Sexuality in the Field of Vision. Jacqueline Rose
throws into crisis the dichotomy on which the appeal to the reality of the event (amongst others) clearly rests. Perhaps for women it is of particular importance that we find a language which allows us to recognise our part in intolerable structures — but in a way which renders us neither the pure victims nor the sole agents of our distress. In its strange attention to an involvement in a structure (say, sexual difference) no more reducible to false consciousness or complicity than to adaptation or ease, psychoanalysis might in fact allow us to rethink this vexed political question.
Let’s turn the critique of psychoanalysis around for a moment and say, not that the concept of a divided subjectivity is incompatible with political analysis and demand, but that feminism, through its foregrounding of sexuality (site of fantasies, impasses, conflict and desire) and of sexual difference (the structure towards which all of this constantly tends but against which it just as constantly breaks) is in a privileged position to challenge the dualities (inside/outside, victim/aggressor, real event/fantasy, and even good/evil) upon which so much traditional political analysis has so often relied. For it remains the case that — without reifying the idea of a pure fragmentation which would be as futile as it would be psychically unmanageable for the subject — only the concept of a subjectivity at odds with itself gives back to women the right to an impasse at the point of sexual identity, with no nostalgia whatsoever for its possible or future integration into a norm. Which is why someone like Habermas, coming from a very different position, who looks to psychoanalysis to solve the problem of how a class comes to knowledge of itself, and hence as a means to the pure rationality of the integrated political subject, so utterly misses the point.
It does seem to me, however, that it is precisely because of what psychoanalysis throws into question at just this level that feminism too, which has centred sexuality on the political stage, often about turns on psychoanalysis when faced with the twists and vicissitudes which psychoanalysis exposes at the heart of sexuality itself. Today the terms of the objections have shifted from the critique of phallocentrism to the argument that feminism needs access to an integrated subjectivity more than its demise.24 Or else it takes the form of a new asserted politics of sexuality in all its multiplicity, but one from which any idea of the psychic as an area of difficulty has been dropped.25
In all of this, what is worth noting is the strange relationship of psychoanalysis to the changing terms of feminist analysis and debate. Thus feminism asks psychoanalysis for an account of how ideologies are imposed upon subjects and how female identity is acquired, only to find that the concepts of fantasy and the unconscious rule any notion of pure imposition or full acquisition out of bounds. Or more recently, as feminism turns to the practices and limits of sexuality, calling for a pluralism which the analytic concept of a multifarious sexual disposition might appear to legitimate or support, it finds itself up against the problem of any sexual identity for the subject and the lie of any simple assertion of self. Perhaps even more difficult, as feminism turns to questions of censorship, violence and sado-masochism, psychoanalysis hands back to it a fundamental violence of the psychic realm — hands back to it, therefore, nothing less than the difficulty of sexuality itself.
For if psychic life has its own violence; if there is an aggression in the very movement of the drives; if sexual difference, because of the forcing it requires, leaves the subject divided against the sexual other as well as herself or himself; if the earliest instances of female sexuality contain a difficulty not solely explicable in terms of the violent repudiation with which the little girl leaves them behind — if any of these statements have any force (they can be attributed respectively, if loosely, to Melanie Klein, Jacques Lacan and Julia Kristeva), then there can be no analysis for women which sees violence solely as accident, imposition or external event. Only a rigid dualism pits fantasy against the real; only an attempt to reduce the difference between them by making one a pure reflection of the other has, finally, to set them so totally apart.
Thus feminism inherits the debates of the 1920s and 30s, not even in two, but in three stages. First the quarrel over sexual difference (the dispute over the phallocentrism of Freud); then the concept of ideology (femininity as a norm); and now the concept of the death drive which was no less controversial than the other two. For the debates over the real event and the limits of what is tolerable in sexual life, clearly contain within them this question of how, or where, violence should be placed. ‘Where does the misery come from?’ — this was the question put by Reich to Freud when he rejected the concept of the death drive, which has been the point at which more than one radical Freudian has broken with psychoanalysis.26 Fenichel also criticised the concept precisely for the way it could be misused to ‘eliminate the social factor from the etiology of the neuroses’, but in the rest of this same paper, although these points are rarely quoted, he argues for the destructive character of the earliest psychic impulses and, against the dualism inherent in Freud’s own conception, posits Nirvana as a general principle of instinctual life.27 If this is important today, it is only because we seem to be gravitating to a point where that same break with psychoanalysis is taking place. Thus sexual violence enters the political scene for reasons which go way beyond psychoanalysis (sexual politics in the immediate sense), only to find itself drawn once again into the confrontation with Freud. In response to which, violence is relegated wholly to the outside. But at that same moment — and with an almost moral distaste — it is the psychic dynamic of sexuality per se which is discarded.
At the same time, in this overall clash between psychoanalysis and a politics of sexuality based on assertion and will, the historical and national differences between the different emphases is important. The different feminist responses to, and uses of, Freud can only be properly understood in terms of the context in which they emerged. Thus the radical feminist rejection of Freud is in part a response to the analytic institution in America where, once the case for lay analysis was lost, then the ‘defeminisation’ no less than the depoliticisation of the analytic community was assured.28 In France, on the other hand, the first links of Lacanian psychoanalysis were with avant-garde artistic practice and surrealism which guaranteed it a position of contestation in relation to bourgeois culture and norms, as well as at least partly explaining its attention to the slippages of language. Furthermore, its specific object of criticism was the very form of psychoanalysis which writers like Millett and Firestone were later to attack. In England, the feminist case comes through Marxism and the theory of ideology which connects with that much earlier radical Freudian project. If we take Montrelay, Mitchell and Millett, they can obviously be set against each other in the uses they make (or do not make) of Freud, but the attention to the play of language in all its dislocating effects, to the constraints of ideology, and to the politics of self-expression, identity and power, also point to crucial historical differences which should perhaps not be theoretically reduced to each other, and then resolved.
One strand of that institutional history and of the cross-currents between different cultures and politics should finally, if briefly, be mentioned. This is the recent assimilation of a literary Freud into the academic establishment. For while the feminist critique of psychoanalysis repeats itself outside, or even against, institution and academy, albeit in new terms, psychoanalysis is being incorporated into literary method, a strange relic of the link in France at least — for this is a French Freud — between psychoanalysis and the avant-garde text. Decisively informing a whole strand of artistic production in the visual image, photography and film, psychoanalysis simultaneously moves into literary analysis in conjunction with what is in fact a sustained and influential critique by Derrida of Lacan and, through him, of Freud.29 Lacan himself always argued that only those who were alert to the processes of literary writing would understand his linguistic reading of Freud. But we need to ask what price this absorption of psychoanalysis — as practice and institution—into writing and reading has for the understanding of subjectivity and for feminism alike.
On the far side of the earlier critiques, this engagement with psychoanalysis aims for all those points in psychoanalytic discourse which reinforce the category of the subject, which Derrida sees as a vestige of the logocentrism of the West. Here the phallocentrism of Freud is objected to, not as a manifestation of male institutional power nor in the name of an identity of women, but in terms of the whole order of representation which supports it. One in which the phallic term receives its inscription at the level of a wholly general metaphysical law.