Body and Sign–Pinning–2
I would like to focus on the title of Cixous’s contribution: Savoir (thank heaven the translators of the text into English chose not to mess around with it!). “Savoir” references both the French for the verb to know as well as the verb voir, to see, preceded by the feminine declension of the possessive article, sa. Cixous’s linguistic pinning of, supposedly, the masculine categories of knowledge, depth, and power to the feminine preoccupations with surface, appearance, and gaze uncovers their questionable determinations. This pinning also uncovers and makes seen our very need to see in order to distinguish between not only the abilities but the genders and their sexualities as well, for nothing makes us more uncomfortable than the inability to see the markers of such identifications, and nothing makes us more volatile, if not violent, than the inability to know to which of the categories their bearers belong. Invariably, the confusion remains ours as much as it may sometimes be theirs, and so does the responsibility to tolerate it.
While transmogrified into an English Id as a proper noun, a privileged and hence, by the very exercise of its naming and pinning, a properly contained agency, Freud’s es holds on to its most ubiquitous and common of characters with the French rendering ça. Another variation on Cixous’s title is then the one that writes a savoir but also speaks and hears a ça-voir, an it-to-see, and hence a seeing that belongs to and indeed defines as a gerund that which lies at the heart of the unconscious, and hence psychoanalytic, enterprise, a gerund that is only subsequently bifurcated into that which supposedly belongs to either a sa or a son, a feminine or a masculine, a ça or a son, an thing or a sound, an object or a word, ultimately, a body or a representation.
“Avant elle n’etait pas une femme d’abord elle etait une myope c’est-à-dire une masquée” (17): “Before she was not a woman first she was a myopic meaning one masked” (10).
Cixous’s refusal to punctuate her words “properly,” to fix them in a logical order and a structural hierarchy, which is to say to pin them to, among many other things, a pre-formed gender, underscores the varied ways in which they are to be understood bodily, sensually, as they are read and/or heard. Depending on its pauses and stresses, “Before she was not a woman first she was a myopic meaning one masked” could point to any one of the following: she was already myopic before she had become woman; while myopic and woman, the site of her primary difference lay in her sight and not in her genitalia; myopia had afforded her a mask behind which she could be whatever woman she chose, if and when she chose; she is now the woman who had once been masked by her myopia; she had once held a myopic meaning that one masked (while available to the English translation, this last reading is significantly absent from the French original).
These are but the beginnings of a potentially inexhaustible series of meanings that points to the instability not so much of meaning per se but of the gendered punctuations to which we have pinned it, forcibly, exclusively. Much of what has been said and written of sexual difference over the last century ascribes it the status of an access code to most of what constitutes and is legitimized as, amongst others, feminist, psychoanalytic, and cultural theory. Much remains to be written of that code’s complications and ambivalences. In the meantime, what needs to be articulated is a reassessment of the very practice of coding as it ascribes to any difference, be it of gender, sexuality, ability, class, race, or what not, a primacy over and above any other bodily marker. In her Savoir, and whether wittingly or not one has no easy way of telling, Cixous points to a network of markers that may be prioritised, i.e., given shape and perspective, only in relation to and in the context of a specific body and a specific life. Gone is the practice of investing this or that quality with a universal privilege, the one with which every therapeutic, intellectual, and/or political project must comply, the one to which every move must be pinned. Cixous indeed opens the door onto a practice that is not only concerned with the specifics of a certain relationship between femininity and myopia, gender and vision, body and perspective, but with the implicit but not any the less crucial redefinition of the practice of pinning as inevitably and synchronically multiple.
This entry was posted on 13 December 2007 at 11:58 pm and is filed under Body and Sign, Cixous, Freud, Language, MetaTherapeutics, Speaking Desire . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
