinq the

Phallic Mother to sinq.' Ironicaily, many critics maintain that it is in the

res~irrecticinof the role of the mother that Kristeva betrays her

idealism tovard the fernale role: What is most damaging to Kristeva's

theory £rom a feminist point of viev-is her revival of the sentimental ideal of materna1 devotion to tame the sinister forces of destruction ..." (Meyers 151). Rather, far from a sentimental ideal of motherhood, Kristeva

sees the poet as beinq forced to experience a nightmarish horror vhich they must subiimate in their writing. Tortured by the abject, Artuad con£ides

A niqhtmare never is an accident, but an evil fastened on to us by a whore, by the mouth of a ghoul of a vhore vho finds us too rich with life, and so creates by very exact slurps some interferences in our thouqht, some catastrophic voids in the passage of the breath of our sleeping body, which believes itself free from care. (Artaud 109)

From this site of abhorrence and horror is created a narrative which clears the vay for nev voices, nev disruptive desirous bodies:

On close inspection, al1 literature is probably a version of the apocalypse that seems to me rooted, no matter vhat its socio-historical conditions might be, on the fragile border (borderline cases) vhere identities (subject/object, etc.) do not exist or only barely so - double, fuzzy, heteroqeneous, animal, metamorphosed, altered, abject. (Fovers 207)

Certainly Céline 's beqinninq of emotion is not to be mistaken as an idealized aesthetic of Romantic beginnings. The text is horror laughing fl-ighteningly in the face of Romanticism. In Kristeva's analysis we see hov in beinq connected to the anguish of birth, Céline's prose is a dehiscence, burst open and pourinq forth in loathsome aqony. In confronthg the Phallic Hother, Cbline can be seen as resigning the literary object and underminhg his ovn authorial position in the vritinq

out of this position of aqony. This is the introduction of crime into art,

the abject problematizinq the normative position of modernist authorship.

We have a deLirious love affair vith the brutality of Céline's vork.

In Journey to the End of the Night, ve vitness a bizarre display of perf ormative cruelty and loathsome propensities. In one section of the

novel, he writes frankly about beinq taken on a tour of tventy-six corpses by the same younq voman vith vhom he has just shared a sexual

encounteK. With unfailinq candour, he recommends afterwards, "[sluch

moments axe not to be missed. They put your eyes out of joint, but it's

vorth it" (333). The closeness of the sex, durinq vhich he "vriggled round

her belly like a love worm" (3321, to the corpses, vhich are described in a

vay that brinqs to mind the worm-invaded mess of decayed flesh, leaves

one feeling ill at ease. Kristeva points out that this "black ïaughtern uncovers not meaninq but ''the faltering of transcendental consciousnessn

(Desire 145). The aesthetic style of Celine's vritinq is a semiotic violence

which is channeiled through sublime art into lanquaqe vhich ve can approach (just barely) - the meeting of apocalyptic horror with the symbolic word.

In Reading Kristeva, Kelly Oliver vrites that MEhlumanlife, human

society, is founded on the abject separation of one body from another at birthw(57). From tkis cornes the "body proper," closed off and autonomous to others. Because the abject, the threat of m/other, can cut across any

system, the symbolic, in its desire to maintain the system, enforces its borders throuqh ritual. The messy body, the blurrinq of m/other and child, opposes the idealized Western construct of the body, a construct vhich Kristeva Identifies as arlshq largtly froi the symbolic order. She studies the Bible in order to elaborate upon extreme reliqious prohibitions in a society formed upon the classification and demarcation of the body. Kristeva outlines various rites of defilement vhich "iilustrate the boundary betveen semiotic authority and symbolic law"

(Powers 73). The symbolic asserts itself throuqh ritual to keep maternal authority at bay:

By means of the symbolic institution of ritual, that is to Say, by means of a system of ritual exclusions, the part ial-ob ject consequently becomes scription - an inscription of limits, an emphasis not placed on the (paterna11 Law but on (maternal) Authority throuqh the very siqnif yinq order. (Povexs 73)

The ritual indicites an avareness of the permeability of boundaries, provoking the symbolic to jettison the abject £rom the system in a protective measure aqainst its looming presence.

Mother, Why did You give me this Hole... - Gai1 Scott

As Kelly Oliver points out in Reading Kristeva, critics often take some of Kristeva's work out of context to provide arguments for her apparent essentialism of the female body, in particular the maternal body

( 4 8 1. Andrea Nye criticizes Kristeva for endorsinq "rightest candidates against the socialistswand essentializinq the female body through a

"materna1 semiotics" (213). As her argument against these "maternal semiotics'' evolves, Nye calls for an l'exposure of the symbolic form of the philosophy of man," for a nev direction in feminist thouqht (217). Oddly enough this seems to be exactly vhat Kristeva's vork points tovard - a theory vhich vill call the existing symbolic order into question.

The criticism of essentialization seems odd after reflection upon Kristevals large oeuvre, vhich, as 1 have already noted, calls for shapeshifting and reliance upon ambivalence. Althouqh Kristeva invokes notions of 'the ferninine' in her description of the semiotic, she is critical of strictly assiqninq the role of semiotic to 'vomen' and the symbolic to 'menF. She believes

if one assigns to vomen that phase alone, this in fact amounts to maintainhg vomen in a position of inferiority, and, in any case, of marginality, to reserving for them the lace of the childish, of the unsayable, or of the hysteric. (Baruch 117)

At the same time, she is leery of vomen adoptinq the lanquaqe of the

Father to gain recognition because "this attitude can be accompanied by the denial of two thinqs: on the one hand, of the question of pover, and on the other, of the particularity of womenw(ibid.). In fact, her essay,

"Womenps The," is a vonderful examination of how she valks a careful line betveen the liberal feminism of the early seventies, and the radical feminism of the eighties, Furthermore, Kxistevapsvork often criticizes both the symbolic reification of motherhood (the Virqin Mary), as a function vhich is used to describe the essence of 'voman,' and the cultural danger of abjectinq aU

'vomen' as such, rather than the necessary abjection of the Phallic

Mother: "A woman is trapped within the frontiers of her body and even of her species, and consequently alvays feels exiled both by the general clichés that make up a common consensus and by the very povers of generalization intrinsic to lanquage" (Desire 296). In this Kristeva beqins a deconstruction of the binary betveen male and female, pointinq out that 'vornan' cannot reside vithin the 'unnameable' role in 'vhich philosophy ha3 pfaced Lier. She does admit to a certain excess in the ferninine element, a female specificity, but there is also alvays the Lav. The split subject of the euther points to the ambivalence betveen these tvo poles and "maternity [becomesl a bridge betveen sinqularity and ethics...at once the guarantee and a threat to its stabilityw(Desire 297). The materna1 body

represents the generation of cultural subjectlvity vhich is threatened

by otherness and difference:

[ilt is probably necessary to be a voman (ultimate guarantee of sociality beyond the wreckage of the paternal symbolic function, as veli as the inexhaustible generator of its reneval, of its expansion) not to renounce theoretical reason but to compel it to increase its pover by giving it an object beyond its Limits. (Desire 146)

Kristeva's investigation into the notion of 'voman' uncovers the

obscure relationship between the moral, the corporeal, and the feminine,

the outcome of which is a biologization of the discourse of ethics. This

ethics which she labels 'herethics,' is maintained by "an instinctual drive" which "refers back to an instinctual body," one vhich vill cause languaqe and flesh t O collide in new, unpredictable ethical considerat ions

(Desire 146). Suddenly, the subject must take into account the body and its instinctual drives, often seen as 'ferninine.' As an examination of this drive unaccountability, vriter Laurie Weeks, in her short story, "Svallov," has her narrator confessïng to the confusion betveen word and body:

1 often said thinqs 1 neither intended nor felt, as if words congregated in my mouth, foreign particles, to svim forth and engulf me in a sticky murk... 1 had bequn to qet vords mixed up vith food; if it came inside my mouth, a thinq seemed to have the ability to change me in unpredictable vays. (36)

For Kristeva, there is something in the transgression vithin the avant-garde text vhich she feels cornes close to siqnifying 'voman,' "a contest against the Sun supported by a feminine figure ...IV (Desire 30). The contest aqainst the Sun vould àlso include the reigninq umbrella of humanism and its reigninq subject - the voice and body of men as the reigning norm for ethics. About her ovn vork, Kristeva believes:

[wlhat makes my vork the vork of a voman is that 1 pay close attention to the element of avant -garde practice that e radicates identity (includinq sexual identity), and 1 try to formulate a theoretical rebuttal to the metaphysical theories that censure vhat 1 just labelïed "a voman." (Psych et Po 9 8)

She makes her voxk an exercise in puttinq thought into beinq, as if she were the foreigner in exile, in order to recreate, to push limits, to tap into this excess, to re-engage in historically and socially pertinent ethical discourse:

If it 1s true that the sudden surge of vomen and children in discourse poses insoluble questions for Reason and Right, it is because this surqe is also yet another symptom of the Death of Man ..., [Tihrouqh the efforts of thougkt in lanquage, or precisely through the excesses in language vhose very multitude is the only siqn of life, one can attempt to brinq about multiple sublations of the unnameable, the unrepresentable, the void. This is the real cutting edqe of dissidence, ("Nev Typen 300)

The relationship vhich she dravs betveen the avant-garde text and 'voman' is, for Kristeva, a move avay from the nihilism of some avant- garde vritinq and t owards a social and political engagement. While there is a continuous threat from the drives, her vork calls for a means by which these impulses can be taken to task. It is a connection betveen semiotic negativity and ethical imperative, in a vorld vhich has been cracked open and throvn into crisis.

The trailing horror and haziness of abjection takes the focus avay

£rom meaning and structure, and opens up a heterogeneity vithin meaninq.

This examination of poststructuralism by Kristeva is meant to

lbreakl free £rom vhat could properly be terrned identif icatory thinking. Identificatory thinkinq accepts the unity of mari reduced to his consciousness and so enjoys dissectirig hunan practices lnto psycholoqical or sociohistorical cateqories that closer analysis reveals to be recapitulations of the Aristotelian categories and the theological virtues...(Guberman 2 59)

By f ocusing on excesses...ve made passion into the vnexpressed side of normalcy. - Kristeva

The abject takes us beyond finite structures, as Kristeva reminds

us of the unfulfiiied and bifurcated subject of postmodernism, vavering

somewhere, nevsr fully assimilated by a rigorous, unqusstioned ethical

system. The shift in emphasis f rom full meaniriq in subject identity to the exploration of a material remainder, causes a moment of pause and vonder.

The crisis of threatened identity, our incompleteness in the face of the other, forces a reassessment of this ethical system. Kristeva alvays reminds us that ve must beqin vith the subject, and her call for

'opemess' to khought' is intended to avaken us to the delicate tension betveen the postmodern subject and the w orld it lives in. chapter Three

Trash Bodies

when ve cmteinplate a creatiorr niade hy a wunian vriter, ve fail to see hov dramatically exceptional she is. Kristeva

I would rather take the idea by the throat, hold it like this, and look it in the eyes until it dies or 1 die myself from its putrid breath. Laure

The un-smooth, rav substance of Kathy Acker's fictions diuplays the transsressive qualities of Kristeva's semiotic, its protrusions unfolding within the rhythm of a pulsing narrative of desire. Disturbed by this desire, Acker's work assaults the xeader with crude and beautiful images, poetic qestures and inescapable noise meant to challenge the notion of idyllic harmony. The sheer force of this passionate unveilinq of the semiotic takes the form of an interna1 vulvaic exploration. This is not a pleasurable, soft-tissued joyride thouqh - it is a prima1 and friqhteninq search for a new subject. 1, the reader, desire to abject this writing, because it both repulses and fascinates me at the sarne the. Reading Acker îs like havinq your mother force cod liver oil down your throat - somehow you know it is qood for you (or is it?),yet it tastes, smells and feels revolting. Much of the nev experimental fiction by women is beqinninq to evolve in the same way, "You can't have the moon, sucker"

(2171, Y? y3 the narrator of Sappkiire's poern, "Arneric.siri Dreams," dispellinq riutioris of eavy readfng. Kristeva tells us that "lwlomen still have a grest deal to teach us about the hatred underlyinq.,.l~ve...~(Boucquey 112,.

Acker displays a desire to challenge the notion of the modern aubject. she creates a buest,! a fernale heroic voyage, vhich

interrogates the notion of a given identity, much like Kristeva's subject in process does. We are al1 familiar with tventieth-century male heroic

archetypes such as ~eminqvay'sHenry in A Farewell to Ams and Kerouac's

Sa1 in On the Road. In her desire to upset the pedestal upon which the

traditional male hero rests, she creates a subject which shifts levels,

continualiy testing locatedness. The texts are littered vith female

subjects vho express material fluidity, change and a heteroqeneity of

identity. In her article discussing Acker's vork, Martïna Sciolino finds

Acker's characters to be "in a constant state of metamorphosis" (64).

In denying any authoritative voice, Acker's texts lack a monologic

focus. The ambivalence of the vriter's authorship functions to infiniteïy

disperse meaning. Kristeva believes this ambivalence functions as a move

away £rom the invard subjectivity of the "I," and tovard a positioning of that "1" in the vorld. There, Yilt is the vriter who 'speaks,' but a

foreign discourse is constantly present in the speech that it distorts"

(Desire 73). Acker's texts set this position of creative ambivalence

against the univocal authorship in a move tovard "narration...as a dialogue between the subject of narration ...and the addressee... the other"

(Desire 74). She incorporates a self-reflexivity which is found in much of

our fin-de-siécle literature, and ve see it in the media vith programs

such as "The Simpsons." Acker's rampant and excessive pornoqraphic

narratives s;re meant to leave the reader vith the same sense of critical

contemplation as Homer Simpson's unbelievably avful parenting skiUs do.

Like Homer Simpson, Acker's subjects become victims .of late-twentieth- century Mennipean satire.

As with Céline, Acker's texts find inscription in a defiance of traditional and normative ïiterary standards. For Acker, wClliterature is

that which denounces and slashes apart the repressing machine at the

level of the signified" (Empire 12). She is unconcerned vith literature as a sacred and untouchable tradition. Thls is obvious ln the way she shamelessly plagiarizes classical narratives and turns them into sexual

peepshows and ritualistic sites of bizarre carnage, as traces of the past

scattered throuqh the text. She gives the past %ev meaning vhile

retaining the meaning it already hadw(Desire 73). Such stylistic parody displaces traditional expectations and brazenly reveals constructions of discourse which systematize and categorize meaninq and lanquage. The

representation of human consciousness as fixed and determinate is

parodled by subiect positions vhich are not only unfhed, but also

situated outside the normative archetypal position. Although the text

relies upon parody and other theoretical techniques, it is also filled with the unknovn and the unrepresentable, carrying us forvard into an

inchoate narrative terrain, which fills the subject and the reader with a sense of quest. With this double layerinq of stylistic techniques and the

unrepresentable, the "meanings" of the text become blurred. Further, a constant and prodigious onslaught of expletlves has the effect of making this type of language seem almost "normal," causing us to question what is

proper and what is not. Both Acker and Céline examine "what lies at the turning point of social and asocial" (Povers 35). Alço like Céline, Acker

ignores the standard notion of crqa~icunity vithin a text, calling the

"beginninq" and the primacy of the Word into question. Emotion is, for both Celine and Acker, a 'message which travels from the invisible tovisible

world," creating texts vhich act as "messenqerkl Cwhichl would lead to

revolutionw(Pussy 10). Followinq the nonlinear and disjointed narratives t~ecomesemot-ionalïy conf usinq, an abject trip of desire for meaning, behg, and language.

Abhor, an aptly named character in Empire of the Senseless, states at the beqinning of the novel that "[rleason vhich alvays homogenizes and reduces, represses and unifies phenomena or actuality into vhat can be perceived and so controlled" (12). In attacking reason, Acker's texts ab to subvert the power of the symbolic order, vhile calling for a new subject, created in part £rom desire: "Every position of desire, no matter hou srnail, is capable of puttïng to question the established order of a society,.." (Blood and Guts 125). Kristeva asserts that "[tlhe dimension of desire, appearing for the first time in the citadel of interpretive viil, steals the platform £rom the Stoic sage... and confers...a transforminq pover to these nev, unpredictable siqnifyinq effects...?' (wPsychoanalysis"

306-307). Beyond the riqid subject sits the subject of desire, a new,

"knowing subject [vhichl is also a desiring subject, and the paths of desixe ensnarl the paths of knowledqett (ibid. 307). In further questionhg this unfulfilled subject, Acker plays vith her reader's patience and sense of sexual 'morality.' In each tee, she offers a narrative fraught vith perversity and sexual gluttony, not only on behalf of the characters, but often in the autobiographical inclusions within the text. The sadomasochistic narrative serves as a dark correlative to spiritual t ranscendence.

The "heroic" voyages of Acker's nomads are filled with technoloqical, cultural and political chaos and vonder, Each novel begins with an escape f rom the complex oedipal triangle. In her very early novels, such as Blood and Guts in Nigh School, she drops her characteirs directly into a mess of eroding human relations, a postmodern cultural horror. These early novels and short stories display an immediate and intense anger through the narrations of betrayed, orphaned and unwanted characters. We sense ~cker'sdesire to reach the immediacy vhich she so admires in the texts of Burroughs and Genet.

In her later novels, of vhich 1 vill be looking at Empire of the

Senseless and In Memoriam to Identity, she introduces characters capable of the same type of senseless and destructive violence and delirium as that seen in her earlier vork. Yet, ve begin to suspect that something else also motivates these subjects, perhaps a desire for personal and social revolution. The ends of such revolution are always left open for questioning, but ve sense that Acker is searching for a new cornmitment

£rom her characters. Although she blows apart any remaining notions of a pastoral world, her subjects display a subtle yearning, perhaps a hunger to capture a momentary glhpse of this archaic vorld. The novels, part ic uf arly Empire of the Senseless, contain an often crit ically overlooked hopefulness and critique of nihilism.

Spit in al1 the mirrors which control me - Acker 1 warula kee Anarchy - The Sex Pistols

Empire of the Senseless is the unbelievable tale of ~WOsubjects, Abhor and Thivai, vho set off, sometimes separately, other times

together, to seek a sense of reality for themselves in a vorld vhich is

filled with crime, capitalism and horrifying nihilism. Empire of the

Senseless is an appropriate title for a vork which seeks to upset the

senses, to question the sensible. Both Thivai and Abhor corne from very unromantic, senseless 'beqinningst - a breakdovn of the Western famfly which is taken out on the bodies of the children in acts of 'unspeakable'

sexual and physical violence. Thivaits first memory is of wanting to kill

and Abhor's is of feeling pain:

[Daddyl taught me a final trick. He showed me hov to inserta razor blade into my vrist just for fun. Not for any reason. Thus, 1 learned hov to approach and understand nature, hov to make gargantuan red flovers, like roses, blooming, drops of blood, so f uU and drippinq the earth under them, my body, shook for hours aftervards. (9)

For Acker's characters, the experience of "living amonq nerves'

(Empire 9) cornes first and, in its primacy, is the most important thrust in

the book. Painfully, the characters learn vhat 1 vïîl call Schmerz-Love, the

anguished, nerve-racking love vith which the symbolic vrecks the body.

Schmerzen effects not only the physical body, but shatters the nerves, as

is ùnplied in the German languaqe. Abhor tells us "[hie forced me to Live

among nerves sharper than razor blades, to have no certainties" (Empire

9). This is a life similar to Kristeva's 'experiencinq-of -limits.' Acker

uses the bodies of her subjects to represent the uncertainties of this nerve-rackinq existence for the tventieth-century subject: -

Let% Say ve divide %ensationWinto: pain and pleasure. Everyone thinks they understand why you vould vant pleasure, but not pain ...but pain can be interesting.... In certain tribes, rites of passage (when you qo from one stage to another) involve a great deal of pain,..There% a quote from Nietzsche: "That vhich does not kill you, viïl only make you grov." (Juno and Vale 180)

Through a metafictional technique, Acker positions herself in the novel, claiming her stake in the voyage as veL The goal of Abhor and

Thivai's voyage is to discover "[vlho is [Kathy]," since YKathyl doesn't mean anything yetw(Empire 34). Acker's vriting represents "a journey, during the niqht, the end of which keeps receding ... .And the more [she1 strays, the more Ishel is savedw(Povers 8).

The voyaqe which the modern primitives of Empire of the Senseless are on involves divinq into the abject which takes over their bodies, in a muvernerit towards a system of signification which is driven by desire.

Acker is exploxinq the notion of taboo, the abject beiriq conducted upon the site of the body. She sets up the realm of the taboo against vhat

Elizabeth Grosz has classified as the "historical privileging of the purely conceptual or mental over the co~poreal'~(187). In playinq vith the body, makinq it the centre (thrust), of her narrative, Acker questions the predominance of an's' mind as the subject of epistemological analysis:

Al1 the accepted forms of education in this country, rather than teaching the child to knov vho she is, or to knov, dictate to the child vho she is. They obfuscate any act of knovledge. Since these educators train the mind rather than the body, ve can start vith the physical body, the place of shitting, eating, etc., to break throuqh our opinions or false education. (Angry Women 165-1661

The binary betveen reason and the body is problematized by Acker in her attack upon lanquage through explorinq its contradictions and ambivalences. Acker's desire is to examine why the body is sacrificed theoreticaiiy, creatively and politically for the sake of reason. "A Few

Notes on Tvo of My Books;' an article in vhich Acker discusses her work, finds her convinced that *'[dJualismssuch as qood/evil are not real and orily renllty worksn (36). ~t the sare tue, lest ve think she is trying to create a master narrative of reality for us, she encourages us in Empire: "use fiction, for the sake of survival, ail of our survivaln (134). It is at

the site of languaqe that Acker attacks the absence of the body' and the gap it leaves, believing that "laln alteration of language rather than of material, usually changes material conditions..." (Don Quixote 2 7 1. For

Acker, lanquage is not a clean, abstract structure because it is

susceptible to forces vhich are in continual agitation in the depths of

our bodies, tvistinq lanquaqe into rav flesh. Acker's use of the body cornes close t O the medieval concept of the body vhich Bakhtin says

"present [SI a contradictory and double-faced fullness of life" (62)- The lack of singularity in dealing vith #thebodyP blurs the limits betveen the body and the world/word. The symbolic distances the subject from the body while the semiotic pushes for a heterogeneity which acknowledges the presence of the body's desire, vhich is never satisfied.

The drives of the body push Acker's modern-day primitives to embaxk on a voyage of play and a search for revolution:

Those of us vho don% vant to split the mind and the body go through ways that are considered abnormal, and play is definitely an area vhere you can investigate certain thinqs with some realm of safety... But it's a dangerous search, obviously, because there aren't many quidelines ... really it's ail about this search. (Juno and Vale nAckerw181-182)

In Empire, "the searchf' involves an exploration of other lands and peoples.

For Acker, the tattoo represents an alien signification vhich swims upon the flesh, changing and shifting meaninqs vith each twist and turn of the body. An unrepresentable desire is inscribed upon these bodies by the characters - a struqqle aqainst the symbolic inscription enforced upon the body- The rituals vhich Thivai and Abhor submit their bodies to are a throvback to mysterious cultural practices, 'outside of language,' to a world vhich stands in opposition to Western civiîization. In an issue of

Re/Search devoted to the examination of the modern primitive, editors V.

Vale and Andrea Juno explain the desire to confront the repressed throuqh the material defilement of the body:

Amidst an almost universal feeling of powerlessness to "change the world," individuals are chanqing vhat they do have power over: their ovn bodies. That shadovy zone between the physical and the psychic is beinq probed for whatever insiqht and f reedoms may be reclaimed. By giving visual body expression to unknovn desires and latent obsessions vellinq up £rom vithin, individuals can provoke change - hovever inexplicable - in the external vorld of the social, besides freeinq up a creative part of themse1ves.-. (4) Tattooing is a postmodern act Mbued vith a serise of outlaved identity and the murlcy undervorld of the criminal. Acker's characters vin become tattooed outlaws and cultural deviants. Acker informs us that

Yiln decadent phases, the tattoo becarne associated with the criminal - literally the outlav - and the pover of the tattoo became intertvined with the pover of those vho chose to live beyond the norms of society"

The underground criminal element is a function of ult imat e privilege for Acker: "The realm of the outlav has become redefined: today, the vild places vhich excite the most profound thinkers are conceptual. Flesh unto flesh" (ibid.). Through their journey, Abhor and Thivai recognize the need to think, to remain inside the syrnbolic, vhile admittinq the forces of the drives vhich cause change vithin thouqht, For Acker, the outlav embodies the tension betveen 'conceptual thinking' and 'flesh unt O flesh.'

Among the rituals Acker's charactexs underqo on their voyage, scarification is one which pushes them close to the point of death, thus brinsing them face to face vith the horror of the abject corpse. The ritual of scarification forces the participant t O realize the corpse as part sf hirri/herself, as the abject from which ve, thr~uqhcultural taboo,

try to run. The corpse represents that vhich ve abject in order to exist in an ordered, civilized society. Abhor, often the voyeur, watches Aqone, a

sailor, considering the play of knife upon his flesh:

Agone couldn't see his ovn death. He was stili too younq, Yet he sensed it vas there, his main interest in living. It vas his, the only point, object and subject, purpose and beinq. It vasn't so much the hidden knife, It was that the kriife vas the tattooer's being, as if he vas holduiq it fully in his right hand. By recoqnizinq it, Agone vas aqreeing to ailow the unallovable. (Empire 134)

In aqony, Agone enters a f in-de-siècle conversation vith death, the

apocalypse of his person, "his main ir.terest in living." Suddenly, in

confronting his corpse, something both part of him and yet other, he transcends the boundaries of the symbolic/religious order which defines

skin as off -Unit, sacred, In fact, many of the characters in Acker's

fictions resemble the valking dead, or at least cause us to vonder hov

they can still be alive after all their sufferings, Kristeva suggests that

"the corpse, seen vithout God and outside of science, is the utmost of

abjection. It is death infectinq lifew(Powers 4). The lav of the Father

states "you shaU not make any gashes in your flesh for the dead or tattoo any marks upon youVt(Leviticus 19.28). The tattooed and scarred body is a brutal stymieing of aesthetic logic. The clean body maintains itself throuqh the abjection of an otherness £rom its surface. Al1 else is given taboo status. Facing one's ovn death, that pure materiality and

"the most sickening of wastesw(Powers 3), points the subject tovards its ovn finitude, its ovn inevitable decay. The subject becomes "therefore heterogeneous, pure and impure, and as such alvays Potentially

Both Abhor and Thivai, portrayed as toyinq vith many shifting sexual identities, present subjectivities vhich are sexualiy destabilized. They begin their voyage to find a 'construct~or 'code: for being vhich include s venturinq be yond 'normalp sexual relat ionships. Ultbat ely they find themselves in France, vhere they subject themselves to inexplicable bouts of masochistic behaviour. In his article, "Postface: Masochism and

Polysexuality," François Peraldi identifies a masochist as being able to desubjectif y his/her body (167). This 'desubjectification' (a crisis in identity), blurs the lines betveen what are understood as normal and abnormal sexual practices, The masochist's desires threaten the notion of stabilized, procreative relations, turninq God's vorld upside dom.

The delirium of the masochists, the villinqness to succumb to a feral sexual humility, or an Copenness: attests to a delirious dwelling in the abject vhich torments the borders of normal sexual behaviour. This masochism likens itself to the suffering and horror vhich Kristeva identifies as a disturbance to normative discourse. Abhor and Thivai display "[sluffeririq as the place of the subject .... An incandescent, unbearable limit between inside and outside, ego and other" (Pouers 140).

The subject simultaneously experiences a seeking of oneself and a losing of oneself.

In Serniotext(e): Polysexuality, Terence C. Sellers details the relationship between masochism and de filement acts such as urolagnia and scatoloqy. The masochist longs for a space where he can create for

elaborate identifications vith lovliness and self- ef facement.. ..He attains this end, and becomes utterly disgustinq, vhen he professes his ambition and attraction to be as one vith the feces and urine of the superior. These substances, unequivocany reqarded as horrid, are revered and sought after by the masochist as the soiirce of .his true identity, (63) Kristeva also has, in various writings, made allusion to the notion that dbject lovliness and animality are connected throuqh abjection. She vrites that "[tlhe abject confronts us, on the one hand, vith those fragile states where man strays on the territories of animalw (Pouers 12). She often uses the term ''human animal," thereby aUuding to the material animality vithin humans, a purposeful veerinq avay from the theoretical dominance of the spiritual. The quote by Swift in Chapter Two displays

Strephonls dif ficulty in perceiving Celia as human-animal precisely because he is used to vieving her as the diqnified woman of culture, and, as Kristeva has shovn, culture demands that Wlhe body must bear no trace of its debt to nature..." (Powers 102). Animality, in Empire, points to a nev vay of informing subjectivity, where self-sufficiency is tested. For

Acker, identity is tied to language which is, in turn, tied to the body- The serises and excess beyond lanquage provide a reneved relationship betveen the subject and culture. It speaks of the sexual rapaciousness of her characters and their inabiiity to disengage themselves £rom the perverse behaviour vhich has them in its hold.

Thus, the masochistic adventures of both Thivai and Abhor threaten to destroy the narrative vith their sheer physicality, varninq us that language must admit the body. As well, Acker seems to be at the mercy of their sufiering just as the reader is. Along vith Acker, ve are meant to endure each nev sufferinq as it unfolds in this abject and fragile

''na rrat ive web."

INIot until the advent of twentieth-century "abject" literature (the sort that takes up where apocalypse and carnival left off) did one reaLize that th'e narrative veb is a thin film constantly threatened vith bursting. For, vhen narrated identity is unbearable, vhen the boundary betveen subject and object is shaken, and vhen even the limit betveen inside and outside becomes uncertain, the narrative is vhat is challenqed first. (Powers 140-1411 Accordiriq to Kristeva, this threatened narrative leads to a "crying-out theme," one which is also seen in ~cker'svork, as she too seems to be paùlfuily yet helplessly troubled by "the shooting sharpness of Iherl su£feririg...[and] vulook for a story, a verisimilitude, a mythw

(Powers 145). This is a crisis risen to the surface, a subject damaged and wrecked (ibid.). Aqain we are reminded of this nerve-racking Schmerz, vhere for Kristeva, "sense topples over into the senses, the 'intimate' into

'nerves.' Beinq as ill-being" (Fowers 140). In a senseless empire, the intimate side of abjection is suffering. Through sufferuig, Acker's characters confront the containment of their bodies vithin the horrible fascism vhich underlies the pover structures of America.

As expressions of abjection, Abhor and Thivai push against the borders which are rneant to ir~stilan "unshakeable adherence to

Prohibition and Laww (represented in Empire by the CiAl, and fiaunt themselves against the constraints of nReliqion, Morality, LavfU vhich are

"Iolbviously always arbitrary, more or less; unfailinqly oppressive, rather more than less; laboriously prevailing, more and more son (Povers

16). The notion of political hegemony vhich Acker vorks against is summarized veîl by Dick Hebdiqe in Subculture: The Neaning of Style:

The term heqemony refers to a situation in vhich a provisional alliance of certain social qroups can exert 'total social authorityr over other subordinate groups, not simply by coercion or by the direct imposition of ruling ideas, but by 'winninq and shapinq consent so that the pover of the dominant classes appears both legitimate and naturalr. (15- 161

Acker represents the infiltration of the CIA as a spider netvor~of power and control vhich has its harids in everything '£rom government organization to street drug dealinq. Acker furnishes a critique of commodity culture, with the description of American capitalism and the pervasiveness of the GIA at the heart of it. The GIA sets up its

strongholds Ybly means of the symbolic institution of ritual, that is to

say, by means of a system of ritual excïusion~...~(Povers 73). Jettisonhg

the crackheads, prostitutes and sexual deviant s outside, the qovernment

keeps defilement at am's length. Yet, we can barely turn away from this

abject America, this "death-in-lifen (My Mother 215). America is an underground of trash peoples and trash bodies: "Ibleinq godless this

trash had only itself to turn tow(Empire 75). In a society vhich is driven

by consumption, each of Acker's novels shows her becominq increasingly

obsessed vith the detritus and remainder of culture's cast-avays. Acker

forces us to confront the other as we are forced to follov Thivai on a

junkiels hunt for drugs, like Renton in Trainspotting, vho takes a dive into a horridly filthy toilet for his last fix of heroine. The ritual aqainst abjection breaks dovn and the strorighold slips, as a trace, a track mark, follows us through our reading patterns. Acker's disdain for American heqemonic pover is matched only by her obvious angez at German fascism. In fact, all forms of fascism are categorized as Nazism, from the father/powerhead of the nuclear family to the CU4 vho control testing of "despised groupsn in Empire. Acker shows how fascism creates lobotomized people, and how domination and control easily creep into such a society. With Empire, Acker tries to re-mobilize her subjects into th~uqhtand revolution in the face of these penetrating forces.

I would ratber be dead than a girl. - Acker The pursuit of a myth is conducted by Abhor, in her running to and runninq f rom the suffering and horror, throuqh a post -apocalyptic Paris. ~bhor1s on a painful voyage avay from stasis, a voyage vhich disturbs

the notion of the fixed locatedness of female subjects, and their place in the traditional domestic triangle. She becomes Kristeva's subject in process, the ndevisor of territories, lanquages, works...[shel never stops demarcating [herl universe ....A tireless builder ..." (Povers 8). In creating a mobile 'desiring 1,' Acker disturbs this commodity culture in vhich stasis

robs it s subject s of their revolutionary pot ential.

Part robot and part human, Abhor must struqgle vith the notion of

"human." An oddity in a vorld of humans, she very quickly learns the impossibility of easy identification with the myths/models by which she is surrounded. In this way, Abhor represents most of Acker's female subjects, cast into a vorld filied vith images of vomen vhich are produced by media-saturated representations - very specific images accompanied by specif ic poles of identification.

Abhor's search for sexual fulfilment is important. Her part robot state functions to question the inherent pleasure of 'voman.' "There is pleasure only in freedorn," Acker tells us in each novel. For Abhor, this would then include freedom from prescribed pleasures. Part human and part construction. Abhor tests the boundaries to see vhere they blur on fier body, somevhere betveen being human-made and voman-born. Acker leaves these borders deliberately unclarified, seemingly as a signal of her own discornfort in dealinq vith a definitive concept of the fernale body.

As Carolene Bynum suggests in her article, 'Why All the Fcss About the

Body?," "there is no clear set of structures, behaviours, events, objects, experiences, words, and moments to which the body ctkrently refers" (5).

Acker seems painfulîy aware of the 'crisis' of the body and the treacherous ambiquities at hand in its discussion, particularly in terms of the hyper-advancement of our techno-aqe.

Yet, Acker does make it clear that Abhoras part robot state is not an extension of rational, technological or hegemonic control. Althouqh it

is never clear vho 'mader her, she desperately runs from being used as a machine, or £rom having her body incorporated into any man-made

institutions. Abhor's state is stiil a challenge to the technological,

capitalistic fix of our culture, because she does not exist as a scientific

testament t O the interests of orqanized %alettechnological

advancement. In fact, she is far less motivated by her mechanical impulses

thari zhe is by her animallstlc desires. Ircrriically, Abhor stands in

opposition to the traditional organized view of cybernetic control vhich

in is described by Jeremy Campbell in his book, Grammatical Man. Campbell

describes traditional cybernetics as designed to combat illness

[whichl is entropie, irregular, an error in the living system, vhile healing is cybernetic, restorinq the body to its original state, correcting the error. Natural selection is also cybernetic, disallowinq genetic mutations which deviate f rom the nom in undesirable vays. (23)

The irony remains that Abhor is far £rom 'healedF or 'corrected.' In fact, despite her robotic state, she is filthy, diseased and highly

undesirable. mess and entropy coilide in overlappinq tropes which connect across her body. Abhor, the face of abject America, is aligned with the scum on the streets. She describes a fantasy in vhich she finds herself screaming as she and the homeless are surrounded and attacked by rats, a symbol vhich Acker uses to represent qovernment officiais in almost every novel. In My Mother: Demonology, abject America is at the mercy of llRat/Bush," vhose follovers play a game to See vhose bans VU be bitten through first, a nasty S&M game Acker uses to describe

Hepublican policy makers vho put America to sleep with varm, honeyed clich&s vhile abjected millions suffer. The rats bite throuqh the flesh of

her subjects, leavinq them paralyzed in their scummy existence, much as they vould bite through Winstonls eyeballs vere he not to cave in to

O'Brien's qovernment sanctioned torture in 1984.

Acker is one amonq a fev contemporary vriters vho develop a

cornparison between the image of insidious vermin and government

corruption. In Sarah Schulman's Rat Bohemia, the narrator describes the

impossible task of keeping rat infestation at bay. The narrator vatches

the decline of urban lives alongside the rapid increase of rat/qovernment

infiltration and control. She laments that

Islometime in the 1980s 1 started to see them scamperinq reqularly in the playgrounds of Central Park. Reagan had just become president and 1 held him directly responsible. Rat infestation felt like something the U.S. government should really have been able to handle. (5)

Abkiox, the deject and social contaminant, reminds us of an experiment gone horribly vrong. She is the ab(v1hored love of her Father and a nation, in vhich thousands suffer because of corporate and government greed, through advancement in 'Wlood and change1' (6). The cïean, an-American identity preys heavily on the mind of Abhor in her messy state of perturbance. Yet, thouqh she is at odds vith her ovn identity in the face of this American myth, Abhor sees the duplicity of the hegemony which vorks to keep her in such a position of subservience. She is the shapeshifter, the liminal figure able to question the difference between appearance and reality, able to point out that, vhile Daddy vas secretly rapinq her, al1 he "cared about vas vhat society thouqht about him" (14)- Narcissistic America, the face of her fathe'r, shudders at the mesu Abhor is making of things. ~eanwhile,there is a whole different set of standards in place for what is happeninq behind closed doors. Three things are I~~atiaMe:the desert, the grave and a vorran's vulva. - Musu sayinq It is throuqh the Schmerz and the voundedness of Abhor's body that

Acker really explores the revolutionary potential of the poetic text. Abhor tells us that "[al man's pover resides in his prick. That's vhat they, whoever they is, Say. Hou the fuck should 1 know? 1 ain't a man..Jf it's true that a man's prick is fris strength, vhat and vhere is my pover?" (127). At the very beginning of Empire, her body is initiated into this man's world by her father. We are mortified at vitnessïng the scabrous relationship vhich unfolds betveen them as this larger-than-life father inscribes reality upon the body of his daughter-lover throuqh rape and incest. Her development as a subject relies upon hov she is vieved throuqh the gaze of the phallic eye, as a sexual and emotional possession. This makes her feel destroyed: "1 vanted to kmmyself just as my mother had killed herself. This is my madnessw(19). Abhor is both vife to, and dauqhter of, the father. He even gives her the name of her mother and, in instances, she is forced into mothering him. Abhorrent to him, Abhor still functions in this tripartite vay, in service tothe Father, vho is elevated to an apotheotic level in this world. Abhor "actualizes the threefold metamorphosis of a voman in the tightest parenthood strxture'' (Tales

2431, beinq fetishized by the monotheistic symbolic order into the role of powerless llother.r'

In most of her novels, Acker sets forth the role of the prostituto as a privileged outlaw of society. The vhore (Ab/vhore) is a useful character for exploring female sexuality because historicall-y the vhore has had access to greater freedoms than other vornen. The prostitutes in these novels are in a sense revolutionary, then. They an leave their "ovners," and in Pussy, King of the Pirates, vhore "Ow even burns dovn aU of ancient Alexandria, leaving it s ancient, corrupt civilization in ruins.

We can read this as the unrepresentable (vhore) breaking free from the

representations of the symbolic, a necessary step, according to

Kristeva, tovards disturbing the fetishized notion of voman. The prostitute, able to express joy in sex, side-steps the role of vife and mother, shaking the oedipal triangle at the roots, like the vhoreAesbian character in Atwood's Handmaid's Tale, the outlawed outlaw,

unclassifiable, not fittinq in, To further push the vhoreCsrevolutionary and disenfranchised status, Acker sets up a connection betveen vhores and avant-garde poets such as Janey and Genet in Blood and Guts, Medea and Rimbaud in In Memoriam to Identity, and O and Artaud in Pussy, King of the Pirates,

For Acker, the voundedness and 'ill-being' of womenls bodies is a sign of the hand of God, "God the tyrantw(Pussy 201, God the Father. The monotheistic violence done t O the Mage of the female body creates an idealized Virqin subject, which Kristeva labels carbon copy of the materna1 receptaclew(Tales 2431, sexless and closed-off. The mutilated and violated bodies of Acker's texts contrast sharply with the clean bodies of the saints which the girls in her fictions are qeneralîy tauqht to respect and emulate, In Memoriam to Identity has Medea informing us that 'lIalccording to the priest here, saints are people vho can cope vith anything" (88). The l'alcoholic,w "syphilicw and wdespoticwpriests in Acker's novels preach but provide no protection or salvation from the horrors

vhich surround the female subject* In Empire, God is 'ineffective but controlling. Abhor calls him "Sickpiqw and "Turdshit" (301, challenqinq the

saintly, spiritual incorporeity upheld before vomen, while they remain burileneCi vith a body vhich 1s violated physically and sexually. Acker

identifies religion as exaserbatinq the mindbody problem, because in the

Name of the Father it offers salvation. In In Memoriam, Nedea cornplains

that religious idealism causes "the body [to open1 like a rose into voundw

(88). Hedea exposes the vays in which the religious prohibitions placed upon womants body prevent her £rom tapping into her sacrificed sexuality.

In an untitled poem by Laure (Collette Laure Lucienne Peignot, Bataille's

lover), the narrator spits in the face of this reliqious monolith vhich helps control and label the female body:

Archanqel or vhore 1 don't mind Ail the xoles are lent to me The life never recoqnized (1-5)

Acker examines all the roles which are lent to women through Abhor

who is firstly her father's vhore and then the vhore of other men vho

pass throuqh her life. Reminescent of traditional tribal rights, she is

passed down £rom father onvards. Then in her desperation and madness, she runs £rom the house of her father to something of her ovn making - a recurring trope for twentieth century female vriters. In Sapphire's poem,

"poern for jennifer, marla, tawana and me," the narrator desires "to use

iherl bones as spearsttto

let them impale our kiïiers and gouge out their eyebaîls. and when the land bleeds clean of them, use my bones to build a house ... a house where my father cannot corne, unless he cornes for forqiveness. (194, 198-201, 203-2061 Acker places a tattoo of two knotted whips on Abhorts 5ack -- one pulls her back into her father's house while the other she desires to use against her oppressors. This is the double bind, to have the love/control of the Father knotted tightly toqether vith an unfulfilled desire to escape him and re-construct oneself. Abhot tells us that this double bind makes her feel "inhuman because 1 am in the act of breving my ovn blood"

(511, while "mernories of past events have and are shapuig me" (52). The knotted whip also refers to the torture vhich hex body endures. Through pain Abhor questions I'what is this body?," this 13 The knotted father's

Schmerz-Love binds her as she cries over and over "[tlhe only thins I desire is innocence" (48).

When Abhor begins to desire of her ovn accord, she performs an obvious transgression of the first relationship which launches the book.

Acker wishes to displace the honorary position which the father holds in the life of the daughtez by givinq us a subject vho, having found only unendinq unfulfiliment in this vorld of the Father, has recreated herself t hrouqh this sexual voyage. Aqainst this dominant discourse of possession scratches the slow razor burn of Abhor's desire, that vhich

-rows into a power of discourse of her ovn, a desire to name herself.

Thus, Abhor, as the boundary between the respectable and the unspeakable, searches for an identity in the confusing abyss of fernale sexuality. In an article discussing Kristeva's abject, Elizabeth Grosz identifies the expulsion of the abject as "the unspoken hole into which the subject may fallw(87). Female sexuality is seen as that 'unspoken hole', the abjected "unknovn" which culture keeps at bay. In the novel fferoine, which deals vith finding one's way out of this abyss, Gai1 Scott's narrator anquishes at her abjected position: "O mother why did you give me this hole?" (31). Leadinq a life vhich seems to echo this desperate plea, Abhor represents the madness of a voman whose creativity and r evolutionary desire is struqqling t O f ree itself £rom the totalizing ~~~~~~~i of 'wonian? as la&. For psychoanalysis, the lack represents a hole which may always return to hold the aan/chfid victh, deterring his progress tovard synibolization. The constant lament, "O mother vhy did you give me this hole?," is a reminder/remainder of the patrilinear order of possession. It is also the narrator's desire to reclaim the potential neqativity which is reflected by this position.

Abhor runs £rom the father to Paris vhere she aligns herself with the Alqerians and their revolution. She dives into the vorld of voodoo and illicit carnival laughter. Most of Acker's quest is driven by an wunofficiaïf' carnival logic, that of fantasy, the grotesque and the secular, offerùlq an extra-linquistic potential to the vorld/vord. Acker describes the

Alserian revolution as an upside-dovn vorld, one guided by vhat Bakhtin calls "the peculiar loqic of the Linside-outf..,of the 'turnabout '..." (11).

Abhor's description of the Aluerians brings to mind an image of grotesque carnival participants vhose bloated bodies have ingested the entire corpus of hish culture and, in their heavy and irrepressible state, regurqitated it in fits and bursts of inversion, recornbination, mockery and unqodly degradation.

Poubt that skims the surface of everything. This is not nihilism. This is a sort of skepticisrn. - Laure

Ab/whored by society's standards, Abhor is most cornfortable in the

Company of sailors and motorcyclists in an effort to assert her: identity beyond the normal expectations- She represents a challenge to the declaration made by Senator George H. Williams of Oregon in 1866: 'When the women of this country corne to be sailor and soldiers... vhen they love the treachery and türmoil of politics ...then it will be time to talk about making the vomen voters" (Tannahill 388). Women may very vell nov have

the vote, but for Acker there is stLll a higher level of political and social

involvement and semiotic negativity required of vomen. In Empire, she

makes this obvious throuqh ~bhor'sassociation vith the criminal element,

in a nation whose *'qovernments are right-ving and the right-vinq owns

values and meaninqs ..." (73).

The Algerian revolution is momentarily successful, but Acker has

the CIA quickly take over Paris to restore order and control. Thivai and

Abhor react differently to the take-over of Paris. Abhor still desires,

vith a "blazing vil1 to live: to live anew" (173). Thivai remains victim of a

systern of pessirnism and closure. From the very beginnins, Abhor has been

informed that death is her code (52), and the vorld around her is informed by the same nihilism. Only halfway throuqh the voyaqe, she already begins to realize ''1 had had enough of somethingw(81), enouqh of this nihilistic course. Shaken by the I'unbearable despair of being human," she is stunned by the take-over of Paris after the revolution, yet, in the end she is still left with the undeniable desire to continue being. Acker's hopefulnesç at the conclusion of Empire, points to Kristeva's concept of the zelationship between a vomanls negativity and ethics. Rather than a

Nietzschean fury, Kristeva asserts, vomen can work toward an ethics which embodies the negativity which ve see in Abhor's voyaqe.

After the revolution, Abhor exists as an exile in Paris. She is at odds vith this post-revolutionary city because the CIA has CO-opted the revolution into its system. Thivai is revealinqly told by a businessman that, "[alny revolution, right -wing left-wing nihilist, it doesn't matter a damri, iu qood for business" (182). By the end of Empire, Thivai seems to have sliqped back intO this commodity culture, vhile Abhor alwa ys remembers that Ye kfie lis 1 a permanent condition" (63). Acker's rcojcct ion

of closiire signals the failurc of an archetypal, triumphant hero's return home to people.? Rather, she vill alvays be at cross-purposes with

culture (the coiled vhip), the unfulf illed s ubject damned f orever t O

voyage the myth of a herols quest.

Ciften my sou1 vil1 yearn for a f uck vith f lesh. - Verlaine & Rimbaud A "blazinq vuto liveV1guides Acker's latest novelistic experiments

even more so than in Empire. In Memoriam to Identity says a f urther qoodbye to many of the binaries vhich drove much of her earlier fiction.

Like Abhorls existence, the life of Rimbaud, vhich is îoosely based on that

of the poet, is not as black and vhite as that of her earlier characters, such as Janey's in Blood and Guts. In choosinq a homosexual subject for this ne-& project, Acker furthrr complicates the normative system, vhile at the same bestoving on this subject a pitiable desire to be accepted.

The abject is a perversion, and in this text we encounter many types of perversions in the form of a grand farevell to the cultural pervasiveness of heterosexuality. In his essay, "Becoming-Woman," Felix

Guatarri states that "homosexuality is no longer a moral matter, but a matter of perversionw(86). In her investiqation of perversion, Acker explores what Kristeva calls "a crossing over of the dichotomous categories of Pure and Impure, Prohibition and Sin, Morality and

Immorality" (Poveïs 16). The subject is made uneasy by a disturbance of the system and the inability to find comfort in a 'moralr space. In this space of crisis, the text and the subject become "im';?licated in the interspace that characterizes perversion ..." (ibid.).

The perversion betveen the poets Rimbaud and Verlaine is traced throuqhout Acker's account of their lives and the abject criininality of

theiz homosexuality. For Guattari, hornosexuality is a subversive system

vhich transgresses the law of normative heterosexuality (86). Acker

ailows the torturous unfolding of the game of tug of var betveen Verlaine

and both of his lovers (his vife and Rimbaud) to represent an examination

of the borderline subject caught betveen social and biological demands.

At one point, in the extremes of his delirium, Verlaine shoots Rimbaud in

the vrist in his frustration at societyls expectations of hhand the perversion vhich Rimbaud symbolizes to him. Rimbaud, also delirious at the prospect of such criminality in the face of early twentieth century moral prohibitions, announces that "[mlental var is constant1' (95). He is simultaneously bound by his erotic desires and threatened by them (the knotted whip).

The memoriam unfolds in two vays in this book. It is a dehiscence which splits open to mourn a lost, unified identity, a guarantee of a stable (heterosexual), existence (vhich Rimbaud longs for desperately), and at the same time it is a continual, hovering, often painstricken uncertainty preying upon the subject. The memoriam is a constant mental war paying tribute to the series of splittings (crises), which both

Kristeva and Acker believe the subject undergoes in life (birth, separation, death).

Also interested in splittings, Guatarri identifies tvo poles of opposition along which all sexual activity can be located as the homo- hetero oppositions. He then defines an intermediary role, that of

'becoming-voman,' which he sees as "a point of ref er'ence, and eventually as a screen for other types of becominq ... becoming-wornan can play this intermediary role, a role of mediator vis-à-vis othex sexed becomings" (87). '~ecorning-vonad is not a simple bond betveen male and female, but

a crisis of the tvo poles, a messy cross-over. In agony at his confused and painful locatedness in the hated Oedipal confiquration, Riinbaud

exclaims: "1 knov vhat hell most women live throuqhw(95). Al1 the vorld is constructed accordinq to a neat little triangle in vhich the 'intermediary

role,' in its ambiquity, is thrust aside. This intermediary position is one

vhich Kristeva also upholds for the future of the subject: "1 also think men can find analoqous objects of knowledqe through their bisexuality..." (Jardine and Menke 133). Furthermore, she warns that it is

epistemologically as vell as polit ically danqerous t O "zeqionalize culture

ancl consider one aspect as female, another as male," because "in that vay,

we castrate the essential polyvalence of subjects" (ibid.).

Der Menschheit ganzer Jammer faBt mich an. - Acker In a desire for normalcy, to be part of this komplaining mankind,?

Rimbaud's search for the woxld of the Father in In tfemoriam takes up most

of the early narrative. In many ways it recalls Abhor's search for

someone/somethinq of comfort value in the vorld of in-suited fathers.

Rimbaud's search is doomed to disappointment, because it is a search

based upon utopian idealisms, a hope for a cure for his 'abncrmalïcies~ throuuh an identification vith the Father. This points to Kristevals

delicat e tension between ps ychoçis and ultra -rat ionalism, vhich will play

itself out on the body of Rimbaud to qreat physical and psycholoqical

extremes. His search for symbolic realism sends him throuqhout occupied

France, which, at the same the, he is surrounded and'stifled by. Once again, Acker holds up the myth of the supreme Aryan race as a foremost historical force of homogenization, that which Rimbaud believes he should emulate. The infiltration of a clean race of beautiful and briiiiant people, tfather-fiqure~,' is contrasted sharply with the way Rimbaud feels about his ovn abjected self/body and country. He declares to himself, wCilf therefs one fucking cannon left in these ruins of ramparts, bombard us vith shit, Our ovn shit.... Mein Herr General- myth" (91-92)- The qreat

Aryan myth of human supremacy makes Rimbaud feel like a slave to the

Gerrnans, who make hhrealize, in their suprerne cleanliness, hov abjected and filthy he 'really' is. He becomes obsessed with their transcendental brilliance, vhile his sexual actions become baser vith each self- condemnation. He knovs "lust has damned [himl" and that the obsession vith lust has "become [hisl brain" (92).

While he idealizes/idolizes the unified subject of the father (the

Aryan), he is confused by the pain he is forced to endure at the hands of this 'master.' The unfulfilled desire of these subjects contrasts poiqnantly with the cruelty of the Law of the Father and its hollov promise of comfort and love. Rimbaud experiences the desperate Schmerz-

Love for a unified, nurturing Vaterland, the Phallus. *'CLlove has equalled pain" (31), realizes Thivai in Empire. The narrative shows hov this love sets the subjects up and destroys them at the same the, just like all of

Germany after Hitler was done 'karinq forf1his people.

Rimbaud's Gerrnan teacher, Father Fist, causes him the most intense

Schmerz-Love of ail. This "love" echoes the tvisted love for Biq Brother which O'Brien teaches Winston in 1984. Throuqh Room 101, which contains the worst thing in the world, Winston is utterly destroyed into lovinq Big

Rrothex. In the same way, Father Fist believes Rimbaud %ust be spread open. His heazt must show. He must te open and available to my hands. The child wants above all to be destroyed" (14). Throuqh control, the Conclusion

Women can do something right nov by pz~sentingnev thoughts. - Kristeva In tandem vith the struggle towards a postmodern ethic is the most recent vork of Acker, Pussy, King of the Pirates, vhich serves as a

'conclusion' and a 'beginninqc to this concern. Kt serves as a fictional interrogation of Kristeva's '%hird vave of feminism," an upside-dovn, !ri& -girl' tieteroglossia of Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island, where ethics is based less upon a mozality than upon a search for otherriess, beyond Abhor's quick anger and overall isolation. This third vave is a fitting conclusion to this thesis and a

'beginningT to the question of a feminist ethics. The ferale subjects of Pussy, King of the Pirates, are as revolutionary as feminists of the early

70's and 80's, but in their outlav ethic they also stxive for '%ornethhg beyond demands," avare of the need to reconnect vith the vorld, as Kristeva also urges for our future: "These mutations, these revoîutions, contain as many delights as dramas...But also somethinq beyond demands, with their explosiveness integrated into the fabric of time, of ethics" (Stanton 221).

The tas). of examining a postmodern subjectivity and ethics is stiïï burdened by the question of difference and the evolving concern for what critic Robert Stoïy calls "cateqories of self-understanding" that are

"alien to the inquirinq mindl' (Storey 47). And, as we have examined,

Kristeva and Acker both make careful reference to the challenqed and chanqing status of the subject and its relationship to the world. As David

Fisher articulates in wKristevalsChora and the Subject of Postmodern Ethi~s,~the sense of enbodhent vhich Kristeva strives for is one borne out of difference: "The problem is ...discernhg hov embodied subjects of desire emerge from complex fields of difference and hov this dif ference shapes ethics as a signifyinq practicem(193). Thus, like the outlaw girls of Pussy, the third vave of feminism tries t O achieve a tricky balance in regard to the question of difference. The search for meaninq vhich stU maîntains its rnultlpUcit y is surely the postmodern double bînd vs now face - the acceptance of dif ference, of the stranqer, whilst establishinq a foundation of ethical relationships amonqst these different subjects, somewhere between tyranny and anarchy. The psychoanalytic criticism which we have encountered in the study of the abject and the othez within, furnishes the project of a discourse of ethics vith the tools to approach otherness in the vorld. In @@MyWemory's Hyperbole," Kristeva states th& "[al 'we' is aUve ordy If it is riever the same" (The Fernale Autograph 220). In fittinq recognition of this di£ference, we can deliqht in being int roduced by Penelope Enqelbrecht t O "John Doe'sw personal hermerieutic approach to Acker's texts:

As (subjective) interpreters of texts, we rely on each other and on our mutual knovledqe, as vell as on context..,What if 1 vere not Pen Enqelbrecht, but were Larry McCaffery, or John Doe? John Doe vould (probably) not seek some indication of parody, not in his heart of hearts. John Doe takes Kathy Acker at face value. Kathy Acker tells John Doe vhat he alxeady "knows." (39)

We have seen that the task of defininq difference takes shape in

Acker's oeuvre, althouqh in a more horrifying and brutaïly unwelcome creatiori of subjectivities than is manageable in one sittinq. In his Border

Crossirq article entitled "Carnival Love," Dennis Cooley quotes Margaret

Atwood teUrtg EU Maridel that to speak of "freaksm vould be offensive riearness to our ovn bodiesw(iLid.). Not only are we disturbed by Acker's

gluttonous inclusion of outlav and carnivalesque freaks, ve are aîso ïeft uncomforted by Acker herself. There is something "freak-likew about this woman. Compactly twisted with muscles, her body is also Uttered vith piercirigs and various tattoos. Intellectually, she is quick to criticize the literary canon and academia, althouqh she teaches at a university and

writes quite chailenging and difficult novels. At the same the, she is a

performance artist and vas at one the a stripper, She is a strange hybxid creature vho plays upon the contradictions and tensions in her

person. Over the course of this study, Kristevapssubject in process has

evolved iri the same rnanrier, iri "rio resolution of corttrauts, orily ari

experience of the contrastsI1(Fisher 104). Like William S. Burroughs'

meldinq of poetry together vith the fusion jazz experimentalist group

"Material," these subjects strugqle tovard/vith a continual remakinq of

"vhat they know" (vho they are).

Perhaps Acker's stint as a stripper, along with her interaction with

the underbelly of 42nd Street in Nev York's punk 70's, informed her

uprisinq aqainst the modernist displacement of the poetic vord from the

world. Acker's work, and indeed her life, serve as a valuable way of

understandinq Kristeva's work on the subject, which is "beyond

fo~getfulness'~(Fisher 104). An ethical vorking throuqh, states Fisher, is the very impulse vhich will drive the notion of the subject beyond its

Yimits of present discussion" (ibid.). And so, beyond f orgetfulness of 4 2nd street and even of "master narratives," everything becomes abundantly plaqiarized, the morals of the "original'! vork bastardized by a vriter whose literary ethical imperatives obviously include her involvernent in both the vorld of the present and the past. The discorf ort felt in reading Kristeva's poetic and analytic texts iz matched beautifuïly by the unease felt in readinq Acker's debauched and passionate narratives. Reading them vith the desire of making sense of the two toqether, becomes a monstrous undertaking - an unfulfilled, unending project, resulting perhaps in an arrogant, overly-optimistic application of theory to text, which vould make Acker, vho is skeptical of criticism upon her work, cackle with distaste. And perhaps "John Doe's" readirig of Acker is the correct one. Beyond the critical application of

Kristeva to Acker remains my "originalwreaction t O her work. In my ovn

'inemcrry's hyperbole," 1 remember thinkinq that if the litezary canon had an asshole, Acker's textual finger of mad~essand hopeful illusion vould certainly be up it, relentless in her creative litany of perilous and skir~ckirigtioirror combiried with an abundarit and glorious abllity for kiope and optimism. BIBLIOGRAPHY

Acker, Kathy. "A Fev Notes on Tvo of My Books." The Reviev of Contemporary Fiction (FaU 1989): 31-37.

. Blood and Guts in High School. Nev York: Grove, 1978. . Don Qufxote. New York: Grove, 1986. . Empire of the Senseless. New York: Grove Press, 1988. . In Memorium to Identity. New York: Grovc Weidenfeld, 1990. . My Hother: Demonoloqy. New York: Grove, 19 9 3. . "On Violence." The Reviev of Contemporary Fiction. (Fall 1989): 23-31.

Pussy, Ki- of the Pirates. Nev York: Grove, 199 6.

Artaud, Antonin. Antonin Artaud Anthology. Ed. Jack Hirschman. 2nd ed. revised. San Francisco: City Liqhts, 1965.

Bakhtiri, Mikhail. Rabelais and His World. 19 6 5. Trans. Héléne Isvolsky. Bloominqt on: Indiana UP, 198 4.

Barthes, Roland. A Lover's Discourse. 19 77. Trans. Richard Hovard. New York: Noonday, 1978.

. The Pleasure of the Text. Trans. Richard Miller. New York: Hill and Wang, 1975.

Bataille, Georges. "The Psycholoqical Structure of Fascism." Visions of Excess: Selected Writinqs, 1927-1939. Trans. Ailan Stoekl vith Car1 R. Lovitt and Donald M. Leslie, Jr. Ed. Allan Stoekl. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1985. 137-160.

. "The Use Value of D. A. F. de Sade." Visions of Excess, 91-102.

Block, Ed. "Desire in Language.ll Contemporary Literature 2 4.4 (19 8 3): 51 2- 520.

Borch-Jacobsen, Mikkel. Lacan: The Absolute Master. Trans. Douqlas Brick. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1991.

Boucquey, Elaine. "'unes Femmes': The Woman Ef f ect.I1 Julia Kristeva Intenrievs. Ed. Ross Mitchell Gub2rman. Nev York: Columbia UP, 1996: 103-112.

Bwe, Carol Ma3trariqel0. "Women and Soclety in Literature, or Readinq Kristeva and Proust.11 Dalhousie Revlev 64.2 (Summer 1984): 260-269.

Braidottl, Rad. "Ethics Revisited: Women anWin ~hllouophy.'!Feminist challenges. Ed, Carolee Pateman and Elizabeth Gross- Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1986. 44-63, . Patterns of Dissonance. Oxford: Polity, 1991.

Brooks, Peter. Body Work: Objects of Desire in Modern Narrative. London: Harvard UP, 1993.

Butler, Judith. Bcdies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex. New York: Routledge, 1993.

Bynum, Caroline. Why aU the Fuss About the Body? A Hedievalist's Perspective." Critical Inquiry 22 (199 5): 1-3 3.

Carr, C. On Edge: Performance at the End of the Tventieth Century. Hanover, NH: UP of Nev England, 1993.

Chline, Louis-Ferdinand. Journey to the End of the Night. Trans. Ralph Manheim. New York: New Directions, 1983.

Collins, Jh. Uncommon Cultures: Popular Culture and Post-Modernism. New York: Routledqe, 19 89.

Cooley, Dennis. "Carnival Love." Border Crossings 14.1 (Winter 199 5): 10- 11.

DeLino, Don. White Noise. Nev York: Penguin, 198 5.

Descombes, Vincent. Modern French Philosophy. 1979. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 1980.

Dix, Douglas Shields. "Kathy Acker's Don Quixote: Nomad Writinq*" The Reviev of Contemporary Fiction. Wall 19 89): 56 -6 3.

Douglas, Mary. Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 19 80.

Engelbrecht, Penelope J. "Re/viewing Kathy Acker." Trivia 21 (1993): 30 - 41.

Fisher, David. "Kristeva's Chora and the Subject of Postrnodern Ethics." Body/Text in Julia Kristeva: Relf gion, Women, and Psychoanalysis. Ed. David Crovnfield. New York: SUNY P, 1992. 91-106.

Fxame, Janet. The Edqe of the Alphabet. Nev York: Georqe Braziller, 1962.

Friedman, Ellen G. "A Conversation with Kathy Acker." The Reviev of Contemporary Fiction (Fall 13 89): 12-23.

Gatens, Moira. Feminism and Philosophy: Perspectives on Dif f erence and Equality. Bloominqton: Indiana University Press, 1391.

Greene, Naomi. Antonin Artaud: Poet Without Words. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1970. Gross, Elizabeth. "Philosophy, Subjectivity and the Body: Kristeva and Irigaray." Femirrist Challerrges. Boston: Northeastern UP, 1986. 125- 144.

Grosz, Elizabeth. Space, Time, and Perversion: Essays on the Politics of Bodies. Nev York: Routledqe, 199 5.

Guattari, Felix- "Becoming-Woman," Semiotext(e): Polysexuality. Ed, Francois Peraldi. New York: Semiotext(e), 199 5- 86-90.

Guberman, Ross Mitchell. "Julia Kristeva Speaks Out." Julia Kristeva Interviews. Ed. Ross Mitchell Guberman. Nev York: Columbia UP, 199 6 257-270.

Hebdiqe, Dick. Suisculture: The Neaning of Style. New York: Routledqe, 1979.

Hutche on, Linda. A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction- Nev York: Routledqe, 1988,

Iriqaray, LK~."This Se:.: Wkiich is rigt One." New French Feminisms: An Anthology. Eds. Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron. New York: Schocken, 1980. 99-106.

Jardine, Alice. Gynesis: Con£ iguxations of Woman and Modexnity. It haca: CorneU University Press, 1985.

Jurm, Andrea and V- Vale. "Kathy Acker." Re/Se?rcti: A-ry Women. San Francisco: Re/Search, 1991: 177-186.

Kolocotroni, Vassiliki. "Avant -Garde Practice." Julia Kristeva Interviews. Ed. Ross Mitchell Guberman. New York: Columbia UP, 1996. 211-225.

Kristeva, Julia. Desire in Larquaqe: A Semiotic Approach to Literat ure and Art. 1977. Trans. Thomas Gora, Alice Jardine, and Leon S. Roudiez. Ed. Leon S. Roudiez. Nev York: Columbia UP, 1980.

- "My Memory's Hyperbole." The Female Autograph. Ed. Domna C. Staritori. Chicaqo: cbf Chicago P, 1964.

. -- . Revolution in Poetic- Larrquaye. 13 74. Trans. Leon .ci. Roudiez- New York: Columbia UP, 1384. Kroker, Arthur and David Cook. The P ostmodern Scene: Excrenental Culture and Hyper-Aesthetics. London: HacHillan Education, 1988.

Kurzveil, Edith. "Ps ychoanalysis and Polit ics." Julia Kristeva Interviews. Ed. Ross UitcheU Gubennan. Nev York: Columbia UP, 1996. 146-161.

Laure. Laure: The Collected Writings. Trans. Jeanine Herman. San Francisco: City Liqhts, 1995.

Lechte, John. Julia Kristeva. Nev York: Routledge, 1990.

Marks, Elaine and Isabelle de Courtivron. Nev French Feminisms: An Ant'hology. New York: Schocken Books, 1981.

McCance, Dawne. Posts: Re Addressing the Ethical. Albany: SUNY P, 1996.

Mill, J. S. Utilitarianism, On Liberty and Considerations on Representative Goverment. London: J. M. Dent, 1972.

Milton, John. Milton: Complete Poems and Ha jor Prose. Ed. Merritt Y. Hughes. New York: Odyssey, 1957.

Oliver, Kelly. Reading Kristeva: Unravelirrg the Double-bind. Bloomïnqton: Indiana UP, 1993.

Peraldi, Francois- "Post face: Masochism and Polysexualit y." Semiotext(e1: Polysexuality. Ed. Francois Peraldi. New York: Semiotext(e1, 1995. 167-170.

Psych et Po Group, French Women's Liberation Movement. 'Woman is Never What We Say." Julia Kristeva Interviews, Ed. Ross Mitchell Guberman. New York: Columbia UP, 1996. 95-102.

Rich, Adrienne. Of Woman Born. New York: Norton, 1976.

Rye, GiU. "Reading Identities vith Kristeva and Cixous in Christiane Baroche's L'Hiver de beauté." Paragraph 19.2 (July 1996): 9 8-113.

Sapphire. American Dreams. Nev York: High Risk, 1994.

. Push. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996.

Sayre, Henry M. The Object of Performance: The American Avant-Garde since 1970. Chicaqo: U of Chicago P, 1989.

Schulman, Sarah. Rat Bohemia. New York: Penguin, 1995.

Scott, Gail. Main Brides. Toronto: Coach House Press, 1993.

. Spaces Like Stairs. Toronto: The Womenps Press, 1989.

Seliers, Terrence C. "Coprophagy and Uruiology." Semiotext(e1: Polysexuality. Ed- Francois Peraldi. New York: Semiotext(e), 1995- 63-66. Stellon, Nicole. "EveOmTvo Girls Reviev 1.2 (1995/96): 33-

Storey, Robert. '1ai Because My Dog knovs F¶e':Prolegomenon to a Theory of mime si^.^ A f ter Poststructuralism: Xnterdisciplinarity and Literary Theory. Eds. Nancy Easteru and Barbara Rieblinq. Evanston, Ill.: Northvestern UP, 1993: 45-70. Suleiman, Susan Rubin. "Porrioqraphy, Transgression, and the Avant-Garde: Bataille's Story of the Eye." The Poetics of Gender. Ed. Nancy K. Miller. Nve York: Columbia UP, 1986. 117-136. . Subversive Intent: Gender, Politics, and the Avant -Garde. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1990.

Svift, Jonathan. "The Lady's Dressinq Room." The Poems of Jonathan Suif t. Vo1.2. Ed. Harold Williams. Oxford: University Press, 1958.

Vale, V. and Andrea Juno. Reflearch: Modern Primitives. San Francisco: Re/Search, 1989.

Wollst onecraft, Mary. A Vindfcation of the Riqhts of Woman. New York: Norton, 1967.