Nothing Mat(t)ers: A Feminist Critique of Postmodernism

LACAN AND IRIGARAY: ETHICAL LACK AND ETHICAL PRESENCE 111
Mallarmé, not de Staël, de Pisan, Stein. Cixous searches for a text to read “the
many-lifed being that I am” (1975/1986, p. 98) and finds it in the “elsewheres
opened by men who are capable of becoming woman” (1975/1986, p. 98).
Bisexuality for Cixous is being a thousand beings: “Bisexuality—that is to say the
location within oneself of the presence of both sexes, evident and insistent in
different ways according to the individual, the nonexclusion of difference or of a
sex, and starting with this ‘permission’ one gives oneself, the multiplication of the
effects of desire’s inscription on every part of the body and the other body” (1975/
1986, p. 85). Cixous’ bisexuality is not Irigaray’s (1977/1985d) woman-to-women
sexuality of “When Our Lips Speak Together.” Instead, Cixous’ many-sidedness will
allow her to take up all positions, to inhabit and to be both inquisitor and sorceress,
hysteric and psychoanalyst. What she loves is the story of Dora, the outrageous
young woman who obsessed Freud throughout his career. Dora was traded to Mr. K.
by her father who wanted more freedom to pursue his affair with Mrs. K.Dora
resisted and broke off therapy with Freud as well. But Cixous says, “I don’t give a
damn about Dora; I don’t fetishize her. She is the name of a certain force, which
makes the little circus not work anymore” (1975/1986, p. 157). Cixous does give a
damn however about Dora as Story, as dizzying space in which it is possible to
fragment, expand and side “frenetically with the different characters” (1975/1986, p.
148) in a hallucinating, masturbatory mimicry; as text that can be entered by the
polyvalent Cixous experimenting her thousand selves:
As Dora, I have been all the characters she played, the ones who killed her, the
ones who got shivers when she ran through them, and in the end I got away,
having been Freud one day, Mrs. Freud another, also Mr. K…, Mrs. K…—
and the wound Dora inflicted on them. In 1900, I was stifled desire, its rage,
its turbulent effects (1975/1986, p. 99).
Cixous is bi- even multilingual. Contrary to Andrea Nye’s (1989, p. 202) assertion,
Cixous’ l’écriture féminine is decidedly not the practice of Irigaray’s parler entre
elles. Cixous asserts: “It is not because a man [Freud] discovered it that I am going
to be afraid it will be a bearded unconscious. Women have not made discoveries…
that must be changed. But that which has been discovered is valid for the universe”
(Conley: 1984, p. 147). In Speculum of the Other Woman (1985c) Irigaray brilliantly
17. cont. from previous page This slogan, according to Cixous, clearly indicates poetic inadequacy
and a lack of polyvalence. The seminar continues as follows: “The French women students are
silent. Two or three of the foreign women students, perhaps whose libidinal economy has escaped
the ‘feminine’ discursive schema of the seminar, dare to speak. They say that there are, among the
feminists called imbeciles, those who are working on psychoanalysis and women’s liberation, and
that, really, the one doesn’t stir without the other, right [A reference to Irigaray’s work.] The
reaction is frankly bad: “If they work on the unconscious, the unconscious will work them too!”
Again asked for her reasons for this hatred of feminists, Mme. Cixous explains that she has difficulty
explaining to foreigners, such as American feminists, who come out of a cultural context lacking in
class struggle and psychoanalysis, the theoretical importance of this division of women into two
camps. These students must therefore do some catch-up work because the others cannot wait for
them” (Rosi: 1980, p. 10).