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Hélene Cixous: A politics of writing
Book Reviews
essay and goes beyond the survey technique to consider important theoretical issues concerning the phuality of women’s experience, besides m the significance of a state balanced as it is between Europe and Asia, Christianity and Islam. Rosalind Marsh entitles her essay “The birth, death, and rebirth of feminist wrih in Russia,” as part of her endeavour to trace the relationship between feminism, marxism. and women’s writing in a society that has undergone a series of traumatic shifts of direction that have had powerful implications for women. Likewise, Celia Hawksworth has the almost impossible task of dealing with Sastern Europe,’ which she handles sensibly and sensitively. Her methodology, given as she points out, that a single essay could not hope to be comprehensive, is to move between writers and countries, offering a representative selection that serves to bring out similarities of tone and experience. The two weakest contributions are Margaret Atack’s essay on France and, very surprisingly, Maggie Humm’s essay on Britain. Both writers seem uncertain of their readers, unsure how much material information to provide and how much to take for granted. As a result. they attempt far too much and the result is a shapeless, baggy piece that in each case contains flashes of insight but which overall is disappointingly vague. My impression about a book such as this is that it should sell well in a lot of countries, and while most of the essays take an international approach, both Atack and Humm seem to feel that they are writing for their own British students who already have all the basic background information. These complaints apart, Helena For&s-Scott has done us all a favour in compiling a richly informative book. SUSANBASSNETT CENTRE FOR BRITISH AND COMPARATIVE CULTURAL STUDIES UNIVERSITY OF WARWICK COVENTRY, UK
LWCE IluGARN: P HIU#KIPHY IN THE mm, by Margaret Whitford. 241 pages. Routledge, London, 1991. Hard cover UKf35.00, soft cover uKf9.99.
Margaret Whitford’s exploration of Lute Irigaray’s work represents a landmark in the study of contemporary French thought. Lucid, rigorous and consistently accessible, her book is intended to offer close analyses of a range of Irigarayan texts, and to present Irigaray not as a spokeswoman for 4criture feminine but rather as a philosopher. whose contribution to feminist thinking has hitherto been inadequately evaluated. Whitford’s study is divided into two &ctio~&. In the first, she establishes the essential premises upon which Irigaray’s work is based. She analyses, for instance, Irigaray’s understanding of the terms ‘imaginary’ and ‘symbolic,’ and outlines her vision of Western (and more especially pbilosophical) discourse as a ‘spec&’ system govern&by a masculine/anal imaginary which elides sexual dlfference. consigns woman to the status of other/object/matter, and constitutes a ‘mirror’ for the male subject. In part two, Whitford explores what Irigaray’s ‘philosophy in the feminine’ aims to achieve, and suggests that it constitutes ‘an act of land reclamation’ whose purpose is to redefme the philosophical terrain by ‘investigating what philosophy has until now been unable to allow in’ (p. 7).
455
Two key aspczts of Irigaray’s project emerge from Whitford’s study. On the one band, Irigaray is shown to offer a systematic, ‘psychoanalytic’ critique of the androcentric assumptions and phantasies which subtend the discursive, symbolic order as it stands. On the other, she is presented as striving to envisage how change in the symbolic might be effected, so that woman can become a subject in language and society. For Whitford, Irigaray is, above all, a ‘theorist of change,’ who endeavours through a variety of means (including the weaving of utopian visions) to alter the status of woman within the Western so&cultural regime. She is not, Whitford argues convincingly, the biological or psychic essentialist her critics have claimed her to be, but rather a pragmatic strategist. whose accounts of feminine identity cannot be disassociated from her efforts to modify the so&l&mbolic order in such a way that women no longer fmd themselves in a state of ‘dereliction.’ Whitford’s monograph. which acknowledges the sometimes hermetic and contradictory character of Irigaray+i oeuvre, is a profoundly honest work. and represmts essential reading for students of French thought. ALEX HUGHES BIRMINGHAM UNIVERSITY, UK
IULENECIXOUB:A POLITICSOF W-G, by Morag Shiach, 136 pages + illustrations and notes. Routledge, London and New York. 1991.
In a lucid and thoughtful introduction, Morag Shiach “announces the colours” of her compact study of prolific writer H&ne Ciious. Refusii to simplify or muddy her palette, she achieves what she sets out to do: portraying the complex trajectory of this major figure of late twentieth-century French letters without turning Ciious into the cult spokesperson for “writing the body” or berating her for an apparent abandonment of feminist theory in favor of postcolonial identity politics. Instead, Shiach argues convincingly for an understanding of Cixous’s works- theory, criticism, and prose fiction (which she treats in three chapters) and theatre (which she examines in a fourth, gi* the best synthesis of Ciious’s dramatic production to date)-as evolutive process. According to Shiach, Ciious has linked throughout her oeuvre questions of writing and performance with attempts to destabilize gender categorizations and national identities. The unwavering “object” (neither Ciious nor Shlach would use such a teleological concept) has been the assertion of alternative and thus liberating forms of subjectivity and intersubjective relations. In Chapter 1 as throughout, Shiach embeds Cixous’s thought within crucial contemporary philosophical debates. Moreover, Shiach engages with the-se debatcs herself. This allows her to respect Ciious’s deconstructive attack on the Oresteia (Sorties, 1975), while at the same time voicing the frustration that reading Cixous sometimes feels like “swimming in cultural mud” @. 15). She makes her case beautifully in her rehearsal of the confusions engendered by Ciious’s well-known statement on and of “feminine writing,” “The Laugh of the Medusa” (1975). Shiach first puts to rest, if uneasily, the charge of essentialism levelled frequently at this essay: She shows how Cixous locates the site of sexual differ-
456
Book Reviews
ence in the nonsexed libido, that is out of corporeal territory. Referring to Domna Stanton’s earlier observations, however, Shiach also protests that Cixous’s lyrical treatment of maternity reintroduces ambiguity into her notion of the body as metaphor. At times, Cixous’s “body” would appear to be nothing if not flesh, blood, and especially. mother’s milk. To use Shiach’s own gloss on Ciious’ major trope of “mining,” she offers up the spectacle of Cixous, theoretician, crossing minefields, planting mines, and und ermining cultural givens but sometimes also mining her own thought in her attempt to write herself out of patriarchy. Of those writers (Joyce, Hoffman, Kleist, Poe, Freud, Liipector) whom Cixous has chosen as partners in an ongoing poetic dialogue, Clarice Lispector. in Shiach’s terms (Chapter 2). presents a Cixousian “double,” her writing “other.” A writer who-like the others of whom Ciious speaks-helps reformulate the idea of the “self” through concentrating on the functioning of the unconscious, Lisp&or also writes to remember and give voice to what has been forgotten and silenced. This ethical imperative weaves through Ciious’s own prose fictions, as do the texts of those writers she admires and reads. One of the great difficulties in reading Cixous. as Shiach points out (Chapter 3), is the extent to which her own erudition htforms and explodes her writing. Shiach’s analysis of Portrait du Soleil(1973) provides, however, an excellent guide to the Ciiousian text. By acknowledging the intertextual presence of Neitxche, Bataille, and Freud and therefore the necessity of reading Cixous in a space beyond dichotomies of inside and outside, body and culture, Shiach shows how this ‘hovel.” as is true of must of Ciious’s fiction, becomes a strategic reworking of some of the West’s oldest mythic sources. Furthermore, Mach suggests to the reader a set of useful critical clues to help apprehend Cixous’s “excessiveness”: concentrating on spatial metaphors and techniques of allusion, exploring the constantly floathtg narrative voice, permitting oneself to feel the violence in Cixous’s grappling with patriarchy and accepting Cixous’s goal of symbolic plurality, accepting, then, a writing practice which moves among text, performance, the unconscious, and biography. In her many fine readings of Cious’s texts (LIeduns, 1969; La, 1976, Le Livre de Promethea, 1983; Mame, 1988). judiciously selected so as to delve into a few key works rather than skimming over the many, Shiach does not hesitate, either, to ask how politically effective such daunting prose can really be. Shiach contends forcefulry that Cixous’s suspiciousness of the impotency of words presages her commitment to theatre: Theatre has allowed Cixous to give concrete form to spatial&d thought and confront the bodily experience of time. Theatre is, consequently, (and Shiach makes palpable how this operates throughout Cixous’s seven plays), the most compelling site for her refusal of the Occident’s instrumentalist rationality and sexual-political economy. Again, Shiach warns how this can lead, as in L’Zndiade ou I’Zndede leurs r&es, 1987, to an expression of “truth” outside the text as well as to a mythic projection of a utopian other. There are a few awkward transitions and lengthy parentheses - efforts to create a metatext for the Ciiousian experience, for example, elaborations of the Pysch and PO perambulations of the 1970s and Edgar AJlan Poe’s co-option by French theoreticians, or the history of the
Th68tre du Soleil. Shiach also assumes a basic familiarity with psychoanalysis, particularly the central Lacanian concepts of “the mirror stage” and the construction of desire based on impossible fulfiient. Neither of these caveats, however, diminishes Shiach’s importance as the commentator who has made reading Ciious both urgent and comprehensible. JUDITHG. MILLER UNIVERSITYOF WISCONSIN-MADISON, USA
MA~ITY AND GENDEU POLICIES WOMI~N AND TBE RISE OF THE E~~~PJMN W-ARE STATES, lMMts-19!Jfts,edited by Gisela Bock and Pat Thane. 259 pages. Routledge. London, 1991. US S59.95; Canada 574.95. According to the editors, this volume seeks to explore some aspects of the relationship between the parallel development of welfare states and of women’s movements between the 1880s and 1950s across seven countries of western Europe, as well as the visions of gender which both of these processes embodied and helped to construct. This purpose is accomplished by the authors of the 12 chapters, although somewhat unevenly. We are offered a wealth of information, including a great deal of colorful detail, particularly about the contributions of individual leaders of women’s movements and labor organizations, and of government officials. The book is, however, considerably less successful in exploring and comparing the development of welfare states. The individual chapters focus almost exclusively on particular time and place, and there is no summary chapter to provide an overview. Another serious omission is the absence of any systematic discussion of such central questions as the relative merits of support for mothers versus sharing parental responsibilities and improving women’s opportunities in the labor market; of mothers staying home to look after their children versus alternative forms of child care; of various degrees of sharing the expenses of child rearing among parents, employers, and the community; and of pronatalism versus limited population growth. The detailed, generally lengthy, and often interesting accounts of the impact proponents of particular views on developments in a specific country offered in each chapter do not take the place of such an analysis. Instead, the presentation of frequently shnilar ideologies and policies in different countries rest&s in a good deal of unneceswy repetition. Further, because the various views presented are often contradictory and even mutually exclusive, it is frustrating that for the most part they are simply presented without a critical examination of their relative merits. Finally, while there is a great deal of useful information to be found in this book so that it has considerable promise as a reference work, it could have benefitted substantially from a thorough editing. For one, concepts with which most readers camtot be expected to be familiar are mentioned without explanation. Two examples are references to %ticle 340 of the Napoleonic Civil Code” (p. 120). and to “puericulture” (p. 122). Second, there are a good many puzzling statements. We are told that men who were themselves pronatalist feared that women would support the dictates of the church (p.
essay and goes beyond the survey technique to consider important theoretical issues concerning the phuality of women’s experience, besides m the significance of a state balanced as it is between Europe and Asia, Christianity and Islam. Rosalind Marsh entitles her essay “The birth, death, and rebirth of feminist wrih in Russia,” as part of her endeavour to trace the relationship between feminism, marxism. and women’s writing in a society that has undergone a series of traumatic shifts of direction that have had powerful implications for women. Likewise, Celia Hawksworth has the almost impossible task of dealing with Sastern Europe,’ which she handles sensibly and sensitively. Her methodology, given as she points out, that a single essay could not hope to be comprehensive, is to move between writers and countries, offering a representative selection that serves to bring out similarities of tone and experience. The two weakest contributions are Margaret Atack’s essay on France and, very surprisingly, Maggie Humm’s essay on Britain. Both writers seem uncertain of their readers, unsure how much material information to provide and how much to take for granted. As a result. they attempt far too much and the result is a shapeless, baggy piece that in each case contains flashes of insight but which overall is disappointingly vague. My impression about a book such as this is that it should sell well in a lot of countries, and while most of the essays take an international approach, both Atack and Humm seem to feel that they are writing for their own British students who already have all the basic background information. These complaints apart, Helena For&s-Scott has done us all a favour in compiling a richly informative book. SUSANBASSNETT CENTRE FOR BRITISH AND COMPARATIVE CULTURAL STUDIES UNIVERSITY OF WARWICK COVENTRY, UK
LWCE IluGARN: P HIU#KIPHY IN THE mm, by Margaret Whitford. 241 pages. Routledge, London, 1991. Hard cover UKf35.00, soft cover uKf9.99.
Margaret Whitford’s exploration of Lute Irigaray’s work represents a landmark in the study of contemporary French thought. Lucid, rigorous and consistently accessible, her book is intended to offer close analyses of a range of Irigarayan texts, and to present Irigaray not as a spokeswoman for 4criture feminine but rather as a philosopher. whose contribution to feminist thinking has hitherto been inadequately evaluated. Whitford’s study is divided into two &ctio~&. In the first, she establishes the essential premises upon which Irigaray’s work is based. She analyses, for instance, Irigaray’s understanding of the terms ‘imaginary’ and ‘symbolic,’ and outlines her vision of Western (and more especially pbilosophical) discourse as a ‘spec&’ system govern&by a masculine/anal imaginary which elides sexual dlfference. consigns woman to the status of other/object/matter, and constitutes a ‘mirror’ for the male subject. In part two, Whitford explores what Irigaray’s ‘philosophy in the feminine’ aims to achieve, and suggests that it constitutes ‘an act of land reclamation’ whose purpose is to redefme the philosophical terrain by ‘investigating what philosophy has until now been unable to allow in’ (p. 7).
455
Two key aspczts of Irigaray’s project emerge from Whitford’s study. On the one band, Irigaray is shown to offer a systematic, ‘psychoanalytic’ critique of the androcentric assumptions and phantasies which subtend the discursive, symbolic order as it stands. On the other, she is presented as striving to envisage how change in the symbolic might be effected, so that woman can become a subject in language and society. For Whitford, Irigaray is, above all, a ‘theorist of change,’ who endeavours through a variety of means (including the weaving of utopian visions) to alter the status of woman within the Western so&cultural regime. She is not, Whitford argues convincingly, the biological or psychic essentialist her critics have claimed her to be, but rather a pragmatic strategist. whose accounts of feminine identity cannot be disassociated from her efforts to modify the so&l&mbolic order in such a way that women no longer fmd themselves in a state of ‘dereliction.’ Whitford’s monograph. which acknowledges the sometimes hermetic and contradictory character of Irigaray+i oeuvre, is a profoundly honest work. and represmts essential reading for students of French thought. ALEX HUGHES BIRMINGHAM UNIVERSITY, UK
IULENECIXOUB:A POLITICSOF W-G, by Morag Shiach, 136 pages + illustrations and notes. Routledge, London and New York. 1991.
In a lucid and thoughtful introduction, Morag Shiach “announces the colours” of her compact study of prolific writer H&ne Ciious. Refusii to simplify or muddy her palette, she achieves what she sets out to do: portraying the complex trajectory of this major figure of late twentieth-century French letters without turning Ciious into the cult spokesperson for “writing the body” or berating her for an apparent abandonment of feminist theory in favor of postcolonial identity politics. Instead, Shiach argues convincingly for an understanding of Cixous’s works- theory, criticism, and prose fiction (which she treats in three chapters) and theatre (which she examines in a fourth, gi* the best synthesis of Ciious’s dramatic production to date)-as evolutive process. According to Shiach, Ciious has linked throughout her oeuvre questions of writing and performance with attempts to destabilize gender categorizations and national identities. The unwavering “object” (neither Ciious nor Shlach would use such a teleological concept) has been the assertion of alternative and thus liberating forms of subjectivity and intersubjective relations. In Chapter 1 as throughout, Shiach embeds Cixous’s thought within crucial contemporary philosophical debates. Moreover, Shiach engages with the-se debatcs herself. This allows her to respect Ciious’s deconstructive attack on the Oresteia (Sorties, 1975), while at the same time voicing the frustration that reading Cixous sometimes feels like “swimming in cultural mud” @. 15). She makes her case beautifully in her rehearsal of the confusions engendered by Ciious’s well-known statement on and of “feminine writing,” “The Laugh of the Medusa” (1975). Shiach first puts to rest, if uneasily, the charge of essentialism levelled frequently at this essay: She shows how Cixous locates the site of sexual differ-
456
Book Reviews
ence in the nonsexed libido, that is out of corporeal territory. Referring to Domna Stanton’s earlier observations, however, Shiach also protests that Cixous’s lyrical treatment of maternity reintroduces ambiguity into her notion of the body as metaphor. At times, Cixous’s “body” would appear to be nothing if not flesh, blood, and especially. mother’s milk. To use Shiach’s own gloss on Ciious’ major trope of “mining,” she offers up the spectacle of Cixous, theoretician, crossing minefields, planting mines, and und ermining cultural givens but sometimes also mining her own thought in her attempt to write herself out of patriarchy. Of those writers (Joyce, Hoffman, Kleist, Poe, Freud, Liipector) whom Cixous has chosen as partners in an ongoing poetic dialogue, Clarice Lispector. in Shiach’s terms (Chapter 2). presents a Cixousian “double,” her writing “other.” A writer who-like the others of whom Ciious speaks-helps reformulate the idea of the “self” through concentrating on the functioning of the unconscious, Lisp&or also writes to remember and give voice to what has been forgotten and silenced. This ethical imperative weaves through Ciious’s own prose fictions, as do the texts of those writers she admires and reads. One of the great difficulties in reading Cixous. as Shiach points out (Chapter 3), is the extent to which her own erudition htforms and explodes her writing. Shiach’s analysis of Portrait du Soleil(1973) provides, however, an excellent guide to the Ciiousian text. By acknowledging the intertextual presence of Neitxche, Bataille, and Freud and therefore the necessity of reading Cixous in a space beyond dichotomies of inside and outside, body and culture, Shiach shows how this ‘hovel.” as is true of must of Ciious’s fiction, becomes a strategic reworking of some of the West’s oldest mythic sources. Furthermore, Mach suggests to the reader a set of useful critical clues to help apprehend Cixous’s “excessiveness”: concentrating on spatial metaphors and techniques of allusion, exploring the constantly floathtg narrative voice, permitting oneself to feel the violence in Cixous’s grappling with patriarchy and accepting Cixous’s goal of symbolic plurality, accepting, then, a writing practice which moves among text, performance, the unconscious, and biography. In her many fine readings of Cious’s texts (LIeduns, 1969; La, 1976, Le Livre de Promethea, 1983; Mame, 1988). judiciously selected so as to delve into a few key works rather than skimming over the many, Shiach does not hesitate, either, to ask how politically effective such daunting prose can really be. Shiach contends forcefulry that Cixous’s suspiciousness of the impotency of words presages her commitment to theatre: Theatre has allowed Cixous to give concrete form to spatial&d thought and confront the bodily experience of time. Theatre is, consequently, (and Shiach makes palpable how this operates throughout Cixous’s seven plays), the most compelling site for her refusal of the Occident’s instrumentalist rationality and sexual-political economy. Again, Shiach warns how this can lead, as in L’Zndiade ou I’Zndede leurs r&es, 1987, to an expression of “truth” outside the text as well as to a mythic projection of a utopian other. There are a few awkward transitions and lengthy parentheses - efforts to create a metatext for the Ciiousian experience, for example, elaborations of the Pysch and PO perambulations of the 1970s and Edgar AJlan Poe’s co-option by French theoreticians, or the history of the
Th68tre du Soleil. Shiach also assumes a basic familiarity with psychoanalysis, particularly the central Lacanian concepts of “the mirror stage” and the construction of desire based on impossible fulfiient. Neither of these caveats, however, diminishes Shiach’s importance as the commentator who has made reading Ciious both urgent and comprehensible. JUDITHG. MILLER UNIVERSITYOF WISCONSIN-MADISON, USA
MA~ITY AND GENDEU POLICIES WOMI~N AND TBE RISE OF THE E~~~PJMN W-ARE STATES, lMMts-19!Jfts,edited by Gisela Bock and Pat Thane. 259 pages. Routledge. London, 1991. US S59.95; Canada 574.95. According to the editors, this volume seeks to explore some aspects of the relationship between the parallel development of welfare states and of women’s movements between the 1880s and 1950s across seven countries of western Europe, as well as the visions of gender which both of these processes embodied and helped to construct. This purpose is accomplished by the authors of the 12 chapters, although somewhat unevenly. We are offered a wealth of information, including a great deal of colorful detail, particularly about the contributions of individual leaders of women’s movements and labor organizations, and of government officials. The book is, however, considerably less successful in exploring and comparing the development of welfare states. The individual chapters focus almost exclusively on particular time and place, and there is no summary chapter to provide an overview. Another serious omission is the absence of any systematic discussion of such central questions as the relative merits of support for mothers versus sharing parental responsibilities and improving women’s opportunities in the labor market; of mothers staying home to look after their children versus alternative forms of child care; of various degrees of sharing the expenses of child rearing among parents, employers, and the community; and of pronatalism versus limited population growth. The detailed, generally lengthy, and often interesting accounts of the impact proponents of particular views on developments in a specific country offered in each chapter do not take the place of such an analysis. Instead, the presentation of frequently shnilar ideologies and policies in different countries rest&s in a good deal of unneceswy repetition. Further, because the various views presented are often contradictory and even mutually exclusive, it is frustrating that for the most part they are simply presented without a critical examination of their relative merits. Finally, while there is a great deal of useful information to be found in this book so that it has considerable promise as a reference work, it could have benefitted substantially from a thorough editing. For one, concepts with which most readers camtot be expected to be familiar are mentioned without explanation. Two examples are references to %ticle 340 of the Napoleonic Civil Code” (p. 120). and to “puericulture” (p. 122). Second, there are a good many puzzling statements. We are told that men who were themselves pronatalist feared that women would support the dictates of the church (p.