8. Psychoanalysis, Post-structuralism and Feminism- Heléne Cixous-"The Newly Born Woman"

Question 1

Hélèle Cixous

Answer 1

• This is what the essay “Newly Born Woman” of Hélène Cixous tackles head-on.
• She right from the start claims that these dichotomies that organize our world view are not innocent, always hierarchical, and that behind the dichotomy man/woman there is hidden another, highly patriarchic “dichotomy”: that of father/son.
• Through this transposition, what appears is not the simultaneity of two equivalent poles, but the hidden desire to be the origin – a highly problematic term, as we know in the meantime.

Question 2

“The New Born Woman”

Answer 2

• “Philosophy is constructed on the premise of woman’s abasement. Subordination of the feminine to the masculine order, which gives the appearance of being the condition for the machinery’s functioning” (350)
• What the opposition assumes, again, is that the two poles are actually stable “identities” from which then a difference can be drawn; that is why the concept of stable identity itself is highly patriarchic, and has to be undermined.

Question 3

Creation and invention

Answer 3

• While “the same” – as static identity – cannot really invent or create something new, creation and invention themselves imply, indeed necessitate, otherness; and otherness within oneself:
• “… there is no invention possible … without there being in the inventing subject an abundance of the other, of variety: separating-people, thought-/people, whole populations issuing from the unconscious, and in each suddenly animated desert, the springing up of selves one didn’t know – our women, our monsters, our jackals, our Arabs, our aliases, our frights. That there is no invention of any other I, no poetry, no fiction without a certain homosexuality (the I/play of bisexuality) acting as a crystallization of my ultrasubjectives” (351).
• This bisexuality, however, is not one that threatens castration (as it has been perceived from a male perspective), but one that Wards off castration (fear).
• “For historical reasons, at the present time it is woman who benefits from and opens up within this bisexuality beside itself, which does not annihilate differences but cheers them on, pursues them, adds more: in a certain way woman is bisexual – man having been trained to aim for glorious phallic monosexuality” (352)

Question 4

How to define female otherness?

Answer 4

• Woman, that is, is not just the opposite of man, but the opposite of opposites. She can include the other without the other being experienced as threatening.
• While this is a reference also to women’s reproductive ability (a pregnant woman is not “one”, and can even carry the other sex inside her), it on the one hand still presupposes some kind of stable concept of woman (to which these qualities are attributed), but deconstructs the concept of gender and of clear-cut dichotomies.

Question 5

Passivity as comprehension

Answer 5

“Being possessed is not a desirable for a masculine -Imaginary, which would interpret it as passivity – a dangerous feminine position. It is true that a certain receptivity is “feminine.” One can, of course, as History has always done, exploit feminine receptivity through alienation. A woman, by her opening up, is open to being “possessed,” which is to say dispossessed of herself.

• But I am speaking here of femininity as keeping alive the other that is confined to her, that visits her, that she can love as other. The loving to be other, another, without its necessarily going the route of abasing what is same, herself.
• As for passivity, in excess, it is partly bound up with death. But there is a non-closure that is not submission but confidence and comprehension; that is not an opportunity for destruction but for wonderful expansion” (353)

Question 6

Le sexe qui n’est pas un

Answer 6

• Woman then represents the “impurity” of the one, the stable, the unchanging, celebrating her diversity, her ability to “comprehend” others: “Where the wonder of being several and turmoil is expressed, she does not protect herself against these unknown feminines; she surprises herself at seeing, being, pleasuring in her gift of changeability. I am spacious singing Flesh: onto which is grafted no one knows which I – which masculine or feminine, more or less human but above all living, because changing I”. She is thus outside of the dichotomic scheme and subverts it.
• This strangely sounds like a poem of Walt Whitman. What this quote opens, however, is a problem that especially psychoanalysis – and psychiatry in general – have been addressing for some time: Whether or not such a “split” identity has to be considered as “pathological.”
• This, in turn, might explain why Freud puts so many women patients at the center of his analyses. It opens, however, even larger questions, as this “splitness” will reappear as pathological or painful (in Fanon) or desirable (in Bhabha) or both (in Anzaldua).
• It actually begs the question whether the assumption of some degree of psychic wholeness is by itself a mistaken (or at least arbitrary) patriarchic assumption.