Appearing before you today to defend a doctorat d’État based upon a body of work produced during a career of almost twenty-five years spent outside the university, in a place where the university may often have come in for criticism, may look to some like an act of defiance or even provocation.
They forget the multiple administrative, symbolic, historical, political, friendly, and emotional ties that have bound me to the university for much longer than that.
It was at the University of Aix-Marseille that I received my initial (literary) education. It was in that institutional context that I became a student teacher in 1956; it was there that I met the man I married; and it was at the Sorbonne that I took my diplôme d’études supérieures.
The MLF chose the Université de Vincennes as the site for its first public demonstration, or its first outing, in the spring of 1970. It was at the University of Paris VIII-Vincennes, the mother campus of Saint-Denis, that I was asked to teach courses on philosophy and psychoanalysis, and I taught some of them together with the Psychanalyse et Politique group between 1970 and 1973. And it was also there that I met several of the women who have shared in my political struggle ever since.
The decision to present and deposit some of the propositions I developed as part of my work at Saint-Denis, the mother university’s daughter university, is therefore inscribed within the history of an encounter between a movement of cultural action and militant research and a university born of the desire to innovate in knowledge, if not to bring about a revolution in knowledge. Once again, there is nothing fortuitous or circumstantial about the overlapping of those territories; on the contrary, it is a mark of fidelity, affinities, overdeterminations, maturations, and renewals. Saint-Denis is indeed Paris VIII, but it is no longer Vincennes. Here we find signs of the site’s renewal, thanks to my political friendship with the woman who was once its president and who offered to be my supervisor. Which means that this is no longer Vincennes and that I am no longer the woman I was in the 1970s.
Less insistent upon maintaining an untamed externality in the attempt to “speak the truth,” but more grounded than ever in these dark times (which seem intent upon spreading to every place, both natural and cultural, in the world), in an awareness that, “to be in truth,” the object of my desire and of my research (the foreclosed knowledge of women) can and must engage in self-questioning and install itself in a place where an adequate ritualization of speech can facilitate its elaboration in a discipline such as feminology. While I am not afraid of losing my heretical status as a result of this excursion, I shall be so bold as to risk the reciprocal integration of a twofold exclusion; I shall risk trying to liberate myself, symbolically perhaps, from my excluded internee status; I shall risk trying to forge a chiastic or open alliance between more than one inside and more than one outside, between mine and yours; I shall risk trying to confront the rigor of academic knowledge with not-yet-legible traces of the foreclosed (in other words, unconscious and excluded) knowledge of women, with a knowledge that I often compare to the Minoan-Mycenaean Linear A script, which has yet to be deciphered.
Being here today does not strike me as a return but rather as a displacement. And my gesture finds in displacement its whole political sense—both its direction and its meaning—of promise. The “homodidact” that I have become—for I was never completely absorbed in any of my institutional formations—is perhaps trying to test (and in my case it really was a test, in the sense of trial or ordeal, attested by several months of psychosomatic symptoms, nightmares, and insomnia) how little autodidacticism there was in my analytic training when I realize that the affirmative component—the epistemological articulation and recomposition of a field and genealogical desire—has always competed with the critical element, the reading of exclusion and the need for deconstruction.
In the life-as-experience that has been my life, in my permanent apprenticeship to the “trade of living,” the university has always been there, on the margins of my work, or my work on its margins, in a permanent counterpoint with which I always had to reckon, without caring too much whether I was going backward or forward, toward an end or a beginning.
The heterogeneous and heteronymous nature of my work is testimony to my displacement; and, as I have said, the feeling of being displaced, here or elsewhere, of appearing where I am not expected, is a trial, one that may, for me, mean wandering between the negative knowledge of women manifested by various institutional discourses and women’s own nonknowledge or unknowledge about themselves.
Fortunately, you members of the jury are here to recognize—with both rigor and benevolence, I hope—as an interpretive act this sign of stubbornness on the part of the subject that I am, adrift, but desiring and waiting.
That the object of my research is also the object of my desire inevitably brings me—me and my research—into contact with psychoanalytic thought and with its masters and its instruments. Lacan (whom I first encountered through his Ēcrits) was the first to conceptualize (to name and substantiate) “the real” as such. Then, and only then, came Freud and his contemporaries, and especially Sándor Ferenczi, whose texts I encountered thanks to my second analysis with Belá Grunberger, a training analyst at the Institute, a Hungarian Jew by origin who was the first analyst to introduce Ferenczi in France. And after him came, quite naturally and in the course of that same second analysis, Melanie Klein, Donald Winnicott, and then, in recent years, Wilfred Bion.
Basically, a classic use of the instrument in both training and practice, loyal to the first of Freud’s principles: “Where id was, there ego shall be.”
1 It seems to me strictly orthodox to want to lift the censorship on the body, just as Freud began by lifting the conscious mind’s censorship on the unconscious; that, as we know, was his major coup, and a political act. At that time the body, which has since become a theoretical object, struck fear into the psychoanalysts who had dedicated themselves to the dead Father. Lacan said much the same thing about it as he said elsewhere about women: “It does not exist, it is pure surface.” The body, the site of dream work, the phantasmatic place par excellence, and therefore the site of the son, who was very much alive, compared with the Father who had already died in the analytic institution.
The transition from psychoanalysis of the subject to psychoanalysis of the body, or “natural psychoanalysis,” resulted in a democratization of symbolic power, even if it did not necessarily give any legitimacy to the flesh , which is the site of the real (and of living thought). Haunted by gestation, which is the paradigm of the other scene, for transference, for what is analytically possible and for “thinking of the other,” psychoanalytic thinking refuses to trace the genealogy of its thought or to think its genealogy. Only Ferenczi made any real attempt to elaborate a theory of genitality, but it remains one of psychoanalytic theory’s fictions, one of the son’s phantasms.
In the 1970s Bion, for his part, fled Germany for that very reason and took refuge in California; he began to theorize thinking (the “alpha function” or “the mother’s ability to daydream”) and revealed women’s ability to contain the other, their responsibility to experience the foreign body as a subject and not an object, without that subject necessarily constituting women as an object, as an object to be forgotten. Where women and their specific libido are concerned, the question of genitality, which either precedes the oral stage or goes beyond the phallic, remains foreclosed, just as the writing of gestation, or the privileged time and space where genealogy comes into play, the time and space of creation as program and project, as proposition and as promise, is usually absent from psychoanalytic discourse.
The fact that the object of my desire is the (living) real—and not the thing—inevitably ties me to the treasures of literature, the science of texts and the practice of writing. One of our counterslogans, in an MLF that thought it was reasonable to desire the impossible, was to want to make the real possible.
The text as the site for deposing stereotypes and universality (a term that can be heard and read as “university”), writing as the moment of the depowering and the deconstruction of what Jacques Derrida calls phallogocentrism, could not but echo women’s powerlessness or their desire to take power only in order to dispossess themselves of it (Monique Wittig expresses this wonderfully in
Les Guérillères).2For me, “poetry as experience”—as an experience of liberation, as an escape from language, which is sometimes analogous with mysticism—naturally entered into an alliance, a relationship, with gestation and found an echo there, for gestation is an experience that takes place outside language, a leap from language into the intimacy of the flesh. The utopian and antitotalitarian character of both these worlds, the old back country that preoccupies poetry and the obscure destiny that lies ahead of us, created, in my view, an indissoluble link between the poetic and the political. This was what led me to establish the publishing house in 1973.
3 It has been an honor to publish—to limit the discussion to French fiction—Chantal Chawaf’s first novel, texts by Emma Santos, Denise Le Dantec, Jeanne Hyvrard, Michèle Ramond, and, above all, from 1975 on, Hélène Cixous, of whom I have had the pleasure of saying, wherever I went, that I regard her, and that I have long regarded her, as our greatest contemporary writer. And I say that in a universal sense, without any distinction as to sex.
Our legal work was the “natural” outcome of the earlier actions that had been the Women’s Movement’s high points; at a moment when there was a lull in the Movement’s activities this work resulted from a series of political acts that had taken us from a call to abstain from voting in 1973—by no means a banal action at the time—to the call to support François Mitterrand in the first round of the 1981 elections; we campaigned with a view to making a transition, perhaps, from a Father’s voice that was becoming stifling (de Gaulle speaking through Giscard) to what I later called a “republic of sons.” The latter, even though women have not greatly profited from it, has at least opened the way to a certain democratization, and it has had the effect of bringing about a change of government and bringing the left to state power.
But our legal work was also the outcome of certain avatars of the struggles that were tearing the movement apart. Oedipal triangulation, the appeal to the law, and the legal charges brought during the court cases of 1976–77 provided a way out of the savage sororicidal struggles that were often orchestrated by male intellectuals or politicians who wanted to see a gladiatorial battle between women.
The Oedipal law in politics takes us from totalitarian violence, from repetition (volte-face, revolt, revolution), and from the omnipotence of the narcissistic subject to the task of democratizing the body of the law.
The law, then, functions as the arbitrator in massacres, as an instrument for partial symbolization, even though foreclosure, in the analytic sense, has not really been analyzed (the concept of foreclosure is also a legal concept). When phallic monism and a pseudo-egalitarianism of unisex symmetry, on which I dwell at length in the documents I have submitted, still hold sway, foreclosure still rules because matricide remains foreclosed (not enshrined in law and dismissed for lack of evidence). We are familiar with what happens when matricide is dealt with in this way, from the Eumenides to Althusser.
4By foreclosing women’s bodies as the space of production of living beings, the law maintains and perpetuates the erasure and nonexistence of the matricial, overlooking its anteriority. The law justifies murder and, by exalting the delirium and perversion of the phallic whole, condemns a humanity that has been cut off from its past to the absence of any future or to a deadly future. (There is now talk of lethal overpopulation, and the UN has just established a commission to look into ways of limiting overpopulation, which is experienced as a cancer, at the very time when George Bush is setting up a fetal tissue bank. While the law takes no account of the matricial, capitalism goes on storing living matter in banks, in a multifaceted industry. That living matter is, I remind you, the speaking-thinking flesh of matricial production).
And, finally, I ask myself, here and now, what “natural law,” as opposed to “the law of the subject,” really is.
5In conclusion, I might say that, in everything I have done, I have been asking, in various ways, just one question: how are we to give a voice to a chapter of history, to a signifier, that has no voice? How can we give existence to foreclosed knowledge? How can we help the women (myself among them?) who are the world to bring women into the world?
In reply, you might ask me: why women, in these distressed times? And I would reply: in order to reinvent ethics.