Actually, as of old, men are on one side and women are on the other. The “Ones” dominate and possess everything, including women, the others are dominated and appropriated. What I believe in such a situation is that at the level of philosophy and politics women should do without the privilege of being different and above all never formulate this imposition of being different (relegated to the category of the Other) as a “right to be different,” or never abandon themselves to the “pride of being different,” Since politically and economically the matter seems to be very slow to get settled, it seems to me that philosophically one can be helped by the process of abstraction.
In the abstract, mankind, Man, is everybody—the Other, whatever its kind, is included. Once the possibility of abstraction becomes a fact among human beings, there are at this level certain facts that can be made clear.
There is no need when coming under the parameters of the oppressed to follow the Marxian design and to wait until the “final victory” to declare that the oppressed are human as well as the dominators, that women are human as well as men. Where is the obligation for us to go on bearing with a series of ontological, etymological, and linguistic entourloupettes2 under the pretext that we do not have the power. It is part of our fight to unmask them, to say that one out of two men is a woman, that the universal belongs to us although we have been robbed and despoiled at this level as well as at the political and economic ones. At this point maybe the dialectical method that I have admired so much can do very little for us. For abstractly, in the order of reasoning, in the order of possibility and potentiality, in philosophy, the Other cannot essentially be different from the One, it is the Same, along the lines of what Voltaire called the Sameness (la “Mêmeté”, a neologism he coined, never used in French). No Thought of the Other or Thought of Difference should be possible for us, for “nothing human is alien” to the One or to the Other.
I believe we have not reached the end of what Reason can do for us. And I do not want to deny my Cartesian cast of mind, for I look back to the Enlightenment for the first glimmer of light that history has given us. By now, however, Reason has been turned into a representative of Order, Domination, Logocentrism. According to many of our contemporaries the only salvation is in a tremendous exaltation of what they call alterity under all of its forms: Jewish, Black, Red, Yellow, Female, Homosexual, Crazy. Far away from Reason (do they mean within Folly?), “Different,” and proud of being so.
Both the figureheads of the dominators and of the dominated have adopted this point of view. Good is no more to be found in the parameter of the One, of Male, of Light, but in the parameter of the Other, of Female, Darkness, So long live Unreason, and let them be embarked anew in la nef des fous, the carnival, and so on. Never has the Other been magnified and celebrated to this extent. Other cultures, the mind of the Other, the Feminine brain, Feminine writing, and so on—we have during these last decades known everything as far as the Other is concerned.
I do not know who is going to profit from this abandonment of the oppressed to a trend that will make them more and more powerless, having lost the faculty of being subjects even before having gained it. I would say that we can renounce only what we have. And I would be glad to send the representatives of the dominators away back to back, whether they come from the party of the One or the party of the Other.
Naiveté, innocence, lack of doubt, certainty that everything is either black or white, certainty that when Reason is not sovereign then Unreason or Folly have the upper hand, belief that where there is Being there is also non-Being as a kind of refuse, and the most absurd of all things, the need and necessity in reaction to this evidence and these certainties to support and advocate, in contrast, a “right to Difference” (a right of difference) which by reversing everything corresponds to the Tweedledum and Tweedledee of Lewis Carroll—these are all the symptoms of what I have once called, out of exasperation, the straight mind. Sexes (gender), Difference between the sexes, man, woman, race, black, white, nature are at the core of its set of parameters. And they have shaped our concepts, our laws, our institutions, our history, our cultures.
They think they answer everything when they read metaphors in this double parameter, and to our analysis they object that there is a symbolic order, as though they were speaking of another dimension that would have nothing to do with domination, Alas for us, the symbolic order partakes of the same reality as the political and economic order. There is a continuum in their reality, a continuum where abstraction is imposed upon materiality and can shape the body as well as the mind of those it oppresses.
THE POINT OF VIEW: UNIVERSAL OR PARTICULAR?
1980
I have gathered here a number of reflections on writing and language, which I wrote while translating Spillway by Djuna Barnes, and which are related to Djuna Barnes’s work and to my own work.
I
That there is no “feminine writing” must be said at the outset, and one makes a mistake in using and giving currency to this expression. What is this “feminine” in “feminine writing”? It stands for Woman, thus merging a practice with a myth, the myth of Woman. “Woman” cannot be associated with writing because “Woman” is an imaginary formation and not a concrete reality; it is that old branding by the enemy now flourished like a tattered flag refound and won in battle. “Feminine writing” is the naturalizing metaphor of the brutal political fact of the domination of women, and as such it enlarges the apparatus under which “femininity” presents itself: that is, Difference, Specificity, Female Body/Nature. Through its adjacent position, “writing” is captured by the metaphor in “feminine writing” and as a result fails to appear as work and a production process, since the words “writing” and “feminine” are combined in order to designate a sort of biological production peculiar to “Woman,” a secretion natural to “Woman.”
Thus, “feminine writing” amounts to saying that women do not belong to history, and that writing is not a material production. The (new) femininity, feminine writing, and the lauding of difference are the backlash of a political trend1 very much concerned with the questioning of the categories of sex, those two great axes of categorization for philosophy and social science. As always happens, when something new appears, it is immediately interpreted and turned into its opposite. Feminine writing is like the household arts and cooking.
II
Gender is the linguistic index of the political opposition between the sexes. Gender is used here in the singular because indeed there are not two genders. There is only one: the feminine, the “masculine” not being a gender. For the masculine is not the masculine but the general.2 The result is that there are the general and the feminine, or rather, the general and the mark of the feminine. It is this which makes Nathalie Sarraute say that she cannot use the feminine gender when she wants to generalize (and not particularize) what she is writing about. And since what is crucial for Sarraute is precisely abstracting from very concrete material, the use of the feminine is impossible when its presence distorts the meaning of her undertaking, due to the a priori analogy between feminine gender/sex/nature. Only the masculine as general is the abstract. The feminine is the concrete (sex in language). Djuna Barnes makes the experiment (and succeeds) by universalizing the feminine. (Like Proust she makes no difference in the way she describes male and female characters.) In doing so she succeeds in removing from the feminine gender its “smell of hatching,” to use an expression of Baudelaire’s about the poet Marceline Desbordes-Valmore. Djuna Barnes cancels out the genders by making them obsolete. I find it necessary to suppress them. That is the point of view of a lesbian.
III
The signifieds of nineteenth-century discourse have soaked the textual reality of our time to the saturation point. So, “‘the genius of suspicion has appeared on the scene.’” So, “we have now entered upon an age of suspicion.”3 “Man” has lost ground to such an extent that he is barely acknowledged as the subject of discourse. Today they are
asking: what is the subject? In the general debacle which has followed the calling of meaning into, question, there is room for so-called minority writers to enter the privileged (battle) field of literature, where attempts at constitution of the subject confront each other. For since Proust we know that literary experimentation is a favored way to bring a subject to light. This experimentation is the ultimate subjective practice, a practice of the cognitive subject. Since Proust, the subject has never been the same, for throughout Remembrance of Things Past he made “homosexual” the axis of categorization from which to universalize. The minority subject is not self-centered as is the straight subject. Its extension into space could be described as being like Pascal’s circle, whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere. This is what explains Djuna Barnes’s angle of approach to her text—a constant shifting which, when the text is read, produces an effect comparable to what I call an out-of-the-corner-of-the-eye perception; the text works through fracturing. Word by word, the text bears the mark of that “estrangement” which Barnes describes with each of her characters.
IV
All minority writers (who are conscious of being so) enter into literature obliquely, if I may say so. The important problems in literature which preoccupy their contemporaries are framed by their perspective. They are as impassioned about problems of form as are straight writers, but also they cannot help but be stirred heart and soul by their subject—“that which calls for a hidden name,” “that which dares not speak its name,” that which they find everywhere although it is never written about. Writing a text which has homosexuality among its themes is a gamble. It is taking the risk that at every turn the formal element which is the theme will overdetermine the meaning, monopolize the whole meaning, against the intention of the author who wants above all to create a literary work. Thus the text which adopts such a theme sees one of its parts taken for the whole, one of the constituent elements of the text taken for the whole text, and the book become a symbol, a manifesto. When this happens, the text ceases to operate at the literary level; it is subjected to disregard, in the sense of ceasing to be regarded in relation to equivalent texts. It becomes a committed text with a social theme and it attracts attention to a social problem. When this happens to a text, it is diverted from its primary aim, which is to change the textual reality within which it is inscribed. In fact, by reason of its theme it is dismissed from that textual reality, it no longer has access to it, it is banned (often simply by the silent treatment or by failure to reprint), it can no longer operate as a text in relationship to other past or contemporary texts. It is interesting only to homosexuals. Taken as a symbol or adopted by a political group, the text loses its polysemy, it becomes univocal. This loss of meaning and lack of grip on the textual reality prevents the text from carrying out the only political action that it could: introducing into the textual tissue of the times by way of literature that which it embodies. Doubtless this is why Djuna Barnes dreaded that the lesbians should make her their writer, and that by doing this they should reduce her work to one dimension. At all events, and even if Djuna Barnes is read first and widely by lesbians, one should not reduce and limit her to the lesbian minority. This would not only be no favor to her, but also no favor to us. For it is within literature that the work of Barnes can better act both for her and for us.
V
There are texts which are of the greatest strategic importance both in their mode of appearance and their mode of inscription within literary reality. This is true of the whole oeuvre of Barnes, which from this point of view functions as a single, unique text, for Ryder, Ladies Almanack, Spillway, and Nightwood are linked by correspondences and permutations. Barnes’s text is also unique in the sense that it is the first of its kind, and it detonates like a bomb where there has been nothing before it. So it is that, word by word, it has to create its own context, working, laboring with nothing against everything. A text by a minority writer is effective only if it succeeds in making the minority point of view universal, only if it is an important literary text. Remembrance of Things Past is a monument of French literature even though homosexuality is the theme of the book. Barnes’s oeuvre is an important literary oeuvre even though her major theme is lesbianism. On the one hand the work of these two writers has transformed, as should all important work, the textual reality of our time. But as the work of members of a minority, their texts have changed the angle of categorization as far as the sociological reality of their group goes, at least in affirming its existence. Before Barnes and Proust how many times had homosexual and lesbian characters been chosen as the theme of literature in general? What had there been in literature between Sappho and Barnes’s Ladies Almanack and Nightwood? Nothing.
VI
The unique context for Djuna Barnes, if one chooses to look at it from a minority angle, was the work of Proust, whom she refers to in Ladies Almanack. It is Djuna Barnes who is our Proust (and not Gertrude Stein). A different sort of treatment, nevertheless, was accorded the work of Proust and the work of Barnes: that of Proust more and more triumphant until becoming a classic, that of Barnes appearing like a flash of lightning and then disappearing. Barnes’s work is little known, unrecognized in France, but also in the United States, One could say that strategically Barnes is nevertheless more important than Proust, And as such constantly threatened with disappearance. Sappho also has disappeared. But not Plato. One can see quite clearly what is at stake and “dares not speak its name,” the name which Djuna Barnes herself abhorred. Sodom is powerful and eternal, said Colette, and Gomorrah doesn’t exist. The Gomorrah of Ladies Almanack, of Nightwood, of “Cassation” and “The Grande Malade” in Spillway is a dazzling refutation of Colette’s denials, for what is written is. “Raise high the roof beam, carpenter, / for here comes the lesbian poet, / rising above the foreign contestants,” This poet generally has a hard battle to wage, for, step by step, word by word, she must create her own context in a world which, as soon as she appears, bends every effort to make her disappear. The battle is hard because she must wage it on two fronts: on the formal level with the questions being debated at the moment in literary history, and on the conceptual level against the that-goes-without-saying of the straight mind.
VII
Let us use the word letter for what is generally called the signifier and the word meaning for what is called the signified (the sign being the combination of the letter and the meaning). Using the words letter and meaning in place of signified and signifier permits us to avoid the interference of the referent prematurely in the vocabulary of the sign. (For signified and signifier describe the sign in terms of the reality being referred to, while letter and meaning describe the sign solely in relation to language.) In language, only the meaning is abstract. In a work of literary experimentation there can be an equilibrium between letter and meaning. Either there can be an elimination of meaning in favor of the letter (“pure” literary experimentation), or there can be the production of meaning first and foremost. Even in the case of “pure” literary experimentation, it can happen, as Roland Barthes pointed out, that certain meanings are overdetermined to such an extent that the letter is made the meaning and the signifier becomes the signified, whatever the writer does. Minority writers are menaced by the meaning even while they are engaged in formal experimentation: what for them is only a theme in their work, a formal element, imposes itself as meaning only, for straight readers. But also it is because the opposition between letter and meaning, between signifier and signified has no raison d’être except in an anatomical description of language. In the practice of language, letter and meaning do not act separately. And, for me, a writer’s practice consists in constantly reactivating letter and meaning, for, like the letter, meaning vanishes. Endlessly.
VIII
Language for a writer is a special material (compared to that of painters or musicians), since it is used first of all for quite another thing than to produce art and discover forms. It is used by every
body all the time, it is used for speaking and communicating. It is a special material because it is the place, the means, the medium for bringing meaning to light. But meaning hides language from sight. For language, like the purloined letter of Poe’s tale, is constantly there, although totally invisible. For one sees, one hears only the meaning. Then isn’t meaning language? Yes, it is language, but in its visible and material form, language is form, language is letter. Meaning is not visible, and as such appears to be outside of language. (It is sometimes confused with the referent when one speaks of the “content.”) Indeed, meaning is language, but being its abstraction it cannot be seen. Despite this, in the current use of language one sees and hears only meaning. It is because the use of language is a very abstract operation, in which at every turn in the production of meaning its form disappears. For when language takes form, it is lost in the literal meaning. It can only reappear abstractly as language while redoubling itself, while forming a figurative meaning, a figure of speech. This, then, is writers’ work—to concern themselves with the letter, the concrete, the visibility of language, that is, its material form. Since the time that language has been perceived as material, it has been worked word by word by writers. This work on the level of the words and of the letter reactivates words in their arrangement, and in turn confers on meaning its full meaning: in practice this work brings out in most cases—rather than one meaning—polysemy.
But whatever one chooses to do on the practical level as a writer, when it comes to the conceptual level, there is no other way around—one must assume both a particular and a universal point of view, at least to be part of literature. That is, one must work to reach the general, even while starting from an individual or from a specific point of view. This is true for straight writers. But it is true as well for minority writers.
The Straight Mind Page 7