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Article Excerpt
This paper begins with the paradox that French feminism from the 1970s to the present constitutes itself both in reaction to and in the tradition of the psychoanalytic theory of Jacques Lacan. (1) Exemplary in this regard is the case of Luce Irigaray. A member of Lacan's Ecole Freudienne at Paris until her expulsion in 1974, after the publication of Speculum de l'autre femme (a move that cannot help but recall Lacan's own exclusion from the Hopitale Ste. Anne ten years before), Irigaray's work is both grounded in the Lacanian theory of the subject's sexualization in language and deeply critical of it. Of the many places in which this ambivalent and all but oedipal relation between teacher and student is played out, it is perhaps best seen in her essay "Cosi fan tutti." In this tour de force, she revisits Lacan's Seminaire XX, Encore, on female sexuality, and through a strategy of extensive quotation, commentary, and parody presents the discourse of the master in the guise of a Mozartian comedy of seduction, only with the genders reversed (Mozart's title was "Cosi fan tutte"). In "Cosi fan tutti," we see the subject presumed to know travestied by the other.
Parody, of course, as Bakhtin tells us, is always double-voiced. (2) In parodic texts, by definition the voice being parodied cannot be absolutely distinguished from the voice of the parodist, if the effect is not to be lost and the discourse degenerate into a monological attack that seeks to annihilate rather than subvert the other. Two systems of accentuation are present in parodic texts, each in its most extreme manifestations clearly distinguishable from the other, but also each overlapping with and mutually determining the other at precisely those moments of contact that make parody possible. Parodic discourse is, thus, always already internally dialogized. Consequently, it must presume the authoritative status of the speech it seeks to inhabit (Bakhtin, "Prehistory" 68-69, 75-76; Morson 63, 65, 73). Parody, therefore, always begins with a concession to the ground of the other, but continues with a simultaneous refusal to grant that territory absolute status and with an imperative that the monologic dreams of the other be relativized and opened to the speech of the interlocutor. Such indeed would seem to be the case in "Cosi fan tutti." For, as Elizabeth Weed has argued, "Virtually every element of the essay ... comes from the twentieth Seminaire" (90). Consequently, the point where Lacan's discourse leaves off and Irigaray's begins is impossible to determine with absolute precision, yet the result is not the annulling of either Lacan's or Irigaray's discursive claims, but rather the opening of the former to the interrogation of the latter. "Cosi fan tutti," then, is one of the purest manifestations of the dialogical possibilities inherent in Irigaray's concept of a feminist mimetic discourse. (3)
This inherently complex situation is further complicated by several factors. In a real sense, Lacan's discourse is self-parodic. When Lacan says, "elles ne savent pas ce qu'elles disent, c'est toute la difference entre elles et moi," ["they don't know what they are saying, that's the whole difference between them and me"] (Encore 68), it must be remembered that for Lacan knowledge, le savoir, is itself constituted within the phallic order of the symbolic, that realm of ordered rationality and noncontradiction that psychoanalysis, both in spite of and because of its own scientific pretensions, must always see as a mystified realm of rationalization and one whose protocols Lacan's own discursive practice violates at every turn. (4)
Lacan ... sees the knowledge (savoir) involved in symbolic processes as indissociable from the knowledge (connaissance) produced in the early imaginary demarcations of 'psyche' and 'body,' a connaissance that is, in turn, activated differently in the symbolic depending on whether the subject is sexed through language as male or female. If anything, Lacan sees women as knowing they don't know what they're saying--by virtue of their position in the symbolic order--while men are dupes of Truth. (Weed 1994: 89)
Women don't "know" what they are saying because the feminine position within the phallic economy is located outside the symbolic, but it is only within the symbolic that "knowledge" defined as information processed in accord with the formal dictates of reason (i.e., the laws of symbolic substitution recognized by a given community) can occur. Lacan, Irigaray, and indeed Kristeva and Cixous agree that woman is not representable within the phallic order of the symbolic. (5) It is for this reason that Lacan argues that "La femme" does not exist, since the article "la" implies a universal and the concept of universality is the logical category that constitutes the very heart of the symbolic order. (6) Woman thus represents a hole in the symbolic, not because she is lacking (although that is the only way the patriarchal symbolic can represent her) but because she is exorbitant in relation to its totalizing claims. The shudder of her jouissance takes place beyond words and thus beyond the symbolic's power to categorize, anatomize, and atomize. It partakes of that real from which the primary repression of our entry into the symbolic has forever severed us. (7) She gives the lie to the symbolic's claim to representing universality, le tout. She says no to that. She is thus the pastoute, "Ce n'est pas parce qu'elle est pas toute dans la fonction phallique qu'elle y est pas du tout. Elle y est pas pas du tout. Elle y est a plein, Mais il y a quelque chose en plus" ["It is not because she is not whole in the phallic function that she is the not-all there. She is not not-all there. She is completely there, But there is something else"] (Lacan, Encore 69 see also 13 and 75). She is the ground on which the phallic figure of totality is erected, the space that makes its calculation possible. As Irigaray observes,
Donc le >--de x, mais aussi du systeme--aura deja prescrit...
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