French Feminism PDF

## French Feminism - Helene Cixous, L. Irigaray, Julia Kristeva - écriture féminine, a feminine or female practice of writing - "The Laugh of the Medusa" - It is a sort writing practice that 'surpasses' what Lacan calls the Symbolic and that we may associate -but not identify -with his Imaginary. -...

## French Feminism - Helene Cixous, L. Irigaray, Julia Kristeva - écriture féminine, a feminine or female practice of writing - "The Laugh of the Medusa" - It is a sort writing practice that 'surpasses' what Lacan calls the Symbolic and that we may associate -but not identify -with his Imaginary. - Lacan: symbolic is greater than imaginary. Cixous: symbolic = semiotic - Julia Kristeva (1941-), literary critic and psychoanalyst, stays close to Lacan with her concepts of the 'symbolic' and the 'semiotic', which is a version of Lacan's 'Imaginary'. For Kristeva, what has been repressed and consigned to the 'semiotic' finds its way into the not yet fully regulated language of children, into poetry, into the language of mental illness -into all uses of language that for whatever reason are not fully under control of the speaker or writer. 'symbolic' and 'semiotic' language are never to be found in their 'pure' state: all language is a mixture of the two. - Symbolic = linguistic, structures, differences ## Postmodern Criticism - Postmodern criticism started as the response of American critics to a new mode of writing that took matters of authorial control, coherence, and unity far less seriously than modernist writing had done, and that as often as not undermined its own authority by flaunting its constructed status and by incorporating wholly unrealistic if not downright zany scenes and events. - Postmodern: No authorial control, coherence or unity. Meaning is unstable. - It saw the universal claims of "Enlightenment thinking" and liberal humanism as a form of (unfounded) essentialism and as "covertly totalitarian". - Poststructuralist theorists: Derrida, Foucault. - Lyotard: 'grand narratives' or 'metanarratives' was over, to be replaced by the far more modest and benign rule of limited, local narratives. - "postmodernism was an 'incredulity towards metanarratives" - postmodern condition inevitably involved "incommensurability", and would produce "unsolvable dilemmas". Undecidability like Derrida. - Jean Baudrillard: they were both real and what he called "hyperreal". Reality itself had at some point become unreal, a simulation, simulacra, because of the ubiquitous commodification caused by free-market capitalism. - Fredric Jameson: he defined postmodernism as 'the cultural logic of late capitalism'. Powerful march of capitalism had led to what he called a 'waning of affect'. - Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari: subversion of "liquidation of the principle of identity". "rhizome", a mode of lateral growth that 'has no beginning or end', and 'is always in the middle, between things'. Deleuze advocates 'deterritorialization', 'flows', 'nomadic' thinking ## Lacan - Freudian psychoanalysis has been heavily criticized for its sexist character, but perhaps even more so for its claims to universal validity. - One size fits all. - Freud's suggestion that his Oedipal model of infantile development is of all times and all places has become increasingly unacceptable. - For Lacan, too, the subject is split beyond repair. But in Lacanian theory that split is not the result of an Oedipal conflict, but of the infant's entry into the slippery world of language. - In Lacan's terminology, the infant leaves the world of the "imaginary" - a state in which it cannot yet speak, is subject to impressions and fantasies, to drives and desires, and has no sense of limitations and boundaries - and enters the "symbolic", in which the real - the real world which we can never know - is symbolized and represented by way of language and other representational systems. (We cannot know the 'real' because it can never be fully represented it is beyond language.) - Three registers: imaginary, symbolic, real. Real cannot be spoken. Symbolic is representation. - This entrance into the 'symbolic' necessitates an acceptance of the language and of the social and cultural systems that prevail in the child's environment. It implies the acceptance of limitations and prohibitions. Lacan calls the massive configuration of authority that works through language the nom du père, the name of the father, in recognition of the patriarchal character of our social arrangements. The same recognition leads him to speak of the phallus as the signifier that signifies that patriarchal character. (Note that he avoids the term 'penis' because in Lacan's conception of things male dominance is a cultural construction and not a biological given. The phallus is thus always symbolic.) Hence the term phallocentric, which is of feminist origin and denotes the (false) assumption that maleness is the natural, and in fact only, source of authority and power. - nom du père = name of the father (not biological). (its biological in freud). - He talks about symbolic signifiers. Father can be the state, church or any other authority. - We go from the Imaginary to the Symbolic through the "mirror stage" in which we are confronted with the 'mirror'image that the world gives back to us. But that image, just like the image that we see in an actual mirror, is a distortion that leads to a 'misrecognition'. - Still, that misrecognition is the basis for what we experience as our identity. For Lacan, we need the response and recognition of the outside world to develop a self. Our 'subjectivity' is construed in interaction with 'others', that is, individuals who resemble us in one way or another but who are also irrevocably different. We become ourselves by way of the perspectives and views of others, a process in which language plays a crucial role so that we may be said to be constructed in language. - Since our identity is constituted in interaction with what is outside of us and reflects us, it is "relational", the idea of difference in the process of identity construction. - For Lacan our identity is the product of acts of misrecognition and will never fully satisfy us. - With the transition from the imaginary to the symbolic, in which we submit to language and reason and accept 'reality' as it is, we lose that feeling of wholeness, of undifferentiated being, that, as in Freudian theory, will forever haunt us. Because we do not have access to this pre-verbal self we live ever after with a lack. - We will always be split. ## Discourses - In its policing of 'abnormal' behaviour, the authority of the human sciences derives from what they claim to be knowledge. - Such a cluster of claims to knowledge in a particular field is what Foucault calls a discourse. In his _The Archaeology of Knowledge_ (1972) Foucault tells us that a discourse is 'a series of sentences or propositions' and that it 'can be defined as a large group of statements that belong to a single system of formation' - a so-called discursive formation. - Thus, he continues, 'I shall be able to speak of clinical discourse, economic discourse, the discourse of natural history, psychiatric discourse'. - These rules determine what counts as knowledge with regard to the field in which they operate and thus establish bodies of 'knowledge' that apply to us all. - Reverse discourse may legitimize original discourse. - "If power were never anything but repressive, if it never did anything but to say no, do you really think one would be brought to obey it? What makes power hold good, what makes it accepted, is simply the fact that it doesn't only weigh on us as a force that says no, but that it traverses and produces things, it induces pleasure, forms knowledge, produces discourse." - Like Althusser's interpellation. - Subject = bizim özne olmamız - Subjection = iktidarın üzerimizde kurduğu otorite -Power subjects us and turns us into objects. - Foucault, however, places language in the centre of social power and of social practices. ## Poststructuralism and Psychoanalysis - We have just encountered the "'historical unconscious' of a period" and in the discussion of literary criticism based on Althusser's critique of ideology we have met with the "unconscious' of the literary text". - Sigmund Freud, for whom it is that part of our mind that against our wishes preserves whatever we want to forget and seek to repress: traumatic or shameful experiences, undesirable urges, unwholesome impulses that we must suppress because they would take us into forbidden territory. - Still, although our "conscious mind vigorously polices the border with the unconscious" - whose traumas and unfulfilled desires always want to remind us that they are still there - the unconscious has ways of getting past its vigilance. - It first of all manifests itself in unguarded moments, in slips of the tongue, for instance, or in unintended puns, or in our dreams. But the unconscious also slips through, according to Freud, in language that we see as figurative - symbols, metaphors, allusions, and the like. - Literary language manifests the unconscious, Freud thinks. - The unconscious can for instance hide a repressed desire behind an image that would seem to be harmless - a trick that Freud called "displacement" - or it can project a whole cluster of desires upon an image in a manoeuvre that Freud called "condensation": a dream figure can for instance combine characteristics of a number of people we know. - Displacement and condensation. - Although we have no access to our unconscious it is a considerable influence in our day-to-day activities. That is dramatically the case if a repressed traumatic experience breaks into our consciousness and we are forced to relive - and perhaps for the first time fully understand an extremely disturbing event (a delay of impact that Freud called Nachträglichkeit - literally, 'afterwardsness'). - Psychoanalytic criticism focuses on 'cracks' in the text's façade, on what slips through authorial control, and seeks to bring to light the unconscious traumas or desires of either the author, or of the characters that the text presents. - Subject is divided between conscious and unconscious. Superego is the authority, like state. ## Foucualdian Power - We deconstruct/dismantle binary oppositions to expose hidden hierarchies. - During his career as a cultural historian Foucault wrote books on the historical trajectory of the concept of madness, on the origin and rise of clinical medicine, on the rise of other forms of knowledge in the domain of the human sciences and on the way these sciences established their authority, and on the emergence of the modern prison system, before turning to the history of 'sexuality' (not as a biological force but as dealt with, as managed, by culture) in his last books. - In so doing, Foucault does not focus on agency, on the individual intentionality of those involved in these historical developments, but on discourses, a notion which he gradually develops, and which he increasingly sees as instruments of power and repression until, towards the end of his career, he would seem to allow the possibility of escape from such repression - not through individual agency, but through resistance that has its source in a specific subject position. - He focuses on discourses instead of personal intentions. For example, madness is in psychological discourse so it is discursively constructed. - There can be reverse-discourse, not through individual agency but through resistance. It is not one person's agency that does something. - The humanist concept of the self-determined, autonomous individual or subject who is gifted with reason is a temporary illusion that will disappear again. - Free, liberal humanism is just an illusion to Foucault. - For Foucault the apparently humanitarian rationality that we already see at work in early modern culture and that was at the heart of Enlightenment thinking has created bodies of knowledge that in the name of discipline and order marginalize or even exclude groups such as the insane, the criminal, the abnormal, the sick. - According to Enlightenment thinkers you are a free individual. Foucault challenges this modernist approach, he is postmodernist. - Foucault's "archaeologies" seek to show how power was at work in the seemingly 'objective' vocabularies, such as the terms that define abnormality or madness, developed by the various branches of the human sciences as these constituted themselves in the aftermath of the Enlightenment. And they seek to show how repressive measures taken to deal with sources of social disruption such as madness, criminality, other forms of deviant behaviour, and contagious diseases, have gradually pervaded modern society. - Archaeologies show how repressive measures pervaded the society policies. ## The Panopticon - Seventeenth-century society did its utmost to contain the plague through confining people to their houses, once the disease had manifested itself. But such a drastic measure demands constant surveillance. - Explores how these contagious diseases were dealt with. - There is with regard to power not a 'massive, binary division between one set of people and another', but a distribution of power through many channels and over a large number of individuals. - He believes power is distributed. Power is a network. - This ideal prison consisted of a ring of cells that was built around a central point of observation from which one single guardian could survey all the cells, which were open to inspection, on a given floor. However, the prisoner cannot see the supervisor. He never knows if he is being watched. This is for Foucault the 'major effect' of the Panopticon. - Inmates supervise each other. - And so a 'real subjection is born mechanically from a fictitious relation'. For Foucault the Panopticon stands for the modern world in which we are 'the bearers' of our own figurative, mental, imprisonment. We are complicit in our own bondage. - There is no inspector but they are still subjected. Even if there is nothing, the mechanism continues. Some surveillance cameras may not be working but everyone thinks they do and act accordingly. Olmadığı halde iktidarı üreten mekanizmalar = panopticon. ## 5-The Poststructuralist Revolution - Everything is historical, everything is in discourse. - Identity is not seen as essential anymore. - //poetry prose notlarından - Derrida: Meaning is fluid. Opposed Saussure. Meaning arises out of the rupture. He thinks signifier > signified. - Subject arises with a rupture, a split, a lack (Lacan). So, there is no unified, perfect notion of subjectivity. - Poststructuralism: - Truths are not timeless - We should treat all claims based on them with caution, objective knowledge is impossible, questions essentialism(özcülük), claim to lasting truth, challenges their claims to permanence to lasting truth - Deconstruction: - Jacques Derrida. Derrida de-stabilizes truth, closure. Of _Grammatology_ (Derrida). - neologism, difference(difference to differ) - moment of signification. closure is impossible. - J. Hillis Miller: 'Deconstruction is not a dismantling of the structure of a text but a demonstration that it has already dismantled itself - differential structure & language. - The chain of signification: signifiers -> signified -> signifier - reality is discursive. there is nothing that is 'outside-text (derrida). - Binary Oppositions, Revisited: - rupture between the signifier and the signified. no transcendental signified. logocentrism. - Literary Deconstruction: - Implications: - infinite flow of meanings. not true discourse but true resistance. Foucault challenges enlightenment.