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2001-12-11 - 4:38 p.m.
Note: This work is copyright protected. Jennifer Slafkosky
ECLS 499
Professor Montag
December 16, 1999
The Body: A Modification
According to Luce Irigaray, the body plays an integral, if subversive, role in Lacanian ideology even though Lacan appears to move psychoanalysis away from biology and to the realm of language. In fact, Lacan is generally credited with advancing the women�s movement by refuting the significance of physical gender difference in psychoanalysis. In opposition, Irigaray asserts that it is this very suppression of physical difference that leaves intact the phallocentric system. According to Irigaray, Lacan upholds a subtly phallocentric view of women that ultimately renounces their specificity and, in turn, recreates them as representations of men.
To first understand Irigaray�s critique of Lacan it is necessary to address her critique of Freud. In fact, it is Lacan�s non-biologistic re-evaluation of Freudian doctrine that is the center of Irigaray�s argument. Traditionally feminists critiqued psychoanalysis as centered on a notion of femininity that was represented as perverse, insufficient, �castrated� within psychoanalytic doctrine. Psychoanalytic theories, particularly the Oedipus complex, appeared to focus on a biologistic hierarchy that privileged the phallus and abnormalized the female body. Therefore, in order for women to achieve �equality� with men, biological differences had to be overlooked.
However, Lacan critiques this position claiming that Freudian doctrine is not centered on biology; that the body is, in fact, nothing more than a signifier of the desire to be recognized by the Other. Lacan�s reading of Freud, through the lens of Hegel, leads him to determine that psychoanalysis is not concerned with the biologistic functions of the body as a model for sexuality. Instead, the Subject both desires and requires the Other in order to recognize itself and therefore the Subject is defined by its lack of the unattainable other�manque-�-�tre, or �lack of being.� Lacan contests that this desire is derived from language, not biology, and therefore �the phallus is the privileged signifier of that mark in which the role of the logos is joined with the advent of desire�(�crits 287).
The interaction between language and desire, in the psychoanalytic sense, is particularly vital for Lacan because the connection between the logos and desire, from his perspective, is inherently flawed. A division exists within the self that is complicated by a missing link between language and desire. This ever-absent copula is signified by the phallus and consequently the phallus is the absent copula to the Other, representing the inherent division of the self. It is vital to note that Lacan�s view of the phallus as an absent copula across the great divide of the self is a non-biologistic view�-all people, regardless of physical gender, lack the phallus and all must search for it in order to gain subjectivity.
In the �crits, Lacan introduces the notion of universal castration. He states that differences between women and men have no actuality prior to the existence of discourse. However, with both men and women as �castrated� subjects the concept of gender would be obsolete. How then does Lacan account for gender identification? Defining sexual difference is a problem that appears in Lacanian doctrine not as biology but rather as a linguistic matter, driven by desire.
It is important to note that Lacan utilizes the Freudian term the �phallus� in order to acknowledge the relationship between the psychoanalytic and linguistic representations of desire.
It can be said that this signifier is chosen because it is the most tangible element in the real of sexual copulation, and also the most symbolic in the literal (typographical) sense of the term, since it is equivalent there to the (logical) copula. �crits 287
This statement implies that any structure other than the phallus is somehow intangible, undefined, and therefore incapable of sufficiently bridging the division of the self. Furthermore, if the letter is the materiality of language, as Lacan notes in �The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious,� then the copula to the self is embodied in the symbol of the phallus because the phallus is the only �tangible� element in the �real� of sexual copulation. The phallus then becomes the �letter,� a signifier among other signifiers that represents the �real� and absent copula to the self. By affirming a necessary relation between biology and linguistics, Lacan describes the body as representative of linguistic materiality.
The body can be seen as the articulation of a demand for the phallus; the desire to reach the Other. Therefore, the Other and the body of the Other can be seen as that which necessarily signifies the satisfaction of desire and which simultaneously can not fulfill that demand. Each �partner� desires to be the signifier of the phallus to the other, a desire that ultimately reflects a need to exist as the same, a longing for the self.
As a signifier of desire, the body becomes an instrument of speech:
This passion of the signifier now becomes a new dimension of the human condition in that it is not only man who speaks, but that in man and through man it speaks (ca parle), that his nature is woven by effects in which is to be found the structure of language, of which he becomes the material, and that therefore there resounds in him, beyond what could be conceived of as a psychology of ideas, the relation of speech. �crits 284
It is not the body that articulates desire, desire being non-biological; instead desire articulates itself through the body. The �nature� of the body is a material manifestation of language and therefore within the body is the inherent split--the failed interaction of speech. In this sense, the subject can be seen as castrated, because the failure of the relation of speech implies a missing �piece� (the phallus) or absent connection.
While the male may desire a representation of the phallus in the woman, �the signifier of the phallus constitutes her as giving in love what she does not have,� her body is merely the signifier of the signifier of the phallus. Therefore, �his own desire for the phallus will make its signifier emerge in its persistent divergence towards �another woman� who may signify the phallus in various ways�(�crits 290).
In this sense, it is impossible for the male to satisfy his desire through woman because she must �reject an essential part of femininity� in order to possess the phallus; she must become masculine. Lacan states: �It is for that which she is not that she wishes to be desired as well as loved,� implying that one can never be feminine and simultaneously possess the phallus. Though Lacan claims that the phallus is non-biological and therefore non-gendered, it still appears that woman can not possess the phallus without losing what is essentially feminine about herself.
Significantly, Irigaray�s critique of Lacan begins precisely with this detour from biology:
Freud brought to light something that had been operative all along though it remained implicit, hidden, unknown: the sexual indifference that underlies the truth of any science, the logic of every discourse. This is readily apparent in they way Freud defines female sexuality. In fact, this sexuality is never defined with respect to any sex but the masculine. This Sex 69
While at first a return to biology seems antithetical to the feminist protest for equality, Irigaray notes that �women merely �equal� to men would be �like them,� therefore not women�(This Sex 166). Therefore it is not biology that excludes women from discourse but the denial of biology, the reference to the feminine only in terms of the masculine. In this sense the denial of sexual difference relegates all human beings to the status of a castrated male, losing any feminine specificity to the pattern of discourse.
In Encore, Lacan describes the body in terms of an absence, incompleteness, the �not-all�. This vision of the body as �not-all� is precisely what Luce Irigaray claims is phallocentric within Lacanian ideology. The inscription of lack on either the male or the female body is an act of phallocentrism because it implies that the self is insufficient without the phallus. The vision of a lacking body will always represent a male physical standard, will always relegate femininity into the marginal, because even if all bodies are �lacking,� they appear to lack in different ways. For the male, lack renders visions of impotence, loss of manhood, marginality. Without the phallus male bodies have lost their power, their potency, as Subjects. However, for woman the case is even more distorted because her very existence signifies loss, while she herself has never �lost� anything.
Irigaray critiques Lacan in a manner that intrinsically denies the fundamental principles upon which he bases his argument. By essentially psychoanalyzing him, Irigaray can discover what essential parts of the argument that Lacan himself represses. By viewing all bodies as castrated Lacan does not actually remove the constricting label of gender from all bodies but imposes one gender; the gender of �lack� which presupposes an object lost or missing. The male is primary through absence. For Irigaray woman has come symbolize lack.
In Lacan�s reading of Freud it is apparent that the structures of female anatomy are viewed in terms of a masculine model. In the essay �The Signification of the Phallus,� from the Ecrits, Lacan discusses Freud�s phallic stage:
We know that in this term Freud specifies the first genital maturation: on the one hand, it would seem to be characterized by the imaginary dominance of the phallic attribute and by masturbatory jouissance and, on the other, it localizes this jouissance for the woman in the clitoris, which is thus raised to the function of the phallus. It therefore seems to exclude in both sexes, until the end of this stage, that is, to the decline of the Oedipal stage, all instinctual mapping of the vagina as locus on genital penetration. (Ecrits 282)
If female anatomy is �raised to the function of the phallus� then it is implied that the female body exists in a role subservient to that of the male body. Furthermore, woman�s body can only be judged by this phallic standard, her clitoris can only be compared to the penis, in terms of insignificance, rather than difference.
According to Freud, the vagina can not be recognized by either sex during the Oedipal stage and therefore the recognition of femininity, of difference, is not even possible because all bodies are essentially viewed as male, some more sufficient (phallic) than others. A hierarchy of worth is placed on bodies, with phallic bodies on top and �castrated� bodies on the bottom. To impose gradations of masculinity upon two separate types of bodies is destructive to those who inhabit the �lesser� male bodies. While Lacan rejects the Freudian biological fa�ade he does not overthrow the phallic regime that is implicit in this assertion of biology. Instead he circles around it, rejecting the generalized biological assertions that are so offensive to feminists but drawing from Freudian theory what is untainted by the biological. In a sense, Lacan represses his structural dependence on biology in favor of a more abstract, egalitarian philosophy. While the rejection of biological gender appears to be a movement towards an even distribution of power, the power is still phallic power and equality is only possible for those who can possess the phallus.
It is then necessary, from Irigaray�s perspective to assert a difference that does not connote castration. The great travesty of discourse, from an Irigarian perspective, is its inability to view woman as anything other than a negation of masculinity. Even Lacan�s reading of Freud seems to presume that subjectivity is possible for all human beings as long as they are castrated, meaning that the phallus still functions as a regulating force. For girls, possessing the function of the phallus is only possible during the Oedipal stage after which she must recognize her vagina as the site for jouissance, the pleasure of the other. Thus, pleasure can only be understood as phallic pleasure, experienced before the transition into obscurity, the �dark continent� of vaginal �awareness.�
As Irigaray notes in Speculum of the Other Woman, ��Nature� is forever dodging his [the subject�s] projects of representation, of reproduction�(134). If �nature� is representative of the object, and therefore femininity, then the �knowledge� of the object is forever �dodging� the subject�s powers of appropriation and alteration in order to maintain that which makes it specific, un-objectified. One can then presume that feminine knowledge is inherently different, separate, from the knowledge of the subject. It is apparent that the subject�s knowledge is in fact narrowly circumscribed by his own reflection, in the sense that the subject can only gain identity through the reflective properties of the object. In this same sense, the subject�s knowledge can only be reproduced, not extended. Irigaray addresses this type of knowledge/logos cloning by stating:
The �subject� plays at multiplying himself, even deforming himself, in this process. He is father, mother and child(ren). And the relationships between them. He is masculine and feminine and the relationships between them. What mockery of generation, parody of copulation and genealogy, drawing its strength from the same model, from the model of the same: the subject. In whose sight everything outside remains forever a condition making possible the image and the reproduction of the self. A faithful, polished mirror, empty of altering reflections. Immaculate of all auto-copies. Other because wholly in the service of the same subject to whom it would present its surfaces, candid in their self ignorance. (Speculum 136)
The repetition of the subject�s knowledge, the only possible knowledge within discourse, presents itself as a closed monologue between the subject and itself. Consequently the object can only participate as the strange, mute, but necessary other that is �lapsed within, disquieting in its shadow and its rage, sustaining the organization of a universe eternally identical to the self�(Speculum 135). The implication here is that the universe is upheld by forces beyond that of the subject, namely the object, and that �truth� is obscured by the inherent narcissism of the subject�s knowledge. The subject is constantly on a quest to appropriate new knowledge, yet �only asks (himself) questions that he can already answer, using the supply of instruments he has available to assimilate even the disasters in his history�(Speculum 137). Therefore the base of knowledge outside of his own reflection, embodied in the corporeal essence of the other, is ignored, disqualified from the validating status as a �body� of knowledge.
Femininity is forced into a type of perversion, a distortion of knowledge, due to its status in masculine discourse as �castrated.� The female body is deemed perverse because it lacks the phallus, the corporeal symbol of �truth� and legitimacy by masculine standards. From this perspective, femininity embodies a sort of lie because there is no corporeal signifier, no visible clue, to prove that women can in fact embody �truth�. Instead, femininity appears to the masculine eye to hold a type of subversive knowledge, an invisible (non-phallic) power that threatens to upset, to castrate, the standards by which the world is perceived.
The subject is ��wounded,� threatened by �castration,� by anything he cannot see directly, anything he cannot perceive like himself�(Speculum 138). In fact Irigaray argues that �the �subject� sidles up to the truth, squints at it, obliquely, in an attempt to gain possession of what truth can no longer say�(Speculum 136). Feminine bodies and knowledge are distinctly separate from the phallic discourse that attempts to describe them. The act of describing femininity on the part of phallic syntax is an attempt to appropriate the knowledge that is amassed by the female body. Moreover, language already acts to demarcate and delineate the body by labeling its structures and describing its movements and therefore does the same to knowledge. If the physical body necessarily becomes the site through which knowledge is accumulated, and language is the tool through which knowledge is articulated, then there must be more than one type syntax, one type of body, one type of knowledge, otherwise how does one account for sexual difference at all? The �body� of language, knowledge, gender, according to Irigaray must follow a system of difference, an open structure that allows for variation and the value of that variation.
The female body is seen as an insufficient replica of the male phallic standard and therefore her place in discourse, her voice, her pleasure are all seen as insufficient copies of the truth. While a �castrated� male lacks the phallus, the term �castration� holding a Freudian intimation of �loss,� it is implied that he once had it. For woman, on the other hand, the lack of the phallus is inherent; she has never possessed the phallus, and she never will. In this sense it would appear ludicrous to call woman �castrated� because she can not �lose� something that she never had. This fact renders woman linguistically indescribable because the phallus is integral to the structure of language and discourse. posits that discourse is complete, it is woman that is �not-all� and therefore there is �always something in her that escapes discourse�(Encore 33). From this perspective woman�s exclusion is not the fault of discourse, the blame rests on woman herself:
Thus, momentarily, it can be useful to hold the Other responsible for this: if the libido is masculine, it is only from that place where she is whole, the dear woman---that is to say, from that place where man sees her, and only from there---that the dear woman can have an unconscious. Encore 10
This is to say that desire is masculine and therefore it is only as the focus of man�s desire that she herself can be allowed to desire. From this perspective Irigaray claims correctly that woman is still inscribed in ��masculine� games of tropes and tropisms. By converting her to a discourse that denies the specificity of her pleasure by inscribing it as the hollow, the intaglio, the negative, even as the censured other of its phallic assertions�(Speculum 141). Woman�s desire is inscribed by masculine syntax, and her pleasure, which escapes discourse, is considered negative, perverse, not-pleasurable because it is not phallic.
The problem exists in woman�s inability to describe her own pleasure, which is due to the masculine structure of syntax that regards her as negative. As Lacan states in Encore, �Regarding feminine sexuality, our colleagues, the lady analysts, do not tell us�the whole story!�(57). He goes on to claim that when women do attempt to speak of their pleasure they �don�t know what they are saying,� their discourse is somehow incomplete. Irigaray counters that woman�s exclusion is �internal to an order from which nothing escapes: the order of man�s discourse�(This Sex 88). She points out that man has used woman as a tool within language to define what is deficiency, �he has inscribed her in discourse, but as a lack, as fault or flaw�(This Sex 89).
With the masculine body and masculine pleasure as standard criterion for subjectivity, woman�s place is marginal, subscribed to her by masculine structural lack, not a lack of her own. Irigaray notes �woman has no unconscious except the one man gives her. Enjoying a woman, psychoanalyzing a woman, amounts then, for a man, to reappropriating for himself the unconscious that he has lent her�(This Sex 94). Woman�s ever-changing, ever-cycling body is re-objectified as a tool to uphold the structure of language: �Thus her body is not an issue, �the dear woman,� but rather what she is made to uphold of the operation of a language that is unaware of itself�(This Sex 93). Unaware of itself because it is not, in fact, itself. It is a copy, a mimicry, a reflection of the subject�s body and his pleasure, his �enjoying of a body, of the body that, as Other, symbolizes it, and perhaps includes something that serves to bring about the delineation of another form of substance, the enjoying substance� (Encore). Therefore the Subject is enjoying not the Object�s body but his own body, his reflected image, �fantasizing that she wants to take the part of his own body that he values most highly.� Irigaray argues that �he skips a logical step. If she wants something, it is by virtue of the unconscious that he has �imputed� to her. She wills nothing but what he attributes to her�(This Sex 94). Desiring the reflection of his own desire, the Subject achieves his pleasure, his phallic jouissance, in which the Object can not partake.
In Encore Lacan states �there is no other than phallic jouissance---except the one concerning which woman doesn�t breathe a word, perhaps because she doesn�t know it, the one that makes her not-whole�(60). Implicated in this statement is the belief that women do not know their own pleasure, or more specifically that women do not know their pleasure as men know their own pleasure. If women do not understand their own pleasure then they also must not understand their own bodies. Therefore, woman�s pleasure as well as her body is somehow illegitimate. Her pleasure is the rebellious alter ego of phallic jouissance--lawless and undefinable. �When that strange state of �body� that men call women�s pleasure turns up, it is gratuitous, accidental, unforeseen, �supplementary� to the essential--a state about which women know nothing, from which they do not--therefore--truly derive pleasure�(This Sex 96). Feminine pleasure is therefore illogical, a whim, child�s play, in comparison to phallic jouissance. This inability to articulate the state of her own body, her own pleasure, is what negates feminine existence within syntax. The absence of feminine subjectivity forces her to mimic, inarticulately, the sounds and meanings of masculine language.
Within the ideology of masculine discourse is the fragmented woman; her body, in pieces, strewn between and throughout the pillars of syntax. The quest for the woman as a whole body is sought within the blanks of her speech, the places where she falters, the places where she is silent.
A woman is stretched out on a leather couch; she is suffering. Her eyes blink, she looks down, she wrinkles her brows, her nose; she wrinkles everything. She speaks badly, stutters, hiccups. From time to time, she makes a strange clucking with her tongue�she is afraid�-of everything; she hurts everywhere�-numb, paralyzed, cramped twisted, warped. �The Guilty One� Catherine Cl�ment 4
Woman�s silence is manifested within the cultural ideology of her body. Visions of her as the sorceress, the witch, the madwoman, the hysteric, are ingrained in Western culture and present themselves in the form of syntactical blanks. As Elaine Showalter notes in The Female Malady, �They [men] have analyzed and illuminated a cultural tradition that represents �woman� as madness, and that uses images of the female body�to stand for irrationality in general�(4). As signifiers of irrationality in masculine language it would be nearly impossible for women to exist as logical, thinking beings. Showalter goes on to state that men �have shown how women, within our dualistic systems of language and representation, are typically situated on the side of irrationality, silence, nature, and body, while men are situated on the side of reason, discourse, culture and mind�(3-4).
From the place where woman defies logic, changes shape, �speaks badly� she is considered insane. Her body is the only thing that speaks for her, and even her body is sometimes mute. As Irigaray notes in Speculum of the Other Woman, �Rack it with radical convulsions, carry back, reimport, those crises that her �body� suffers in her impotence to say what disturbs her�(142). If we choose to take the Lacanian perspective and view woman�s body as a signifier for her desire--her desire to speak--then her lack of pleasure, her �impotence to say what disturbs her� is a physically manifested problem. She is physically unable to articulate that which makes her a woman.
The reticence of the female body is therefore due to an external force, a force that both silences her and inhabits her. Irigaray refers to the �non-visible, therefore not theorizable nature of woman�s sex and pleasure� as a �dark continent�(Speculum 139). Implicated in this terminology is the notion of colonialism. Homogenous syntax renounces her specificity by colonizing her �dark continent,� populating her uncharted territory with the ideology of castration until her native language is lost, forever. Her body becomes a territory to be conquered, unless she first inhabits herself and fends off the colonizer. If she does not inhabit her own body, the colonizer will, and she will learn to speak his language, speak about his body. She will be �unable to say what her body is suffering. Stripped even of the words that are expected of her upon that stage invented to listen to her�(Speculum 140). Her inability to describe herself is what will lead her to madness--at least what appears to be madness to the colonizer:
The expression on her face is contorted, suffering, her eyes blink, she looks at the ground, eyebrows knit in a frown, the naso-labial creases are deep. She speaks with difficulty, in a low voice, interrupted from time to time by a spasmodic speech disorder to the point of stuttering. (Freud, Studies on Hysteria quoted in Cl�ment 11)
The natives are hysterics; it is their feminine sorcery, the colonists say. We will fix it for them, they say, exorcise the beasts, �women�s bodies must be bound so that the constraints will make the demons come out�(Cl�ment 11). The bodies are bound by discourse, the structure destroying the ambiguity, the darkness of the feminine continent. It is a structure that homogenizes, cleanses femininity of its distorting principles and produces a near-exact replica of itself on the body of the �Other.�
As an act of defense against homogenization, Irigaray calls for a �representation of the self/same---that which insists upon its heterogeneity, its otherness�(Speculum 137). It is vital to articulate the distinction between the sexes within discourse because universal castration serves only to relegate woman to the position of the unidentifiable lesser �equal.� Irigaray notes that by attempting to assert herself as a �subject� within discourse, woman discards those attributes that make her female and effectively creates for herself a masculine persona. In an interview Irigaray states:
In other words, the articulation of the reality of my sex is impossible in discourse, and for a structural eidetic reason. My sex is removed, at least as the property of a subject, from the predicative mechanism that assures discursive coherence. This Sex 149
Subjectivity, existence even, is defined by the masculine, making anything other than the masculine an impossibility. While this homogenization of gender benefits woman by giving her symbolic subjectivity within discourse, it is not her own subjectivity, and diametrically opposes that which makes her female. Therefore, woman is a colonized body, her subjectivity that of the colonizer and her language the broken, babbling patois, the hysterical version of her colonizer�s speech.
At one point Lacan labels the speech of women as lalangue, the feminine article la with the noun langue, which can be seen as the �level at which language may �stutter,��(footnote to Encore 44). From this definition, one can see the position of woman within syntax. She is defined by the infantile, the undeveloped, she is in this sense the �not-all� because she has not yet developed a �coherent� language for herself--she is unstructured.
Woman�s madness is therefore her inability to express herself within systems of masculine discourse. Her erratic speech reveals the �blanks in discourse which recall the places of her exclusion and which, by their silent plasticity, ensure the cohesion, the articulation, the coherent expansions of established forms�(Speculum 142). Her exclusion, according to Irigaray, is made visible by her inability to articulate herself, her position in discourse that leaves her metaphorically, physically, mute.
As her voice and body are mysterious to her, so is her pleasure. Lacan states in Encore, �There is a jouissance that is hers, that belongs to that �she� that doesn�t exist and doesn�t signify anything�(74). Woman�s pleasure is enigmatic because the two key factors in defining her pleasure, her body and her voice, are not her own.
Irigaray states in This Sex Which is Not One, �Woman has no unconscious except the one man gives her�she wills nothing but what he attributes to her�(93-4). If this is the case then the pleasure that is willed to her by men is not a pleasure that she herself can enjoy. Instead, it is a pleasure that man attributes to her with the hope of reappropriating it again for himself. In addition, Irigaray states:
So there is, for women, no possible law for their pleasure. No more than there is any possible discourse. Cause, effect, goal�law and discourse form a single system. And if women�-according to him�-can say nothing, know nothing, of their own pleasure, it is because they cannot in any way order themselves within and through a language that would be on some basis their own. This Sex 95
There is nothing for woman within masculine discourse other than an inherent disassociation from that which the structure defines as logical. It would be incorrect to claim that woman is excluded from the system of language; she is very much a part of language. However, language attributes to her qualities of madness, incoherence, infantilism, and hysteria. These images of female insanity operate as �ways of controlling and mastering feminine difference itself�(Showalter 17).
In �The Guilty One,� Catherine Clement gives three examples of women who are represented as madness: Flaubert�s Ennoia, Michelet�s sorceress, and Freud�s classic case of hysteria, Emmy von N___. She states, �These three figures of women have three men as their authors�(4). Madness is then a product of masculine discourse, inscribed upon woman by her inability to speak against it. Woman�s �broken� speech circles around the inevitability of destruction, colonization, and inescapable madness. She plays a role within syntax that necessarily defines masculinity by displaying that which the masculine is not. In this way her role of the madwoman is necessary for the assertion of masculine logic. The existence of the phallus is contingent upon that which can not ever be the phallus. Woman�s body, speech, and pleasure are therefore vital for the continuation of masculine language and must be reappropriated over and over again to rejuvenate, to reproduce, the system already at hand.
Irigaray�s solution to the syntactical colonization of woman�s speech is to:
Press on a little further into the depths, into that so-called dark cave which serves as a hidden foundation to their speculations. For there we expect to find the opaque and silent matrix of a logos immutable in the certainty of its own light, fires and mirrors are beginning to radiate, sapping the evidence of reason at its base! Speculum 144
By inverting syntax it becomes possible to recover meanings hidden behind linguistic structure. Furthermore, it is possible to reclaim the �dark continent� from its foreign inhabitants and return it to the rightful owners. A distinction between colonizer and colonized, masculine and feminine, is necessary in order for women to articulate their own experience. As castrated representations of men, women are mute, hysterical, struggling, because they can not explain what is happening to them. Therefore the acknowledgment of sexual difference is vital to the struggle of women. To define woman by standards of the masculine is to mute her twice: to bind her body through discourse, stifling her ability to protest; and to force her to live as a �man�, or not exist at all. In either sense she is unable to see herself as whole, being �castrated� and �not-all� all at once.
While the Lacanian vision of non-biologistic discourse initially appears to be a feminist ideal, Irigaray�s separation from Lacan and subsequent return to biology raises some disturbing questions about the true place of woman within discourse. Within masculine discourse, woman�s body remains fragmented, �this is the only way for the �subject� to enjoy the body, after having chopped it up, dressed it, disguised it, mortified it in his fantasies�(This Sex 88). As only an object to be �enjoyed,� woman�s existence within the margins of linguistic structure creates for her a persona that is hysterical, unable to communicate with her masculine counterparts, or with herself. It is only through her own distinctive articulation of her sexual difference that she will finally separate from masculine syntax and learn, again, to speak.
The articulation of sexual difference is problematic however because within it is an implied separation from the �body� of linguistic structure. Difference then becomes a type of Cartesian dualism, separating the structure of �mind�, in Western culture masculine language, from the physical body, or �femininity�. In Space, Time, and Perversion, Elizabeth Grosz refers to this dualistic approach as a �Crisis of Reason� which is �in part a consequence of the historical privileging of the purely conceptual or mental over the corporeal; that is, of the inability of Western knowledges to conceive their own materiality�(26). With this statement Grosz appears to criticize the Western ideology of empiricism in which �the procedures of socially legitimized knowledges are assumed to be transparent and neutral conceptual tools which contribute to the growth of knowledges but are unproblematically disposable by them�(STP 27). Knowledge, in other words, is not developed in a neutral environment, but is identified, delineated, by the forces which procure and reproduce it.
By utilizing the terminology of a �sexualization of knowledges,� Grosz attaches a necessary intimation of perspective to �empirical� knowledge. She notes that through Western philosophical doctrine we are �assured that knowledges do not distort, manipulate, or constrain their objects,� however, she argues that the privileging of that which is not corporeal, or �feminine�, creates a structural dynamism favoring phallic conceptions of knowledge/power.
In This Sex Which Is Not One, Irigaray states, �psychoanalysis ought to wonder whether it is even possible to pursue a limited discussion of female sexuality so long as the status of woman in the general economy of the West has never been established�(67). The establishment of a feminine �body� of knowledge is a critical venture in Irigaray�s work and one that she is often criticized for. In Bodies That Matter, Judith Butler claims that Irigaray�s work is a �reenactment of philosophical error [which] requires that we learn how to read her for the difference that her reading performs�(36). Butler�s critique stems from Irigaray�s apparent construction of the feminine as that which is excluded from philosophical doctrine, �Irigaray then isolates the feminine as precisely this constitutive exclusion, whereupon she is compelled to find a way of reading a philosophical text for what it refuses to include�(Bodies 37). In a sense, Irigaray can be accused of committing a form of castration, defining knowledge by what it lacks. Moreover, knowledge that lacks implies castration, a non-phallic knowledge, but not a feminine knowledge. Butler�s analysis of Irigaray attempts to minimize the argument of difference by regarding it as simple reductive reasoning; that the mere articulation of the �blanks�, the lack, in discourse does not necessarily define femininity, but rather continues to construct it in the phallogocentric tradition. Butler questions the very focus on biology as the defining factor in reappropriating the feminine, �this presumption of the material irreducibility of sex has seemed to ground and authorize feminist epistemologies and ethics, as well as gendered analyses of various kinds�(28). She continues by stating: �I want to ask how and why �materiality� has become a sign of irreducibility, that is, how is it that the materiality of sex is understood as that which only bears cultural constructions and, therefore, cannot be a construction?�(28).
However, it is not clear that Irigaray is focused entirely on the materiality of the body as an original point of departure in the development of feminine discourse. Rather, she focuses on the Lacanian privileging of the phallus that subversively acknowledges a masculine standard; one that discredits, but does not completely ignore, biology. In fact, Irigaray herself acknowledges during the course of her argument that biology is not the point to which all other points are reducible: �Indeed, if the sexualized being of these �not-all� women is not a function of the body (at least not their own bodies), they will nevertheless have to serve as object a, the bodily remainder�(This Sex 90). That is, if one follows the Lacanian model and �The sexualized being of these not-all women is not channeled through the body, but through what results from a logical requirement in speech,� then women are still left with the remainder of physicality, the �blanks� that can only be filled with the body. (Lacan Encore, quoted in This Sex 88-9) Furthermore, to begin with knowledge that has always already been appropriated by the masculine, filling in the �blanks� of the monologue to make it a dialogue, does not necessarily prohibit the expansion of these �blanks� into a further feminine monologue. As Elizabeth Grosz notes �If the body is an un- or an inadequately acknowledged condition of knowledges then the sexual specificity of bodies must be a relevant factor in the evaluation of these knowledges�(26).
Language and the body are irreversibly intertwined, the trace of the corporeal marking syntax and the structure of linguistics shaping the body. Therefore, the �sexualization of knowledge� is formative in the process of explicating linguistic structure because the process of acquiring knowledge makes gender �visible� while the acknowledgment of sexual difference sheds a glaring light on the appropriation of what is considered to be truth.
In a discussion of the �body image,� a concept borrowed from Paul Schilder, Grosz describes it as a �map or representation of the degree of narcissistic investment of the subject in its own body and body parts�(Grosz 83). From this perspective, the �subject� must require a direct relationship with its own body, must be familiar with, must possess its own flesh. This connection between the subject and its body becomes necessary according to Grosz because the �body image� is a �differentiated, gridded, and ever-changing registration of the degrees of intensity the subject experiences, measuring not only the psychical but also the physiological changes the body undergoes in its day to day actions and performances�(Grosz 83).
It is therefore necessary for the �subject� to develop a relationship with the body as a whole and with each specific body part, because the very act of gaining knowledge is dependent upon the psychical relationship with the body. In addition, if psychological knowledge and physical knowledge are interdependent then linguistic �subjectivity�, as is discussed by Irigaray, must also function within the same mercurial associations. As Grosz contends:
The body image does not map a biological body onto a psychosocial domain, providing a kind of translation of material into conceptual terms; rather, it attests to the necessary interconstituency of each for the other, the radical inseparability of biological from psychical elements, the mutual dependence of the psychical and biological, and thus the intimate connection between the question of sexual specificity (biological sexual differences) and psychical identity. (85)
Then, how can woman ever gain �subjectivity� if the structure of the relationship between the psychic identity of the subject and the physical body rests on the male corporeal standard, the source of the phallic construction? It is here that a return must be made towards Irigaray and the �body� of her work. �If we keep on speaking the same language together, we�re going to reproduce the same history. Begin the same old stories all over again�listen: all around us, men and women sound just the same�(This Sex 205). Two realities speaking one knowledge, one language, and subjectivity is only awarded to those who are native speakers. To gain �subjectivity� is to become masculine, to refuse subjectivity is to be objectified. The only way to gain actual, corporeal, feminine subjectivity is to reinstate a standard that recognizes the female body as an entity of experience, a site of knowledge.
In a discussion of Maurice Merleau-Ponty�s work Elizabeth Grosz notes that a focus on the body may be �feminism�s major contribution to the production and structure of knowledges---its necessary reliance on lived experience, on experiential acquaintance as a touchstone or criterion of the validity of theoretical postulates�(94). She continues to describe Merleau-Ponty�s conception of ��the flesh,� a term providing the preconditions and the grounds for the distinctions between mind and body, subject and object, and self and other�(Grosz 95). The �flesh� represents both �the inside and the outside, the subject and the object, one sense and another in a common flesh�(Grosz 95). Embodied in the flesh is the �asymmetrical reversibility� of the �material subject to the material world� in which the subject and the object mirror the other�s visibility.(Grosz 102) It is Grosz�s contention that the �feminine may be understood as the unspoken, disembodied underside of the flesh: the flesh Irigaray argues, has a point-for-point congruence with the attributes of both femininity and maternity�(103).
Grosz notes that Irigaray does not entirely agree with Merleau-Ponty�s argument, and in fact critiques it harshly, positing that visual and tactile sensations are not congruently mapped and therefore can not be equal bases for the acquisition of knowledge. However, the notion of the flesh as an entity to live through, simultaneously externally and internally, as opposed to outside of or underneath, as well as Merleau-Ponty�s view of language as �another flesh,� becomes vital to the force of Irigaray�s case.
If language in fact operates as �another flesh,� as Merleau-Ponty posits, then Irigaray�s argument towards a feminine discourse would best be described as a separation from the �other flesh.� She states: �If we don�t invent a language, if we don�t find our body�s language, it will have too few gestures to accompany our story. We shall tire of the same ones, and leave our desires unexpressed, unrealized"(This Sex 214). The invention of a new language would also necessarily entail the invention, or re-invention, of the flesh.
In Bodies That Matter, Judith Butler describes a Platonic economy which �deprives the feminine of a morphe, a shape, for as the receptacle, the feminine is a permanent and, hence, non-living, shapeless non-thing which cannot be named�Plato�s discourse on materiality�does not permit the notion of the female body as a human form�(53). Without �human form� is the female body even a �body� at all? If the only true �body� is then the male body then, due to the necessary connection between the physical and psychological, male consciousness and experience can be the only true knowledge, the only true speech.
Therefore, language would appear to necessitate the concrete redefinition of femininity into a linguistic rubric that recognizes vaginal/clitoral jouissance as coherent, meaningful. However, to define femininity is to run the risk of essentialism, as Grosz states, �Thus, any attempt to define or designate woman or femininity is in danger of relying on commitments that generalize on the basis of the particular, and reduce social construction to biological preformation�(STP 55). So the same problem again arises: to give woman a �body� within the constructs of a phallic society is to reduce her to an elemental, incomplete, castrated level. As Toril Moi notes: �To define �woman� is necessarily to essentialize her�(STP 55). It becomes necessary to discern is how femininity can be normalized in the corporeal sense without being bound indefinitely to terms of the flesh.
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