Garry Gillard > writing > 263 > Lecture 3

H263 Language, Culture and the Unconscious
Lecture 3: The Unconscious

Jennifer Nash

11 August 1992

Preface
'The unconscious' is a huge topic for a short lecture. When I accepted the task of giving this lecture I decided it would be presumptuous of me to stand here and try to tell you all about it. For that reason I decided to try to deconstruct some of notions and representations of the unconscious, with the aim of remotivating them to expose some already determined views. Walter Benjamin wrote:

Something becomes an object of knowledge only as it 'decays' or is made to disintegrate. 1

Derrida's Spurs, which is an example of this style of 'post-criticism', as it is called, tries to create a new style that is modelled in the material itself; that is in the style of Nietzsche's own writing which is the subject of Derrida's text. Gregory Ulmer writes that, in this work, Derrida links allegory with psychoanalysis to create a 'paraliterature'. 2

The subject of 'the unconscious', it seemed to me, provides the ideal material for this post-critical kind of exploration. Many of the thinkers I will be covering in this lecture (in a conventional manner) believed that the unconscious is coded in symbols and images and not words. For this reason I have put together a tape of some of the images in movies that may  be seen to depict, or may be interpreted as representing, images  of our deep unconscious fears or symbols of our desires. Visual images may, according to some psychoanalysts, speak directly to our unconscious.

You don't need to watch all of what appears of the screen, think of it more as a backdrop for what is being said. Incidentally the films on the tape span nearly a century of film-making and are in no particular order. (Overhead 1)

The only other trace of my original plan is in the last part of the lecture where you will hear a quotational piece of writing performed. This is a compilation of the words of Friedrich Nietzsche and Luce Irigaray set against each other to created an artificial conversation between the two writers. The rest of the lecture is in the more conventional form where I will simply tell you, in an authoritarian sort of way, about the ideas of others.

Introduction
Psychoanalysis starts but doesn't end with Freud. Thinking about the 'unconscious' however, didn't start with Freud. But perhaps because he was responsible for instating the term 'unconscious', so effectively  into our language and our thinking , he remains the main reference point for discussion of the topic, whether we wish to avoid him or not. Much has been written about the unconscious, in nearly a century of debate with returns, either to Freud himself, or to notable interpretations.

Melanie Klein and Jacques Lacan are two psychoanalysts who interpreted and developed Freud's ideas and practices. Although there are many others of acclaim including : Lou Andreas-Salomé, Karen Horney, Karl Abraham, Carl Jung, Ernest Jones, Otto Rank, Alfred Adler, Wilhelm Reich and R.D. Laing.  The work of these analysts will not be examined here for three main reasons none of which is a reflection on the importance and quality of their work.  Firstly and secondly, time doesn't permit and they are not read in this course. And thirdly the work of thinkers including Melanie Klein and Jacques Lacan, that I will consider today, provide the missing links between Freud's thinking, and the thinking of contemporary feminist theorists, who are on this course.  Thus Klein and Lacan are the bridges to Julia Kristeva and Luce Irigaray who you will be reading and to many other contemporary writers—who you may have encountered in other courses—such as Juliet Mitchell, Jacqueline Rose, Toril Moi and Australia's own Elizabeth Grosz.

The modern debate in psychoanalysis considers the relationship between the unconscious,  language and the privileged position of sexuality in the development of the subject. The concept of 'the subject' has been refereed to in different ways under different authors and is sometimes interchangeable with other terms. So you may hear me jump around between the development of ' the individual' or 'the ego' or 'the personality' depending on whose work I am referring to.

The debate in psychoanalysis has become intermarried with the modern feminist debate in the past twenty years to the extent that thinking about the unconscious, that doesn't reflect on feminist issues, seems to hardly occur, or it fails to  be published.

'The history of psychoanalysis can in many ways be seen entirely in terms of its engagement with (the) question of feminine sexuality. Freud himself started with the analysis of the hysterical patient.' 3

These patients were almost always women or girls and from his work with them, he came to recognise 'the fragmented and aberrant nature of sexuality itself. Normal sexuality is, therefore an ordering , [of stages] ... which the hysteric refuses... .  The rest of Freud's work can ... be read as a description of how that ordering takes place, which led him back ... to the question of femininity.' 4 Freud's account of these ordering stages is  essentially his theory of the unconscious: which is also why it is so relevant to our topic today.

Feminist debate in the field of psychoanalysis dates back to the 1930s and in particular to an incident that has been called 'the great debate'. This was a scandal created by Ernest Jones when he went to Vienna and chose to lecture on 'feminine sexuality' where he proclaimed, among other things, that the castration complex was derogatory to women. Many analysts of Jones's persuasion at that time, including Melanie Klein, refused Freud's notion that 'the castration complex' alone, divided the sexes and made the human being, human. They believed that earlier separations and anxieties occur for the child many of which are associated with the body of the mother.  Freud's castration complex and Melanie Klein's variation will be outlined in a moment.

 The  feminist debate at this time became focused on the notion that the subject has a primary masculinity or femininity. This idea has been, more recently, criticised for being a narrow, biological explanation that, when taken to its extreme, leads to a focus on sexual difference that positions women in a subsidiary role due to the cultural significance of the phallus.

The 'return to Freud' that occurs in the general movement of the feminist debate now days, is not a return to the letter of his text but to the reopening of the debate via Lacan's reading.  Lacan addressed the issue of feminine sexuality, increasingly throughout his life, an issue which Juliet Mitchell (among others) says is at the centre of a debate that Freud lost. Most analysts have argued that Freud's account of sexual difference has serious limitations and Lacan attempted to resolve these. Lacan is the topic of a later section of this lecture but first I would like to outline the part of Freud that is central to a century of controversy; the Oedipus complex and its inherent castration complex.

Freud
Freud has already been introduced and discussed in this course in lectures and tutorials. By now you will have read The Introductory Lectures   and have thought about the importance of language in psychoanalytic theory and practice. Since there is some explanation of Oedipality on pages 372-382, which you can look at closely in your own time, I will keep my summary brief, and I'm indebted to Juliet Mitchell for parts of it.

Freud's ... concept of the unconscious is a concept that studies how people of all cultures transmit and inherit social (cultural) laws. In each person's unconscious lies all 'ideas' of history; a history that cannot start afresh with each individual but is acquired and added to over time. In order to understand the governing structures of the unconscious we need to consider the ideological functioning involved in the acquisition of these ideas and laws by which we must live. A primary aspect of the law is that we live according to our sexed identity, our ever imperfect 'masculinity' or 'femininity'. 5

'The determining feature in Freud's reconstruction of human history is the murder of the primal father in a prehistorical period. It is the dead father that is the mark of patriarchy. In an imagined pre-social epoch, the father had all the power and all rights over all the women of the clan. A band of sons, all brothers, weak on their own, but strong together, murdered the father to get at his rights...they could not all have his rights and they felt ambivalent about the deed they had committed. They dealt with this in two ways; with laws of totemism and exogamy. No one else could kill the now 'symbolic' father or his heirs as they are protected by a totemic taboo. Furthermore, not one of the brothers can inherit this father's right to all women. For as they cannot all inherit, none shall, and this outcome is ensured by exogamy, (or the marriage laws). This is the start of social law and morality. The brothers identify with the father they have killed, and internalise the guilt which they feel along with the pleasure in his death. The father thus becomes far more powerful in death than in life: it is in death that he institutes human history. The dead, symbolic father is far more crucial than any actual living father who merely transmits his name. This is the story of the origins of patriarchy. It is against this symbolic mark of the dead father that boys and girls find their cultural place within the Oedipus complex. 6

In terms of individual development within the confines of this symbolic structure, the little boy learns his place as the heir to this law of the father and the little girl learns her place within it. At first both sexes want to take the place of  both the mother and the father, but as they cannot take both places, each sex has to learn to repress the characteristics of the other sex. But Freud says that both the boy and girl want to replace the father because of their desire for the mother. The mother meanwhile, desires the phallus-turned-baby and both children desire to be the phallus for the mother. But only the boy can fully identify himself in this role. All primary femininity in both the boy and girl is repressed as it has no place in this set of relations. The girl only acquires her secondary feminine identity, within the law of patriarchy, in her positive Oedipus complex when she is seduced by, or seduces the father. The boy becomes heir to the law with his acceptance of 'symbolic castration' from the father, and the girl learns her feminine destiny with her symbolic seduction of, or by, the father. But it is less important than the boy's castration because she has already acquired the information that she is not the heir to the phallus, she need not fear symbolic castration - she is already castrated. As she cannot receive the … law, her submission to it must  be in establishing herself as its opposite—as all that is loving and irrational. As she cannot be the  heir to the 'law of culture', her task is to ensure that the human race reproduces itself within the supposedly natural family. Such is the condition of patriarchal human history. 7

Melanie Klein
Melanie Klein started work as a psychoanalyst at the time of the First World  War and died in the 1960s. She developed a model of mental development that differed from Freud's primarily on the basis of a more biological starting position. Basically, she believed that the newborn baby brings into the world two main conflicting instincts; love and hate or the life drive and the death wish. Primal repression in Freud's view is something that happens in the individual's prehistory but for Klein, what is unconscious, is the biological condition of the human being.

Klein's unconscious is based on the instincts of the life and the death drives and the affects of these. Freud's unconscious is a dynamic system that works through displacing, condensing or symbolising different elements. We have been discussing this in tutes under the name of dream-work and slips of the tongue etc. Klein's unconscious is full of contents, of fantasies of breasts and other symbols of the mother's body. Her priority is on the mythic images and symbols formed in the pre-linguistic mind of the infant and the images of external objects that have been worked over by the primary processes. (Zoe will go into this in the lecture next week.) This comes about because the baby encounters a world which is both satisfying and frustrating. It exists from the start in a relationship to the mother or part of her (her breast) which later becomes accessible to the baby in the substitute form of an image or fantasy. 8  Klein writes:

My hypothesis is that the infant has an innate unconscious awareness of the existence of the mother. We know that young animals at once turn to the mother and find their food from her. The human animal is not different in that respect, and this instinctual knowledge is the basis for the infant's primal relation to the mother... 9

Klein also stresses the 'desire for a child', as a crucial developmental stage in girls. You will read more about this in the first piece of Klein's writing in the course Reader. Her answer to the 'castration complex' in the Oedipal model is the 'femininity complex' and she criss-crosses the phases of development of the sexes. Thus the boy also has a 'femininity complex' to negotiate in the course of his pre-Oedipal development. In this way Klein is able to explain the boy's periods of attachment to his mother.

Klein disagreed with Freud about when penis-envy occurs and on its significance in the development of the girls. She wanted to stress what she felt Freud had failed to recognise: the significance of the child's early identification with the mother and the further stages of identification including the girls anxiety to be a mother.  This desire is inevitably a frustrated one in the little girl, living within her immature body. Furthermore the girl has a dread that her 'womanhood' might somehow become impaired and this, Klein says, is her equivalent to the 'castration complex'—not penis envy. The girl's fear for her womanhood is what checks her Oedipal impulses, just as castration fear checks the boy's. But the difference here is that the boy's castration complex is checked by the paternal super-ego while the girl's is checked by a maternal super-ego.

Lacan seems to follow Melanie Klein's views of child development in so far as he postulates that the child's earliest experiences are in a state of 'fragmentation'. Zoe Sofoulis in her paper 'Lacklein', which you should have read before next week, outlines other ways in which Jacques Lacan drew on the ideas of Melanie Klein without always acknowledging his debt to her. At this juncture, I would like to turn now to Lacan's view of the unconscious.

Lacan
Jacques Lacan was dedicated to the task of redefining and reformulating the work of Freud by setting it in the cohesive framework of linguistic science, which he felt Freud would have done himself had it been available to him. The tasks of psychoanalysis: to unravel the development of a) the human subject b) the unconscious together with c) the question of human sexuality, Lacan believed, could be assisted by a closer look at d) the function of language in all these domains.

For psychoanalysts of all persuasions, including Lacan, the development of the human subject, her unconscious and sexuality are entwined. A person is formed through their sexuality—their psycho-sexuality—which is closely bound to the development of their unconscious. Language has a primary function in this process.
 Lacan's 'symbolic function', concerning the relationship between the individual and society, is derived from the anthropology of Lévi-Strauss and Marcel Mauss. The 'imaginary function' on the other hand draws on Freud's notion of ego development which Lacan boasts is a 'return to the long-misunderstood Freud'.

Thus Lévi-Strauss, who you will encounter in greater depth later in the course, provided the foundations for much of Lacan's work. Lévi-Strauss elaborated the relation between linguistic and social structures and psychoanalytic thinking and introduced new terminology. From here Lacan developed the vocabulary of concepts for his psychoanalysis that include 'metaphor' and 'metonymy' and 'signifier' and 'signified'. Also, via the lead provided by Lévi-Strauss, Lacan differentiated between need, demand and desire in the constitution of the individual and developed the categories of imaginary, symbolic and real—some of which I will outline in a moment.

 Lacan, never intended a complete break with Freudian concepts by his new approach or linguistic framework. Neither did he wish to break, he says, with the traditional terminology used to describe these. In the original preface to Ecrits he wrote:
'But it does seem to me that these terms can only become that much more clear if their equivalence to the language of contemporary anthropology is established, or even to the latest problems of philosophy, where psychoanalysis has often only to take back its own.' 10

He believed that much psychoanalytical terminology had become deadened and ambiguous by its entry into everyday speech.

Lacan focused on Freud's insistence on the significance of the language of the unconscious, as it irrupts into consciousness via parapraxes, jokes and dreams. He took up this idea to arrive at the central fact that the word symbolizes and renders symbolic the essence of things. Everything that is meaningful for us is inscribed in us, in the archives of our unconscious, by language. 11

Language imposes its order on us from a very early age. Our constitution as conscious subjects occurs when we are slotted into a pre-existing chain of signifying attributes (including male and femaleness). We are culturally constituted. The language of culture, its structures, codes, laws and meanings, comprise the Symbolic Order, in Lacan's view, which ruptures into the pre-linguistic ego of the child and its identifications, or what he calls the Imaginary. His third term, 'the real', is the impossible but endlessly returning moment when the imaginary and the symbolic are grafted together in the subject.

'The Imaginary and the Symbolic Order constitute one of the most fundamental sets of terms in Lacanian theory and are best understood in relation to each other.' 12

In the Imaginary, as in Freud's pre-Oedipal period, there is no separation between the child and the mother, no absence—only presence and total identification. At this stage the child has no consciousness or subjectivity, it is not yet a subject in its own right. Furthermore, Lacan says that at this time it has no unconscious.

With the acquisition of language the child enters the Symbolic order. This roughly equates to the Oedipal crisis when the Oedipal Father splits the child away from the mother and her body.  'Lacan's understanding of the 'name-of-the-father', on which the child's entry into the symbolic order depends, is a reading and a rewriting of Freud's Oedipal model in linguistic and socio-cultural terms.' 13

The name-of -the-father is actually a Lacanian displacement of what Freud bequeathed us, the Oedipal Father. Whereas Freud's Oedipal Father might be taken for a real, biological father, Lacan's 'Name- of-the-Father' operates explicitly in the register of language. The Name-of-the-Father is language, as our inscription into patriarchy. It is the attribution of paternity by law and language. 14

With the loss of the mother, the desire for the Imaginary unity with the mother is necessarily repressed. This primary repression opens the unconscious (or starts it off) since prior to this time, there was no experience of lack in the child's existence. Thus the (now) speaking subject is lack. And the 'phallus' is the sign of lack. The child who can now say 'I am' 'only comes into existence because of the repression of the desire for the lost mother.' 15  Lacan terms this phase 'the mirror stage' (a discussion of which I will return to in a moment.)
 
The second term, (in the set of terms comprising the imaginary, symbolic and real); 'the symbolic' relates to a socialising function which is the imposition of the order of the family, and cultural structures, on the individual. The form of language is the law of culture.  The language of the speaking subject—both the conscious and unconscious language—conforms in structure to the structures of society's words.

All human culture and all life in society is dominated by the Symbolic order, and thus by the phallus as the sign of lack. The subject may or may not like this order of things, but it has no choice: to remain in the Imaginary is equivalent to becoming psychotic and incapable of living in human society. 16

So what exactly is 'the phallus' in Lacan's view and how does it differ from 'the penis'? I think the distinction needs to be made at this juncture. The penis is what men have and women don't, the phallus is the attribute of power which neither men nor women have. The attribute of power is the phallus which refers to and can be confused (in the Imaginary register) with the penis. Because this happens, contemporary feminist psychoanalysts say, this easy confusion is why it seems natural for men to have the power and not women.  In Freud the women's version of the castration complex is called 'penis envy'. Lacan thought it was much smarter to say that what women really want is not the penis but the phallus. 'Penis envy' is Freud's term, but Lacan privileges the terms 'phallus' and 'desire'. But, it seems to many, that Lacan's understanding of the phallus is closer to what Freud meant than the translation of the term 'penis envy' conveys. 17

But the phallus cannot be grasped as a 'concept', for it is the referent of the unconscious and it escapes all inscription—it cannot be pinned down, or represented in an image or a text. Any image or text is merely a translation of the 'phallus'. Language always evokes the phallus, or indicates it, but never exceeds the phallus. So the tape you are watching, of excerpts of films that evoke the phallus, may not succeed as a representation but as merely a translation of the phallus as the referent in the unconscious. Lacan talks about the 'castration' that is experienced by the subject-in-language or, that is to say, the subject in the symbolic order. This castration is because of the split between having or not having a referent like the phallus that is some sort of transcendental truth. 18

For Lacan then, the child's entry into the Symbolic order opens up the unconscious. The primary repression of the desire for unity with the mother creates the unconscious. The unconscious emerges as a result of the repression of desire and is therefore, in a way, constituted as desire.

In the words of Toril Moi: 'Lacan's famous statement "The unconscious is structured like a language" contains an important insight into the nature of desire: for Lacan, desire "behaves" in precisely the same way as language: it moves ceaselessly on from object to object or from signifier to signifier, and will never find full and present satisfaction just as meaning can never be seized as full presence.' 19

But, retracing the sequence of events in the development of the subject, I would like to say a little about Lacan's mirror stage and its place in his view of ego development and sexuality.

The point at which subjectivity begins to form and the subject becomes capable of operating as an 'I' has already been described above in terms of a clash between the social symbolic order and the imaginary order in the subject. Lacan explains how this occurs via his concept of the Mirror Stage. He describes the mirror itself in the following way.

'..the idea of the mirror should be understood as an object which reflects—not just the visible, but also what is heard, touched and willed by the child.' 20

The mother provides the mirror for the child which gives her the first sense of identity. The image is a fiction because the mother does not reflect back an exact image of the child to herself; complete with all its fragmented drives and physical underdevelopment. But the image is salutary for the child, in any case, since it gives her the first sense of a coherent identity through which she can begin to recognise herself.

But the mother is no longer always present for the child when she becomes fully conversant with the symbolic order. Words come to represent, or stand in for the loss or absence of the desired object (the mother). The name-of-the father and the phallus have broken the dyadic unity between mother and child and become the 'third party' in the structure. Therefore the subject must find her place in the social order as a speaking being, while constantly repeating that primary moment of division. The subject is constituted in language as this division or splitting. 21 As the subject speaks her language, complete with her ego identifications including her loss, she forms a moment that is the 'real'. What is always left over is the subject's impossible, primary desire as a 'something other'. This desire is crucial to Lacan's notion of sexuality particularly because of the fact that unlike a 'need' which contains the possibility of being met or satisfied, desire is insatiable.  As Elizabeth Grosz says:

Indeed as far as Lacan is concerned, the relation between desire and language constitute the twin axes of psychoanalytic interpretation. Together they serve to locate the subject as split and divided, a being who fades in the unfolding of discourse. 22

Unlike a demand which can be made conscious and expressed, desire is repressed from articulation because it is barred from consciousness. It is the reality of the unconscious and the way in which the unconscious and sexuality have become coextensive.  Putting it simply, our desire is our unconscious, inarticulate sexuality.

Sexuality is not a socially defined masculinity or femininity that is added later. Nor is it a natural biological drive or instinct- it is a constant force. Sexuality is highly malleable, variable and culturally specific but Lacan says, it is 'pleasure', dominated by a lack. The aims and objects that the sexual drive develops are effects of the social meaning of the child's body and pleasures.

 For Lacan, and Freud before him, sexuality is an essential aspect of the unconscious, but the unconscious constantly undermines the subject from any position of certainty of knowledge of her own psychic processes. One aspect of this undermining by the unconscious is its exposing of the fictional nature of the sexual category to which she or he has been assigned. Individuals must line up on either the side of having or of not having the phallus in the imposed symbolic code.

Lacan's innovations did not constitute a rebellion. His reading of Freud is said to have created a climate of renewed interest in Freud particularly in France and provided a meeting place for different disciplines that hadn't previously existed. The interests and languages of structural anthropology, psychoanalysis, literary criticism, philosophy, feminism and other disciplines had begun to blend.

Kristeva
One of the many new French psychoanalysts who entered the new multi-disciplinary discourse, was Julia Kristeva who, along with other significant contemporary, post-modern, feminist, philosophers (so-called), has actively entered the Lacanian debate. Kristeva herself has been criticised for being too readily supportive of Lacan. I won't say a lot about Kristeva because you will be hearing about her in more detail later in the course. There are two course readings in the Study Guide  that will help. One is a piece by Kristeva and another by Elizabeth Grosz on Kristeva.

Kristeva has written about femininity in terms which seem to equate 'the feminine' with the 'semiotic', or the 'pre-oedipal' in Freud and Klein's terms, or 'the imaginary' in Lacan's. More specifically, she transforms Lacan's distinction between the imaginary and the symbolic order into a distinction between the semiotic and the symbolic. The feminine, for Kristeva, is different or 'other' in relation to language and meaning, but is nevertheless thinkable only within the symbolic, and therefore also necessarily subject to the Law. 23

Kristeva moves from her understanding of the 'semiotic' to the exploration of 'the hidden fantasies of violence and destruction linked to the pre-Oedipal mother' She avoids the idealisation of the pre-Oedipal mother (or the 'semiotic'), as an idealised feminine enclave, by introducing the concept of the 'father of personal prehistory' or the pre-Oedipal father. The first splitting, that sets off the child's ego development, is caused by the mother's desire for the phallus which is, symbolically speaking, the pre-Oedipal father. 24 This splitting occurs in the baby at about four months.

The 'semiotic' constitutes the primary processes in the infant and its motions are predominantly anal and oral and sexually indistinct. Kristeva gathers this semiotic under the term chora, which is Greek for 'enclosed space' or 'womb'. From here Kristeva says the 'semiotic chora' becomes split at the 'thetic' phase. At this point the subject begins to identify itself as a separate identity, as Lacan says it does in the mirror phase. 'Following Lacan, Kristeva posits the mirror phase as the first step that permits the constitution of objects detached from the semiotic chora  and the Oedipal phase with its threat of castration as the moment in which the process of separation or splitting is fully achieved. Once the subject has entered into the symbolic order, the chora will be repressed and can be perceived only as a sort of pulsing 'pressure' on or within symbolic language in the form of contradictions, meaninglessness, disruption, silences and absences. The chora then is a rhythmic undercurrent, not a new language. 25

So femininity is different, something other to the culture, it is not inscribed in the Law. We may only know the feminine in the form of grotesque, cultural stereotypes. Kristeva (unlike Irigaray) doesn't believe that these images can be dispatched. Knowing the origin of the repression of the feminine, and its desire, doesn't by itself dismantle the force. We can only feel the 'feminine' in the disruptions and silences of the male partriarchal language we speak.

Irigaray
This seems to be the ideal place to turn our attention to Luce Irigaray, who has a different view about what can be done to motivate feminine discourse in the gaps of the phallus-dominated symbolic that inscribes our identities. Irigaray following Lacan, found that the only possible subject-position, within our particular symbolic system, known as patriarchy, is masculine. She takes Freud's model for the understanding of dreams of a rebus (which means a riddle composed of  words and syllables) and uses it as a basis for writing. She presents an abundance of thoughts and associations through which the rhythms of the body and the unconscious can break through the strict (masculine) defences of conventional social meaning.  The danger is that the women who attempt this return to the imaginary risk madness.  I haven't said much but I won't say any more at this stage about Irigaray (who is dealt with in another lecture later in the course) except that she is an advocate of radical readings of texts and would probably approve of the way I have recontextualised her words in the quotational text you will hear in a moment. Margaret Whitford says:

I want to argue that it is a mistake to hypostatise Irigaray, to fix her in a single meaning, a single instant of contemporary history, a single moment of the text. The most productive readings are the dynamic ones, which attempt to engage with Irigaray. The key words here are 'mobility' and 'exchange'.  Irigaray explains ... she is trying to produce writing that cannot be reduced to a narrative or a commentary, but that calls for an interlocutor...' 26

The quotational text that follows seems to fit perfectly with these requirements.  All of Irigaray's lines are taken from her 1974 work Speculum of the Other Woman 27from a section in which she calls for less specularization of women by men, and describes the journey back into the unconscious, via the gaps and spaces in language, back to the pre-symbolic madness where women must go, to find a new feminine subjectification that isn't dominated by the phallus.

Nietzsche
But finally, I need to say a few words about Friedrich Nietzsche who pre-dates all of the other thinkers I have mentioned today. He is the other voice in the quotational piece that follows, and in view of his notion of the cyclic nature of time, he would probably approve of being positioned last and not first.

I believe that Nietzsche (1844-1900) laid the foundations of subsequent psychoanalytic theory of the kind that has been mentioned today. See if you can detect material for Freud's 'primal horde' and Oedipus Complex in what follows.

'For Nietzsche all ideas are arbitrary structures of chaos and his answers to whether we should believe them or not was always framed in psychological terms.' 28  He saw the laws of common sense as so deeply embedded in our conceptual structure that we cannot easily identify them. This may sound familiar to you as what has since been designated as 'the symbolic' or the 'law-of-the-father'. For Nietzsche, the world of appearance is a construct of the human mind but is also a world of errors and fantasies. In Nietzsche's own words:

The importance of language for the development of culture lies in the fact that in language man juxtaposed to the one world another world of his own, a place which he thought so sturdy that from it he could move the rest of the world from its foundations and make himself lord over it... he really did believe that in language he had knowledge of the world.' 29

Nietzsche also wrote:

[The Philosopher's].. thinking is less a discovering than a recognizing, a recollection, a coming home to a distant, primeval mental condition, out of which these concepts first took their growth...The amazing family resemblance of all Indian, Greek and German philosophizing is simply enough explained. Precisely where there is a linguistic relationship, it is not to be avoided that, thanks to a common philosophy of grammar—I mean thanks to the unconscious domination and guidance through the same grammatical functions—everything is prepared in advance for a similar development and order of philosophical systems. 30

You won't have failed to notice that Nietzsche uses a word that is translated as 'unconscious' and also that he sees the unconscious as a force that dominates and guides our thinking via grammatical functions.

Nietzsche also says that we operate within a world of useful fictions, constructed in language. In his words: 'We operate only with things that do not exist:  lines, planes, bodies, atoms, divisible time spans, divisible spaces.' 31 Furthermore, there are articles of faith that inherently structure our thoughts and minds and, in his own words again, 'they have been inherited to become, finally, almost the condition of the human species'. 32  The notion of inherited thought structures, we have seen, recurs in Freud and later theories, in particular, as part of the pre-oedipal infant's unconscious.

I'd like to add a final quote of Nietzsche's, the meaning of which is tantalisingly difficult to pin down. He says: 'the grammatical subject of our sentences is converted, through the mythopoetic working of the primitive mentality of man, into the substance of the world.' 33

What lies beneath this linguistic framework is a set of deep, primal, undifferentiated drives that he equates with the personality of the Greek god Dionysus and which include both a full-on drunken love of life and a hunger for death or self-obliteration.

Nietzsche (unlike Irigaray) never sought a new language, although sometimes his frenzied use of poetic diction, his intentionally paradoxical statements and his deliberately perverted use of terms, might be taken as calculated to crack the shell which linguistic habit has erected between our unconscious selves and reality. 34

On that note, sit back, watch the film and listen to the unaltered words of Nietzsche and Irigaray juxtaposed with each other, in a completely forced discursive framework.

Playing with Irigaray and Nietzsche

Nietzsche: Speech is a beautiful foolery: with it man dances over all things.(1985, p234)

Irigaray: ... the horizon line is already drawn, and drawn, in fact, by the "subject" who defines himself at the same time, in a circularity that knows no end except the return, over and over again, upon itself/ himself. (1974, p192)

Nietzsche: "Alas, man recurs eternally! The little man recurs eternally." (1985, p326)
I go new ways, a new speech has come to me; like all creators, I have grown weary of the old tongues. My spirit no longer wants to walk on worn-out soles.? (1985, p108)

Irigaray: The problem is to break down the walls around the (male) one who speaks, sees, thinks, and thereby now confers being upon himself, in a prison of self-sufficiency and a clarity made of the shadows of denial. (1974, p192)

Nietzsche: "Forgive me," answered the shadow, ... "that it is I; and if you do not like me, very good,...I praise you and your good taste in that ... I have unlearned with you belief in words and values and great names. When the Devil casts his skin does his name not also fall away? For that too is a skin...how should I still love myself?...Oh eternal Everywhere, oh eternal Nowhere, oh eternal- Vanity!" (1985, p284-6)
Why was I so frightened in my dream that I awoke? Did not a child carrying a mirror come to me? (1985, p107)

Irigaray: A living mirror, thus, am I (to) your resemblance as you are mine. We are both singular and plural, one and ones, provided that nothing tarnishes the mirrors that fuse in the purity of their exchange. Provided that one, furthermore does not exceed the other in size and quality. (1974, p197)

Nietzsche:  When we endeavour to examine the mirror in itself we discover in the end that we can detect nothing there but the things which it reflects. If we wish to grasp the things reflected we touch nothing in the end but the mirror. (1911, p240)

Irigaray: When I look upon you in the secret of my "soul," I seek (again) the loss of specularization, and try to bring my nature back to its mirroring wholeness ... Or again because this has been explained—by the theological, teleological imagination- as the mutual attraction of the father and the son felt in a loving breast—thereby rescuing the "soul" of man  from being completely lost to that attraction. (1974, p197)
The task is to go back through the house of confinement and the darkness of the night until once again he feels the light that forms and other speculative veils had shrouded from his gaze in an effort to weaken its white heat. All this left man hungry and thirsty. At least sometimes, at least in some places. Even now.(1974, p192)

Nietzsche: The clouds that veil these peaks have to lift for once so that we see them glowing in the sun. Not only do we have to stand in precisely the right spot in order to see this, but the unveiling must have been accomplished by our own soul because it needed some external expression and parable, as if it were a matter of having something to hold on to and retain control of itself ... I mean to say that the world is overfull of beautiful things but nevertheless poor, very poor when it comes to beautiful moments and unveilings of these things. But perhaps this is the most powerful magic of life: it is covered by a veil interwoven with gold, a veil of beautiful possibilities, sparkling with promise, resistance, bashfulness, mockery, pity, and seduction. Yes, life is a woman. (1974, pp271-2)

Irigaray: But as the eye is already guardian to the reason, the first necessity is to slip away unseen. And in fact without seeing much either. In a blind breaching of the philosophers closed chamber, from the matrix of speculation in which he has cloistered himself in order to consider everything clearly. The "soul" escapes outside herself, opening up a crack in the cave (une antrouverture) so that she may penetrate herself once more. The walls of her prison are broken, the distinction between inside/outside transgressed ... Moreover, she doesnt know where she is going, and will have to wander randomly and in darkness ... onward into a touch  that opens the soul again to contact with divine force, to the impact of searing light ...Words begin to fail her. She senses something remains to be said  that resists all speech, that can at best be stammered out.  All words are weak, worn out unfit to translate anything sensibly. For it is no longer a matter of longing for some determinable attribute, some mode of essence, some face of presence. What is expected is neither a this  nor a that , not a here  any more than a there. No being, no places are designated. So the best plan is to abstain from all discourse, to keep quiet, or else utter only a sound so inarticulate that it barely forms a song. (1974, pp192-3)

Nietzsche: O my soul, I taught you to say "today" as well as "once" and "formerly" and to dance over every Here and There and Over-there.
O my soul, I rescued you from all corners, I brushed dust, spiders, and twilight away from you.
O my soul, I washed the petty shame and corner-virtue away from you and persuaded you to stand naked before the eyes of the sun...
O my soul, I gave you the right to say No like the storm and to say Yes as the open sky says Yes: now, silent as light you stand, and you pass through denying storms ...
But if you will not weep nor alleviate in weeping your purple melancholy, you will have it sing..
O my soul, the nameless one for whom only future songs will find a name! And truly, your breath is already fragrant with future songs,
already you glow and dream, already you drink thirstily from all deep, resounding wells of comfort, already your melancholy reposes in the bliss of future songs!
...that I bade you to sing, behold, that was the last thing I had to give!
(1985, p238-40)

Irigaray: No doubt we must edge our way through narrow doorways and along knife-edge paths, dark and terrible, squeeze painfully between two walls, wedge our bodies through slits in order to move into the full light of the caves to be explored.  (1974, p194)

Nietzsche: ..the smallest gap is the most difficult to bridge. (1985, p234).

Irigaray: In an "abyss that swallows up all persons, all names" and her "self identity- as- same", she is "yet to experience a union in its most outrageous nakedness" ... the soul was closed up over the possession of a knowledge which made her quite obtuse, particularly in her claims to the immaculate state that no creature had yet been able to pierce or undo. And which is mixed in a jouissance so extreme, a love so incomprehensible, an illumination so unbounded that un-knowledge thereby becomes desire. Nothing has a price in this divine consummation and consumption ... Even simple counting hinders her fall into the abyss of her prodigality, her madness, expansion and dissipation of self ... Hidden away, she waits for the rapture to return, the ecstasy, the lightening flash, the penetration of the divine touch.(1974, pp194-5)

Nietzsche: ... almost everywhere it was madness which prepared the way for the new idea, which broke the spell of a venerated usage and superstition ... Something in voice and bearing as uncanny and incalculable as the demonic moods of the weather and the seas and therefore worthy of a similar awe and observation? ... wherever there is madness there is also a grain of genius and wisdom- something divine, as one whispered to oneself ... all superior men who were irresistibly drawn to throw off the yoke of any kind of morality and to frame new laws had, if they were not actually mad., no alternative but to make themselves or pretend to be mad - and this indeed applies to innovators in every domain and not only in the domain of priestly and political dogma:- even the innovator of poetical metre had to establish his credentials by madness ... Who would venture to take a look into the wilderness of bitterest and most superfluous agonies of soul in which probably the most fruitful men [and women] of all times have languished! To listen to the sighs of these solitary and agitated minds: Ah, give me madness, you heavenly powers! Madness, that I may at last believe in myself! Give deliriums and convulsions, sudden lights and darkness, terrify me with frost and fire such as no mortal has ever felt, with deafening din and prowling figures, make me howl and whine and crawl like a beast: so that I may only come to believe in myself! ... The new spirit which is in me, whence is it if it is not from you? Prove to me that I am yours; madness alone can prove it. And only too often this fervour achieved its goal all too well:  ... there were in Jerusalem vast madhouses for abortive saints, for those who had surrendered to it their last grain of salt. (1982, pp13-16)

Irigaray: Man's identity in the hommologous, his reason in hommosexuality was preserved by the interpretation ... And perhaps He has chosen her  body to inscribe His will, even if she is less able to read the inscription, poorer in language, crazier in her speech, burdened with matter(s) that history has laid on her, shackled in/by speculative plans that paralyse her desire. (1974, p198)
Therefore she is condemned by confessors or inexperienced voyeurs who are horrified to see or hear her fall stricken to the ground, toss and turn, shriek, grunt, groan convulsively, stiffen, and then fall into a strange sleep. They are scandalized or anxious at the idea of her striking herself so terribly, thrusting sharp points into her stomach, burning her body to put out the fire of lust, searing her whole frame, using these extreme actions both to claim and to arouse her sleeping passions. (1974, p198)
She bathes in a blood that flows over her, hot and purifying. And what she discovers in this divine passion, she neither can nor will translate. (1974, p200)
... And if god who has thus re-proved the fact of her non-value, still loves her, this means that she exists all the same, beyond what anyone may think of her. It means that love conquers everything that has already been said. (1974, p199)

Nietzsche: They wanted to escape from their misery and the stars were too far for them. Then they sighed: Oh if only there were heavenly paths by which to creep into another existence and into Happiness! - then they contrived for themselves their secret ways and their draughts of blood!
Now they thought themselves transported from their bodies and from this earth, these ingrates. Yet to what do they owe the convulsion and joy of their transport? To their bodies and to this earth. (1985, p60)
I am body and soul- so speaks the child. And why should one not speak like children? (1985, p61)
What the sense feels, what the spirit perceives, is never and end in itself. (1985, p62)
Your Self laughs at your Ego and its proud leapings ... The self says to the Ego: Feel pain! Thereupon it suffers and gives thought how to end its suffering.
Even in your folly and contempt, you despisers of the body, you serve your Self. I tell you: your Self itself wants to die and turn away from life.
Your Self can no longer perform that act which it most desires to perform: to create beyond itself. (1985, p62/3)

Irigaray: Her confessor will not always lend an approving ear to this, especially if he lacks experience in such things. But what does that matter, she knows that she can no longer be mistaken. It is enough to know that God loves for her to live, and die. (1974, p202)

Nietzsche: My brother [sister], if you have a virtue and it is your own virtue, you have it in common with no one.
To be sure, you want to call it by a name and caress it; you want to pull its ears and amuse yourself with it ...
You would do better to say: "Unutterable and nameless is that which torments and delights my soul and is also the hunger of my belly." ...
Thus say and stammer: "This is my  good, this I love, just thus do I like it, only thus do I wish the good."  I do not want it as a law of God, I do not want it as a human statute: let it be no sign-post to super earths and paradises. (1985, p63)

Irigaray: And if someone were to object that, with the Good thus within her, she no longer needs to receive it, she would reply in her ateleogical way, that, for her, the one doesnt rule out the other. (1974, p202)

References

Irigaray, Luce, 1974. Speculum of the Other Woman, trans. Gillian C. Gill, New York, Cornell University Press.
Nietzsche, Friedrich, 1911. The Dawn of Day, trans. J.M. Kennedy, Edinburgh, T.N. Foulis.
Nietzsche, Friedrich, 1974. The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann, New York, Vintage Books.
Nietzsche, Friedrich, 1982. Daybreak, trans. R.. Hollingdale, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.
Nietzsche, Friedrich, 1985. Thus Spoke Zarathustra,  trans. R.J. Hollingdale, Middlesex, England, Penguin Books.

Footnotes

Garry Gillard | New: 17 November, 2015 | Now: 20 May, 2021