New Vocabularies in Film Semiotics

140 PSYCHOANALYSIS
(Rose 1986:72)
However, such a critique of BIOLOGISM can veer into a denial of the
body altogether. For a number of feminist theorists the problem became one
of retaining the concern with the constructedness of femininity (a process
that parallels the emergence of subjectivity itself) while negotiating a space
for the female body and reclaiming JOUISSANCE (sexual ecstasy or
pleasure characterized by explosiveness, dissipation, the shattering of
limits) from its phallic definition. Several French feminists propose theories
of feminine writing based on a very specific conception of the female body;
ironically, this has opened them up to the same critiques of essentialism
leveled at the proponents of a universal, pre-existing feminine essence.
Julia Kristeva and Hélène Cixous see forces of resistance associated
with the imaginary register of the psyche, with pre-Oedipality, and with the
maternal (feminine) body. Cixous asks, “What is female pleasure, where
does it happen, how is it inscribed on her body, in her unconscious? And
then how do we write it?” (Heath 1982:111). Kristeva responds with the
theory of a SEMIOTIC CHORA in special relation to both poetic language
and the feminine, which, through its disordering of syntax and logical
sequence and its emphasis on the rhythms, intonations and energies of preverbal
discourse, constantly challenges and transforms the phallocentrism
of the symbolic order. Luce Irigaray, a psychoanalyst who broke with
Lacan’s Ecole Freudienne, argues for a specifically FEMININE
LANGUAGE that is based on an identity with the female anatomy; her
“two-lipped discourse” challenges the unity of phallic symbolic
representation with fluidity and multiplicity, thus indicating possible forms
for the expression of female desire. Michelle Montrelay suggests that there
is a specific, feminine unconscious that exists simultaneously with the
masculine unconscious, thereby enabling her to adhere to the structures of
the phallic economy while arguing for a specifically feminine jouissance
based on “the ‘set’ of feminine drives.” Thus, while maintaining the
symbolic priority of the phallus, she posits a notion of woman not as
“castrated,” but as a “fullness” which has to be repressed, and in that
plenitude lies the “ruin of representation.”
For Mary Ann Doane, the terms of the body and of sexuality are not
reducible to the merely physical (such as in the common-sense definition of
“sexual response”), but are constructed in a matrix of symbolic and social
relations. Still, she finds that an emphasis on the organization of psychic
processes defined only in relation to a masculine subjectivity is in danger of
leaving the female body out entirely. In Joan Copjec’s words, there is a
legitimate “fear of being deceived by the very theory through which we
hope to be brought to truth” (Copjec 1986:58). Doane therefore proposes
that we “try to consider the relation between the female body and
language, never forgetting that it is a relation between two terms and not