Textual Practice Volume 07 Issue 3

Editor

Terence Hawkes, University of Wales College of Cardiff Postal address: Centre for Critical and Cultural Theory, University of Wales College of Cardiff, PO Box 94, Cardiff CFl 3XB US associate editor

Jean E.Howard Columbia University Postal address: Department of English and Comparative Literature, 602 Philosophy Hall, Columbia University, New York N.Y. 10027, USA Reviews editor

Fred Botting Lancaster University Postal address: Department of English, Lancaster University, Lancaster LA1 4YT Editorial board

Gillian Beer Girton College, Cambridge Malcolm Bowie All Souls’ College, Oxford Terry Eagleton University of Oxford John Frow Queensland University, Australia Linda Hutcheon Toronto University, Canada Ania Loomba Stanford University, USA Editorial Assistant Louise Tucker This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.” Textual Practice is published three times a year, in spring, summer and winter, by Routledge Journals, 11 New Fetter Lane, London, EC4P 4EE. All rights are reserved. No part of this publication may be reprinted, reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the author(s) and publishers, but academic institutions may make not more than three xerox copies of any one article in any single issue without needing further permission; all enquiries to the Editor. Contributions and correspondence should be addressed to the Editor at University of Wales College of Cardiff. Books for review and related correspondence should be addressed to Fred Botting Department of English, Lancaster University, Lancaster LA1 4YT Advertisements. Enquiries to David Polley, Routledge Journals, 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE. Subscription rates (calendar year only): UK full: £55.00; UK personal: £28.00; Rest of World full: £58.00; Rest of World personal: £30.00; USA full: $90.00;

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Notes for contributors

Authors should submit two complete copies of their paper, in English, to Professor Terence Hawkes at the Centre for Critical and Cultural Theory, University of Wales, College of Cardiff, PO Box 94, Cardiff CF1 3XB. It will be assumed that authors will keep a copy. Submission of a paper to will be taken to imply that it presents original, unpublished work not under consideration for publication elsewhere. By submitting a manuscript the author agrees that he or she is giving the publisher the exclusive right to reproduce and distribute the paper, including reprints, photographic reproductions, microfilm or any other reproduction of a similar nature. Authors will not be required to assign the copyright. The manuscript Submissions should be typed in double spacing on one side only of the paper, preferably of A4 size, with a 4cm margin on the left-hand side. Articles should normally be of between 7000 and 8000 words in length. Tables should not be inserted in the pages of the manuscript but should be on separate sheets. The desired position in the text for each table should be indicated in the margin of the manuscript. Photographs Photographs should be in high-contrast black-and-white glossy prints. Permission to reproduce them must be obtained by authors before submission, and any acknowledgements should be included in the captions. References These should be numbered consecutively in the text, thus: ‘According to a recent theory,4…’, and collected at the end of the paper in the following styles, for journals and books respectively: J.Hartley and J.Fiske, ‘Myth-representation: a cultural reading of News at Ten’, Communication Studies Bulletin, 4 (1977), pp. 12–33. C.Norris, The Deconstructiue Turn (London and New York: Methuen, 1983). Proofs Page proofs will be sent for correction to the first-named author, unless otherwise requested. The difficulty and expense involved in making amendments at the page proof stage make it essential for authors to prepare their typescripts carefully: any alterations to the original text are strongly discouraged. Our aim is

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rapid publication: this will be helped if authors provide good copy, following the above instructions, and return their page proofs as quickly as possible. 0ffprints Ten offprints will be supplied free of charge.

TEXTUAL PRACTICE VOLUME 7 NUMBER 3 WINTER 1993

Contents

Special Issue: Desire Articles Re-iterating desire TAMSIN SPARGOFRED BOTTING

1

Desire in theory: Freud, Lacan, Derrida CATHERINE BELSEY

6

Between women: lesbianism in pornography PETER BENSON

33

‘And all is semblative a woman’s part’: body politics and Twelfth Night DYMPNA CALLAGHAN

49

AIDS, identity and the space of desire JONATHAN KEANE

74

Machinic desire NICK LAND

92

Review Articles Reading homoeroticism in early modern England: imaginations, interpretations, circulations MARIO DiGANGI

105

Futures for feminist history RACHEL BOWLBY

120

Reviews Julia Epstein and Kristina Straub (eds), Bodyguards Marjorie Garber, Vested Interests SIMON SHEPHERD

127

Joseph Bristow (ed.), Sexual Sameness DEREK DUNCAN

133

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Peter Middleton, The Inward Gaze JOSEPH BRISTOW

136

Sally Robinson, Engendering the Subject LISA ROULETTE

139

Sue Roe, Writing and Gender BRENDA LYONS

143

Gilles Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity ROBERT T.TALLY, JR

147

John Bender and David E.Wellberry (eds), Chronotypes BARBARA ADAM

151

Anthony Giddens, Moderniiy and Self-Identity Paisley Livingston, Literature and Rationality John B.Thompson, Ideology and Modern Culture Albrecht Wellmer, The Persistence of Modernity EDMOND WRIGHT

157

Ralph Cohen (ed.), The Future of Literary Criticism GRAHAM ALLEN

166

Joseph Grixti, Terrors of Uncertainty JAMES KIRWAN

170

Leslie Hill, Beckett’s Fiction Carla Locatelli, Unwording the World P.J.MURPHY

177

Jeremy Hawthorn, Joseph Conrad REYNOLD HUMPHRIES

185

N.Coupland, H.Giles and J.M.Wiemann (eds), ‘Miscommunication’ and Problematic Talk MERCEDES BENGOECHEA

192

Index to Volume 7

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Re-iterating desire TAMSIN SPARGO and FRED BOTTING Guest Editors

This issue is about desire… Or perhaps it would be more accurate, if also more opaque, to say that desire is about this issue.1 Desire is… Desire is never having an object or name to call one’s own. It remains wanting. Excessive, desire connotes a heterogeneity that overflows channels of communication and utility. Powerful, desire disciplines and directs as much as it resists and transgresses. Desire is of bodies; of bodies that are not themselves but rendered other by looks and languages that lie elsewhere. Desire is of the Other and in interminable relation to the Other. Gendered, desire engenders and disengenders, articulates as much as it disconnects. Desire is of the copula that never closes the distance between subject and object. Desire is to want to be at one with oneself as one’s own object, image and signifier. Called ‘Desire’, this issue is not so much an issue on desire, in the sense of projecting the definition of an object in a display of mastery; it is more concerned with issues of desire, of the displacements, effects and implications circumscribing any discussion of the topic. Involved in desire, the essays included in this issue return to formulations enunciated in the diverse writings that have become catalogued under the name poststructuralism. Returns, as with Lacan’s famous return to Freud, are also departures, movements away that happen in the process of going back. The double movement of the return to particular texts involves their modification, transformation and redirection, diverging from them rather than achieving a unity with them.2 Lacan’s return to Freud is similarly twofold, involving a demand for meaning and an enactment of desiring. A substitution of new signifiers for old, the return to Freud was a misreading and an embezzlement, a theft of meaning from psychoanalytical institutions.3 In the very name of Freud, psychoanalysis is transformed by an encounter with Saussurean linguistics. The return re-iterates questions of desire; its repetitive movement activates differences. The text at which the return is directed is no longer recognizable as the image of the reading position: refusing to comply with the demand that anticipates meaning, the text to which one returns is reinscribed with the marks of desire, the displacements of signification. Reading is never without desire.

2 RE-ITERATING DESIRE

Desire is a mysterious and many-splendoured thing, as one might have wanted Jacques Lacan to spell out. He never did. Instead, he cast the spells that have left him a resplendent figure of desire. And it is for desire that his seminars and writings offer most. But the figure of Lacan as charlatan, genius, shaman and guru still shimmers as the autobiographical excess of the writings. Sacralized and demonized, the figure staged the truth of desire in the lie of his performance. A ‘diamond of unnamable desire’, the dead-end of structuralist phallocentrism, Lacan’s performance crystallized diverse writings, among them psychoanalysis, linguistics, philosophy, literature and anthropology, into a fascinating prismatic focus that was simultaneously diffractive and refractive. As phallus or objet a Lacan was neither there nor their deliverer, but hovered spectrally and speculatively, like Hamlet’s ghost, with injunctions that situated desire as that which follows the law of the father, a law whose locus was the Other, the signifying conventions of language. Indeed, the Other of which Lacan spoke (and, of course, which spoke him) was the place of those writings from which he duplicitously etched and appropriated desire in processes of extraordinary repetition. For example, reading Kojeve’s lectures provokes a shocking recognition, an uncanny sense of déjà vu: desire, negatively differentiating humans from animals, nature and objects, is the ‘desire of the Other’.4 Only possible after reading Lacan, recognition makes reading a simultaneously anticipatory and retrospective act. Identifications are no less uncanny for that. Moreover, the doubling of two figures discloses a chain of recognitions and repetitions, a substitution of names which can immediately be supplemented with Hegel’s. Reading desire, seeking an end to meaning, only extends its range. And something is wanting: to recognize Lacan in Kojeve is also to forget the difference, to overlook the role of the signifier and the way that recognition, in the mirror stage, has become misrecognition. In recognition, the want, as lack/ desire, is already in place: Kojeve can only be recognized as Lacan because the latter has already been read, the reader already positioned by the language, the (purloined) vocabulary of psychoanalysis. There is more to the relation of desire and recognition which replaces Lacan with Kojeve: a want of identity, origin and closure. But there is no end to the play of repetition and substitution, no restricted economy of meaning which holds one singularly in place beside the other. Hegel intervenes. Or Freud. Indeed, like processes of condensation in the dreamwork, substitution entails displacements, relocations of significance. ‘Lacan’ refracts through another lens. Even the triangulations for which Lacan is famed cannot be neatly reduced to an absolute equivalence with those of Hegel, in the dialectic, or Freud, with Oedipus. The negativity of desire involves the transgression of boundaries and refuses reconciliation by means of a third term. Displaced along other chains, recognized amongst other signifying relations, Lacan, the figure of desire, becomes a mark of negative capability. Whether casting ‘him’ away or bringing ‘him’ back, one discloses one’s implication in a repetitive relation to desire. It is, moreover, a relation that remains structural.

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In this sense, desire can be associated with difference. Offering no position that is not in itself an effect of desire, there is no outside desire, no Other of the Other. If desire is anywhere, if it is in anything, it is in between, in relation to. Linking, binding subjects to an identity and order that lies elsewhere, desire binds one, fantasmatically at least, to others and objects. Wanting others or objects discloses a lack, their absence: desire also separates. Doubled, like difference, as bond and severance, desire evinces a certain mobility, a peculiar errancy. Such errancy delivers a sense of desire as that which does not pertain to the subject. It is an errancy which leaves desire ungraspable, impossible, even, in some strange (non)originary way, essential: ‘différance remains a metaphysical name, and all the names that it receives in our language are still, as names, metaphysical.’5 Desire, too. The errancy of this unsettling essence becomes a site of lost origination, of movements, traversals, which deliver desire only by detours. It remains unfixed and destabilizing. Its location can never wholly be bodies. Even Freud’s biologism, sitting uneasily with psychoanalysis and assuming instincts, drives, bound and unbound energies, slides from the body as origin to find a unity, an originary indifference, in myths, legends, tales: the loss of origin marks the point from which desire stems and drives seek to return. Desire, always bound up with romance, has already inscribed the body, marked it as always already signifying. Bodies, indeed, have always, according to Foucault, been sites of inscription. Disciplined, regulated, bodies are the material of power’s operations. Its agents, bodies are never without power: with power they speak, defining, positioning, resisting, but only within its diffuse and specific networks. Power remains as much inside as without. But in the friction between subjects and relations of power, desire appears. Not as some fundamental sexual liberation, or as the place where a basic, intimate and individual human truth is discovered, but desire as a discursive and institutional channelling of identities and actions. However, the resistances inherent in power’s operations display an excessive, inhuman, technological aspect to desire even as they shape the desire to be truly, fully human. Like power, desire demands the transgression and thus the affirmation and transformation of limits. It proposes a movement disruptive of any boundaries that attempt its final regulation. So, too, with desire and Lacan, desire’s agent provocateur. Indeed, in resistance to the limits and lacks of Lacanian psychoanalysis, desire has become many things and evinced an excessive and unchartable potential. Against an apparent structural stasis and rigidity, disavowing any determining lack, desire has been diversely characterized as energies, flows, movements, diffuse plenitudes. As rhythms, pulsions, multiplicities, desires offer a very different subject from the one analysed by Lacan. A return to the topic of desire and Lacan, however, cannot see the writings other than in the chiaroscuro of these criticisms, inflections and transformations. Such a return might turn out to be a departure.

4 RE-ITERATING DESIRE

Desire both connects and differentiates the essays in this issue, as the issue of desire invites diverse engagements and articulations. Whilst all these contributions return to, or turn on, questions of desire, these questions are multiple and various. The bodies, relations, sexualities, desire and Desire(s) in and of these contributions are differently displayed and diversely directed. In ‘Desire in theory: Freud, Lacan, Derrida’, Catherine Belsey returns to accounts, analyses and elusive performances of desire in Freud’s essay ‘On the universal tendency to debasement’, Lacan’s The signification of the phallus’ and Derrida’s The Post Card. This return is not an attempt to extract the truth of desire or the truth of the texts. In Belsey’s reading, these are texts whose doublings and displacements mimic the ways of desire: they are engagements with desire that can never be sealed in a union sanctified by truth. The truth of desire, Belsey argues, can neither be seen nor shown. But this essay, by meticulously tracing the contradictions, inflections and inscriptions of desire in writing, can itself be read as an enactment of desire in theory. The textual enactment of scenes of desire constitutes the space of analysis in the next essay, Peter Benson’s ‘Between women: lesbianism in pornography’. In a study which employs Freudian and Lacanian psycho-analysis, Benson argues that pornography cannot simply be regarded as the commercial exploitation of narrowly defined desires but that it plays an active role in negotiating contradictions within the male social role and psyche. Pornography, like psychoanalysis, is seen to view sexual desires and experiences as produced by structures of phantasy rather than being immediate responses to present reality. The essay analyses the appeal to a heterosexual male market of fantasy scenes of lesbianism which apparently exclude the male viewer or reader, leaving the purchaser of the fantasy with no obvious place. The viewing of lesbian sexual activity is connected with primal scenes whose fantasies of exclusion serve as templates of desire, with the phantasized excesses of female pleasure and with an eroticism which resides not in the representation of sexuality but in the sexualizing of representation. Benson’s study opens up a new space of textual and critical analysis, subtly and forcefully suggesting that the fractures and lacunae of the male gaze offer radical reflections in which it becomes an object of criticism. A different analysis of the female body in representation is offered by Dympna Callaghan in her counterblast to current celebrations of the subversive possibilities of transvestism in Renaissance drama. Callaghan examines Twelfth Night in terms of the graphic display of the female body—figured in genitalia which are constructed as monstrous—and produces a reading of the play’s articulation of inappropriate desire. The ritualized deregulation of desire presented in Twelfth Night is seen not to affirm a corporeal female desire, but rather to textually and performatively connect with the materiality of women’s exclusion from the stage and their suppression and containment outside the world of theatre or text.

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Re-examining relations between inside and out in ‘AIDS, identity and the space of desire’, Jonathan Keane raises the question of being gay with a certain passion, the passion of the signifer. Lacanian theory, however, is refracted through a series of other positions which rewrite notions of identity and desire. The space of desire is a contradictory, fluid arena in which identities are written and rewritten. Articulating performance, history and experience, the theoretical exposition and the subsequent analysis of Oscar Moore’s ‘coming out’ novel, A Matter of Life and Sex, emphasize the very serious implications that the writing of self has for cultural constructions of AIDS and gay identity. In ‘Machinic desire’, Nick Land presents the in-humanity of desiring technologies. Replication replaces reproduction. Human artificiality and its myths of self, control and possession are reprogrammed by the nomadic and neuroromantic impulses of cyberspace. Turning on Kant’s subject and Freud’s drives, the essay tunes Deleuze and Guattari into the dazzling circuitry of virtual systems. Deploying the technoscientific recombinations of cyberspeak, ‘Machinic desire’ traces the evanescence of bodies and borders along the silicon defiles of global markets whose science fictions are all too real. Desire, its mobility and machinations, possesses interrogative dimensions. Always beyond specific parameters, desire may also be at work in the gaps, in the interstices, between these essays, in what they and this text cannot write, cannot present. Forever elusive, desire will always leave us wanting. Liverpool John Moores University Lancaster University NOTES 1 Misquoted from Salman Rushdie, Shame (London: Picador, 1984), p. 59. 2 See Michel Foucault, ‘What is an Author?’, in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, ed. Donald F.Bouchard (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977), pp. 113– 38. 3 See Catherine Clement, The Lives and Legends of Jacques Lacan, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), pp. 121–3; Stuart Schneiderman, Jacques Lacan: The Death ofan Intellectual Hero (Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard University Press, 1983), p. 31. 4 Alexandre Kojeve, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, ed. Allan Bloom (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1980), pp. 3–30. David Macey, Lacan in Contexts (London and New York: Verso, 1988), p. 98: ‘to return to Kojeve after reading Lacan is to experience the shock of recognition, a truly uncanny sensation of déjà vu.’ 5 Jacques Derrida, ‘Differance’, in Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester, 1982), p. 26.

Desire in theory: Freud, Lacan, Derrida CATHERINE BELSEY

I What is the truth of desire? In 1912 Sigmund Freud published a psychoanalytic account of true love as the union of two distinct currents in sexual life, the affectionate and the sensual. In this ideal state of affairs, Freud argues, ‘the greatest intensity of sensual passion will bring with it the highest psychical valuation of the object’.1 Here science perfectly reproduces a dualism already comfortably familiar to us from three centuries of romantic fiction and moral exhortation. In Freud’s version, mind and body, psyche and sensuality, join to unite man and woman in a healthy sexual relationship. The essay is ‘On the universal tendency to debasement [Erniedrigung] in the sphere of love’, and its ostensible topic is psychical impotence. This condition, Freud the clinician briskly explains, affects men of perfectly normal sexual appetite who find themselves unable to carry out the sexual act, despite a strong psychological or emotional inclination to do so. On investigation, it appears that this disturbance inhibits intercourse only with certain individuals, and that it is commonly accompanied by the sense of an obstacle inside the sufferer: a ‘counterwill’, which he cannot explain, interferes in specific circumstances with his conscious intention. Freud goes on to give what appears as a characteristically lucid account of the psychosexual development of this disorder. Two currents whose union is necessary to ensure a completely normal attitude in love have, in the cases we are considering, failed to combine. These two may be distinguished as the affectionate and the sensual current. (p. 248) The affectionate current reaches right back into early childhood. In the interests of self-preservation the child develops a close relationship with those who care for it. This primary object-choice carries with it a sexual component, which of

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course is not able to fulfil its aims. At puberty, the affectionate current is joined by a powerful sensual current, which reinvests the child’s original objects with an explicitly erotic desire. This time, however, the sexual drive encounters the obstacles that have been set up by the taboo on incest, the result of the Oedipus complex and its resolution. The drive therefore seeks other objects, outside the family, with whom real sexual relations are admissible. These new sexual objects in due course attract the affection that was initially directed to the child’s original objects, and in consequence ‘affection and sensuality are then united’ in the mature adult (p. 250). Unless, that is, something interferes with this normal developmental process. An unconscious inability to surmount the original incestuous attachment to a mother or a sister can isolate the affectionate current from the sensual current. Then the affections seek out objects who recall the family members, and excite a high degree of respect and admiration, while sensuality can find satisfaction only with women of a wholly different kind, who do not recall the original incestuous objects in any way. Love subsists within the sphere of legality and sex outside it. Some of the decisiveness, the clarity of the scientific explanation Freud gives in this essay, and its consequent persuasiveness, stems from the sustained metaphor which defines the psychosexual process. In Freud’s account the psychosexual impulses resemble waterways which flow from different springs. First one current pursues its course and then is diverted; subsequently another current joins it, but runs up against obstacles; this second current then finds a means to bypass the impediments, and in this way it becomes possible for the two streams to unite—or to diverge. We could draw a sketch-map of this developing waterscape, a hydraulic topography charted in words by a master of rhetoric. How transparent the narrative seems, how true, how inevitable. And the oppositions it identifies are of course already familiar: affection and sensuality, mind and body, ideally in harmony, rarely so in practice. The classical opposition between agape and eros, reformulated at intervals throughout western culture, is here scientifically accounted for, and an aspect of the history of fine art is shown in consequence to reveal an explicable kind of pathology: ‘The whole sphere of love in such people remains divided in the two directions personified in art as sacred and profane (or animal) love’ (p. 251). Freud’s analysis is triumphantly confirmed by an aphorism that perfectly specifies a tragic duality: ‘Where they love they do not desire and where they desire they cannot love’ (p. 251). Meanwhile, the division within masculine sexuality leads in turn to the identification of another antithesis, again already familiar, already ‘obvious’, between two feminine sexual types, the idealized, chaste wife and the despised but sexy prostitute: the man almost always feels his respect for the woman acting as a restriction on his sexual activity, and only develops full potency when he is with a debased sexual object; and this in its turn is partly caused by the

8 DESIRE IN THEORY: FREUD, LACAN, DERRIDA

entrance of perverse components into his sexual aims, which he does not venture to satisfy with a woman he respects. He is assured of complete sexual pleasure only when he can devote himself unreservedly to obtaining satisfaction, which with his well-brought-up wife, for instance, he does not dare to do. This is the source of his need for a debased sexual object, a woman who is ethically inferior, to whom he need attribute no aesthetic scruples, who does not know him in his other social relations and cannot judge him in them. It is to such a woman that he prefers to devote his sexual potency, even when the whole of his affection belongs to a woman of a higher kind. It is possible, too, that the tendency so often observed in men of the highest classes of society to choose a woman of a lower class as a permanent mistress or even as a wife is nothing but a consequence of their need for a debased sexual object, to whom, psychologically, the possibility of complete satisfaction is linked. (p. 254) The tendency in question, we are to remember, is a ‘disorder’, but one which is much more widespread than most people suppose. And in fact, Freud has already confided, to a certain extent this dismal division can be said to characterize the sexual life of civilized man in general (p. 253). For thus gradually but decisively normalizing a perverse male sexuality, in conjunction with a succession of crude patriarchal female stereotypes of class as well as gender, Freud surely once again merits all the wrath directed at him by feminists from Kate Millett to Luce Irigaray and beyond. It is as if the reader is invited to share the masculine attribution of ethical and aesthetic inferiority to working-class women, to endorse male promiscuity, and at the same time to recognize as inevitable the fact that men are simply like that, that they can’t help it, that there’s nothing to be done. Possibly the most brilliant analysis of Freud’s misogyny is Sarah Kofman’s account of his ad hoc invocation of penis envy in order finally to guarantee the debasement of all women. The theory of penis envy, she points out, has no place in the logic of Freud’s account of psychosexual development, but it does have the virtue of founding women’s inferiority in biology. And by depreciating women in general, it solves the problem of the division between wife and whore set up in the essay on Debasement: ‘Women’s penis envy is certainly the best solution for Freud, the solution that makes it possible to dispense with the dangerous solution of recourse to prostitutes, those women of humble birth sufficiently debased to exalt man’s sex and to banish any association with incest.’2 If all women are naturally and necessarily envious of men, then they are all in that sense debased, and men can have nothing to fear from even the most admirable of them. Of course, the antithesis between the chaste but chilling wife and the uninhibited working-class mistress has a distinctively Victorian flavour, even if it goes back at least to Renaissance religious iconography, and although traces of it still survive even now in the preferences and practices of certain prominent

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politicians and television evangelists. In the nineteenth century in particular, in view of the Victorian idealization of feminine purity, it must have been particularly difficult to solicit participation in eccentric sexual practices from the Angel in the House. No wonder it was necessary to turn to ‘uncultivated’ prostitutes in whom polymorphous perversity was widely perceived to persist.3 Today’s superwoman, however, a product of the twentieth-century sexual revolution, is expected to take sexual eccentricities in her stride, and indeed to dress up in black leather as required, in between organizing the household and accepting well-deserved promotions at the office. The problem is now surely largely solved. And yet the underlying opposition Freud’s text depicts is remarkably close to the dualism identified by current popular romance: minds and bodies out of line with each other in a slightly different way; two distinct currents converging only coincidentally, if at all; a version of love which strives to reconcile sensuality and affection, while driving them in practice further apart than ever.4 The essay on Debasement is divided into three sections and the second of these inaugurates what is apparently a new beginning. The account of psychical impotence, it appears, was merely a prelude, an introduction which now makes way for an approach to Freud’s ‘proper subject’ (p. 252). The problem with the theory as it stands, Freud points out, is that while it explains why some men are psychically impotent, what it leaves out of account is how any succeed in escaping this affliction. And it is at this point that Freud reveals the widespread character of the disorder he is considering: a degree of psychical impotence is the rule rather than the exception. Something of the same problem affects women too, it now appears. For young women sexuality is so long prohibited, Freud explains, that it is often difficult for them to undo the connection between sexual activity and prohibition. Legitimate sex leaves them frigid, while forbidden sensuality, by contrast, often releases a capacity for pleasure which cannot be found elsewhere. Clandestine love, for example, is a parallel experience for women to the masculine recourse to prostitutes: ‘unfaithful to their husband, they are able to keep a second order of faith with their lover’ (p. 255). There is thus a certain symmetry between men and women in this respect. Women share, after all, in the ‘universal’ tendency towards prohibited passion. Freud had already argued in Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (and would reiterate) that there is only one libido, whether it occurs in men or women, and that if desire is ‘masculine’ in character, it is so primarily in the sense that ‘masculine’ means ‘active’, since a drive is always ‘active’.5 This notorious passage, with its long subsequent footnote, displays a characteristic Freudian pattern of affirmation followed by hesitation when the issue is sexual difference. Here male sexuality is taken as the norm; sexual difference is brought into being with the ending of the phallic phase; female sexuality is thus different—and the same; and in any case, in human beings pure ‘masculinity’ and pure ‘femininity’ do not exist. In the Debasement essay men and women share a pleasure in

10 DESIRE IN THEORY: FREUD, LACAN, DERRIDA

forbidden love. The situations are not identical: women neither over- value their husbands nor experience a corresponding need to debase their lovers. But both men and women are adversely affected by the long delay, ‘which is demanded by education for cultural reasons’, between the moment of sexual maturity and the arrival of the time for legitimate sexual activity (pp. 255–6). If the affectionate and the sensual impulses commonly fail to coalesce, that is seen at this stage of the argument as a consequence of the cultural practice which separates marriage from the onset of puberty. The victim of psychical impotence in this second section of the essay is no longer a number of unfortunate marriages in which pathology regrettably plays a part, but the institution of marriage in general. And the culprit is not so clearly an inadequate resolution of the Oedipus complex, leading to an unconscious attachment to forbidden, incestuous objects of desire, but rather the chronological gap between the development of a sexual capacity and its legitimate exercise. Freud’s ‘proper subject’, it appears, is not so much a clinical disorder as civilization and its discontents. And in case the reader might draw from this analysis a precipitate inference that earlier marriage would make for happier marriage or, more radically, that marriage itself might not be the happiest location for sexual activity (a case that Freud had already argued vehemently four years earlier),6 the essay disarmingly draws back from any implied prescription: In view of the strenuous efforts being made in the civilized world today to reform sexual life, it will not be superfluous to give a reminder that psychoanalytic research is as remote from tendentiousness as any other kind of research. It has no other end in view than to throw light on things by tracing what is manifest back to what is hidden. It is quite satisfied if reforms make use of its findings to replace what is injurious by something more advantageous; but it cannot predict whether other institutions may not result in other, and perhaps graver, sacrifices. (p. 256) The final note of warning is chilling. What are these ‘graver sacrifices’ that the text hints at but does not define? And are they incidental to the argument, or part of the ‘proper subject’ of the essay? What, indeed, is this ‘proper subject’? Have we reached it when the opening of section 3 of the essay alludes to ‘the curb put upon love by civilization’ (p. 256)? The transparent text has begun to cloud over as Freud takes away with one hand what he gives with the other. A disorder becomes a common condition, at least in ‘civilization’. But the most obvious remedy will not necessarily produce the cure. The problem is inevitable; there is nothing to be done; and in any case another state of affairs might be worse. Meanwhile, as the discussion develops, or rather doubles back on itself, a new set of oppositions begins to emerge, replacing the text’s earlier dualities: no longer mind and body, or man and woman, but sexual pleasure and marriage, sexuality on the one hand and

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‘civilization’ [Kultur] on the other. And what is the alternative to this ‘civilization’, its defining difference? Savagery? Primitivism? Uninhibited working-class sexuality?7 Or nature itself? And if so, where in human experience might this nature be found? In the pre-Oedipal, instinctual life of the infant, perhaps. The opening of the third section of the argument, which constitutes something like another new start, simply effaces most of the distinctions the first two sections have set up, by alluding to the title of the essay: the topic is a ‘universal’ (allgemeinste, most widespread) tendency in sexual relations.8 Since it seems that the question is no longer primarily one concerning differences of culture, class or gender, the essay goes on to clarify its project by attention to the nature of the sexual drive itself. The initial frustration of sexual pleasure (twice over, we must suppose — by the castration complex and again at puberty by ‘education’) has the effect of subsequently inhibiting legitimate sexual activity. And yet delay is not after all the culprit: ‘But at the same time, if sexual freedom is unrestricted from the outset the result is no better’ (my italics, p. 256). As the decline and fall of the ancient civilizations demonstrates, Freud goes on, easy sex is worthless sex. ‘An obstacle is required in order to heighten libido; and where natural resistances to satisfaction have not been sufficient men have at all times erected conventional ones so as to be able to enjoy love’ (pp. 256–7). Now it appears that nature and convention are not antithetical, but in alliance, producing ‘resistances’ which enhance desire. Medieval Christian asceticism, for instance, ‘created psychical values for love which pagan antiquity was never able to confer on it’ (p. 257). Forbidden love is more not less thrilling. Civilization increases the value of the erotic; culture invades sexual life with the effect of intensifying it. How, the essay goes on to deliberate, can this be? Is it simply an economic question, a matter of supply and demand? Obviously the psychical insistence of an impulse rises in proportion to its frustration. But does its importance also fall when the impulse is easily satisfied? And here Freud invokes the alcoholic, whose desire for wine is not enhanced by scarcity: ‘Does one ever hear of a drinker who needs to go to a country where wine is dearer or drinking is prohibited, so that by introducing obstacles he can reinforce the dwindling satisfaction that he obtains? Not at all’ (p. 257). It seems, then, that the character of sexuality is in some way special, that there is something in the nature of the sexual drive itself that is ‘unfavourable to the realization of complete satisfaction’ (even, we must presumably suppose at this stage of the argument, with a debased or prohibited object) (p. 258). The essay goes on to offer two possible reasons for this new insight. The second of these, the view that genital activity is fundamentally ‘animal’ and thus incompatible with civilization, apparently reinstates the earlier duality of nature and culture:

12 DESIRE IN THEORY: FREUD, LACAN, DERRIDA

The genitals themselves have not taken part in the development of the human body in the direction of beauty: they have remained animal, and thus love, too, has remained in essence just as animal as it ever was. (p. 259) This argument carries very little credibility for us now, as products of a culture which, in the wake of D.H.Lawrence, sexology and the sexual revolution of the 1960s, is more likely to idealize sex than to be disgusted by it. Freud seems to be generalizing from his own historical moment, and presenting as universal a problem which has now been solved by sexual liberation. It is not, however, quite as simple as that. The paragraph as a whole is altogether more puzzling. The second reason why something in the nature of the sexual instinct is unfavourable to complete satisfaction is that sexuality, the sexual drive itself, develops: the sexual instinct is originally divided into a great number of components —or rather it develops out of them—some of which cannot be taken up into the instinct in its later form. (p. 258) These (animal) components include coprophilia, for example, which is discarded when human beings adopt an upright gait, and which has no proper place in human sexual life. At the same time, however, the fundamental sexual processes ‘remain unaltered’: ‘The excremental is all too intimately and inseparably bound up with the sexual.’ Human beings both are and are not ‘animal’, and the impulses that cannot be incorporated into human sexuality persist and are registered as non-satisfaction (p. 259). Sexual liberation, freeing the erotic from culturally imposed inhibition, is not, after all, quite what is at stake. The process of development that is identified here is evolutionary, phylogenetic. But a parallel development defines the psychosexual history of the individual human being. The first reason Freud gives in the Debasement essay for the incompatibility between sexuality and satisfaction concerns an originary loss. His account of this process of loss explicitly calls into question yet again the dualities that so much of the essay appears to take for granted. It also tells a story which is implicit in all of psychoanalysis, but which is rarely glimpsed more clearly than it is here. This is the history of a gender-neutral human being, belonging to no particular race or class, which, from its earliest infancy, is already an animalin-culture, a composite figure in which nature and culture, body and mind are inextricably intertwined, and in which in consequence the great dualism of the Cartesian cogito no longer holds. According to the text, the first reason why the sexual drive remains unsatisfied is this:

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as a result of the diphasic onset of object-choice, and the interposition of the barrier against incest, the final object of the sexual instinct is never any longer the original object but only a surrogate for it. Psychoanalysis has shown us that when the original object of a wishful impulse has been lost as a result of repression, it is frequently represented by an endless series of substitute objects none of which, however, brings full satisfaction. (p. 258) Every object of adult desire is always only a substitute for an original object which is forever lost, and which it represents. Since each substitute, each representation, is always only that and no more, it can never fully be the object of unconscious desire. Loss returns as the impossibility of perfect satisfaction. But what is this lost object which can never be recovered in adult life? The essay has already told us a good deal about it. The child’s primary object-choice is directed towards those who look after it, and is formed ‘on the basis of the interests of the self-preservative instinct’ (p. 248). It is an effect, in other words, of the child’s initial dependency, its need for food and warmth, and its fundamental impulse to survive. This impulse ‘carries along with it’ sexual components, Freud argues, but these become attached only secondarily to the child’s valuation of the attentions originally necessary to the preservation of life. It follows, as Jean Laplanche has argued on the basis of a parallel passage from Freud’s Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, ‘that on the one hand there is from the beginning an object, but that on the other hand sexuality does not kave, from the beginning, a real object’.9 Laplanche argues that in psychoanalytic theory sexuality is not simply mysteriously given in nature. On the contrary, the sexual drive (Trieb: the psychical representative of an instinct)10 is ‘propped on’ the impulse to survive. Sexual excitation comes in the first instance from outside, from adults, from the necessary process of caring, which is invested with sexual meanings.11 But it comes to the child too early to be intelligible. In consequence, the child reaches puberty only after sexuality has already been associated with a whole range of repressed because unintelligible meanings. These meanings are learned from those who bring up the child, from the significances and fantasies which are inseparable for them in turn from love and care. Sexuality, according to Laplanche, is initially supplementary to self-preservation.12 Moreover, adult sexuality, it appears, is subsequently ‘propped on’ the requirements of the ego (which explains, for instance, the narcissistic element in object-choice). In Freud’s own words in the essay on Debasement, the sexual instincts find their first objects by attaching themselves to the valuations made by the ego-instincts precisely in the way in which the first sexual satisfactions are experienced in attachment to the bodily functions necessary for the preservation of life. The ‘affection’ shown by the child’s parents and those who look after him, which seldom fails to betray its

14 DESIRE IN THEORY: FREUD, LACAN, DERRIDA

erotic nature (‘the child is an erotic plaything’), does a very great deal to raise the contributions made by erotism to the cathexes of his ego-instincts. (p. 249) It seems, then, that there is no primordial, original, founding sexual object at all, but only an object subsequently sexually cathected, and invested with sexual meanings initially learned from others in the course of the necessary process of caring for a human infant whose physical autonomy is so long delayed. The mother, or those who care for the child, by their attentions first teach the child how to love.13 This means, as Laplanche points out, that the object of adult desire is not the lost object, but its substitute by displacement; the lost object is the object of self-preservation, of hunger, and the object one seeks to refind in sexuality is an object displaced in relation to that first object. From this, of course, arises the impossibility of ultimately ever rediscovering the object, since the object which has been lost is not the same as that which is to be rediscovered.14 It also means that sexuality does not exist in a pure state prior to the meanings and fantasies with which it is invested by the caring adults. There is no erotic life outside what is learned, no infantile instinctual sexuality untrammelled by meaning, no body independent of mind, and no lost golden world outside ‘civilization’ or culture.15 Human sexuality is inevitably bound up with representation. Civilization is present from the beginning in the world of the little human animal, long before the awareness of castration impels it to submit to the explicit imperatives of the cultural order. A third party thus always attends the sexual relation, and this is culture itself, the location of sexual meanings as well as proprieties and prohibitions. Desire, the Debasement essay indicates, commonly repudiates the norms affirmed by ‘education’, with its delays and deferments, seeking out instead in illicit relationships the pleasure so long forbidden by the cultural order. At the level of the unconscious, which is where desire subsists, prohibition promotes libido. There is thus a resemblance between Freud’s analysis of desire and the brilliant account Denis de Rougemont gives of passion as suffering. Tristan and Isolde, de Rougemont points out in Love in the Western World, repeatedly seek out impediments to satisfaction. This adulterous love, the ideal type of passion in western culture, depends on dangers, is enhanced by absences, and has recourse to self-imposed obstacles. At one point in the story Tristan implicitly reaffirms the threat of castration as the penalty for forbidden love by placing his naked sword between the bodies of the lovers as they sleep. Later Tristan perfectly voluntarily marries another woman, another Isolde, but continues none the less to long for his first love, refusing to consummate the marriage. The jealous wife finally brings about Tristan’s death, and then her own, when she lies to him

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about the colour of the first Isolde’s sails as she comes to cure him. Neither legitimate love nor illicit passion finds perfect fulfilment.16 Something in the nature of the sexual drive, Freud has argued, is unfavourable to the realization of complete satisfaction. The third party, civilization, the cultural order, which irretrievably differentiates human beings from animals, cannot be fully reconciled with the sexuality which it itself makes possible. Freud’s essay finally reverts, of course, to the Enlightenment categories with which it began, in order to argue that although the sexual drive cannot be reconciled with the demands of civilization, although sexual activity cannot in the end satisfy human desire, the sublimation of the sexual impulse produces the noblest human achievements. In this way the text furnishes itself with a happy ending. But which of the questions it addresses, we might wonder, is its ‘proper subject’? Is it the set of oppositions of race (‘civilization’ and its unspecified— perhaps primitive —alternative?), class or gender, which cannot be made to stay in place as the text moves on? Is it instead the Enlightenment dualisms of mind and body, culture and nature, which are the only categories apparently available for discussing and analysing sexuality? Or is it finally a radical reinterpretation of human desire which refuses to conform to any analysis that isolates mind from body, culture from nature, and civilization from what the Standard Edition calls ‘instinct’ (Trieb, drive)? II As so often in Freud’s work, the scientific clarity of the text is an illusion. The writing doubles back on itself, never reaching the promised goal, but offering another in its place. The process of displacement and substitution mimics, we might argue, the ways of desire, and makes of the text itself an object of desire for the reader. Redactions of Freud, mapping, schematizing, systematizing, and eliminating in the process the seductive duplicities of Freud’s texts, produce all too often a theology without mysteries and a science which has about as much plausibility as astrology or black magic. In this sense Freud’s best reader has surely been Jacques Lacan, whose dense, difficult, elusive texts make no promises of an illusory transparency. Lacan’s writing explicitly foregrounds the processes of enunciation by simulating the modes of speech which are its primary theme. His texts are associative, allusive, figurative, digressive. The signified slips and slides under the signifier as the meanings produced by the Lacanian system of differences, ‘other’ and ‘Other’, ‘objet a’, ‘imaginary’, ‘real’, and ‘desire’ itself, refuse to stay in place. Lacan’s ‘algebra’, the literal symbols, diagrams, graphs imitate—and parody—the ‘objectivity’ relentlessly pursued by the will to truth. Meanwhile, the lapses, jokes, narratives which disrupt and illuminate the texts mimic the interventions of the unconscious in all human utterance. To schematize Lacan’s work, however helpful the process, is in the end to do an injustice to the texts’ complexity, and at the same time to diminish their power of seduction. In

16 DESIRE IN THEORY: FREUD, LACAN, DERRIDA

what follows, a reading of Lacan’s account of desire, I try to reproduce Lacan’s own text wherever possible. Lacan’s essay, ‘The signification of the phallus’, was originally delivered as a lecture in 1958. His discussion begins with a ‘knot’ that fastens together the identity of the human being: ‘We know that the unconscious castration complex has the function of a knot.’17 The castration complex is also a knotty theoretical problem which psychoanalysis sets out to untie, and this second knot at the level of the signifier is formulated in the lecture as a riddle or a mathematical puzzle which confronts both Lacan and his audience: ‘what is the link between the murder of the father and the pact of the primordial law, if it is included in that law that castration should be the punishment for incest?’ (p. 282). What, in other words, is the connection between the Oedipus complex and the order of language and culture, if castration is the punishment for forbidden love? How does psychoanalysis chart the relationship which is constitutive for human beings between ‘death’ (or ‘murder’) and the Law, loss and sexuality? In answer, ‘The signification of the phallus’ recounts the birth of desire, and if it ‘solves’ the riddle, it also paradoxically defers it by invoking the question of sexual difference. The essay makes explicit the importance for Lacanian psychoanalysis of the post-Saussurean distinction between the signifier (the acoustic or written image) and the signified (meaning). Although Freud was not in a position to take account of modern linguistic theory, his work, Lacan argues, not only anticipates its findings, but brings out their full implication. This is above all the discovery that language is constitutive of meaning, that signification differentiates, and in consequence, that the signifier has an active function in determining certain effects in which the signifiable appears as submitting to its mark, by becoming through that passion the signified. (p. 284) Lacan offers three terms where Saussure provided two. The signifier actively transforms into the signified an undifferentiated signifiable real, which pre-exists it as unknowable and unintelligible. As a result of the work of the signifier, ‘there is born the world of meaning of a particular language in which the world of things will come to be arranged’.18 For Lacan the real seems to submit to the signifier, and its transformation is defined as a ‘passion’: that is to say suffering, something which is endured and, supremely in western culture, the suffering of Christ on the cross. Lacan’s own signifier is not idle. There is a birth here, the birth of the world of meaning, but also a death, since ‘the symbol manifests itself first of all as the murder of the thing’.19 Language erases even as it creates. The signifier replaces the object it identifies as a separate entity; the linguistic symbol supplants what it names and differentiates, relegates it to a limbo beyond language, where it becomes

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inaccessible, lost; and in consequence ‘the being of language is the non-being of objects’.20 The symbolic ‘passion’ institutes a lack which does not exist in the real. By its attention to the signifier, and to the primacy of the symbolic in the construction of the world of meaning and difference, Lacan goes on to argue in ‘The signification of the phallus’, psychoanalysis gives a new account of the human condition, ‘in that it is not only man who speaks, but that in man and through man it speaks (ça parle)’ (p. 284). ‘It’ here represents language, the symbolic order, the word as Law, which forms the human subject in its own image;21 at the same time ‘it’ signifies language as the material of psychoanalysis itself, the ‘talking cure’; and this is so in turn because ‘it’ (id) is also the unconscious which is presented, made present for the first time, in signification—as marks on the body, or in verbal slips, jokes told and dreams recounted. There ‘resounds’, therefore, rings out in the (hollow, perhaps; certainly echoing) human being, what the essay calls ‘the relation of speech’ (p. 284). No longer an organism in the real, the speaking human being encompasses a void, a lack under the Law. Speech is a ‘relation’, the possibility of dialogue, of demand, of community, reciprocity, love. As the condition of subjectivity, permitting a difference between ‘I’ and ‘you’, speech is also necessarily the possibility of intersubjectivity, of address and response, question and answer. But this liberation is at the same time a constraint. To the extent that the subject can come to exist in language only under a name (or a pronoun) which is not chosen but allotted from elsewhere, by the Father as representative of the Other, the symbolic itself, that name (le Nom du Père) supplants what it constitutes. In consequence, ‘I identify myself in language, but only by losing myself in it like an object.’22 Moreover, the place of the ‘“intra-said” (intra-dit)’ within the relation of speech between two subjects is also the place of the ‘inter-dif, the location precisely of interdiction, prohibition and Law (le Non du Père), and therefore of a split in the subject between what can be acknowledged and what cannot be recognized.23 The fear of castration and the consequent submission to the (paternal) Law, to the symbolic order, releases the possibility of speech and at the same time divides the subject from itself, instituting and simultaneously outlawing the unconscious. Unconscious desire is thus caught up with what is prohibited. The unconscious speaks, however, in the symbolic. The repressed returns in the process of speech, putting on display the division, the difference which inhabits and defines the speaking subject: It speaks in the Other, I say, designating by the Other the very locus evoked by the recourse to speech in any relation in which the Other intervenes. If it speaks in the Other, whether or not the subject hears it with his ear, it is because it is there that the subject, by means of a logic anterior to any awakening of the signified, finds its signifying place. The discovery

18 DESIRE IN THEORY: FREUD, LACAN, DERRIDA

of what it articulates in that place, that is to say in the unconscious, enables us to grasp at the price of what splitting (Spaltung) it has thus been constituted. The phallus reveals its function here. (p. 285) The phallus, the protagonist in Lacan’s narrative of the birth of desire, is defined in the first instance by a series of negations. It is not, we are to understand, a ‘phantasy’; it is not an ‘object’ in the sense in which the term features in objectrelations theory; and finally, ‘it is even less the organ, penis or clitoris, that it symbolizes’ (p. 258). The phallus is not an anatomical feature, whether male or female. On the contrary, ‘the phallus is a signifier’ (p. 285) and what it signifies, the essay will later reveal, is desire, ‘the desire of the Other’ (p. 290). But it signifies, we should remember, only by means of a submission to the symbolic order which Lacan has already figured as a ‘passion’. The phallus occupies its privileged position at the price of a loss, and this loss is represented in the Freudian economy as castration. Through the passion of the real, separated off from the organism, the phallus (as ) comes to signify the objet a which is irretrievably lost.24 How does this loss come about? What are the effects of the advent of signification in the human being? First, the essay proposes, signification causes a ‘deviation’ of organic human needs in the process of transforming them into demands. Subjected to the signifier, these needs return to the speaking subject ‘alienated’, other than they are, since it is from the Other, the locus of speech which already exists outside the subject, that the subject’s message is emitted (p. 286). That which is thus alienated in needs constitutes an Urverdrängung’, disappears from view in an urrepression, an anterior, prior, primal repression. But this in turn gives rise to something which does appear, namely desire (p. 286). Desire is the effect of the lost needs: loss returns and presents itself as desire. Desire is not the same as need: analytic experience certainly demonstrates ‘the paradoxical, deviant, erratic, eccentric, even scandalous character’ which distinguishes desire from anything that could possibly be necessary (p. 286). What returns as desire is quite other than the repressed needs that are its cause. In this morality play of the advent of signification, Lacan presents three allegorical figures, need, desire, and demand. ‘Demand…bears on something other than the satisfactions it calls for. It is a demand of a presence or of an absence’ (p. 286). Demand is ultimately the demand for love, and its mythological founding moment is the story Freud tells in Beyond the Pleasure Principle of the child with the cotton reel. At the age of eighteen months, little Ernst, Freud’s grandson, took to symbolizing his mother’s alternate absence and presence with a cotton reel attached to a piece of string. As he threw it away, the little boy uttered a mournful sound which approximated to ‘fort’ (gone), and when he pulled it back, he greeted the cotton reel with a joyful ‘da’ (here).25 This elementary system of differences, however imperfectly under control, represents

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the child’s entry into the symbolic order, in accordance with which its existence will be structured.26 But this moment of naming absence is also the instant of the birth of desire, since the signifier, while it replaces the mother, does not fill her plAce, makes nothing present. The fort/da game represents both command and loss. It is in the mother’s absence, in solitude that the child makes itself ‘master’ of her desertion, by acknowledging the otherness of its mother, and her independent existence (with, indeed, her own separate object of desire).27 The process of symbolic mastery thus has the paradoxical effect of rendering desire itself indestructible.28 In addition, Freud suggests that by throwing away the cotton reel the child enacts an emblematic revenge on the mother who has abandoned it.29 The game is therefore also an act of hostility, a dismissal of the loved object, a figurative destruction. ‘Thus the symbol manifests itself first of all as the murder of the thing, and this death constitutes in the subject the eternalization of his desire.’30 Murder; the symbolic pact which subjects the human being to the Law; loss; and desire: the strands which make up the knot that constitutes the human being, fastens it together, indeed, begin to distinguish themselves at the level of theory (though to untie them in practice would be to precipitate psychosis). At this stage, however, it is the ‘mother’ who is the murder victim, since language is first invoked in the relationship with the ‘mother’, which is described in the essay as shown to be ‘pregnant with that Other to be situated within [en deça de: some way short of]31 the needs that it can satisfy’ (p. 286). Ultimately the ‘father’ will stand for the symbolic order in its entirety, the paternal authority representing Law, which will be invoked in order to impose limits on the imaginary omnipotence of the now differentiated other, the arbitrariness of the signifier, and the anxiety of desire.32 Or rather the Father. Lacanian psychoanalysis is not much concerned with narratives of childhood, except in so far as these lay down a structure which defines the subject. Lacan’s theory is not a version of child-psychology, and is not usefully read as an account of the roles of mothers and father.33 The stages of psychosexual development have a mythological status: the ‘story’ of the child is important only in so far as it is perpetually recapitulated in the experience of the adult. The Father is a signifier, and it is the Name of the Father which authorizes meaning, the paternal-signifying Law which holds in place the ordering mechanisms of the symbolic.34 The Mother, too, is crucially a signifier, not a person, ‘the signifier of the primordial object’.35 With the resolution of the Oedipus complex, which is the entry into the Law, it will be the symbolic Father who belongs with death: How, indeed, could Freud fail to recognize such an affinity, when the necessity of his reflexion led him to link the appearance of the signifier of the Father, as author of the Law, with death, even to the murder of the Father—thus showing that if this murder is the fruitful moment of debt

20 DESIRE IN THEORY: FREUD, LACAN, DERRIDA

through which the subject binds himself for life to the Law, the symbolic Father is, in so far as he signifies this Law, the dead Father.36 Demand is the possibility of love—and hate. Demand constitutes the Other as able to satisfy needs, or to withhold satisfaction. ‘That which is thus given to the Other to fill, and which is strictly that which it does not have, since it, too, lacks being, is what is called love, but it is also hate and ignorance.’37 The Other, however, which is not a person but the locus of speech, is not full. Since what the Other can give is not substantial, demand ‘annuls’ the specificity of what is given by turning it into a proof of love. ‘It is necessary, then, that the particularity thus abolished should reappear beyond demand’ (p. 286). What appears beyond demand, ‘in the interval that demand hollows within itself’,38 in the place of the absence brought into being by the signifier, is desire. Thus desire is neither the appetite for satisfaction, nor the demand for love, but the difference that results from the subtraction of the first from the second, the phenomenon of their splitting (Spaltung). (p. 287) Desire is a difference. It is an effect of the alienation in the human animal of the requirement for gratification in the demand for love. And if the sexual relation ‘occupies’ the field of desire, that is because sexuality delivers its appeal at once to the lost, absent, ‘murdered’ real of the human organism and to the Other for the proof of love. It follows from the gap that necessarily appears within this doubly barred appeal in antithetical directions that for both the partners in the sexual relation, ‘it is not enough to be the subjects of need, or objects of love, but that they must stand for the cause of desire’ (p. 287). The cause of desire, Lacan’s objet a, is the lost object that never was in the unknowable real. Desire is thus ‘a relation of being to lack. This lack is the lack of being properly speaking. It isn’t the lack of this or that, but the lack of being whereby the being exists.’39 Desire is a metonymy (a displaced version) of the want-to-be40 that necessarily characterizes a human life divided between the unmasterable symbolic and the unreachable, inextricable real. And desire itself is split between the quest for satisfaction in the real, ‘a refusal of the signifier’, on the one hand, and the desire of (for) the Other, the origin of meaning, which entails ‘a lack of being’.41 This must be so because if the subject longs to find the real again, it also yearns to find the self which is perpetually created and destroyed by the signifier.42 And where else is the signifying subject to be found but in the Other? Lacan’s repeated insistence that desire is the desire of the Other is his most plural, most elusive formulation. It can be read as meaning variously (at least): desire originates in the Other (the symbolic); it inhabits the Other (the unconscious); it is for the Other (the recognition of the other at the level of the unconscious); it is for the Other (the subject-presumed to know, the analyst in the

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transference); it is for the Other (a guarantee of meaning and truth in the symbolic, a transcendental signified, ‘God’). How absurd in these circumstances to suppose that desire can be met by ‘leaving it to the virtue of the “genital” to resolve it through the maturation of tenderness’ (p. 287). Lacan has nothing but contempt for the view that true love leading to happy marriage is the project of desire, since desire precisely exceeds the dualism of sensuality and affection, resides beyond both need and demand. As early as 1948 he invoked La Rochefoucauld’s maxim that there are good marriages, but none that are exciting (délicieux).43 Imagining a marriage between Dora and Herr K, Lacan commented that it would be ‘as unhappy as any other marriage’.44 Whatever the nature of desire, genital harmony in conjunction with affection is not its object. Even the most fulfilled relationships involve so many debasements (Erniedrigungen), Lacan insists, in consequence of the Oedipal drama which conjoins desire with love but also with hate, ‘the black God in the sheep’s clothing of the Good Shepherd Eros’.45 Desire subsists both within and beyond the realm of the pleasure principle; it cannot be contained by the stable, institutional, public legality which is marriage. On the contrary, desire, which is absolute, knows no law.46 For Lacan, as for Freud, then, there are three parties involved in sexual desire, the subject, the Law, and the unconscious as outlaw. The subject is an effect of the Nom/Non du Père; it inhabits the syirtbolic order which both produces and prohibits unconscious desire. In consequence the object of unconscious desire has no name. It is precisely ‘the desire for nothing nameable’.47 This is what it means to say that desire exists beyond demand, beyond the signifier. And yet desire speaks, in the unconscious, in the Other. And its signifier is the phallus. Why the phallus, Lacan’s essay asks? Partly, of course, the reader must suppose, because this is a reading of Freud, and the argument consequently starts from the infantile phallic stage, which in Freud’s account leads up to the castration complex. The phallic stage is the same for boys and girls, and precedes sexual difference (p. 282). In Freud’s version sexual difference is produced in relation to the phallus. And perhaps, Lacan adds, the phallus is the privileged signifier of desire because it is the most salient of what can be seized (le plus saillant de ce qu’on peut attraper)48 in the real of sexual copulation, the element which makes visible the incompleteness of both individuals, and which in heterosexual relations promises to join each partner to the real. This is one of the most evasive moments in an essay which is very far from transparent. The phallus is a signifier; it symbolizes the penis or the clitoris; but it is also the penis— perhaps (‘It can be said…’). Moreover (perhaps) it represents the copula typographically in the symbolic (as the equals sign (=)?). And (perhaps) it offers an image of the vital flow transmitted in generation (p. 287). But then the essay takes back what it might appear to have given: ‘All these propositions merely conceal the fact that it can play its role only when veiled, that is to say, as itself a sign of the latency with which any signifiable is struck, when it is raised (aufgehoben) to the function of signifier’ (p. 288). The phallus

22 DESIRE IN THEORY: FREUD, LACAN, DERRIDA

is, after all, a signifier, and it can play its role as a signifier only when it appears as such, that is to say when it seems to render ‘latent’ the real of which it is only the representative, and which it cannot make present. The moment it is ‘unveiled’, it becomes the bar which ‘strikes the signified’, which bars the subject’s access to the lost (urverdrängt, primarily repressed) real and the (secondarily) repressed meanings which constitute the unconscious (p. 288). Much of the rest of the essay is concerned with sexual difference. And here it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that Lacan, like Freud, is inclined to take cultural stereotypes for structural effects. Women, it appears, tend to want to be the phallus, the object of desire, whereas men want to have it. And yet almost at once a (somewhat confusing) allusion to the ‘masquerade’ of femininity calls this conclusion into question (p. 290). In her essay on ‘Womanliness as a masquerade’, first published in 1929, Joan Riviere proposed, with whatever hesitations and reversals, that femininity is no more than a mask adopted to deflect male retribution and elicit sexual approval. Riviere’s account is psychical, but the hierarchized eroticism that it describes is palpably articulated with the social and cultural, with a sexual identity which is learned.49 What is ‘behind’ the mask, what women might (learn to) be(come) remains to be seen. Lacan’s essay reverts, however, to stereotypes and hierarchy. Women, it argues, wanting to be the phallus, tolerate frigidity, while in men, who want to have it, the dialectic of demand and desire produces a tendency to debasement (Erniedrigung) and a consequent ‘centrifugal’ inclination to infidelity (p. 290). And yet, the essay continues, ‘it should not be thought that the sort of infidelity that would appear to be constitutive of the male function is proper to it. For if one looks more closely, the same redoubling is to be found in the woman’ (p. 290). True in the end to Freud, Lacan cannot sustain the opposition he seems to want to set up. There is, after all, only one libido, even if it is ‘masculine’ in character (p. 291). If this account of sexual difference is finally inconclusive, it is also possible to argue that it is incidental to Lacan’s gender-neutral account of desire. But is it? The identification of the phallus as the primary signifier has been critical in the feminist denunciation of Lacan’s phallocentrism. ‘The signification of the phallus’ is certainly phallocentric in the most literal sense of the term. And the story Lacan tells there of sexual difference is not one that feminism could easily endorse. Why, then, or how, would any feminist find the essay sympathetic? The question seems to turn on the meaning of the phallus. As I have already suggested, there is a certain slippage here, or perhaps a certain textual teasing. The phallus is a signifier. No one has it, neither women nor men. It signifies the unnameable object of desire, the desire of the Other, and it re-presents (stands in the place of) the objet a, the lost object in the real. And yet it ‘can be said’ that this signifier is chosen because it stands out as what can be seized in the real of the sexual act. It can be said. But is it being said here? The answer is not obvious.50 In addition, the essay reproduces the Freudian account of the Oedipus complex to the extent that it portrays the child as longing to be the phallus, which is to say

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the object of the mother’s desire. What the child discovers is that the mother does not have the phallus (p. 289). Does this mean that she does not have a penis, or that she has a desire of her own?51 The latter, I think, but in reading such an elusive text, a text which so palpably reproduces the elusiveness and the plurality of the signifier, who can be sure? And finally, the essay tells us in its account of the differential relation of men and women to the phallus, the woman ‘finds the signifier of her own desire in the body of him to whom she addresses her demand for love’ (p. 290). This is an organ, even if it is also a signifier (and in the following sentence a fetish). Lacan’s essay flaunts the issue of sexual difference by so explicitly, scandalously, privileging the phallus, and then evades the question it has raised by refusing to ‘fix’ the meaning of its central figure. The text’s phallic teasing thus preserves the anonymity, the tantalizing incognito of desire’s true object. The issue of sexual difference is critical for psychoanalysis, and indeed for feminism.52 Feminism has tended to consider the question by differentiating between anatomy (sex) and gender (culture). Evidently there is an anatomical difference between men and women. Does this imply an essential female sexuality? Or are women not born but made sexually, and made differently in different cultural and historical locations? If we answer ‘yes’ to the first question, we are in danger of eliminating the differences between women; if we answer ‘yes’ to the second, do we not risk ignoring the difference between women and men? Psychoanalysis defers both questions—to the degree that it repudiates the dualist opposition between nature and culture. In psychoanalytic terms it is not a matter of sex and gender, still less sex or gender, but of a’knot’ which ties together the signifying subject and the lost but inextricable real. This knot is indissoluble, and it is tied ‘without regard to the anatomical difference of the sexes’ (p. 282).53 Its consequence is the indestructibility of unconscious desire. The question whether the character of this desire is sexually differentiated is perhaps one that theory is not yet equipped to answer satisfactorily. III René Magritte’s famous painting of a pipe incorporates its own ‘title’ within the frame of the picture: ‘This is not a pipe.’ The painting is then independently named The Treachery of Images. Illusionism in painting, logocentrism in philosophy, the metaphysics of presence easily betray us into taking the symbol for the object, or the signifier for its meaning. A picture is not a pipe. The Treachery of Images first appeared in 1929. Subsequently Magritte intensified the joke, and in the process complicated the issue, with This is a Piece of Cheese, which shows a framed painting of a slice of brie, perfectly illusionist in its execution. The picture stands on a pedestal under a glass dome. Where now is the ‘truth’ which images betray? Of course, we could not eat the cheese: the process of symbolization does not make it present.

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But to name a piece of cheese, to mention it, to write of it, is not to eat it either. On the contrary, the signifier precisely defers, supplants, relegates the imagined presence it sets out to name. But the piece of cheese we eat is always already named, with the consequence that its imagined presence independent of the deflecting, deferring, differing signifier is not an option. There are not, then, two separate orders, the object on the one hand, free-standing in its pristine integrity, and the signifier on the other, secondary, dependent on the object, fallen. On the contrary, there is a condition which is also a process, for which Jacques Derrida has coined the term ‘differance’.54 In ‘Le Facteur de la verite’ (‘The Factor/Postman of Truth’), first published in 1975, Derrida launches an uncharacteristically vehement attack on Lacanian psychoanalysis in general, including ‘The signification of the phallus’ in particular. Lacan’s work, Derrida insists, is phallocentric, logocentric, metaphysical. The insistence that the phallus is not an organ is an evasion. A whole theory of sexual difference is elaborated on the basis of woman’s castration: the phallus is not the organ, penis or clitoris, that it symbolizes, but it mostly and primarily symbolizes the penis. What follows is obvious: phallogocentrism as androcentrism, along with the entire paradoxical logic and reversals this engenders.55 Derrida’s main case against Lacan and against psychoanalysis is that they promise to deliver the truth, a truth beyond language, however inscribed in it. Psychoanalysis, for all its attention to the signifier, in practice sets out to ‘decipher’ the ‘semantic core’ of a text or an utterance, the primary content veiled by the signifier. The psychoanalytic process, Derrida argues, is thus an unveiling of truth, and psychoanalytic theory offers itself as the truth of truth.56 Of course, he concedes, Lacan is not naive enough to suppose that truth is simply a matter of self-expression, or that it is a question of correspondence between a signifier and an object. On the contrary, Lacan’s ‘full speech’ is full of ‘itself, of its presence, its essence’;57 this presence is the (unconscious) truth of the subject’s desire; and it is made manifest, unveiled, only in verbal exchange with the analyst, who knows how to read it.58 ‘The values of presence (in person), of proximity, plenitude, and consistency form the system of authenticity in the analytic dialogue.’59 The psychoanalytic truth is always linked, Derrida goes on, to the power of speech, and its evidence is repetition, which is possible only on the basis of a buttoning down of the sliding signified in a point de capiton. Psychoanalysis is thus phonocentric as well as phallocentric, and if the phallus is the prime signifier, the voice is its vehicle: Only a speech, with its effects of presence in act and of authentic life can maintain (garder) the ‘sworn faith’ which links it to the desire of the other. If the ‘phallus is the privileged signifier of that mark in which the role of

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the logos is joined with the advent of desire,’ the privileged site of this privileged signifier, then its letter is the voice: the letter as spokesman, the letter-carrying-speech. The letter alone—as soon as the point de capiton of the signified ensures its repeatable identity—carries the necessary ideality or power of idealization that can safeguard (in any event this is what it means) the indivisible, singular, living, non-fragmentable integrity of the phallus, of the privileged signifier to which it gives rise. The transcendental position of the phallus (in the chain of signifiers to which it belongs, while simultaneously making it possible) thus would have its proper place—in Lacanian terms, its letter exempt from all partition—in the phonematic structure of language. No protest against metalanguage is opposed to this phallogocentric transcendentalism.60 The problem here is not that Derrida is wrong: if psychoanalysis divorces truth from the cogito, the object of knowledge from the knowing subject, it is only in order to reinstate truth elsewhere, in the unconscious (Freud), or in the Other (Lacan), even though we might suppose that this is already a ‘Copernican’ break with Enlightenment rationalism and empiricism. What is odd here is that Derrida repeats what he denounces in Lacan: he sets out to decipher the semantic core of Lacan’s text, treating the signifier as nothing more than a veil.61 Thus, Derrida reFreudianizes Lacan’s account of desire, ignoring the Lacanian want-to-be in favour of Freudian castration, and he barely acknowledges the implications of the textuality of Lacan’s writing: ‘Lacan’s “style” was constructed so as to check almost permanently any access to an isolatable content, to an unequivocal, determinable meaning beyond writing.’62 This reads more like an accusation of obscurantism than a recognition of indeterminacy. What disappears, therefore, from Derrida’s version of Lacan is the textual teasing which unfixes the meaning even of the privileged signifier, the performance by which the Lacanian text enlists the desire of the reader in a quest for a truth that is withheld even in the moments when it is most obviously on display. The denunciation of Lacan, in conjunction with the dismissal of Lacan’s textuality, is even odder in the light of ‘To speculate—on “Freud”’, Derrida’s brilliant reading of ‘Beyond the pleasure principle’, which precedes ‘Le Facteur de la verite’ in The Post Card. This tour de force is precisely an account of Freud’s text as performance (though it is also a critique of Lacan, who took it, Derrida says, for truth). To speculate— on “Freud” ‘traces the outline of ‘FreudY own desire, the textuality of the desire inscribed in the text, and its hopes, fears, anxieties and repetitions. In a series of oppositions, which turn out in practice not to be oppositions after all, the fort/da, absence and presence, the death drive and the pleasure principle, the text both delineates and enacts a struggle for sovereignty which remains unresolved. Freud’s sequence of ‘speculations’, which are not to be confused with ‘philosophy’, Freud insists, are ‘a-thetic’: they put forward no thesis and take up no (final) position. This is a text, Derrida demonstrates, ‘which advances without advancing, without advancing itself,

26 DESIRE IN THEORY: FREUD, LACAN, DERRIDA

without ever advancing anything that it does not immediately take back, for the time of a detour, without ever positing anything which remains in its position.’63 On the contrary, it repeats itself and its speculative differentiations, just as little Ernst repeats the alternation of pleasure and unpleasure in the fort/da game. Freud’s text repeatedly distances the pleasure principle only in order to bring it back so that it (and Ernst, and his distinguished grandfather) retain their authority, their mastery of the founding moment of psychoanalysis.64 Like a promise or an oath, the text performs what it defines, Derrida maintains. His infinitely supple and subtle reading identifies in the twists and turns of ‘Beyond the pleasure principle’ a kind of performative, which carries out in its writing the process of production (and protection) of psychoanalytic theory. And Derrida’s own text, which is more a celebration than a critique, endorses the a-thetic character of Freud’s writing which it affirms, its lack of systematicity, which reveals it as performative of desire. Lacan’s supreme error, then, we may construe, is that he systematizes desire, substituting theory for performance, and in the process laying claim to a single truth which is constitutive for human beings. In Derrida’s account, psychoanalysis is thus no more than another, and perhaps the supremely privileged, metaphysics of desire. Derrida’s own text(s) of desire, the ‘Envois’ which make up the first half of The Post Card is (are) anything but systematic. Defying synopsis for this reason, the ‘Envois’ have perhaps received less attention than is their due. These (love) letters (or postcards), the fragmentary inscription of forbidden love, identify neither their author(s?) nor their addressee(s?) and refuse all the oppositions on which theory is necessarily based. They are intense, passionate, elliptical, elusive, impenetrable. They undermine our confidence in our ability to read by refusing to indicate how they are to be read, when they are coded to avoid a possible censor, when they are ironic, when they allude to ‘reality’. They blur the boundaries between fact and fiction. And in all these ways they constitute textual performances (performatives) of desire. Who is the ‘author’ of these ‘missives’ (dispatches, in-voices)? At one moment a figure whose (punning?) signature is ‘j’accepte’;65 at another a person whose initials are J.D. (pp. 202–3); someone who travels—to Oxford, Yale, Geneva, Brussels…and theorizes (or rather, speculates?) about Oxford philosophy, Plato and Socrates, psychoanalysis. But elsewhere it is impossible to be sure. And who is addressed? A woman? Sometimes, but at other times the genders of the correspondents are left in question. And the text is determined not to clarify the situation: Who is writing? To whom? And to send, to destine, to dispatch what? To what address? Without any desire to surprise, and thereby to grab attention by means of obscurity, I owe it to whatever remains of my honesty to say finally that I do not know. Above all I would not have had the slightest

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interest in this correspondence and this cross-section, I mean in their publication, if some certainty on this matter had satisfied me. (P. 5) It is open to the reader to note that desire defers and destabilizes identity, calls it into question. In love identities are gained and lost. Lovers speak from a range of subject positions. ‘I’ is ungendered, its sex veiled (pp. 178–9). The addressed, idealized, fantasized other, object of love and hate, is a displacement, a metonymy, perhaps a succession of surrogates. It is open to the reader to note all this… Meanwhile, what is the genre of this text as a whole? Is it an epistolary novel? Is it, as Derrida’s blurb claims, a satire on epistolary fiction? Is it an ‘apocryphal’ text, doubtfully attributed to a philosopher, like Plato’s letters, perhaps? Or is it (tempting, tantalizing thought, which must of course immediately be resisted as ‘unsophisticated’) the coded remainder of the real correspondence that it (fictionally?) claims to be? (After all, ‘real’ figures appear in it: Hillis, Jonathan and Cynthia, Neil Hertz, Paul de Man. But the text takes account of that.)66 And is there a relationship between this generic indeterminacy and desire? As it fantasizes, imagines, idealizes, overvalues, not only at a distance, but as the condition of sexual pleasure, is desire fact or fiction? Or does it precisely exceed those alternatives? The ‘Envois’ are full of gaps. ‘You might consider them, if you really wish to, as the remainders of a recently destroyed correspondence. Destroyed by fire or by that which figuratively takes its place’ (p. 3). You might…. The later ‘Envois’ are full of references to a fire, a projected incineration of the correspondence itself, or parts of it, and to publication, with the names withheld, identities confused, ciphers introduced to protect the anonymity of the participants. Fiftytwo typographical spaces mark ellipses within the texts. Who can say what is lost here? What is deleted, censored, repressed? What is not said? ‘Desire is that which is manifested in the interval that demand hollows within itelf, in as much as the subject, in articulating the signifying chain, brings to light the want-to-be, together with the appeal to receive the complement from the Other…,’67 To quote Lacan, however, is to suggest that the repudiated psychoanalysis returns in the Derridean performance of desire. But is it repudiated, or is it only the metaphysics of psychoanalysis that is rejected, its systematicity, and its truthclaims based on Values of presence (in person), of proximity, plenitude’? The existence of this correspondence assumes an absence, the separation of the lovers. And the ostensible project of the letters, like the many telephones calls which are referred to but not recorded, and even the airmail cassettes the lovers send to each other, is to bridge the gap, to fill it with ‘truth’, with presence. It cannot, of course, be done. The love letter demonstrates the impossibility of communication as the transmission of im-mediate, transparent meaning. All signification is at the mercy of ‘the Postal Principle as differantial relay’ (p. 54): meaning and truth are necessarily differed and deferred, ‘differantiated’ by the intervals, time differences, delays which interfere with transparency. No letter,

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the text insists, can be guaranteed to reach its destination. Much of the correspondence concerns a lost letter, which was ‘true’ and definitive for the relationship. The now ‘dead’ letter was never delivered and is finally returned to the sender. It remains unopened, and yet continues to haunt the living love affair. Fort/da, gone/here: the alternatives do not hold as opposition. Moreover, the addressee may be ‘present’, that is to say not at a distance, in the same room: ‘I believe that I prefer to write to you (even if you are facing me, or as at this moment at your secretary, just next to me), you push me away less’ (p. 174). What then is the actual project? ‘Do I write to you in order to bring you near or in order to distance you, to find the best distance—but then with whom?’ (p. 78). And what is the difference? ‘Absent or present…(you are always there, over there, in the course of going back and forth (en train d’aller-venir))’,68 like the cotton reel in the fort/da game (p. 181). And yet the difference is critical: ‘no, it happens that without you I lack nothing, but as soon as you are there I cry over you, I miss you to death, it’s easier to bear your departure’ (p. 250). Fort/da: command and loss. It is in the mother’s absence that Ernst renders himself master of her desertion. Differantiated presence, which is always and inevitably differed and deferred, and which in consequence exceeds the alternatives of presence and absence, is the condition of desire. But presence itself is its object. You have always been ‘my’ metaphysics, the metaphysics of my life, the ‘verso’ of everything I write (my desire, speech, presence, proximity, law, my heart and soul, everything that I love and that you know before me). (p. 197) You are the only one to understand why it was really necessary that I write exactly the opposite, as concerns axiomatics, of what I desire, what I know my desire to be, in other words you: living speech, presence itself, proximity, the proper, the guard, etc. (p. 194) And it is unattainable—of course, since we desire what we don’t have: you are now the name, yourself, or the title of everything that I do not understand. That I never will be able to know, the other side of myself, eternally inaccessible, not unthinkable, at all (du tout), but unknowable, unknown—and so lovable. As for you, my love, I can only postulate (for who else, with whom would I have dreamed this?) the immortality of the soul, liberty, the union of virtue and happiness, and that one day you might love me. (p. 147)

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The trace of the other in the selfsame exceeds the alternatives of presence and absence, which differance defines—and simultaneously prohibits. Differance gives rise to desire and at the same time prevents its fulfilment: differance makes the opposition of presence and absence possible. Without the possibility of differance, the desire of presence as such would not find its breathing-space. That means by the same token that this desire carries in itself the destiny of its non-satisfaction. Differance produces what it forbids, makes possible the very thing that it makes impossible.69 It follows that it is not possible to tell the truth of desire, or about desire. Between the lovers truth merely distances, and the desire for truth is ‘perverse’ (pp. 82–3). The dead letter is in one sense ‘true’—and therefore both formative and irrelevant. The truth is always and inevitably the non-truth: Freud knows this (p. 82). Desire cannot be theorized, systematized; the truth of desire can neither be seen nor shown. Desire cannot be put on display. Unless, perhaps, in its inscription as a succession of postcards, its textual enactment, its non-systematic, untheorized, elliptical, incomplete, uncertain, elusive performance, in a work which mimes desire and mimics fiction, which is inconclusive, apparently inconsequential—a text which is above all and in all kinds of ways neither here nor there. University of Wales College of Cardiff NOTES I am grateful to Charles Shepherdson for detailed discussion of a draft of this essay. His comments have made all the difference. 1 Sigmund Freud, ‘On the universal tendency to debasement in the sphere of love’, in On Sexuality, ed. Angela Richards, Penguin Freud Library, vol. 7 (London: Penguin Books, 1977), pp. 243–60, p. 250. Subsequent page references are given in the text. 2 Sarah Kofman, The Enigma of Woman: Woman in Freud’s Writings, trans. Catherine Porter (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985), pp. 85–6. 3 Sigmund Freud, Three Essays on the Theory ofSexuality, in On Sexuality, ed. Angela Richards, Penguin Freud Library, vol. 7 (London: Penguin Books, 1977), pp. 31–169, p. 109. 4 See Catherine Belsey, ‘True love: The metaphysics of romance’, Women: A Cultural Review, 3 (1992), pp. 181–92. 5 Freud, Three Essays, p. 141 and n.15. See also ‘Female sexuality’, in On Sexuality, pp. 367–92, p. 388. 6 Sigmund Freud,’ “Civilized” sexual morality and modern nervous illness’, in Civilization, Society and Religion, ed. Albert Dickson, Penguin Freud Library vol. 12 (London: Penguin Books, 1985), pp. 27–55.

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7 All these possibilities are also implicit in the earlier essay, ‘“Civilized” sexual morality and modern nervous illness’: ‘the injurious influence of civilization reduces itself in the main to the harmful suppression of the sexual life of civilized peoples (or classes)’ (p. 37). 8 The English translation is not quite right here. Allgemeinste is (unusually) a superlative: most general. 9 Jean Laplanche, Life and Death in Psychoanalysis, trans. Jeffrey Mehlman (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), p. 19. 10 Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, p. 83. 11 ‘A child’s intercourse with anyone responsible for his care affords him an unending source of sexual excitation and satisfaction from his erotegenic zones. This is especially so since the person in charge of him, who, after all, is as a rule his mother, herself regards him with feelings that are derived from her own sexual life: she strokes him, kisses him, rocks him and quite clearly treats him as a substitute for a complete sexual object. A mother would probably be horrified if she were made aware that all her marks of affection were rousing her child’s sexual instinct and preparing for its later intensity’ (Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, pp. 145– 6). 12 Infantile auto-eroticism is parasitic on self-preservation, as the example of thumbsucking demonstrates (Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality pp. 95–9). 13 Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, p. 146. It is tempting to attribute the male impulse towards a debased sexual object to the division of childcare in the nineteenthcentury middle-class family between the mother and working-class nursemaids. But this would be to ignore the fact that little girls are similarly brought up but do not share the tendency to debasement. What they do share is a preference for the clandestine: the ‘universal’ component of the erotic, as the essay analyses it, is in practice prohibition, not debasement. 14 Laplanche, Life and Death, p. 20. 15 The terms are indistinguishable in Freud: ‘Human civilization, by which I mean all those respects in which human life has raised itself above its animal status and differs from the life of beasts—and I scorn to distinguish between culture and civilization…’, The Future of an Illusion, Civilization, Society and Religion, ed. Albert Dickson, Penguin Freud Library, vol. 12 (London: Penguin Books, 1985), pp. 179–241, p. 184. The Future of an Illusion was published in 1927. In The Decline of the West (1922) Spengler had differentiated between Kultur (the arts, philosophy, etc.) and Zivilisation (vulgar technological progress). I owe this point to Balz Engler. 16 Denis de Rougemont, Love in the Western World, trans. Montgomery Belgion (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983). 17 Jacques Lacan, ‘The signification of the phallus’, in Ecrits, trans. Alan Sheridan (London: Tavistock, 1977), pp. 281–91, p. 281. Subsequent page references to this essay are given in the text. 18 Lacan, Ecrits, p. 65. 19 ibid., p. 104. 20 ibid., p. 263. 21 ibid., p. 106. 22 ibid., p. 86. 23 ibid., p. 299.

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24 Cf. Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-analysis, trans. Alan Sheridan (London: Penguin Books, 1979), pp. 103–5. 25 Sigmund Freud, ‘Beyond the pleasure principle’, in On Metapsychology: The Theory of Psychoanalysis, ed. Angela Richards, Penguin Freud Library, vol. 11 (London: Penguin Books, 1984), pp. 269–338, p. 284. 26 Lacan, Ecrits, p. 234. 27 Lacan, Ecrits, pp. 103–4. For an expanded version of that discussion, see JacquesAlain Miller (ed.), The Seminar ofjacques Lacan, Book I, trans. John Forrester (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 173–4. 28 Lacan, Four Fundamental Concepts, p. 239. 29 Freud, ‘Beyond the pleasure principle’, pp. 285–6. 30 Lacan, Ecrits, p. 104. 31 Jacques Lacan, Ecrits (Paris: Seuil, 1966), p. 691 (hereafter referred to as Ecrits (Paris)), and Jacqueline Rose’s translation in Feminine Sexuality: Jacques Lacan and the Ecole Freudienne, ed. Juliet Mitchell and Jacqueline Rose, trans. Jacqueline Rose (New York: Norton, 1985), p. 80. 32 ‘The fact that the Father may be regarded as the original representative of this authority of the Law requires us to specify by what privileged mode of presence he is sustained beyond the subject who is actually led to occupy the place of the Other, namely, the Mother.’ The ‘margin’ between demand and need creates anxiety, and the ‘whim’ of the Other ‘introduces the phantom of the Omnipotence, not of the subject, but of the Other in which his demand is installed…and with this phantom the need for it to be checked by the Law’ (Lacan, Ecrits, p. 311). 33 For a discussion of this point see Charles Shepherdson, ‘History and the real’, (unpublished paper). 34 Lacan, Ecrits, p. 199. 35 ibid., p. 197. 36 ibid., p. 199. 37 ibid., p. 263. 38 ibid., p. 263. 39 Jacques-Alain Miller (ed.), The Seminar ofjacques Lacan, Book II, trans. Sylvana Tomaselli (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 223. 40 Lacan, Ecrits, p. 274. 41 ibid., p. 166. 42 Jacques Lacan, ‘Of structure as an inmixing of an otherness prerequisite to any subject whatever’, in The Structuralist Controversy: The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man, ed. Richard Macksey and Eugenio Donato (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1970), pp. 186–200, pp. 192–5. 43 Lacan, Ecrits, p. 24. 44 Miller (ed.), The Seminar, I, p. 184. 45 Lacan, Ecrits, p. 245. 46 ibid., p. 311. 47 Miller (ed.), The Seminar, II, p. 223. 48 Lacan, Ecrits (Paris), p. 692. 49 Joan Riviere, ‘Womanliness as a masquerade’, in Formations of Fantasy, ed. Victor Burgin, James Donald and Cora Kaplan (London: Methuen, 1986), pp. 35– 44. See also Stephen Heath, ‘Joan Riviere and the masquerade’, in Formations of Fantasy, pp. 45–61.

32 DESIRE IN THEORY: FREUD, LACAN, DERRIDA

50 For a discussion of the question see Jane Gallop, ‘Reading the phallus’, in Reading Lacan (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985), pp. 133–56. 51 Cf. Lacan, Ecrits, pp. 197–8. 52 Charles Shepherdson, ‘The maternal and the symbolic: Some remarks on Julia Kristeva’, (unpublished paper). 53 Elsewhere Lacan seems to attribute sexual difference to culture. The ‘laws of urinary segregation’ are palpably cultural, however widely shared, and in the case of the two children who see ‘Ladies’ and ‘Gentlemen’ from the window of the train, Lacan comments, ‘For these children, Ladies and Gentlemen will be henceforth two countries towards which each of their souls will strive on divergent wings, and between which a truce will be more impossible since they are actually the same country’ (my italics. Ecrits, pp. 151–2). 54 Jacques Derrida, ‘Differance’, in ‘Speech and Phenomena’ and Other Essays on Husserl’s Theory of Signs, trans. David B.Allison (Evanston, II: Northwestern University Press, 1973), pp. 129–60. His translators and admirers do Derrida an injustice when they leave the word in ‘French’. ‘Différance’ is not a French word. In the essay Derrida emphatically makes the point that it is not possible to hear the difference between ‘differance’ and ‘difference’. To differentiate orally it is necessary to invoke the spelling, the written form, to say ‘differance with an a’, thus demonstrating the invasion of writing into speech (pp. 132–3). 55 Jacques Derrida, ‘Le Facteur de la vérité’, in The Post Card from Socrates to Freud and Beyond, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), pp. 411–96, p. 481. 56 ibid., pp. 414–15. 57 ibid., p. 472. 58 ibid., pp. 468–76. 59 ibid., p. 476, n.54. 60 ibid., pp. 477–8. 61 Barbara Johnson, ‘The frame of reference: Poe, Lacan, Derrida’, in Literature and Psychoanalysis: The Question of Reading: Otherwise, ed. Shoshana Felman (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982), pp. 457–505. 62 Derrida, ‘Le Facteur de la vérité’, p. 420. 63 Jacques Derrida, ‘To speculate—on “Freud”’, in The Post Card, pp. 257–409, p. 293. 64 ibid., pp. 298–304. 65 Jacques Derrida, ‘Envois’, in The Post Card, pp. 1–256, p. 26. Subsequent references are given in the text. 66 ‘ln several places I will leave all kinds of references, names of persons and of places, authentifiable dates, identifiable events, they will rush in with eyes closed, finally believing to be there and to find us there when by means of a switch point I will send them elsewhere to see if we are there, with a stroke of the pen or the grattoir I will make everything derail’ (p. 177). 67 Lacan, Ecrits, p. 263. 68 Jacques Derrida, La Carte postale: de Socrate à Freud et au-delà (Paris: Flammarion, 1980), p. 196. 69 Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), p. 143.

Between women: lesbianism in pornography PETER BENSON

When the Swedish pornographic magazine Private conducted a survey of its readers, they found that ‘the men who replied…wanted to see mainly lesbians, a big percentage there.’1 This will not surprise anyone who has seen and read the contents of sexually explicit magazines aimed at a male heterosexual market. Yet it remains puzzling. The immediate explanations which might be offered do not seem completely adequate to the insistence of this fact. True, the male viewer of these scenes is enabled, by this device, to see two young women, instead of just one; but at the cost of having no obvious place reserved for him in the readymade fantasy he has purchased. Rupert Smith, in his discussion of pornographic writing for a male gay audience, notes that, in some texts ‘the emphasis is on the idea that women are being tricked out of something that is rightfully theirs when two dishy men get together’, a situation of evident misogyny.2 He goes on to claim that ‘in straight men’s pornography, the recurrent fantasy of lesbianism repeats much of this attitude: two women who have sex together…are often interrupted or punished by the men whom they have been depriving by their lesbian activities.’ However, in the pornography which is publicly available in Britain, there is rarely any ‘punishment’ for lesbianism, and it is not uncommon for men to be totally absent from these imagined scenes. My principal intention, in the present essay, is to analyse one specific example of this fantasy, taken from popular pornographic literature, in the hope of casting some light on these questions. My theoretical framework will be provided by the only available discourses which are remotely adequate to the complexities of human sexuality: Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis. There has, to date, been very little serious analysis, within literary studies, of pornography as a popular genre. Numerous discussions exist of those highly intellectual pornographic novels by de Sade, Bataille, Klossowski, etc. But these works do not belong to popular literature. Significant studies of commercially produced romantic novels3 have not been matched by an equal attention to the pornography available in magazines and books, despite the interesting fusion between these genres which forms a widely read category of modern novels for women (whose emblematic example would be Shirley Conran’s Lace (1982)).4

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Representative of this absence is the collection of essays entitled Perspectives on Pornography, published in 1988.5 This contains interesting and valuable discussions of sex films, and of pin-ups, by Anthony Crabbe and Gary Day respectively. But the essays devoted to written texts concern Henry Miller, Angela Carter, and Alexander Pope: all of whom lie well within the bounds of selfconscious literary art, rather than popular fiction. The story I intend to discuss, by contrast, is anonymous: one of a series of similar tales (to whose requirements it conforms) published in a magazine which can be bought in almost any newsagent in Britain. But the fantasies of lesbianism it involves are not confined to such commercial exploitation of narrowly defined desires. Before turning to this text, therefore, it will be useful to place it in direct contiguity with certain lucid works of modern literature where the satne phantasy structure can be found playing a central organizing role.6 It is in these more familiar realms (from the viewpoint of literary theory) that I will begin. Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past is constructed around a complex interweaving of heterosexual and homosexual desire, neither of which, it seems, can be sustained without the other. The narrator’s love for Albertine is completely coextensive with his jealous suspicions of her, and these suspicions largely concern the possibility that she is having sexual relationships with other women. A fantasy of lesbianism thus subtends the narrator’s desire. He pursues his interrogations of her friend Andree even after Albertine’s death, when ‘the idea that a woman had perhaps had relations with Albertine no longer aroused in me anything save the desire to have relations with that woman myself. I told Andree this, caressing her as I spoke’ (III, p. 612).7 It is under the effect of these caresses that Andree describes the details of Albertine’s promiscuous lesbianism. Hence it is unclear whether this is the ultimate revelation of a suspected truth, or merely a fantasy designed by Andree to arouse her new lover (III, p. 616). In a manner which we will find repeated within the contemporary story I intend to analyse, Albertine’s female lovers are (according to Andree) procured for her by a man, Morel, who first seduces them himself. This reflects exactly the narrator’s own situation. Albertine’s lesbian desires can only be sustained and satisfied by the heterosexuality of her lovers. What is more, Morel is the same person whose homosexual affair with the Baron de Charlus forms the other principal axis of the novel’s analysis of desire. Neither homosexuality nor heterosexuality can have any priority in this amorous nexus indissolubly woven from the two. The originating source of the narrator’s suspicions and phantasies is several times identified8 with an incident witnessed in his childhood, at the very heart of the idyllic and timeless Eden of Combray. Through an open window, the child accidentally observed a scene between two young women containing elements of both lesbianism and sado-masochism. It is ‘an impression which at the time was without meaning’ but which ‘was to play an important part in my life’ (I, p. 173). This situation of an observed scene which retrospectively receives great significance (an important and recurring

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structuring principle of the Proustian narrative) exemplifies that deferred action (Nachträglichkeit) proposed by Freud in his discussion of the ‘primal scene’. Classically, the primal scene is constituted by the accidental observation (or overhearing) of the child’s parents copulating. This brings to the child, not a knowledge of sexuality (for the incident is, precisely, not understood) but a field for its subsequent elaboration in phantasy. The child’s later apprehension of sexual facts and feelings receives from this scene the stamp of its form, shaping that history of desire through which ‘the subject brings himself into being’.9 The prominence given, in the structure of Proust’s novel, to the scene between the two women at Montjouvain, accords it the weight due to a primal scene in which the parental couple has been replaced by a lesbian pair. For Proust’s narrator, this is decisive for the entire formation of his erotic life. Two subsequent incidents of importance in the book repeat this situation of the (hidden) narrator observing a sexual scene. These separate out, from that primary scene, the two components of homosexuality and sado-masochism. At the beginning of ‘Cities of the Plain’, it is a scene of male homosexuality which he sees (between Charlus and Jupien). In Time Regained’, it is the scene of Charlus being whipped in Jupien’s brothel (III, p. 843). Among the events surrounding this latter incident, the conventional primal phantasy (‘when I was a kid I used to watch my parents making love through the key hole’) is contemptuously delegated to one of the young men in the brothel, who is thereby shown to ‘reveal… depths both of stupidity and of innocence’ (III, p. 856). According to Freud, the primal scene is a structuring phantasy which need not have been actually witnessed as a real event. An innate, phylogenetic tendency to construct such a phantasy is supplemented and shaped by hints from observation and intuitions derived from the child’s own sexual drives.10 The scenario is born from this particular fusion of contingency and inevitability. We may easily suppose, therefore, that a lesbian version might sometimes exist, either in parallel with the heterosexual form, or erasing the latter entirely.11 In the psyche of a woman, this might lay the foundation for her later development as a lesbian herself. But in the psyche of a man, it could never have such a simple consequence. The power of lesbian imagery over the minds of many men suggests just such a primal ‘imprinting’,12 as does the initiating role of this scene in the complex structure of Proust’s novel. It is possible to discern a similar fantasy, slightly more disguised, underlying an early short story by Franz Kafka, ‘Description of a Struggle’, which gives an unusual prominence, amid a host of bizarre incidents, to an apparently trivial scene remembered by the character referred to as ‘the Supplicant’. Trying to understand ‘why it is that around me things sink away like fallen snow’ (p. 34),13 he recalls how ‘as a child I opened my eyes after a brief afternoon nap, still not quite sure I was alive, I heard my mother up on the balcony asking in a natural tone of voice: “What are you doing, my dear? Goodness, isn’t it hot?” ‘This question appears to be addressed to him, but ‘From the Garden a woman answered: “Me, I’m having my tea on the lawn.” ‘His place, as respondent to the

36 BETWEEN WOMEN: LESBIANISM IN PORNOGRAPHY

mother’s demand and affection (‘my dear’) is thus usurped. What is more, this replacement (of the role he had assumed was his) is contentedly accepted by his mother: They spoke casually and not very distinctly, as though this woman had expected the question, my mother the answer’ (p. 35). The Oedipal structure of the scene is clearly evident. The primary situation in which the son is everything (is the phallus) to the mother, is disturbed when he becomes aware that she finds satisfactions elsewhere for her verbalized desire. The boy’s rival in this triad, however, is not his father (as in the more usual accounts of the Oedipal drama) but another woman who, moreover, is herself immersed in narcissistic self-gratification (‘Me, I’m having my tea on the lawn’). The scene is constituted as primal, not by any overt sexual content, but by the boy’s displacement from his position as phallus (signifier of the mother’s desire)14 and his consequent erasure from the verbal circuit of question and response. There is not the least hint of a sexual relation between the two women, who are separated from each other by an intervening balcony. But the context for the recollection of this scene is the Supplicant’s alarming sensations of disintegration, which are infused with all the sexual overtones missing from the memory itself: The spire of the Town Hall is moving in little circles…. The Virgin Mary’s cloak is curling round her pillar and the wind is tugging at it’ (p. 36). Here, the self-sufficiency of the woman on the lawn has been transmuted into a hermaphroditic figure (jointly composed of pillar and cloak) representing the Virgin, who has no need of man to experience jouissance (signified by the wind, which the supplicant finds fearful). He recounts the remembered scene to the other major character, the Fat Man, who declares it to be ‘remarkable’ and ‘couldn’t make head or tail of it’. What is more, he ‘didn’t believe it was true…it must have been invented for a special reason whose purpose wasn’t clear to me just now’ (p. 35). These are extreme reactions indeed to an anecdote which appears, on the surface, far more mundane than the accounts of mental disintegration surrounding it. On the following page the Fat Man tries to repudiate his captivation by the scene, declaring: ‘I really don’t find [it] so remarkable.’ But his obsessive return to the incident directly contradicts such a claim. Unable to resist its fascination, he continues: ‘Not only have I heard and experienced many stories of this kind, I have even taken part in some. The whole thing is perfectly natural.’ The Fat Man thus declares himself to be a subject imprinted with the same formation (it is his ‘nature’). He, too, must try to find a place in an Oedipal scenario lacking the clue of sexual difference to orientate identification. The only possibility he suggests is to occupy both positions at once, forging a fundamental split in his own subject position: ‘Do you really mean to suggest that had I been on that balcony in the summer, I could not have asked the same question and given the same answer from the garden?’ (p. 36; my emphasis). The options opened by the scenario are reduced to a choice between the boy’s place of erasure, or a position of profound division. Infected by the consequences

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of this story, in which he has attempted (unsuccessfully) to place himself, the Fat Man can only repeat the tale to a third person (the overall narrator of the text) before himself drowning ‘in the loud roar of the waterfall’ (p. 47). This image of an overwhelming force of nature serves (like the wind) to indicate the place of jouissance, where fear, loss, and pleasure coalesce. Could such a disturbing text have any relevance to popular pornography? Kafka’s story contains no trace of lesbianism, placing its emphasis instead on the boy’s exclusion from a vague affection indicated in the words ‘my dear’. The scene in question is insufficiently eroticized to subtend any emotions other than those of anxiety and disintegration. In the overtly sexual scene from Proust’s novel, by contrast, the place of exclusion is shared between the narrator and the (deceased) father of one of the women, whose photograph they ritually defile before beginning to make love (I, p. 178). This father is the composer Vinteuil, whose music weaves through the novel as a figuration of transcendent creativity. By identifying with this position of exclusion the narrator will thus, after traversing the winding intricacies of jealousy, finally achieve his ambition of becoming a writer. Proust suggests that the pleasures of exclusion ultimately exceed those of involvement. Perhaps it may be just such a pleasure-in-excess that the repeated lesbian scenes of popular pornography gesture towards. Certainly the ‘explicit’ nature of their language should not deceive us into believing that their significance within the reader’s psychic economy is revealed as plainly as the actions described. The ‘wild joy’ of Vinteuil, in his creative activity, produces ‘the boldest approximation to the bliss of the Beyond’ (III, pp. 256 and 263). Yet it is described in a string of metaphors we might easily find within an erotic story: ‘enraptured, quivering as though from the shock of an electric spark…panting, intoxicated, unbridled, vertiginous’ (III, p. 256). Compare, with this, the following description of lesbian sex from a piece of contemporary pornography:15 ‘An almighty orgasm exploded… I came more strongly than I’d ever done, panting and arching my back as the full force hit me…tingles…spread all the way through my body.’ This is from a story of some 2,500 words which has, for its brevity, a surprisingly complex narrative structure. It is one of four stories in the section of the magazine called Talkin’ Blue’, all of which present themselves as if they were letters from (different) female readers. Their similarity of style would be enough (quite apart from any knowledge of the editorial practices of such magazines) to expose this claim as a framing fiction, which effectively renders the story anonymous. It may have been written by a man. (The editorial staff are predominantly, though not exclusively, male.) Any competent writer of either sex could imitate the required style. Even its fictitious signature, ‘Lindsey’, could be a man’s name, though the narrator within the story is definitely female. In the third paragraph this narrator tells us: ‘I’ve…changed the names of everyone…in this story, except, of course, mine.’ Her own name, however, appears nowhere in the story itself (having disappeared behind the shifter ‘I’). It

38 BETWEEN WOMEN: LESBIANISM IN PORNOGRAPHY

is present solely as a signature, and thus not entirely ‘in’ the story at all (nor, entirely, outside it). Author (anonymous), signatory (‘Lindsey’), and heroine (‘I’) are produced as separable instances. Their potential collapse into identity (their mutual replaceability) would give to the text the fiction of truth. (Within the story itself we will discover a parallel theme of mutual replaceability between three women.) The narrator deceitfully assures us that her own name has not been changed, but the other characters are hidden behind aliases. Yet this is (obviously) a work of fiction! These hidden real identities have no ‘reaP existence. Their assumed names replace nothing. A rhetorical effect of truth (carrying, it must be admitted, no conviction) is created through this declared fictitiousness of nomination. On the one hand (within the text) we find an (announced) replacement which lacks an original term; on the other hand, there is the (denied) replacement of ‘I’ for ‘Lindsey’ for the name of the author him/herself, as source of the fiction. These questions of the origin for a sequence of replacements will also prove problematic inside the narrative, when we seek the originating object of desire. Pornographic fiction is designed to have an effect. ‘I can’t help thinking’, writes the narrator, ‘that other men and women out there might get turned on by my horny story.’ This effect would be real. Actual arousal and orgasm are to be (potentially) induced by the fictional arousal and orgasm of characters in a text which has already used declared fictionality to set in play a truth effect. It is a habit of fiction imperiously to relegate truth to the status of a secondary effect of its own self-duplication. There are, for example, a succession of films (from The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (1919) to Black Rainbow (1989)) in which stage charlatans are found genuinely to possess the powers they profess. In its specific reflection of this structure of fictionality, pornography precedes the arousal it purports to describe. This was recognized and given dramatic form by De Sade in his monumental 120 Days of Sodom, where the stories told by the ageing whores serve to arouse and structure the libertines’ desires. Pornographic fiction thus shares, with psychoanalysis, a conviction that sexual desires and experiences are moulded and produced by structures of phantasy, rather than being an immediate response to a present reality. In this, psychoanalysis is at odds with a great deal of contemporary popular theories of human behaviour. Such theories can also be found to underpin some of the feminist objections to pornography, as for example those of Elizabeth Carola in her article ‘Women, erotica, pornography—Learning to play the game’.16 As an alternative to a sexuality which is ‘essentially about fantasy’ (and to which, as she correctly states, pornography makes its appeal), Carola proposes ‘a sexuality which could embody our original sense of self-respect and integrity…and allow for a total, directly experienced connection with ourselves and others. There is no reason to believe this could not be so’ (p. 174). Unfortunately, there are a great many reasons for feeling this could not be so, notably the fruitfulness of psychoanalytic theory in providing convincing descriptions of human sexuality. In the terms of this theory no sense of human integrity could ever have been an ‘original’ state.

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(Integrity is an effect of the Ego, which comes to replace and suppress an originating condition of fragmentation among the parts of the body and their associated drives.) Nor could any connection with others be simultaneously total and direct. (Its totality could only be an effect of inevitable transferential mediations.)17 My own theoretical position, in the present article, is that pornography is one attempt, among others, to negotiate the psychic and social contradictions through which sexuality is produced in its present (oppressive and divisive) form. These contradictions can be traced, and read, within the pornographic text. The story I am considering is not simply oppressive towards women. By which I mean both that their oppression, within the narrative, is not simple; and that they are not simply and solely oppressed. Furthermore, the location in relation to sexual pleasure of the male character (and the assumed male reader) proves to be deeply problematic in this narrative, thus dramatizing the constraints of a construction of sexuality which is not ‘simply’ beneficial to men. The first few paragraphs of the tale, however, would scarcely seem to presage any such complexities. The heroine applies for a job as secretary and housekeeper to a rich businessman. This opening, with its description of his Georgian house (‘like something out of “Dallas”’) could be the start of a Mills & Boon romance. The woman is in an economically and socially subservient position. She wonders (‘fleetingly’) if her new boss intends to try to seduce her, but declares that ‘he really wasn’t my type’ and ‘I’d be able to handle it if he made any unwanted advances.’ This initial aversion of the heroine to the man is equally typical of the Mills & Boon type of romantic story, where it exists in order to be reversed. In conformity with these conventions, the final sentence of the present story does indeed have the heroine anticipating her future marriage to her boss, which will take place after the end of the story, in that unrealized space where conventional romances locate sexual consummation. But this conclusion does not entail the traditional conquering of her (sexual) aversion. For, even after the end of the story, she will probably not sleep with her intended husband. The heroine’s journey towards marriage is obstructed, not only by her lack of desire for the (older) man, but by the presence in the house of that man’s wife. (Jane Eyre has long been recognized as one prototype for classic romantic narratives.) This problem, however, is immediately reduced by being mirrored: for there is a third woman, his previous wife, also living in the house. A motif of replacement is thus introduced, intensified by the fact that all three women are (so we are told) similar in age and looks. A narrative place for the heroine has been marked out (she will be the third wife) in a recursive series to which the structure of the tale invites her to succumb. But her place in the Symbolic Order (to which belong both the institution of marriage, and recursive series) can be sustained only by an Imaginary formation of the kind provided by a primal scene. Lacan’s account of the Wolfman’s primal scene explains how ‘the traumatic force of the imaginary break-in produced by this spectacle… re-emerges in the course of the subject’s progress into a symbolic woild’.18 In the face of the shock

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of seeing the (heterosexual) primal scene, the subject locates a (symbolic) place for itself within the scene, as a future ‘father’ or ‘mother’. The placing of the heroine of the present story will be more complex, but the delay (indicative of Freud’s ‘Nachträglichkeif’, on which Lacan places considerable emphasis) between the imaginary break-in and its symbolic integration is noted in the very first sentence of the story, where the narrator says she has ‘taken…more than a year to even write it down’. This act of eventual symbolic inscription enables the anticipation of marriage with which the story ends (a year after the events described). Such delay in narration is in sharp contrast to the swiftness of the actions described. Five short paragraphs after meeting the other two women in the house, she ‘accidentally’ discovers them in ‘an incredibly torrid lesbian clinch’. We are no longer in the world of Mills 8c Boon. Among the many possible reactions to a primal scene, joining in the action is not usually an option. In fact, it is only the separation of the observer from the scene which allows this tableau to function as a founding template of desire. The exclusion of the child (in the infantile realization which these phantasies rehearse) is due in part to its sexual immaturity, and is only later reinterpreted in terms of Oedipal taboos. In an interesting erotic short story by the lesbian writer Cherry Smyth,19 a similar primal scene fantasy is evoked, but the girl watching (through a keyhole) is prevented from entering the scene by the sudden ringing of the school bell (suitable signifier of authority and taboo). When it is the phantasy of a male subject, the lesbian primal scene figures (as we have seen in the examples from Proust and Kafka) an exclusion intensified and made absolute by his gender. If he should then envisage a woman watching the scene, it is to imagine the possibility of an inclusion which would be equal and opposite to his own exclusion. She can enter the scene in his place, transgressing all taboos, available for an overwhelming jouissance. This figuration of jouissance is one of the functions served by the representation of women for men, as is evident in Lacan’s discussion of the mystical ‘feminine jouissance’, for which he finds his principal image, not in the writings of St Theresa herself, but in a statue of her, carved by a male artist, Bernini.20 It is as jouissance that the narrator of the present story experiences her response to the scene she has encountered: ‘I felt a huge lurch of lust.’ The primal scene is traumatic, in general, because it releases in the subject (either at the time, or later) quantities of sexual energy (‘a huge lurch of lust’) which his or her psyche is not yet competent to cope with.21 If this could have been discharged in a sexual act, the scene would lose its force and, consequently, its role in structuring desire. Whereas a lesbian author dreams of staying outside the scene (formative of her desire), the heroine of the present story has both desire and will lifted from her by the male reader who watches (so to speak) over her shoulder, rendering her free to participate in what she sees. ‘Before I could think, my tracksuit and

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undies were off.’ Though she has taken them off herself, her status as agent of this action is erased by the passive construction of the sentence. The decision that she should participate belongs to the desire structure of the male reader. But it is important to recognize that her will has not been reversed (as in the typical trajectory of romantic fiction). Her lust is not for the man (whom she has already decided she doesn’t fancy). Though the story implies (without actually stating) that this is to be her first lesbian experience, she has not expressed any prior aversion to lesbianism. From her own perspective, as narrator of the tale, an immediacy of response is presented as possible, bypassing the detours of desire. Her orgy with the other two women (the description of which occupies one-third of the total text) takes her along a rising reflex arc, from her ‘huge lurch of lust’ until she ‘came more strongly than ‘I’d ever done’. But this blissful indulgence in pleasure is also intended to arouse the male reader, who of necessity cannot share these specific experiences (the heroine’s final orgasm results from cunnilingus). We know, from a long succession of cultural texts, stretching from the legend of Tiresias to the theories of Lacan, that men imagine women’s sexual pleasure greatly to exceed their own. Can this phantasized difference induce anything other than envy? Why should it have the capacity to arouse? According to Lacan, the guilt associated with masturbation is ‘bound up with the recall of jouissance that is lacking in the office rendered to the real organ’.22 It does not, therefore, solely derive from recollections of parental interdiction. If the purpose of pornography is to encourage and enhance masturbation, it must deal in some manner with this guilt. The phantasy to which masturbation responds must soak up the jouissance imagined as lacking in the real act. By this means, ‘phantasy… takes on the transcendental function of ensuring the jouissance of the other’.23 The heroine comes in the reader’s place. The story, however, has not finished. Its remarkable final section contemplates the elaborate means whereby a man might find access to that jouissance which has been represented as possible only between women. The specular image of a woman has two functions (among others) in structuring male sexuality: she is the index of jouissance (‘you only have to… look…to understand immediately that she’s coming, there is no doubt about it’);24 and her absence of a penis enables ‘the erectile organ…to symbolize the place of jouissance…as a part lacking in the desired image’.25 To these functions correspond two fundamental varieties of the photographs to be found in men’s magazines: the miming of orgasm, and the proud display of the model’s vulva. She feels sexual pleasure, but lacks a symbol for that pleasure. The man’s access to jouissance is symbolic; the woman’s is immediate. Of course, there is every reason to doubt whether these professional models are actually having orgasms when they are photographed. And in fact, men never do know if a woman has really come, or has merely pretended. The ‘certainty’ of the fact belongs, as Lacan says, only to the image—to the domain of the Imaginary.26 Jouissance,

42 BETWEEN WOMEN: LESBIANISM IN PORNOGRAPHY

however, is of the order of the Real, and so is the trauma that a primal scene might cause. After their orgy, the three women pause (‘For several minutes none of us said anything’). As in de Sade,27 rational discourse will now replace the ejaculatory use of language (‘yelling really dirty things’) which had accompanied their sex. Just as a primal scene is followed by a retrospective attempt to comprehend it; and a large class of narratives (such as detective stories) retrospectively explain an initial series of unlikely events; so this story proceeds to ‘explain the household…situation’ (ellipsis in the text). Soon after her marriage, the businessman’s first wife, Cindy, had recognized that ‘I’m a dyke and always will be.’ She tells her husband this and finds that, far from being annoyed, he is ‘secretly pleased. It emerged that he’d never really enjoyed actively participating in sex…his favourite thing was to watch two women screwing each other senseless.’ In being a lesbian, Cindy is thus conforming to male desire, having found no escape from this into something other (which would, presumably, be female desire). Nor does she repudiate her ex-husband: ‘he’s a great bloke and he was a good husband.’ The narrator, too, finds that her actions have conformed to a scenario anticipated by the (absent) man. And the third woman, Rochelle, was also chosen by the husband to be his ex-wife’s lover. His marriage to Rochelle seems to have no purpose beyond inscribing himself as master of her relationship to Cindy. All three women reflect his own preferences in female beauty, hence their physical similarity and replaceability. But there is a further factor propelling this obsessive series of replacements (which, the conclusion to the story suggests, will continue; indeed, the story ends when its indefinite possibility for repetition is established). Cindy, we are told, had been having an affair with the man’s sister. ‘Obviously it wouldn’t have been right for Terry to watch his own sister and his wife make love’, and so Rochelle is introduced to replace this incestuous and originating object of desire. The sister does not, except in this one instance, figure as a character in the story. Her erasure enables and compels the repetitive replacements of the narrative, ensuring (by her absence and uniqueness) that they will have no end. Had the man stumbled upon his sister and wife in bed together, this sight might have had for him the force of a primal scene—arousing both surprise and incestuous desire. Since, however, he has merely been told about it, he is protected (by language) from the ‘huge lurch of lust’ which the heroine has enjoyed. Fully in control, master of the events, the man is in danger of losing all access to jouissance. Even sex with his attractive wife was without pleasure for him. Far from celebrating the male dominance it depicts, this story traces the lack (of pleasure) on which that dominance depends. Pornography is a utopian form of literature in which conflict is abolished, usually (as here) by each of the man’s (problematic) desires receiving gratification. But, as in a fairy tale, such

TEXTUAL PRACTICE 43

immediate fulfilment of all wishes does not necessarily bring satisfaction. The women he is accumulating in his house are having a much better time than he is. ‘Terry’s wife and ex-wife looked like mirror images’, says the narrator, ‘Strangely, I didn’t have any misgivings about living at the centre of such a strange set-up. The idea really excited me.’ This sensation of strangeness (twice emphasized: ‘Strangely…strange’) is only possible for the woman in so far as she is not in control of the situation. The excitement she feels is located ‘at the centre’, between two ‘mirror images’. This is the very place (between women) where the man yearns to be. His symptomatic actions display this wish metaphorically (in the Symbolic) since his repetitive switching of wives renders him frequently ‘between women’. But he will also seek to occupy this place in the Imaginary, utilizing techniques of representation to this end. Few fictions thematize their function, reflecting with clarity on the roles they serve. The extraordinary final scene of this story is remarkable in this respect, and deserves an attentive reading. Already, in the second paragraph of the tale, the principal purpose of pornography has been stated (‘that other men and women out there might get turned on’). The representation of sex encourages further acts of sex. This fact shows the deep imbrication of human sexuality with the realms of representation. Since human beings have no inborn (‘instinctive’) knowledge of sexuality (possessing only the drives which that knowledge will organize), they must learn the ‘facts of life’ through verbal or other representation.28 The unexpected shock induced by this new knowledge gives, to all subsequent depictions of sexuality, the potential for repetitively reviving a flood of excessive and unmastered (unbound) stimuli. Hence it is that censorship and taboo always surround, to a greater or lesser extent, images and descriptions of sex. Liberal notions that these are merely depictions of a normal human activity (needing no special consideration) cannot account for their power. In the final part of the story the three women watch a video film showing two of them making love. This is the very sight which the heroine had already stumbled upon, and become incorporated into. But it is now framed, set at a distance as an image. The result is that ‘I was feeling even hornier than before.’ Representation of sex not only impels repetition (‘well before the film had ended we were all stroking, kissing and masturbating each other’), it also acts as a relay in the progressive intensifying of that experience (‘if possible my orgasm was even more forceful this time’). There is, here, no narrative escalation of more and more extreme sexual acts (as in de Sade’s stories, and a great deal of sexual fiction). The women do not engage in any actions different from their earlier orgy (which was described in much greater physical detail). But the fact that their arousal is received back from their own image multiplies its effect. Lesbianism is here phantasized within the dimension of narcissism. The women (with their similar looks) receive desire from their own image, becoming self-sufficient. As Freud noted, it is narcissistic women who hold the greatest fascination for men.29 This captivation contributes to that position of exclusion which male desire seems to seek.

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But an additional (supplementary) object (one common in lesbian pornography for men) is also introduced into the video film. The women make use of a ‘long, cream coloured, double ended dildo’. They have taken possession of this symbol of the phallus and made it an instrument of their own pleasures. The phallus stands between women as a signifier of their desire (which the man has commanded). It could block their access to each other (and to pleasure) could it not be made to vanish. If the man’s demand be met, he must disappear from the scene (from that which is seen) just as the dildo is engulfed when the women come together, leaving only their bodies visible as the ‘unquestionable’ image of jouissance. The man has equally removed himself from the scene, by filming it (for it is he who is operating the video camera). But this is not a position of engulfment. It is, rather, the controlling authorial place he has maintained throughout the tale (determining, in large measure, the women’s actions). It is a place resembling that of the story’s (possibly male) author, invisible behind the female narrator’s involvement in the engrossing (engulfing) action. Filming the fascinating image of lesbian sex reintroduces the separation earlier transgressed when the voyeur’s position was delegated to a woman. Now, in a symmetrical moment, it is the three women watching the film who are placed in a position of exclusion (produced and necessitated by the machinery of representation as such). Yet, in this vertigo of mirrors, the two women on the screen also sit beside the heroine, watching themselves. The role of women in this story, it would seem, is to deny the exclusion they instantiate. By making a video film which they themselves will watch, the man delegates to them his own position of desire, his will-to-see. They lift from him the burden of this desire, seeing through his eyes, exactly as the reader had watched the initial ‘primal’ scene over the heroine’s shoulder. The effect is the same, freeing him for the possibility of jouissance. His will and gaze are passed on to the women, and his physical presence is erased by the mechanics of reproduction (unable to represent the place from which it sees). Abolished, he comes. ‘Obviously Terry had been filming the action, as just as the two lesbian lovers climaxed, two or three thick wads of come hit them, splashing over their boobs and stomachs.’ He comes, precisely, between women: sandwiched and invisible between the lovemaking on the screen and the reflected actions among the women watching. When their desire has finally erased the man who drew them together, he can experience at last, not the pleasure (le plaisir) of control, but radical intoxicating loss and disappearance, la jouissance (which his orgasm, here, serves to represent).30 After his initial recruitment of the heroine, this is the man’s sole appearance in the story: visible only as a stream of come. Not even his penis can be seen. A woman’s jouissance can be represented by her body, but the male body (a metonymy for his erect penis—rigid and unified) must disappear at this moment, to be replaced by a flood of amorphous, milky fluid. This replacement, this dissipation of identity, is jouissance for the male subject.

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The complex construction which enables this to happen involves the production of a seam between two layers of representation: the video image and the (written) description of the events taking place on the ‘huge sofa’ where the women sit to watch it. De Sade’s 120 Days of Sodom has a similar oscillating structure, between the stories told by the whores and the surrounding scenes (usually printed in a different type-face) inspired by these tales. Barthes has described the production of just such a seam as necessary for erotic pleasure,31 recognizing that eroticism resides, not in the representation of sexuality, but in the sexualizing of representation. On the smooth surface of the textual body, a line of difference is traced. The erotogenic zones of the human body itself are similarly formed (as Lacan has noted)32 by those places where (as with the lips) there is an edge, a rim. The presentation of this story, in the pages of the magazine, involves an equivalent seam, for it is illustrated by two photographs. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that these photographs appear on the same pages as the story, for they do not directly ‘illustrate’ it; they do not depict any of the events described in the text. Yet there is some (minimal) association between text and images, for the photographs portray three women who (like the characters in the story) are of similar age and looks, with the same colour hair and eyes. They serve as a further replacement for the three women in the story, without directly depicting them. Curiously (enigmatically) the larger of the two pictures shows them in the ‘three wise monkeys’ pose of speak-no-evil, see-no-evil, hear-noevil: an odd protestation of innocence whose function is difficult to analyse. The story’s thematic structure of permutations (repetitions with differences) is taken up by this picture, in which one of the women wears two white gloves, another two black gloves, and the third a single black glove (had she worn one white and one black, the permu tational set would be complete; as it is, other possibilities remain (e.g. two bare hands) which leaves the image, like the text, open-ended). The reader has, before his eyes, the bodies of these women, as well as the complex sexual narrative of the story. It is, no doubt, between these two regimes of representation (in, metaphorically, the white margin which separates them) that he will find his pleasure joining with that of the man in the tale. The man’s jouissance—his streaming, his coming, his dissolution (terms in precise opposition to the ‘masculine’ postures of control, rigidity, mastery)—can take (its) place only between regimes of representation, and between women. His come flow splashes their bodies, laps at the edges of their untouched landscapes, flows over their surfaces, to be licked like cream (‘The video ended with them rubbing the spunk into their soft skin, and then licking it off each other, just like a pair of cats.’: an image common in hard-core pornographic photographs and films.) Maleness, male essence, male come, becomes an amniotic fluid spreading over the woman, giving birth to her and feeding her milk from the nipple of his prick.33 Jouissance swirls in the disruptive disintegration of symbolic divisions between male and female.

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Which does not for one moment alter the fact that the man, in this story, holds the power to control the moment of his loss of power— entirely dependent as this nevertheless is on the aquiescence of these women, their quiescent aquatic floating in the field of his camera viewfinder. In filming them, he simultaneously films his own coming. Pornography’s submission of women to its gaze displays all these troubled traces of male desire—for it is there, where the man is not, that the unpeeled outer surface of his firm ego lies. The woman figures everything whose loss makes him man, and that site of loss is the source of jouissance. The authors of Rewriting English note that ‘there is a clear and strong sexual division in the industry and conventions of sexual fantasy: romance for women, pornography for men.’34 Their discussion of popular romantic novels concludes with the following remarks: Romance works with the basic conflict in women’s lives. That is what makes it a popular form, and allows the same stories to be told over and over again. Fundamental changes in the genre are likely only when the contradictions that shape women’s lives are altered or resolved.35 It would seem, from my discussion, that pornography has a similar task of negotiating contradictions within the male social role and psyche. But the passivity of that final sentence (duplicating the passivity required of women by Romance), in which change in the genre must await the arrival of changes elsewhere (in ‘life’), is itself in contradiction with the writers’ claim, later in their book, ‘that popular fiction of all types has an important role to play in the reproduction of forms of gendered subjectivity within patriarchy’.36 It is in writing, and re-writing (and the re-writing constituted by analysis) that we may find the fractures where future changes will take root. London NOTES 1 Quoted in D.Hebdith and N.Anning, Porn Gold: Inside the Pornography Business (London: Faber & Faber, 1988), p. 30. 2 R.Smith, ‘One-handed reading’, in M.Lilly (ed.), Lesbian and Gay Writing (London: Macmillan, 1990), p. 171. 3 e.g. J.A.Radway, Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1984); also chapter 5 of Rewriting English: Cultural Politics of Gender and Class, by J.Batsleer, T.Davies, R.O’Rourke, and C.Weedon (London: Macmillan, 1985). 4 Later examples have greatly increased the proportion of pornography in this brew. 5 G.Day and C.Bloom (eds), Perspectives on Pornography: Sexuality in Film and Literature (London: Macmillan, 1988).

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6 I am following the accepted convention of using ‘fantasy’ (with an ‘f’) to refer to conscious manifestations, and ‘phantasy’ (with a ‘ph’) to refer to unconscious structures of thought. 7 References to Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past are, by volume and page number, to the three-volume edition of the English translation by C.Scott Moncrieff, revised by T.Kilmartin (London: Chatto & Windus, 1981). 8 e.g. at the end of ‘Cities of the Plain’ (II, p. 1152). 9 J.Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book I, trans. J.Forrester (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 191. This passage (pp. 189–91) is a particularly lucid exposition of the theory of the primal scene. 10 S.Freud, ‘lntroductory lectures on psychoanalysis’, Standard Edition (SE), vol. XVI, pp. 370–1. (All references to the works of Freud will be to The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (London: Hogarth Press, 1953–73), by volume and page number.) 11 Given that the (phantasized or real) presence of the mother (as first love object for either sex) is central to the scene’s importance, it is less easy to imagine a version which would involve male homosexuality. 12 Lacan, op. cit., p. 190. 13 Page references are to F.Kafka, ‘Description of a Struggle’ And Other Stories, trans. T. and J.Stern (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1979). 14 J.Lacan, ‘The signification of the phallus’, in Ecrits: A Selection, trans. A.Sheridan (London: Tavistock, 1977), p. 289. 15 ‘Three’s No Crowd’, in Club International, 20, 1 (January 1991), pp. 62–4. 16 Included in G.Chester and J.Dickey (eds), Feminism and Censorship: The Current Debate (Bridport: Prism Press, 1988). 17 These objections by no means apply to all feminist critiques of pornogra phy, as can be seen from the article by Sheila Jeffreys (‘The censoring of revolutionary feminism’) in the same anthology. Sharing their aversion to pornography, Carola and Jeffreys hold fundamentally different assumptions about the nature of human sexuality. A detailed discussion of feminist critiques of pornography is beyond the scope of the present article. 18 J.Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book I, pp. 189–90. 19 C.Smyth, ‘Maeve and Beth go shopping’, in More Serious Pleasure: Lesbian Erotic Stories and Poetry (London: Sheba Feminist Publishers, 1990). 20 J.Lacan, ‘Seminar XX: Encore’, extract published in J.Mitchell (ed.) and J.Rose (trans. and ed.), Feminine Sexuality: Jacques Lacan and the Ecole Freudienne (London: Macmillan, 1982), p. 147. 21 This is the theory of traumata given in Freud’s ‘Beyond the pleasure principle’, SE XVIII, p. 31. 22 J.Lacan, ‘The subversion of the subject and the dialectic of desire in the Freudian unconscious’, in Ecrits: A Selection, p. 320. 23 ibid., pp. 323–4. 24 Lacan, ‘Seminar XX: Encore’, p. 147. 25 ‘The subversion of the subject’, p. 320. 26 In hard-core pornography (whose lack of current legal availability in Britain indicates the deeper taboos it must transgress) these terms are reversed: it is the man whose orgasm is visible, in the fact of his ejaculation. Pulling his penis out of the woman, he makes a spectacle of himself. Conversely, it is the woman’s body,

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27 28

29 30

31 32 33

34 35 36

drenched with his come, which serves as a symbol of his jouissance (and no longer an index of her own), taking on (in the moment of his detumescence) the value of Phallus. Cf. R.Barthes, Sade/Fourier/Loyola, trans. R.Miller (New York: Hill & Wang, 1976), pp. 145–6. ‘The human being has always to learn from scratch from the Other what he has to do, as man or as woman.’ (J.Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, trans. A.Sheridan (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1979), p. 204.) S.Freud, ‘On narcissism: An introduction;, SE XIV, p. 89. This point is of some importance. Physical sexual climax does not necessarily always partake of the psychoanalytic category of ‘jouissance’, but the ‘almighty’ orgasms of sexual fiction can usually be taken as signifiers of this dimension. R.Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, trans. R.Miller (New York: Hill & Wang, 1975), p. 7. Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, pp. 168–9. This association is made by Gary Day in his introduction to Perspectives on Pornography, p. 5. It would be supported by Bruno Bettelheim who, in his major study of male envy for the female bodily functions, suggested that ejaculation could serve as a compensation for man’s inability to lactate. (Symbolic Wounds: Puberty Rites and the Envious Male (London: Thames & Hudson, 1955), p. 113.) op. cit., p. 99. ibid., p. 105. ibid., p. 172.

‘And all is semblative a woman’s part’: body politics and Twelfth Night DYMPNA CALLAGHAN

I Once a marginalized object in traditional literary scholarship, the body has emerged as a crucial category of critical inquiry. In Renaissance studies, it has become the focus of attention as the site of emergent notions of the modern subject and attendant concepts of privacy and intimacy hitherto viewed as natural and transhistorical. Transformations wrought by the Reformation and the shift from feudalism to capitalism rendered the body subject to what Norbert Elias has called ‘the civilizing process’,1 More specifically, Renaissance theatre itself had a corporeal, sexual identity. It was a place where, to use Dekker’s redolent term, ‘stinkards’ gathered, where patrons engaged in those sexual practices so often vilified by anti-theatricalists: arousal, prostitution, perhaps even copulation itself.2 The Renaissance body, then, especially in the arena of theatre, has been recognized as political, that is, as a site for the operation of power and the exercise of meaning, and one ‘fully social in its being and in its ideological valency’.3 That the Renaissance seems peculiarly concerned with the somatic might seem justification enough for a study of the body in Shakespeare. We might concur with Carroll Smith-Rosenberg who argues, ‘During periods of social transformation, when social forms crack open…ideological conflict fractures discourse…sexuality and the physical body emerge as particularly evocative political symbols.’4 But the resurgence of the body in Renaissance studies (and elsewhere) is not a perennial, cyclical phenomenon. Rather, the intensity of focus on the body is related to very specific, historically situated developments in poststructuralist theory. In The Ideology of the Aesthetic, Terry Eagleton draws attention to the politics of current concern with the body: few literary texts are likely to make it nowadays into the new historicist canon unless they contain at least one mutilated body. A recovery of the importance of the body has been one of the most precious achievements of recent radical thought…. At the same time, it is difficult to read the later

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Roland Barthes, or even the later Michel Foucault, without feeling that a certain style of meditation on the body, on pleasures and surfaces, zones and techniques, has acted among other things as a convenient displacement of a less immediately corporeal politics, and acted also as an ersatz kind of ethics. There is a privileged, privatized hedonism about such discourse, emerging as it does at just the historical point where certain less exotic forms of politics found themselves suffering a setback.5 The body is simultaneously situated here as de facto, ‘exotic’, ‘precious achievement’, and ‘displacement’ of serious politics. The emancipatory potential projected on to the body (by feminist and Queer theorists as much as the doyens of poststructuralism) versus the political limitations of current fetishizations of the body seem to put the ‘undecidable’ and the ‘dialectical’ perilously close. None the less, Eagleton draws our attention to the fact that the body in much critical discourse becomes the site of ‘micropolitics’ (in centrist or ‘ludic’ readings of the postmodern as opposed to resistance postmodernism),6 which is believed to have replaced the grand conceptual, liberatory narratives of political economy. Ludic postmodernism produces a naive notion that social transformation can be articulated at the local level of the corporeal. Foucault falls into this utopian vision of the body at the end of The History of Sexuality. The body, as a site of opacity almost exempt from meaning, becomes the privileged locus of resistance: ‘The rallying point for the counterattack against the deployment of sexuality ought not to be sex-desire, but bodies and pleasures.’7 While ‘bodies and pleasures’ mark Foucault’s distance from Derridean and Lacanian desire, in the end the ideological effect is the same, namely one of ‘privileged, privatized hedonism’. Similarly Bakhtin, whose rhetoric is more that of mouth and anus than zone and surface, none the less deploys a populist, utopian view of the disruptiveness of the grotesque body.8 Paradoxically too, micropolitical analyses are frequently presented as ‘materialist’. For example, both Foucault’s techniques of the subject and Bakhtin’s grotesque realism have been viewed as such, in what Eagleton dubs ‘the modish, purely gestural uses of that most euphoric of radical buzz-words’.9 In some instances, popular and politically specific uses of the term materialism are employed as if they were synonymous. Lucy Gent and Nigel Llewellyn, for example, in their fairly traditional, thematic approach to Renaissance Bodies, argue for the sheer material reality of the body, as opposed to ‘abstraction and distance’, that is, the discursivity of the ‘figure’: ‘“Body”, by contrast, suggests the solidly central unrepresented fact of existence, a materiality that is of itself inarticulate. It is the mute substance of which “figure” is a more nervous and expressive shadow.’10 Yet, this appearance of substance occurs only because this is how, within the transactions of discourse, the body is rendered intelligible in our culture. When Gent and Llewellyn refer to the body’s ‘sheer physicality’, the mute facticity of its materiality, they reduce the material to the elemental. This is

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a classically humanist definition of the material as the density of things you can touch. Mas’ud Zavarzadeh explains: In the discourses of ludic postmodernism, ‘politics’ is an exemplary instance of totalitarian ‘conceptuality’. The micropolitics of the body, on the other hand, is politics without concepts: the local politics of material experience. However material in these theories…means the immediate elements of the medium of the political, that is to say, the discourses that articulate subjectivities and thus produce the micro-political. It is, in other words, a materialist politics only in the sense that, for example, focusing on the ‘photochemical reality’ of film makes the film maker a ‘materialist’ film maker. An idealist materialism isolates single issues and their mode of enunciation from the global structures of the political economy.11 Such critical discourses, then, invoke the body as substantive, ontologically grounded raw material devoid of any agenda for social transformation. Alternatively (and sometimes simultaneously) in its textualist rendition, the material is defined as discourse, as the material part of the sign, to which the body contributes, as Barthes has proposed, through the phatic dimension of speech.12 Thus, a characteristic deconstructionist manoeuvre places the opacity of both the signifier and the body as the ‘material’ dimensions of the production of meaning. This depoliticized materialism conveniently coincides with both post-Marxism and those reactionary elements of the (ludic) postmodern to which it is also causally related. In this way, contemporary discourse on the body, as Eagleton argues, has become alienated from the ‘more traditional political topics of the state, class conflict and modes of production’, that is, from historical materialism as it has been previously and more rigorously understood.13 The body, then, even when it is understood not as simple transhistorical fact but as ‘a relation in a system of liaisons which are material, discursive, psychic, sexual, but without stop or centre’,14 niay signal, none the less, the displacement of the political defined as the global, totalizing agendas relegated to obsolescence in much postmodern theory. Thus, while ludic postmodern discourses of the body offer substantially different accounts of the body from humanist understandings, finally, their ideological effects are disarmingly similar. Materialism, as I have argued, can be reduced neither to raw physicality nor to the so-called materiality of signs; both constitute ‘idealist materialism’. In terms of discourse on the body, this is to deny neither the ‘reaP ontological existence of the body nor the materiality of discourse.15 However, the material should not be confined to the binarism brute-material/discursive, but rather considered as the way the social and cultural always exceed the discursive. For this is precisely what is at stake over the question of the material. An example may clarify the point: that certain classes of women were particularly marked out as rape victims in the Renaissance (servants, for example), and that women continue to be viewed as sexual terrain to be possessed, violated, and commodified, constitute

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physical, social and cultural aspects of rape as opposed to purely physical or ‘textual’ ones.16 (Thus, women are no more vulnerable to rape as an inherent fact of biology than men are to castration.) Rape has, then, both a physicality and a politics that in a patriarchal culture concerns relations between men in which women are property, and as such it cannot be separated from issues of class and ownership. That is, the discursive construction of the gendered body is implicated in the materiality of the non-discursive; and the latter is not simply raw materiality, but also the social and cultural. I have chosen an example pertinent to feminist struggle because the politics of the body are exacerbated and more urgent there: as the object of patriarchal subjugation women are uniquely identified with their anatomy, which has been simultaneously and problematically marked as the ground of feminist resistance. The problem is whether the body intrinsically constitutes an appropriate and effective site of resistance to the increasingly dense, subtle, and comprehensive conceptual trap of late capitalist patriarchy. The danger is that ‘its pre-existing meanings, as sex object, as object of the male gaze, can always prevail and reappropriate the body.’17 It is not clear that we reclaim women’s bodies— especially denigrated female genitals which get culturally marked as the source of women’s oppression—without regressing into biological essentialism (the very rationale for women’s subordination), the phenomenology of lived experience, or the political evasions of poststructuralism.18 Nor can we reclaim past representations of female corporeality in any simple, celebratory way. In what follows, I want to use a more politically effective understanding of materialism than the one current in cultural criticism of the body in order to focus on the absent-presence of female genitals in Twelfth Night. My analysis of the play’s representations of the female body works within global rather than local structures and resists the characteristic poststructuralist notion that undecidability is liberating. Further, I want to resist the pervasive tendency in Shakespeare criticism, in both its humanist and poststructuralist manifestations, to conflate ‘matter’ and materialism, a trivialization that blocks the emancipatory potential of this radical concept.19 For the female body, while not literally present on the Renaissance stage, was constantly and often scabrously constructed in masculine discourses in ways that reinforced larger patriarchal institutions and practices.20 II In Shakespearean comedy the female body is most obviously a problem at the (secondary) level of the text’s fiction where female characters like Viola and Rosalind disguise themselves as eunuchs and lackeys. But the female body is also problematized at the primary level of Renaissance theatre practice in which boys played ‘the woman’s part’. Lisa Jardine argues: ‘“Playing the woman’s part”—male effeminacy—is an act for a male audience’s appreciation’ and that ‘these figures are sexually enticing qua transvestized boys, and that the plays

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encourage the audience to view them as such.’21 As the complexity of this state of affairs has been emphasized, however, there has been something of a displacement of the initial feminist recognition that transvestism is an aspect of misogyny based on the material practice of excluding women from the Renaissance stage—the ‘boy actress’ phenomenon.22 Thus, while Stephen Orgel in a brilliant contribution to South Atlantic Quarterly’s special issue on homosexuality contends like Jardine that homosexuality was the dominant form of eroticism in Renaissance culture, he also argues (and this is indeed a crucial recognition) that the homoeroticism of the Renaissance stage was not inevitably misogynist.23 Transvestism could not have had particularly insidious implications for women, he argues, because plays depended for their success on the large numbers of female play-goers. None the less, the exclusion of women from the stage and their simultaneous inclusion as customers—the fundamental characteristic (contradiction) of the institution of theatre in early modern England —does not exculpate theatre from charges of misogyny. This should not lead us to conclude, of course, that women’s appearance on the stage at the Restoration should be read simply as ‘progress’. In those countries where female players were allowed on stage, women were no less oppressed than in England.24 Rather, the point here is to recognize the flexibility, the historically and geographically variable nature of patriarchy, while insisting on the exclusion of women from the Renaissance stage as the determinate material condition in the theatre’s production and representation of femininity. Catherine Belsey’s essay, ‘Disrupting sexual difference: Meaning and gender in the comedies’, a feminist-deconstructionist reading of the comedies, where any destabilization of meaning is in and of itself ‘politicaP, urges the positive play of transvestism only by ignoring the fact that it is founded on the systematic and structural oppression of women. She reads the endless play of meaning inherent in transvestism as inherently subversive; it becomes undecidable and therefore, ‘for us to decide’. But since, as she points out, all meanings in language are inherently unstable, it is hard to see why transvestite destabilizations should offer any particularly liberating possibilities for feminism.25 None the less, for Belsey, comic transvestism, particularly in Twelfth Night, which ‘takes the most remarkable risks with the identity of its central figure’ permits us ‘to glimpse alternative possibilities’. But it is very likely that the new possibilities Belsey envisages would equally provide the basis for control and self-surveillance.26 In contrast to this strain of criticism, I want to argue that in the carnivalesque world of Twelfth Night the female body’s capacity for resistance and disruption is severely curtailed by the fact that the transvestite actor is ‘as likely to be portraying women with contempt as with respect’27 and where the male body, ‘the very instrument of the art of the theatre’,28 repeatedly and ritually enacts the displacement, exclusion, and discipline of its female counterpart.

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III In the Renaissance, mimicking social superiors by wearing their clothes was as much a violation of natural order as the assumption of a sexual identity other than that dictated by one’s anatomical destiny. Antitheatricalists tirelessly inveighed against the latter. A fairly typical example of such an attack is to be found in Philip Stubbes’s infamous book, whose very title, The Anatomy of Abuses, invokes the corporeality of deviance: Our apparell was given as a sign distinctive, to discern betwixt sexe and sexe, and therefore one to wear the apparell of an other sex, is to participate with the same and to adulterate the veritie of his own kinde.29 Gender cross-dressing is an obvious target for antitheatricalists given the biblical injunction against it: ‘“the Lord forbideth men and wemen to chaunge raiment”’, and the 1620 pamphlet controversy about androgynous dress, Hic Mulier and Haec Vir.30 Nevertheless, two types of transvestism prevailed: that which violated the boundaries of gender demarcation and that which violated class hierarchy. On this matter, Jonas Barish summarizes the representative view of Puritan cleric William Perkins: ‘Distinctions of dress, however external and theatrical they may seem to us, for Perkins virtually belong to our essence, and may no more be tampered with than that essence itself.’31 Thus, for the likes of Perkins and Stubbes, essence resides in apparel rather than in what lies beneath it. To divest oneself of the appropriate social signifiers is to alter one’s essence, to adulterate God-given nature. From this point of view, the soul resides in the clothes, not just for Parolles, but for all humanity. That there is a structural identity between gender and class transvestism is demonstrable in the fact that the profound hostility to transvestite actors was related to the revival of medieval sumptuary laws which prohibited the confusions of ‘degrees’ and ‘callings’ ordained by God.32 This is so much the case that Malvolio’s obedience to the injunction contained in a forged letter that he wear yellow stockings and cross-garters, all but overwhelms the Viola/ Sebastian plot from which it singularly diverts the audience’s attention.33 Malvolio’s cross-gartering, his ‘transvestism’ is, then, structurally and symbolically related to gender inversion, and it is no further removed from anatomical inscription than is Viola’s disguise. Malvolio adopts attire that might be suitable if worn by a young gentleman suitor to Olivia, but incongruous and ridiculous when worn by a servant who sees himself fit to be her husband.34 As the Elizabethan ‘Homily Against Excess of Apparell’ contended, such behaviour constitutes a violation of both decorum and decree: many a one doubtless should be compelled to wear a russet coat which now ruffleth in silks and velvets, spending moe by the year in superfluous apparell than their fathers received for the whole revenue of their lands.35

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Having indulged in these improprieties, in a sense, Malvolio really is mad because it is, as Raymond Ruyer remarks, such eccentricities and deviations from the naturalized orthodoxy of decorum which are ‘the small change of madness’.36 Notably, the only record we have of a Renaissance performance of the play does not so much as mention Viola’s transvestism.37 John Manningham’s contemporary response places Malvolio at the play’s core: At our feast we had a play called Twelfth Night or What You Will, much like the Commedy of Errors or Menechmi in Plautus, but most like and near to that in Italian called Inganni. A good practise in it to make the Steward believe his Lady Widdowe was in love with him by counterfeyting a letter from his Lady in general terms, telling him what shee liked best in him and prescribing his gesture in smiling his apparaile etc, and then when he came to practise making him beleeve they tooke him to be mad.38 Similarly, Charles I, embracing the title’s invitation to tag the play, ‘What You WilP, inscribed Malvolio opposite the title of the play in his second folio. A 1623 performance of the play also refers to it by that title.39 Although we cannot account for all the changes that may have occurred from the time of the first recorded performance to the text we have received (Olivia is not a widow for instance, and we have no way of knowing whether this represents Manningham’s error or a reference simply to the costume of a widow, or to a change in the text), there is good reason to concur with Margaret Maurer who contends, ‘Frankly he [Malvolio] has upstaged the twin device.’40 However, Malvolio does not merely upstage the comedy of the main plot: he notoriously disrupts the festive spirit of Twelfth Night. The unrecuperable Tll be reveng’d on the whole pack of you’ (V.i. 377) troubles all the charm and delight that critics and audiences have found in the play. It is also possible that Malvolio’s desire for revenge is directed at women, and at Olivia quite specifically for her ‘Alas, poor fool, how they have baffled thee!’ (V.i. 368). It would seem, then, that class transvestism is more threatening than that of gender, which can be resolved rather more readily.41 In this respect, Malvolio’s cross-gartering is more subversive than any instance of gender cross-dressing because it is Malvolio who disturbs the romantic coupling with which the play concludes. Because traditional criticism has often been at pains to gloss over or dissolve the discordant tone produced by Malvolio’s promise of revenge, it has never been linked to the other major source of disharmony, namely the ‘“discord” between the romance and the broader comedy of the play’.42 The dimensions of significant corporeality enacted in both gender and class transvestism and the feminized carnal excesses constitutive of the play’s bawdy are crucially interarticulated. Recognizing this interconnectedness, the way the female body is imbricated in complex ways with other social categories, especially class, renders the female body in Twelfth Night not as a merely localized phenomenon

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but as a pervasive cultural one. Specifically here I want to contest the notion put forth by Kathleen McLuskie that ‘The primary, physiological, distinction could not, of course, be represented on the stage.’43 In other words, in my reading, what is at issue is not whether it could be represented but how it is represented. That is, the monstrous female genitalia in the play’s representational register is not merely a localized ‘theme’, but rather depends upon and produces the exclusion and denigration of women, and the ridicule and punishment of men who attempt to change their status in the social hierarchy. This is nothing less than the maintenance and reproduction of patriarchy. Let me elaborate first on the text’s bawdy, the raw physical humour that often disconcerts critics who favour the ethereal lyricism held to be the definitive characteristic of romantic comedy. Eric Partridge in a revised edition of his famous book, Shakespeare’s Bawdy, is obliged to retract an earlier declaration that Twelfth Night is ‘the cleanest comedy except for A Midsummer Night’s Dream’.44 Further, since Twelfth Night is by critical consensus the culmination of Shakespeare’s work in the genre, when he ‘completely masters and exhausts the possibilities of this form of drama’,45 and since comedy is inherently corporeal, that range of possibilities necessarily includes the ‘bawdy body’. Stephen Greenblatt observes: ‘Shakespearean comedy constantly appeals to the body and in particular to sexuality as the heart of its theatrical magic; “great creating nature”—the principle by which the world is and must be peopled.’46 Such a view, although it once again ignores the exclusion of real female corporeality, none the less grates against Granville-Barker’s contention that Shakespeare’s was a celibate stage devoid of physical representations of sexuality where transvestism functioned as an aesthetic device to foreground theatrical artifice.47 For all the critical reluctance to address it, the ‘broad humour’ of the play is perfectly appropriate to its celebration of Twelfth Night, the Feast of Misrule, when licensed inversion is the order of the day; as Feste remarks: ‘To see this age! A sentence is but a chev’ril glove to a good wit—how quickly the wrong side may be turned outwardl’ (III.i.11–12). Here the fleshy grotesque body reigns supreme. Stallybrass and White describe the symbolic components of this structural inversion as follows: Grotesque realism images the human body as multiple, bulging, over-or under-side, protuberant and incomplete…with its orifices (mouth, flared nostrils, anus) yawning wide and its lower regions (belly, legs, feet, buttocks and genitals) given priority over its upper regions (head, ‘spirit’, reason).48 The play’s laughter is thus produced by such comic violations of social and somatic decorum integral to the culture of ‘cakes and ale’, ‘masques and revels’, which has its most ardent devotees in Sir Toby Belch and Sir Andrew Aguecheek. Sir Toby, who epitomizes the corpulent excess of the carnival grotesque, vows to remain a drunkard as long as there is passage in his throat and

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drink in Illyria (I.iii.39–40). Should he renege on this oath, Sir Toby avers, ‘call me cut’ (II.iii.186). In the spirit of carnivalesque inversion, such derogatory references to the female genitals constitute much of the play’s humour—not to mention its misogyny—thwarting the attempt of hegemonic, twentieth-century criticism to find in the play the good clean fun of benign (verging on the beneficent) comedy romance. Malvolio’s class transvestism, as I have argued, is the central inversion of the play and is closely related to the play’s representation of femininity, as well as its bawdy humour. In accordance with its carnival theme, female genitals are at the heart of Malvolio’s gulling, the play’s most famous scene: Mal. [Taking up the letter] By my life, this is my lady’s hand: these be her very C’s, her U’s, and her T’s, and thus makes she her great P’s. It is in contempt of question her hand. Sir And. Her Cs, her U’s, and her T’s: Why that? Mal. [Reads] To the unknown beloved, this, and my good wishes. Her very phrases! By your leave, wax. Soft! and the impressure her Lucrece, with which she uses to seal: ’tis my lady! To whom should this be? (II.v.87–96) Sir Andrew’s exclamation is in part a rhetorical question emphasizing the scandalous pun, which Malvolio spells out in slow, excruciating detail: ‘cu[n]t’. On another level the query justifies this crude jest because, of course, no C, U, or T exist in the superscription of the letter.49 At that literal, textual level we never really do know why there is a ‘CU[N]T’ in Twelfth Night. Symbolically, however, Malvolio, in taking seriously the possibility of trading a steward’s servility for sexual service with his mistress—‘She that would alter services with thee’ (II.v.157–8)—has, as Maria promised, been gulled into a ‘nayword’ (II.iii. 135–6). That is, he has become, ‘liver and all’, feminized, ridiculed, castrated; his corporeal being in its entirety has been reduced to the most denigrated body part —a ‘cut’. Malvolio is already primed for this by his earlier fantasies of social advancement, which begin to forge the connection between debased femininity and class aspirations: To be Count Malvolio’ (II.v.35). ‘Count’ and ‘cunt’ were probably homonymic in Elizabethan English as we see from Katherine’s translation of ‘la robe’ in Henry V, III.iv as the ‘mauvais, corruptible, gros, et impudique’ ‘le count’. Malvolio’s is a stern lesson on the dangers of wish fulfilment. His degeneration into femininity is a reversal of the transformation from female to male thought biologically feasible in the Renaissance on the grounds that nature strove for perfection. In short, Malvolio’s gender reversal constitutes an unnatural act. Thus his social ambitions implicate him, albeit inadvertently, in a species of deviance far more dangerous than Viola’s deliberate transgression.50 The resonance of the female genitalia, however, is more comprehensive than that. It signifies Maria’s ambivalent sexual identity as Amazon Queen, Penthesilea (prefiguring in the denouement’s genitally undecipherable ‘fancy’s

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Queen’) and as the text’s author, and Olivia’s private parts. The audience is thus presented with the dynamic between Olivia’s political authority and the (mis) representation of her body. To some extent, the letter reveals all representation of the aristocratic body, which Leonard Tennenhouse has shown is necessarily female in the Elizabethan era,51 as untrustworthy mimesis. Olivia’s authority is undercut by her status as semi-petrarchan object of diverse passions—Orsino’s idealizing and Malvolio’s idiocy—and compounded by the letter’s further dislocation of her power. That Malvolio’s ‘CUT’52 does indeed have implications for Olivia’s power is established by the banter with Cesario about how, without ceding her virginity, Olivia might leave some copy of her beauty in the world. In the wordplay on (corporeal) reproduction and (discursive) representation, Olivia works to retain at least linguistic sovereignty over her body. In one sense she plans to extend this control even to the grave, but in another, female sovereignty of the body is merely dominion over a corpse: ‘I will give out divers schedules of my beauty. It shall be inventoried, and every particle and utensil labelled to my will. As, item, two lips indifferent red; item, two grey eyes, with lids to them; item, one neck, one chin, and so forth’ (I.v.247–51). Olivia’s inventoried body is its representation after her decease in her will. ‘Will’ signifies both sexual desire and, literally, the legal document containing instructions about the disposal of her property. Command over one’s body consists of command over its representations, its reproductions—something that would have resonated with Elizabethans, whose queen carefully supervised the reproduction and dissemination of her authority by controlling the use of her image as stringently as she controlled marriage plans prepared on her behalf. Of course, Olivia cannot know that in the very next Act, without her consent, her private parts will be on display for everyone’s amusement. It is significant, too, that Olivia is the object of this form of ridicule since she is clearly the female figure with most authority in the play and the one with the most inclination to use it independently of men. Not only is the sexual function of the pudendum ridiculed but also its urinary one in the jest on Olivia’s micturition —‘her great P’s’. The allusion to Olivia’s copious urination further deforms veiled, cloistered, aristocratic femininity into the grotesque and, paradoxically, more suitable object of Malvolio’s sexual and social ambitions. ‘Her great P’s’ also bring us closer to the source of Olivia’s excitement, ‘folds adjacent to the meatus urinarius on the female’, which when tumescent can result in tribadism, as Ambrose Pare’s On Monsters and Marvels fearfully points out: ‘they grow erect like the male rod, so much so that they can disport themselves with them, with other women’.53 Olivia’s private parts, preposterously resembling the phallic proportions of a full-grown man, make her ridiculous (as female character, as boy actor, and as wooer of Cesario). The clitoris, the site of female desire, is in a sense a phallic imposter, as Jane Sharp’s midwifery guide asserts: ‘lt will stand and fall as the yard [penis] doth and makes women lustful and delight in copulation.’54 Olivia as the ‘phallic’ woman in her advances towards Viola has a

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cultural parallel in homophobic accounts of women whose clitoral hypertrophy made them similarly aggressive suitors of other women.55 Thus, Nicholas Tulp’s treatise on anatomy gives an account of a German woman’s predilection for exposing her clitoris, which extended some way from the vulva, in order to engage in ‘licentious sport with other women’.56 The boy actress Olivia thus becomes the ‘hypersimulation’ of a woman57 because despite the allusions, there is, of course, no female body as such in the ‘C.U.T’ passage (just as there is none in the play). It is worth exploring the cultural resonance of women’s genitals, particularly in the arena of theatre. Andrew Gurr offers one of Henry Peacham’s anecdotes from The Compleat Gentleman, which has a certain positive, erotic connotation, rather than one aimed at violence or ridicule. None the less, it suggests that the most important thing about both a woman’s ‘cut’ and a woman’s purse (metaphorically related in contemporary psychoanalytic theory), is that both belong to her husband and can therefore be stolen by other men: A tradesman’s wife of the Exchange, one day when her husband was following some business in the city, desired he would give her leave to go see a play; which she had not done in seven years. He bade her take his apprentice along with her, and go; but especially to have care of her purse; which she warranted him she would. Sitting in a box, among some gallants and gallant wenches, and returning when the play was done, returned to her husband and told him she had lost her purse. ‘Wife, (quoth he,) did I not give you warning of it? How much money was there in it?’ Quoth she, Truly, four pieces, six shillings and a silver tooth-picker.’ Quoth her husband, ‘Where did you put it?’ ‘Under my petticoat, between that and my smock.’ ‘What, (quoth he,) did you feel no body’s hand there?’ ‘Yes, (quoth she,) I felt one’s hand there, but I did not think he had come for that.’58 Thus, even if as Leah Scragg suggests, the ‘C.U.T.’ of Twelfth Night is an admonition to the audience to beware pickpockets; to feel themselves up and pat themselves (or their neighbours) down, its implications may not be so innocent as an issue of warning about potential financial loss. (This is particularly the case when we recollect that the appellation Moll Cutpurse in The Roaring Girl, connotes her identity as both thief and ‘codpiece daughter’ (II.ii.89).59 Given the prevalence of pleasure in critical discourse at present, perhaps we should also consider the possibility that this admonition may signal that ‘cut’ is not entirely pejorative; it may have erotic connotations. Indeed, while the public exposure of female genitals by women was rare, it was an explicit invitation to sexual activity. That Malvolio comically presents himself as having familiarity with Olivia’s private parts, can also be read as a claim to have engaged in mutual masturbation, which seems to have been a very common form of premarital sex, as in the case of one virgin whose intimacies entailed the woman lying on the

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bed while her partner ‘combed her private member’.60 While we may read the potential eroticism of the suggestion of mutual masturbation in Twelfth Night as positive, it is counterbalanced by the contravention of social hierarchy, which, as it relates to Malvolio and Olivia’s ‘relationship’, is resoundingly negative. The argument for the scene as a benign jest on women’s sexual pleasure—which could be rationalized in terms of Laqueur’s claim that female pleasure, specifically orgasm, was thought to be necessary for conception—is severely compromised by the fact that this was also used as a way of dismissing rape charges.61 Magistrates were advised that women who were impregnated during rape must have been pleasured and therefore must have consented.62 This points up not only the difficulty of reading the gulling scene in terms of female pleasure, but also the fact that the episode depends for its humour on the conspicuous absence of Olivia’s ‘consent’. The ‘C.U.T.’ scene is connected with the social enactment of women’s oppression. Numerous women brought legal complaints about men trying to touch and manipulate their genitals: ‘Whiles he was thus soliciting her, his hand was always grappling about her plackett, striving to have felt her privy part.’ Many of these incidents have been usefully assembled from court records in G.RQuaife’s Wanton Wenches and Wayward Wives. One man apparently told his friends of how he had groped a woman’s genitals, and told the woman herself, ‘Faith Mary, thou hast a soft cunt.’ Another case, perhaps even more pertinent to that of Olivia, is that of one Margaret Woods who was held by the privates so long that she urinated in the man’s hands.63 Further, the public exposure of women’s genitals could have unambiguously violent meanings and effects. One man from Batcombe ‘did violently take up the clothes of Elizabeth Numan and showed her nakedness to many’, and a husbandman from Halse made an offer to divers then present that for a penny a piece they should see his wife’s privities and there withal did take her and throw her upon a board and did take up her clothes and showed her nakedness in most beastly and uncivil manner.64 Predictably, however, men are recorded as having found such violence both comic and erotic. One inn servant jumped in terror from a window after being thus abused, but it is quite clear from the account of a fellow female servant that her drunken assailants felt otherwise: throwing her down Jay, Willis and Sherwood holding her legs and arms down by force did one after another lift her clothes up to her girdle and then thrust their hands shamefully between her legs and feel her privities and look upon them. After which done Jay (who named himself the knight of the castle) sat upon a bench, taking and holding Edith between his legs, placing a stool before her face, and holding her arms fast. And then and there drawing their wicked rapiers and laying them upon the table made

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proclamations in these or the like words viz: ‘Oyes, whosoever dareth to break down the walls of grimcunt castle let him approach… Henry Sherwood come forth and appear at grimcunt castle.’ Whereupon Sherwood came forth with a glass of beer in his hand and taking up Edith’s coats above her knees felt her privities and then threw the glass of beer at the same.65 The histrionics of this incident share certain features of the ‘C.U.T.’ scene in Twelfth Night. There is a fantasy of exalted social status (knighthood), male bonding (recall that Maria exits directly before the gulling and reenters directly after it), and abuse directed quite specifically at the pudenda. Also, like Olivia’s household, this gathering was amused by the graphic exposure of the woman’s genitals and relished it as a focus of their theatrics. The ‘graphic’ display in Twelfth Night is, of course, precisely that, a written representation, linguistic rather than somatic, allowing the company to be hugely entertained. The elusiveness of ‘graphic’ display renders female genitalia present in pornographic detail, and absent as the ‘real’ beyond representation.66 What is palpably present, however, is ‘anatomized’ femininity. Olivia’s ‘hand’ is both a limb and writing; in this case a blatant misrepresentation—a forgery. There is also the figure of Lucrece, who would seem to interject this scene with a more sober rendition of the feminine as object of male violence. The usurped seal ring depicts Lucrece, probably portrayed in the ‘noble’ act of stabbing herself, the self-penetrating re-enactment of her violation that constitutes the only recourse of the ravished woman who seeks to preserve her moral integrity.67 Lucrece is an appropriate figure for a seal, made to be ruptured by the letter’s recipient in an act loosely analogous to sexual violation. To ‘open’ a letter—to read it, to interpret it, is in some sense to breach its integrity. We are thus left with images of comically debased and tragically valorized femininity, each of which are specifically associated with writing as a mode of representation. In fact, the ‘licence of ink’ with which Sir Toby urges Sir Andrew to taunt Cesario (III.ii.42– 3) is precisely the liberty taken by Maria’s missive. For writing offers freedom from anatomical and class designations. Its manoeuvrable discursivity is emblematic of the power of (mis)representation which constitutes theatrical licence itself, and does so most vividly in the various forms of transvestism we have detailed here. In order to consolidate (and complicate) the connection between the business of representing corporeality and the overall implications for a reading of Twelfth Night, I want to turn briefly to Stephen Orgel’s comments on the play. He writes: Viola announces in the final moments of Twelfth Night that she cannot become a woman and the wife of Orsino until her woman’s clothes have been recovered—a dress borrowed from Olivia or a new one purchased for the occasion apparently are not options—and that this will require the release of the sea captain who alone can find them, which in turn will

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necessitate the mollification of the enraged Malvolio, who has had the sea captain incarcerated: this all materializes out of nowhere in the last three minutes of the play. And Malvolio at the play’s end offers no assistance but runs from the stage shouting I’ll be revenged on the whole pack of you.’ For Viola to become a woman requires, in short, a new play with Malvolio at its center [my emphasis].68 Orgel is right that the play’s production of femininity is dependent upon Malvolio, but it is so in more ways than he imagines. For as I have argued, we do not need a new play because we already have Malvolio at the centre of a plot where femininity is little less than an impossible condition, and female authority a ridiculous one. For if the play, as Leonard Tennenhouse argues, involves the explicit transfer of patriarchal power into the body of a woman, who then returns it, now in ‘a more humane and less violent form’ via marriage,69 the play must persuade us of the urgency of the final transaction. Twelfth Night, then, treats the corporeal representation of sexuality, which was equated with femininity. Sue-Ellen Case summarizes the cultural rationale for this manoeuvre as follows: The female gender had become the custodian of male sexual behavior, which it instigated and elicited. The female body had become the site for sexuality. If women performed in the public arena, the sexuality inscribed upon their bodies would elicit immoral sexual responses from the men, bringing disorder to the social body.70 Thus, the very thing that justified women’s exclusion from the stage is graphically foregrounded in this play. But the play does not therefore subversively evade the strictures against female bodies on stage; rather it adds weight to them by presenting the female body in its most biologically essential form—the cunt.71 For the critic, Twelfth Night illustrates the problem of recovering the female body for feminism. We cannot make a female body ‘materialize’ from nowhere; we can only register the complexity of its exclusion. IV Jane Gallop recalls that in Les Bijoux Indiscrets the protagonist is given a magic ring in order to confer the power of speech, and thence sexual revelation, upon female nether parts. Diderot’s narrative, recounted by Gallop in 1989, almost exactly parallels her own rendition of the rank, raucous pudendum in The Daughter’s Seduction, where, taking her cue from Freud’s remarks on the odour of menstrual blood, she constructs an opposition between vaginal aroma and the veiled impassive specularity of the phallus: ‘the cunt clamours for attention, makes a big stink’.72 In the later analysis of Les Bijoux Indiscrets she elaborates on the protagonist’s desire for a female pudendum that will speak with the

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‘feminist’ fantasy of one possessing powers of intellection—a shift from the stinking to the talking/thinking cunt. Gallop’s is a fascinating effort to disrupt the mind/body dualism structuring Western thought. But as I noted at the start, the articulation of corporeal female desire is always open to appropriation by patriarchy. Twelfth Night, as we have seen, invokes the raucous articulation of desire in the process of its ritualized de-regulation. In its world, if you are fortunate enough to evade the castrating effect of the letters ‘C.U.T.’ (as Malvolio cannot), you may become or possess ‘What You Will’. ‘Will’, as is apparent in the sonnets, is bawdy for both penis and pudenda. Its bawdy humour derives from the articulation of inappropriate desire, especially female desire. Female desire is not clearly affirmed in this inverted world, just as in actual social sites of symbolic inversion such as carnivals, women were as likely to be sexually abused as given sexual licence. Thus, there is as much violence against women in the tradition of carnivalesque transgression as in the authoritarian suppression to which it was formulated as a response.73 None the less, the corporeality of sexual desire, which tends to be identified with the feminine, is articulated in this play as food, olfaction, noise, plague and pestilence. To give but a brief example from the ‘C.U.T.’ scene, Malvolio’s desires make him a ‘brock’, a badger, a stinking beast. Eating and hunting as emblems of the erratic course of sexual desire open the play, as Orsino is alternately pleasured and tormented by all his sensory capacities: If music be the food of love, play on, Give me excess of it, that, surfeiting, The appetite may sicken, and so die. That strain again, it had a dying fall: O, it came o’er my ear like the sweet sound That breathes upon a bank of violets, Stealing and giving odour. Enough, no more; Tis not so sweet now as it was before… Curio Will you go hunt, my lord? (I.i.1–9, 16ff) Olivia is identified with a scent, both that of the hunted hart (into which Orsino rhetorically metamorphoses when pursued by his own uncontrollable desires) and that which ‘purg’d the air of pestilence’ (I.i.20). She is the food which whets his appetitive sexual desire, and sates it all too quickly, ‘Enough, no more.’ Orsino maintains his dignity by responding with lethargy to the onslaught upon his senses.74 This corresponds with the notion that sexual attraction was immanent in the body of the desired object. It is an illusion which characterizes itself, ‘a wish to locate the arousal, the erotics, in some object rather than in an intersubjective dynamic’.75 And of course, Olivia does not actually desire Orsino, any more than she does Malvolio. None the less, she manages to usurp her own dignity and ‘a

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smooth, discreet, and stable bearing’ (IV.iii.19) of her authority by marrying an effeminate boy of dubious social standing. In the letter that dupes Malvolio, the ‘dish of poison’ that is set for him by Maria, we come closest to Gallop’s fantasy of the thinking, (almost) vocal cunt: [He opens the letter.] Fabian This wins him, liver and all. Mal. [Reads] Jove knows I love: But who? Lips, do not move. No man must know. ‘No man must know’! What follows? The numbers altered! ‘No man must know—If this should be thee, Malvolio! Sir To. Marry, hang thee, brock! Mal. [Reads] I may command where I adore: But silence, like a Lucrece knife, With bloodless stroke my heart doth gore: M.O.A.I. doth sway my life. (II.v.96–109) In one sense the letter has itself become a cunt clamouring its desire, but forced either to feign passivity or actually be quiescent, ‘Lips, do not move’. The bawdy implications of the earlier ‘C.U.T.’ are not abandoned either; as both ‘lips’ and ‘know’ have carnal connotations, as Pare observes: Moreover, at the beginning of the neck of the womb is the entrance and crack of the woman’s ‘nature’, which the Latins call Pecten; and the edges, which are covered with hair, are called in Greek Pterigomata [sic] as if we were to say wings, or lips of the woman’s crown, and between these are two excrescences of muscular flesh, one on each side, which cover the issue of the urine conduit; and they close up after the woman has pissed.76 The woman’s part also requires considerable powers of exegesis: ‘No man must know… The numbers altered!’ Voracious female sexuality, it would appear, despite the injunction to silence, speaks for itself and yet demands the careful attention of interpretation, referring us also to the extra-diegetic reality of the boy actress’s sexual equipment. Similarly, Viola’s dubious sexual identity appears to give itself away, to sound off: For they shall yet belie thy happy years, That say thou art a man; Diana’s lip Is not more smooth and rubious: thy small pipe

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Is as the maiden’s organ, shrill and sound, And all is semblative a woman’s part. (Liv.30–4) The maiden’s organ is both voice and genital femininity. Thus for Viola: ‘A little thing would make me tell them how much I lack of a man’ (III.iv.307– 8). Here, however, contrary to the feminist fantasy of the inherently disruptive qualities of the female genitals in the phallocentric order, Viola must speak on behalf of her sexual parts because, ambivalent as they are, they incite her to discourse. Kathleen McLuskie writes of the endless complications of signifying woman on the Renaissance stage, ‘The frustrated critic may wish, like the puppet in Bartholemew Fair, simply to lift the skirts and expose the reality behind the signification, but the result, as in Jonson’s play, would simply be a disconcerted silence.’77 In Twelfth Night, however, we have anything but that; we have an elaborate, fanciful instance of patriarchal ventriloquism. I have attempted here to give a theoretical and critical context for my partial reading of the female body in Twelfth Night. In it, I have insisted on the materiality of woman’s exclusion from the stage even while examining the representation of her private parts. To do so is to some extent to halt the play of possibilities envisaged by much contemporary cultural analysis of transvestism in order to take a political position which works to open up new space for the purposes of resistance postmodernism rather than leaving us suspended in the poststructuralist space of the undecidable.78 I have also tried to confront the exclusion of women from the Renaissance stage without denying the complexity of the representation of the female body. This claim requires some small elaboration; for we have reached a moment when ‘complexity’ is now routinely invoked as a reactionary formulation of ‘undecidability’ in order to claim that things were not so bad for women in the Renaissance after all.79 What is complex is the way in which apparently benign representations of women operate as regulatory fictions for the suppression, exclusion and containment of those who, in their corporeality, lived the Renaissance condition of femininity. In this, I hope that my analysis constitutes an intervention for current feminist politics by using the body in a Shakespeare text as a way of articulating the problems of its reclamation at this historical juncture for a materialist feminist agenda.80 V It has become a commonplace of criticism, one that recurs in interesting ways in analysis of Renaissance transvestism, that the anarchic, transformative possibilities of Renaissance Drama, especially those relating to the status of women, were foreclosed by the Puritan-motivated closing of the theatres.81 However, there is no evidence that the closing of the theatres can be identified as a major component of either the progressive deterioration of women’s status

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during the seventeenth century or the subsequent post-Enlightenment regime that now recruits our subjectivities.82 For it was not, of course, the Puritans who were the agents of the then emergent politics and sensibility that we now live, although it is possible that the closing of the theatres offers some a sign of why the revolution failed. Rather, the Puritans were the radical forces of change whose revolution was foreshortened by Royalist victory. This confusion coincides with a persistent tendency to conflate women crossdressers abroad in the streets of London and the institutional practice of theatrical transvestism necessitated by the exclusion of women from the stage. The issue about women in men’s clothing is one to which the romantic comedies only obliquely refer.83 While the phenomena of stage and social transvestism are connected, they are not identical. Thus, even the case of The Roaring Girl does not involve a woman cross-dressing on stage—it entails that only as part of the plot’s fiction, not as a systematic aspect of the operation of theatre. Further, no antitheatricalist would have been mollified by the suggestion that if female actresses played women, the evil of stage transvestism might happily be avoided. This simply is not an option available within the conceptual horizon of early modern England. For it is the presence of women in any and all its manifestations that poses a problem either horrifying or unthinkable. Further, in social life women dressed as men, but in theatre men dressed as women, and the latter is to some degree an arena for licensed inversion.84 No matter how heinous antitheatricalists found theatrical transvestism, they never found it necessary to inveigh against men gadding about London dressed as women. That men did not dress as women in social (as opposed to theatrical) practice is a phenomenon not contended with by those who argue for theatre as pre-eminently a site of gender instability.85 Nor did the political radicals of early modern England share the enthusiasm of contemporary ‘radical’ critics about theatrical transvestism. JeanChristophe Agnew remarks: What is clear from the protracted debate over stage transvestism…is the Puritans’ utter disbelief in the traditional corrective virtues of travesty. How could they countenance a remedy that was so difficult to distinguish from the disease?86 From the perspective of my analysis, the Puritans had a point.87 Syracuse University NOTES This essay was completed with the help of a Monticello College Foundation Fellowship at the Newberry Library, Chicago. 1 Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process, vols I and II (1939; Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1982). See also Lucy Gent and Nigel Llewellyn (eds), Renaissance Bodies: The

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2 3 4

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Human Figure in English Culture c. 1540–1660 (London: Reaktion Books, 1990), pp. 1–10. Andrew Gurr, Playgoing in Shakespeare’s London (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 38. Francis Barker, The Tremulous Private Body: Essays on Subjection (London and New York: Methuen, 1984), p. 13. Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, ‘The body politic’, in Elizabeth Weed (ed.), Coming To Terms: Feminism, Theory, Politics (London and New York: Routledge, 1989), p. 103. One important strain of analyses of the body in Renaissance Studies has been that of the body politic. For a recent Shakespearean example see Zvi Jagendorf, ‘Coriolanus: body politic and private parts’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 41, 4 (1990), pp. 455–69. Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990), p. 7. See Mas’ud Zavarzadeh, Seeing Films Politically (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991). On the political necessity of asserting women’s physiological specificity, see Emily Martin, The Woman in the Body: A Cultural Analysis of Reproduction (Boston: Beacon Press, 1987). On resistance postmodernism, see Teresa L.Ebert, Tolitical semiosis in/of American cultural studies’, American Journal of Semiotics, 8, 1/2 (1991), pp. 113–35. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume One: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books 1981), p. 157. For a trenchant critique of Foucault’s ‘body politics’, see Nancy Fraser, Unruly Practices: Power, Discourse and Gender in Contemporary Social Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), pp. 62–3. See also Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (London and New York: Routledge, 1990), pp. 128–41. See Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986). Terry Eagleton, Against the Grain: Essays 1975–1985 (London: Verso, 1986), p. 80. Gent and Llewellyn, op. cit., p. 2. Zavarzadeh, Seeing Films Politically, p. 48. For an excellent account of this phenomenon see Donald Morton, ‘Texts of limits, the limits of texts, and the containment of politics in contemporary critical theory’, Diacritics, 20, 1 (1990), pp. 57–75. Eagleton, Ideology of the Aesthetic, p. 7. Barker, op. cit., p. 12. See Michele Barrett, Women’s Oppression Today: The Marxist/Feminist Encounter (1980; London: Verso, 1988), p. xxviii; Janet Wolff, ‘Reinstating corporeality: Feminism and body politics’, in Feminine Sentences: Essays on Women and Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), p. 133. See Nazife Bashar, ‘Rape in England between 1550 and 1700’, in London Feminist History Group (ed.), The Sexual Dynamics of History (London: Pluto Press, 1983), pp. 28–46. Wolff, op. cit., p. 121. There are other important and related debates which I do not have space to engage in here. There has been a lot of rethinking around biological essentialism, especially as it has been articulated in response to Irigaray’s ‘womanspeak’ and

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19

20 21

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Cixous’ écriture féminine. Also there has been considerable debate as to whether the body exists outside discourse. Elizabeth Grosz argues, for example, that ‘the body can be seen as the primary object of social production and inscription’ in her ‘Notes towards a corporeal feminism’, Australian Feminist Studies, 5 (Summer 1987), pp. 1–16. See also Wolff who argues ‘the critique of essentialism does not amount to proof that there is no body’ (p. 135). Both Wolff and Elizabeth Dempster try to locate new, liberatory understandings of the body in dance, but the result is a feminist rendition of the utopian excesses of the theorized bodies of Barthes and Foucault. Elizabeth Dempster, ‘Women writing the body: Let’s watch a little how she dances’, in Susan Sheridan (ed.) Grafts: Feminist Cultural Criticism (London: Verso, 1988), pp. 35–54. See also Denise Riley, ‘Am I That Name?’ Feminism and the Category of “Women” in History (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1988), pp. 96–114. She remarks that ‘the very location of “the sexual” in the body is itself historically mutable’ (p. 104). See for example Gail Kern Paster, ‘Leaky vessels: The incontinent women of city comedy’, in Mary Beth Rose (ed.), Renaissance Drama As Cultural History: Essays From Renaissance Drama 1977 to 1987 (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1990), pp. 211–33, which, though an elegant and useful reading, takes urine as the ‘raw material’ of its ‘materialist’ analysis. See also Valerie Wayne (ed.) The Matter of Difference: Materialist Feminist Criticism of Shakespeare (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991). See Sheila Fisher and Janet E.Halley (eds), Seeking the Woman in Late Medieval and Renaissance Writings (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1989). Lisa Jardine, Still Harping on Daughters: Women and Drama in the Age of Shakespeare (Brighton: Harvester, 1983), pp. 31; 29. Stephen Orgel contends, like Jardine, that homosexuality was the dominant form of eroticism in Renaissance culture. ‘Nobody’s perfect: Or why did the English stage take boys for women?’, South Atlantic Quarterly, 88, 1 (Winter 1989), pp. 7–29. See also Linda Woodbridge, Women and the English Renaissance: Literature and the Nature of Womankind, 1540–1620 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1984), pp. 154; 327. See Kathleen McLuskie, Renaissance Dramatists (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press International, 1989), pp. 100–57 and her ‘The act, the role, and the actor: Boy actresses on the Elizabethan stage’, New Tbeatre Quarterly, 5 (1987), pp. 120–30; Kiernan Ryan, Shakespeare (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press International, 1989), pp. 88–9; Sue Ellen Case, Feminism and Theatre (London and New York: Methuen, 1988), pp. 26–7; Woodbridge, op. cit., p. 327. Orgel, op. cit., p. 17. Phyllis Rackin draws attention to the homophobic satire of Jonson’s Epicoene, thus demonstrating the important point that not all instances of transvestitism were homoerotic. Phyllis Rackin, ‘Androgyny, mimesis, and the marriage of the boy heroine on the English Renaissance stage’, PMLA, 102, 1 (1987), pp. 29–41; 31. Jean Howard points out that the social transgressions entailed in women attending the theatre may well have been more directly related to the goings on in the auditorium than to the content of the plays. See ‘Scripts and/ versus playhouses: Ideological production and the Renaissance public stage’, in Wayne (ed.), op. cit.

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24 In a different vein, Juliet Dusinberre observes: ‘Restoration drama boasts neither female heroes nor male heroines. But the woman actor offers no challenge to the dramatists to understand femininity beyond surface appearance.’ Juliet Dusinberre, Shakespeare and the Nature of Women (London: Macmillan, 1985), p. 271. 25 Catherine Belsey, ‘Disrupting sexual difference: Meaning and gender in the comedies’, in John Drakakis (ed.), Alternative Shakespeares (London and New York: Methuen, 1985) pp. 190; 166–90. See Ryan, op. cit., p. 9 for an account of the limitations of deconstruction in Shakespeare studies. Ironically, Ryan proceeds to valorize the play of instabilities in his subsequent analysis of the comedies, pp. 88–9. 26 Belsey, op. cit., pp. 185; 166–7. See Wolff, op. cit., p. 127. 27 Wolff, p. 129. 28 Brian Gibbons (ed.),. Romeo and Juliet (London and New York: Methuen, 1980), p. 64. 29 Philip Stubbes, The Anatomy of Abuses (London: J.R. Jones, 1583), p. 38. 30 Jardine, op. cit., pp. 14; 155–6. 31 Jonas Barish, The Antitheatrical Prejudice (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1981), p. 92. See also Jonathan Dollimore, Sexual Dissidence: Augustine to Wilde, Freud to Foucault (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991); J W. Binns, ‘Women or transvestites on the Elizabethan stage?: An Oxford controversy’, The Sixteenth Century Journal, V, 2 (1974), pp. 95–120; Sandra Clark,’ “Hic Mulier, Haec Vir” and the controversy over masculine women’, Studies in Philology, 82, 2 (1985), pp. 157–83; Rudolf Dekker and Lotte C.Van de Pol, The Tradition ofFemale Transvestitism in Early Modern Europe (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1989); Laura Levine, ‘Men in women’s clothing: anti-theatricality and effeminization from 1579 to 1642’, Critidsm (Spring 1986), pp. 121–43. 32 Orgel, op. cit., p. 15. 33 Malvolio similarly occupied the attention of critics of the play until in the surge of recent interest in gender, cross-dressing focused instead on Viola’s disguise. 34 On Malvolio’s class status, see Cristina Malcolmson,’ “What you will”. Social mobility and gender in Twelfth Night’, in Wayne (ed), op. cit., pp. 29–57. 35 Certain Homilies Appointed to be Read In Churches in the Time of Queen Elizabeth (London: SPCK, 1908), pp. 334–5. 36 Quoted in Peter Stallybrass, ‘Patriarchal territories: The body enclosed’, in Margaret W.Ferguson, Maureen Quilligan, and Nancy J.Vickers (eds), Rewriting the Renaissance: The Discourse of Sexual Difference in Early Modern Europe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), p. 123; see also Leonard Tennenhouse, ‘Violence done to women on the Renaissance stage’, in Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse (eds), The Violence of Representation: Literature and the History of Violence (London and New York: Routledge, 1989), p. 67. 37 There is perhaps a ‘coded’ reference to transvestism in the mention of the play’s Italian parallel. If as Margaret Maurer suggests, the play is a ‘trick’ play, Manningham might not have wanted to give the game away. None the less, the emphasis is all on the ‘device’ against Malvolio, which reinforces the sense that this is the trick of the play. Margaret Maurer, ‘Coming of age in Illyria: Doubling the twins in Twelfth Night’ (unpublished).

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38 T.V.King, Shakespearean Staging 1599–1642 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971), p. 97. 39 Criticism since the Renaissance has also been preoccupied with Malvolio. See T.W.Craik and J.M.Lothian (eds), Twelfth Night (1975; London and New York: Methuen, 1981), pp. Ixxix-xcviii. 40 Maurer, op. cit., p. 2. 41 Malcolmson, op. cit., p. 51, argues that social estate in Twelfth Night, is ‘a matter of desire or will rather than birth or title’ in order to praise willing service, as that of Viola to Orsino, and to condemn self-interest represented by Malvolio. 42 Craik and Lothian (eds), op. cit., p. liv; Levine op. cit.; Joseph Westlund, Shakespeare’s Reparative Comedies: A Psychoanalytic View ofthe Middle Plays (Chicago: (Jniversity of Chicago Press, 1984). 43 McLuskie, Renaissance Dramatists, p. 110. 44 Eric Partridge, Shakespeare’s Bawdy: A Literary and Psychological Essay and a Comprehensive Glossary (1947; London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1968). 45 Mary Beth Rose, The Expense of Spirit: Love and Sexuality in English Renaissance Drama (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988), p. 41. 46 Stephen Greenblatt, ‘Fiction and friction’, in Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), p. 86; see also Craik and Lothian p. lii. 47 Harley Granville-Barker Prefaces to Shakespeare, vol. 1 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1952), p. 15. 48 Stallybrass and White, op. cit., p. 9. 49 Craik and Lothian (eds), op. cit., p. 67. 50 Malvolio’s connection with bawdy is consolidated by the fact that despite his Puritan leanings, he isn’t immune from making a lewd jest himself, as when he describes Orsino’s messenger to his mistress: Not yet old enough for a man, nor young enough for a boy; as a squash is before ‘tis a peascod, or a codling when ’tis almost an apple. ’Tis with him in standing water, between boy and man. He is very well-favoured, and he speaks very shrewishly. One would think his mother’s milk were scarce out of him. (I.v.158–64)

‘Peascod’ and ‘codling’ refer to his genitals. It would seem too, that he participates in the solitary pleasures of masturbation—playing with his jewel; a pretty common double entendre (II.v.60–1)—despite editors’ efforts to sanitize his lines. 51 Tennenhouse, op. cit., p. 79. 52 Partridge argues that in this ‘nursery spell-out’ of cunt and piss that ‘Shakespeare has not, after all, omitted the n; it occurs in “and no T’s” [sic] as several discerning scholars have noted’ (p. 160). ‘N, innuendoed or concealed or—especially in and (pronounced ‘n’)—representing in; connected with the ways in which words or sounds are—for instance, with suggestive pauses—delivered on stage…. Mr Aylmer Rose, in a long and valuable letter dated 2 October 1955, writes thus,

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61 62 63 64 65 66

concerning Twelfth Night, II.v.87–89: “‘Her very C’s, her U’s, and [pronounced ‘n’, i.e. N] her T’s; and thus makes she her great P’s’ [where, he implies, there is a significant pause before P’s]. If my suggestion about the innuendoed N is correct, it draws attention to the necessity of considering the sound of words and the way in which they are delivered on stage”’ (op. cit., pp. 151–2). Ambroise Paré, On Monsters and Marvels (1573), trans. Janis L.Pallister (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), p. 188. Paré was first translated into English in 1634 by Th. Johnson; Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990), pp. 116; 188. Quoted in Thomas Laqueur, ‘Amor Veneris, vel Ducedo Appelatur’, in Michael Freher, Ramona Naddaff and Nadia Tazi (eds), Fragments for a History of the Human Body: Part Three (New York: Zone Books, 1989), p. 105. Valerie Traub offers an important critique of the heterosexist bias of the assumption ‘that love between women was readily available as a source of both humour and humiliation for members of Shakespeare’s audience’. Valerie Traub, ‘Desire and the difference it makes’, in Wayne, op. cit., p 83). And indeed, while misapprehension of any sort may be a source of ridicule, this does not exclude the production of homoerotic play here. Quoted in Laqueur, op. cit., ‘Amor Veneris’, p. 115. I have borrowed this term from Sue Ellen Case’s ‘Toward a butch-femme aesthetic’, in Lynda Hart (ed.), Making A Spectacle: Feminist Essays In Contemporary Women’s Theatre (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press), pp. 282–99; especially p. 297. Gurr, op. cit., pp. 6–8. See Rose, Expense, p. 78; Leah Scragg, ‘Her C’s, Her U’s, Her T’s’, Review of English Studies, 42 (1991), pp. 1–16; 15–16 especially. A contemporary pun with a similar effect is ‘snatch’ which can mean theft (as in purse snatching), or can mean a woman’s crotch. Jane Gallop’s Thinking Through the Body (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988) uses ‘snatches of conversation’ as a subtitle in one of its chapters in order to suggest both female crotch and partial apprehension. G.R.Quaife, Wanton Wenches and Wayward Wives: Peasants and Illicit Sex in Early Seventeenth Century England (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1979), p. 169. This is a possibility not entertained by Gail Kern Paster’s reading of this episode. Paster claims that Malvolio’s verbal transgression is constituted by the fact that he appears to have contravened the norms of urinary segregation (op. cit., p. 213). I am indebted to Fran Dolan for the reference to Quaife. Laqueur Making Sex, pp. 2–3; 161; 182. Quaife, op. cit., p. 172. ibid., p. 168. ibid., p. 168. ibid., p. 170. Further, the emphasis on the linguistic dimension of the sexualization and denigration entailed in the process of enforcing social hierarchy, links both Olivia and Viola, whose names, as Jonathan Goldberg has pointed out, are anagrammatic mirrors of one another and links both with Malvolio, to whose names his adds a negative prefix. Jonathan Goldberg, ‘Textual properties’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 37, 2 (1986), p. 216.

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67 For a fascinating analysis of the image of Lucrece in Shakespeare’s narrative poem, see Nancy J.Vickers, ‘This heraldry in Lucrece’s face’, in Susan Rubin Suleiman (ed.), The Female Body In Western Culture: Contemporary Perspectives (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985), pp. 209–22. 68 Orgel, op. cit., p. 27. 69 Leonard Tennenhouse, Power On Display: the Politics of Shakespeare’s Genres (London and New York: Methuen, 1986), p. 68. 70 Case, Feminism and Theatre, p. 20. 71 ‘Everything pertaining to the female genitalia is comprehended in the term “of nature” [phuseos], and the obscene term cunt [cunnus]’, wrote Caspar Bauhin, professor of anatomy and botany at Basel (1560–1624). Laqueur, ‘Amor Veneris’, p. 107. 72 Jane Gallop, The Daughter’s Seduction: Feminism and Psychoanalysis (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982), p. 32; Thinking Through the Body. 73 See Peter Stallybrass, ‘“Drunk with the cup of liberty”: Robin Hood, the carnivalesque, and the rhetoric of violence in early modern England’, in Armstrong and Tennenhouse, (eds), op. cit., pp. 45–76; and Stallybrass and White, op. cit. 74 As Leonard Tennenhouse puts it, Orsino ‘aestheticizes love by dislodging it from its political body’, Power On Display, p. 63. 75 Gallop, Thinking, p. 139. 76 Paré, op. cit., p. 188. 77 McLuskie, op. cit., p. 111. 78 See Case, ‘Toward a butch-femme aesthetic’, pp. 282–99; Butler, op. cit., p. 136; Marjorie Garber, Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety, (London and New York: Routledge, 1992). 79 See my Woman and Gender in Renaissance Tragedy (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press International, 1989), chapter 2. 80 It is not, in my view, that materialism has become impossible, but that it is perhaps not quite so self-evident as it was, say in 1982 (see Barrett), op. cit., or even in 1985 (see Judith Newton and Deborah Rosenfelt (eds), Feminist Criticism and Social Change: Sex, Class, and Race in Literature and Culture (London and New York: Methuen, 1985)). 81 See for example, Case, Feminism and Theatre. 82 Rackin argues, ‘The Puritans closed the theaters and a multitude of causes, which we were only beginning to understand, closed off many of the opportunities and possibilities that had been open to women at the beginning of the modern age’ (p. 38). 83 See Rose, Expense, p. 91. 84 Greenblatt points out in relation to Arnaud du Tilh’s impersonation of Martin Guerre, ‘What is entirely unacceptable—indeed punishable by death in the everyday world—is both instructive and delightful in spaces specially marked off for the exercise of impersonation. For in these spaces, and only in these spaces, there is by a widely shared social agreement no imposture.’ Stephen Greenblatt, ‘Psychoanalysis and Renaissance culture’, in Patricia Parker and David Quint (eds), Literary Theory/Renaissance Texts (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), pp. 219–20. 85 This remains true of Dollimore’s recent chapter on cross-dressing in Early Modern England in Sexual Dissidence.

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86 Jean-Christophe Agnew, World’s Apart: The Market and the Theatre in AngloAmerican Thought, 1550–1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer sity Press, 1986), p. 131. Dollimore argues: ‘But what kind of resistance, if any, does a materialist criticism discover in Renaissance tragedy? I argued in Radical Tragedy that we find in this theater not so much a vision of political freedom as a knowledge of political domination. But we simply cannot slide between the two, or assume that the second easily produces the first. This knowledge was challenging: it subverted, interrogated, and undermined the ruling ideologies and helped precipitate them into crisis. But history tells us time and again that from such crisis there may emerge not freedom but brutal repression. And such repression emerges not because the subversive was always contained, subversion being a ruse of power to consolidate itself, but because the challenge really was unsettling.’ Jonathan Dollimore, ‘Shakespeare, cultural materialism, feminism and Marxist humanism’, New Literary History, 21, 3 (1990), pp. 471–93; 482. 87 Phyllis Rackin, who, in a fascinating comment, argues for the positive nature of the transvestism none the less points out that it is the stuff of male fantasy rather than women’s historical experience: Thus, in Jonson’s play [Epicoene], which subscribes to the neoclassical ideal of art as an imitation of life, gender also imitates life—both in a limited, literal sense, since the sex of Epicoene is finally revealed as male (the sex of the actor who played the part), and in a broader sense, since women in the play are subjected to the same calumny, stereotyping, and social restrictions that real women suffered in Jonson’s world. For Lyly and for Shakespeare, the relation between art and life is complementary as well as reflective…. Thus, in these plays the true gender of the transvestite figure turns out to be feminine, the opposite of the real sex of the boy who played her part. Similarly, the dynamics of the plots make femininity a desideratum rather than the liability it was in actual life’ (Rackin, op. cit., p. 33).

AIDS, identity and the space of desire JONATHAN KEANE

A recent safer-sex advert on my local radio station involved a man relating how his fear of ‘coming-out’ or of publicly acknowledging his same-sexual desire had led him to suppress knowledge of his own sexual practices and consequently ignore information that advised a modification of those practices as a necessary precaution against HIV infection. He then spoke of his present HFV antibodypositive status and asked for others not to fall into the same trap as he did. This advert presents the person with HIV as a man who could not or would not face up to his own identity and is now suffering as a consequence. In a perverse paradox the conclusion of the narrative presents the man profoundly at peace with himself. It seems that HIV has reconciled him to his own sexuality, so much so that he can now be ‘out’ not only about ‘being’ gay but about ‘being’ HIV as well. He has gained control of himself and the audience are asked to do the same. But is such self-control so easily attained? The philosophers that influenced the Enlightenment believed so. Descartes theorized identity as self-knowledge. Locke theorized identity as an effect of a transhistorical ‘sameness’ of the body. These theories have informed what has become a hegemonic concept of individuality in modern western societies. Identity has become naturalized as a categorization of self that can be demarcated through a comparison between bodily differences, which remain constant and unchangeable through time, and as that which can be governed by minds which transcend and control those selfsame bodies. This idea of identity is the structural framework of the safer-sex advert. It is the structure that engenders the viewpoint that HIV is the fault of the individual: the person with HIV’s ‘bodily’ desire is presented as out of control, his ‘essential’ gayness is practiced without regulation or reason. In effect we are led to believe that he contracted HIV disease through his own lack of volition: he can blame no one but his undisciplined cogito. What this conceptual framework of identity suspends is the transformational and relational complexities of subjectivity: it fails to acknowledge our lack of coherence, the gaps in our selfknowledge, our historicity and, perhaps most importantly, the way our identities are shaped by culture and society. In suspending these complexities safer-sex adverts fail to circumvent the problems and causes of the audience’s disidentifi cation with, in this case, potentially life-saving information. Moreover,

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by characterizing the person with HIV as an individual who has achieved a totally stable identity, the advert ignores the painful loss of coherency of self which a knowledge of AIDS or HIV can engender.1 This essay engages with poststructuralist theories in order to produce a theory of identity that is capable of addressing, critically and productively, the culturally inscribed experience of people who have or who are affected by HIV and AIDS, and which can relate that experience to the hegemonic production and deployment of AIDS knowledges and contingent relations of power. My aim is to construct a critical framework through which the knowledge of the person with AIDS can emerge, a knowledge which has been historically silenced to the detriment of those with the condition. It may also contribute to the formation of affective preventative knowledges for those who are not yet affected. I IDENTITY AND DESIRE In theorizing the split subject, Jacques Lacan turned the masterful cogito into a wish, an effect of the ‘mirror phase’.2 The mirror works upon the individual as a ruse. It solicits a misrecognition of ‘self’ and of others as complete and as whole, engendering a specular ‘I’ which is alienated or split from the bricolage of conflicting needs that is his/her lived experience. Out of this split emerges a lack which is fundamental to subjectivity, a lack from which stems desire. Consequently, the primary relation between the individual and reality is established upon an impulse to recover a coherency of self, to attain the misrecognized autonomous ‘I’ through interaction with the ostensible ‘completeness’ of others. From this time onwards identification and identity are lived out through an endless desire for coherency which is mediated through the desire of others and acted out in the structures of Law and the Symbolic order. The Symbolic is the order of language, representations, culture and meanings. It is a concept which refers to a wide range of signifying practices which link the world of unconscious mental processes to speech and both of those to social structures. The act of speech subjects the individual to a possibly limitless deferral of meaning. In effect, the individual’s subjectivity is divided once more through the very act of speaking. His/her needs are subjected to the signifier in the form of a demand. As these needs undergo a detour and a deviation in language they necessarily return to him/her in an alienated form. Because the alienated need by definition cannot be articulated ‘fully’ in a demand it exceeds the signifying process, reappearing ‘as a residue that presents itself in man as desire’.3 This desire is ‘not a state or motion but a space, and not a unified space but a split and contorted one’.4 Its coordinates are need and demand. However, as need and demand are only conceivable in so far as one is the alias for another, these coordinates cannot be plotted. Consequently, desire is a space of permanent instability.

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Paradoxically, Lacan interprets the workings of the unstable and appar ently insatiable space of desire within the quite stable meanings framed by the lovers’ discourse. The space of desire deforms what are initially unconditional demands into absolute demands for love. This is a demand to be recognized and in consequence loved for our presence. This propels subjects to wish to be the object of the desire of others: they wish to (mis)recognize their coherency of self in the absolute demands of all those they know. Identity becomes a test of desire which is destined to fail. As all object relations are conducted through the Symbolic, then they will engender the replication of lack and the creation of the space of desire that is the condition of our alienated subjectivity. Our identities are propelled through Imaginary glimpses of Autonomy and presence into Symbolic replications of lack and loss. In this sense, love is the structure for the replication of dissatisfaction, ‘the limit relation which is established by every organism with the object which satisfies it’.5 But what defines the objects that we look to for the gift of self-presence? If the Symbolic is a realm in which meaning is inexorably displaced then how do we acquire the meaning of our identities and identify the objects that promise to reflect those identities? In other words, what process engenders ‘anchoring points’; what allows the identifications that provide signifiers with their particularity, permitting some rather than others to represent a degree of stability? To answer this question we must grasp the Lacanian signifier extraordinaire, the phallus. The phallus is the ordering principle of the Lacanian Symbolic order. Like a deity it is never present but omnipresent, ‘the privileged signifier of that mark where the share of the logos is wedded to the advent of desire’.6 The phallus is both the condition of possibility for signification and, in its veiled absence, the condition of impossibility for fixed signification. Because of its potent but veiled force the concept of the phallus can be used to theorize how desire and subjectivity are gendered into masculine and feminine forms. Men, according to psychoanalysis, need someone to ‘be’ the phallus: to ‘be’ that signifier which can promise stability of self through a gift of desire. The object that perfectly fills this role in the Lacanian typology is woman. In ‘being’ the phallus women must endure a double repression: not only are they split subjects in consequence of their entrance into the Symbolic order, but their Imaginary identity only acts as ‘being for’ man, the guarantor of a masculine subject position. Their own desire must be played out in a ‘masquerade’ where they ‘become’ the mirror but can never receive a reflection of even Imaginary autonomy: ‘it is in order to be the phallus, that is to say, the signifier of the desire of the Other, that the woman will reject an essential part of her femininity, notably all its attributes through masquerade.’7 In Lacanian theory all other identity structures are shaped by the phallic moment. Men and women are subsequently propelled into a life of comedy in which desire is gendered and those genders are essentially and incompatibly linked. It is not only frigidity and permissiveness that receive a structural reification through the concept of the phallus, a range of received ideas

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concerning sexuality are given a coherence that they would not othenvise have. Masculine homosexuality is forced onto the axis of the phallus, and female homosexuality is characterized as an effect of too great a demand for love. There is a presumption that runs through these ideas that the body has transhistorical and cross-cultural limits of signification, limits that cannot be reorganized or transformed without fear of psychosis. This obviously ignores the diverse, if only Imaginary, variety of identities that are intelligible and coherent within society. Women desire things other than the penis in their relationships and identify with other objects of desire without fear of madness, as do men. But does this mean that we have to reject Lacanian theory? I believe not. What is important in his theory of subjectivity and identity is the stress placed upon language’s determination of identity and the structure of identifications, and the importance of social relations as an arena for constructing and acting out those identities. Identity emerges out of relations of difference. In Derridean terms, its condition is radical alterity, an effect of differance, a dynamic of differentiation and deferral. By linking Derridean and Lacanian theory it is possible to rework the latter’s structural phallocentrism. As a mark of a difference that is itself an effect of differance, the phallus can be used to signify points when the play of meaning is arrested so that a specific object and a coherent subject can take shape in the space of desire. It indicates the process through which a sense of coherency and permanency is established for meaning and identity. Spacing between elements of meaning must, Derrida writes, be produced between one element and its other, and ‘be produced with a certain perseverance in repetition’.8 The effect of coherent identity is produced through a repetition of certain meanings and an exclusion of others. Incessant repetition normalizes meanings. Within this framework, identity, although still split, becomes contingent on the historical organization of differences, and on differences which are open to transformation and change. The Symbolic itself becomes a fluid, complex web of signification that is constantly organized into fields of intelligibility and constantly involved in the processes of repetition, transformation and dissolution. As a consequence, the specific structure of our identity, our desires, our sexuality, our gender, are all dependent on the historical moment when we enter the Symbolic order and where we are positioned and position ourselves in relation to its systems. In the first volume of The History of Sexuality, Michel Foucault writes that the cultural field or, using Lacan’s terminology, the Symbolic order is constituted of systems of knowledge circulating in the form of discourses. These discourses are materially produced and disseminated from a multiplicity of institutional sites. Foucault provides examples of such discourses: ‘demography, biology, medicine, psychiatry, psychology, ethics, pedagogy and political criticism’.9 They are chains of meaning that have been organized so that they apparently form unified, transparent, systems of Truth. It is in the deployment of discourses, in their relations of power, that certain socially normative characteristics are ascribed to certain identities.

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In formulating Identity in this way, Foucault theorizes the body as the site of cultural inscription. Conscious thought or even unconscious thought cannot be viewed as actual physical or mental spaces: they are names for the effects engendered by intersecting differential systems of meaning on the body. Productive knowledges of self are constantly disrupted, displaced and repeated through interaction with other structures of meaning encountered by the individual. This interactive process can reveal the suppressed traces which threaten to render a knowledge of self-identity incoherent.10 In effect, selfknowledge determines a possible field of action for the individual, acting as a structural hermeneutics through which one understands oneself and others. Consequently, our ability to think, the structures through which we think and the meanings and values that we attach to such thoughts, are all determined by our construction within hegemonic technologies of self. Our ability to identify with and acquire new systems of knowledge is contingent on the capacity to identify that those technologies provide. Hegemonic systems of belief and hegemonic linguistic structures are indissociably related according to Helene Cixous. She states that in modern western society ‘what is thinkable is organised by dualisms of exclusion’.11 As such, meaning in occidental culture had been historically organized through hierarchized oppositions, such as masculine/feminine, straight/gay, whereby one concept is valued above another. Groups, individuals and institutions maintain their coherence through a historical and political repetition of these values. Such an investment in certain meanings involves a constant negotiation between constructed identities and the embedded linguistic structure as it is represented in various cultural forms. For excluded identities such as gays, blacks and lesbians this process can be confusing. They do not often live in an Imaginary realm of coherence but are more likely to be only too painfully aware of identity as incoherence. In other words, those marginalized by cultural hegemony find it almost impossible to experience identity as self-presence, as they are constantly positioned by that culture as its negative element while they are simultaneously constructed through other discourses to aim for mastery and positivity. Of course, not all structurally marginalized identities are experienced as contradiction: people have varying degrees of access to hermeneutical discourses and practices depending on their economic and social position. However, the existence of reified binary structures of meaning make it more likely that the linguistically marginalized will be subjectified in this contradictory way. There is, as it were, a sliding scale of Imaginary identification whereby those in control of the cultural apparatus hegemonically produce images of themselves and others through which they can ‘misrecognize’ their legitimacy, whereas those disenfranchised by lack of access to signifying production are forced to recognize, or at least painfully negotiate, the contradiction between technologies of legitimacy and technologies of illegitimacy. The construc tion of new identities is to a large extent conditional on a critical reversal or displacement of structural hegemonies. It involves cultural and social intervention. However, the subjective

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space for new identity is opened by the very performance of a marginalized identity. In Gender Trouble, Judith Butler takes the position that all identities are an effect of a performance of acts, gestures and desires: ‘in the sense that the essence or identity that they otherwise purport to express are fabrications manufactured and sustained through corporeal signs and other discursive means’.12 In other words, identity has no ontological status prior to its enactment in practices whose meanings are governed by the cultural field: every performance is itself a new identity. A reiteration of differing characteristics in differing contexts assumes the appearance of continuity only because the regulatory fiction of essential identities is repeated so incessantly in western societies. Because coherence of identity is a lived fiction, structurally embedded identities are necessarily displaced through a different type of performance, a performance that actively strays from the script. Thus, a nominal heterosexual who practices same-sex desire is performing a potentially revolutionary act. He feels desire for an object that within the heterosexual matrix of meaning is valued as wrong. But at the same time he maintains his positive position as a masculine male and consequently disrupts and displaces the repressive, impossible structure of compulsory heterosexuality. His practice effectively adds an element into the signifying chain of heterosexuality and deconstructs its violent alignment. What Butler tends to suspend in her analysis is the always-already available structure of meaning that may well render such a performance already negative, enforcing a hermeneutical framework which engenders a sense of self as ‘internally’ deviant. Taking this into account it seems sensible to suggest that new and different identities only emerge when a potentially radical performance is supported by an already existing positive and practical hermeneutical technology of self. What I would like to suggest is that such performances, even without the availability of such a technology, actually engender the will or desire to develop such a knowledge precisely because of the pervasiveness, within western cultural and social paradigms, of the idea of identity as coherence. Cixous writes of other notions of identity. She describes the conscious experience of marginal subjectivity as a polyvocality of thought: an abundance of the other, of variety: separate people, thought people, whole populations issuing from the unconscious, and in each suddenly animated desert, the springing up of selves one doesn’t know—our women, our monsters, our jackals, our Arabs, our aliases, our fights.13 Although keeping to the conscious/unconscious topology, Cixous wonderfully describes the textuality of thought once differing and differential technologies of self reveal each other’s traces in a dizzying whirlpool of contradictions. It is out of this whirlpool that the possibility for the rejection of what she depicts as ‘the spurious Phallocentric Performing Theatre’ emerges.14 Within the discourse of coherent identity entrenched in the workplace, in legal relations and in the family,

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there is inscribed a desire to appear identifiable, to ‘be yourself’. Consequently, a ‘sudden’ experience of plural ‘selves’ engenders a writing of thought in an attempt