The Future of an Illusion: Film, Feminism, and Psychoanalysis by Constance Penley (review)

Book Reviews123 CONSTANCE PENLEY. The Future ofan Illusion: Film, Feminism, and Psychoanalysis. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989. 207 p. The title for this collection of essays comes from Freud's treatise on the psychical origins of religion, The Future of an Illusion (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1961). Freud calls religious doctrines "illusions" because of the predominance of wish fulfillment in their motivation, in this case the desire to overcome the situation of infantile helplessness and the desire for protection from life's dangers and the forces of nature. After presenting his central argument, Freud goes on to speculate that other of our "cultural assets"—for example "the assumptions that determine our political regulations" or "the relations between the sexes" (59)—may be of a similar (illusory) nature. But "necessity" forces Freud to confine his work "to the pursuit of a single one ofthese illusions, that is the religious" (60). Constance Penley takes up Freud's challenge for another of our cherished illusions, a patriarchal culture's assumptions about sexual difference. Penley demonstrates the way in which ideas about femininity and masculinity are articulated and negotiated through a wide variety ofcultural forms, from avant-garde films to European art cinema and television to contemporary popular cultural texts like The Terminator or Pee-wee's Playhouse. Running through all of these essays, written over a period of approximately twelve years (1977 through 1988), is a commitment to a method both feminist and psychoanalytic, and an exploration of the challenges and implications of that dual commitment for the political practice of feminism. These concerns are most directly addressed in the two essays which open and close the collection, the introductory preface, in which Penley defends her use of "sexual difference" as a "working term" over "gender" (xii), the term preferred by many contemporary feminist theorists, and the concluding essay on pedagogy, "Teaching in Your Sleep: Feminism and Psychoanalysis." Both essays directly take on what is perceived by many to be basic incompatibilities between the two theories and practices, to explain, as Penley puts it, "what possible interest feminism could have in psychoanalysis, particularly the Lacanian version of it" (165). For Penley, feminists in the early seventies turned to psychoanalysis, particularly Lacan's rereading of Freud, for "a more complex account of subjectivity and sexual identity than any then available" (xii), and a feminist political practice ignores the insights of that account at its peril. For example, although Penley acknowledges that "No political movement or ideology could generate itselfwithout an idealistic sense ofpolitical will and a vision ofa better future," she also argues that "American feminists have often been reluctant to confront theoretical evidence about the limitations of those idealist and utopian ideas which are fundamental to feminist ideology and practice" (xiv). Ignoring the implications of the psychoanalytic concepts ofrepression and the unconscious has and will continue to lead to an overestimation of the ease with which a transformation of the psychic structures that support patriarchy can occur. In the latter essay, the danger of ignoring the insights ofpsychoanalysis is specifically brought to bear on feminist pedagogy. For example, after enumerating some ofthe techniques of the feminist classroom, techniques which "clearly aim toward a dispersal 124Rocky Mountain Review or even elimination of authority," Penley asks, "But can the feminist classroom afford to lose sight of the extreme power of the transferential relation, of the narcissism underlying the demands of both students and teachers, or the basically eroticized nature of learning (the constant appeal for recognition)?" (174). On the other hand, such recognition ofthe intractability ofthe unconscious or the split subject with conflicting wants and desires need not preclude political action or the formation of political alliances, "as a result of (more or less) conscious decision-making" (xviii). In fact, Penley looks to feminism, with its "acknowledged political success and longstanding pledge to the idea that 'the personal is political' " to "most productively incorporate these newer and more complex notions of subjectivity without succumbing to any political fatalism" (180). The rest ofthe book is divided into four sections, "Feminism and the AvantGarde ," "Feminism and Film Theory," "Feminism and Femininity in Godard," and "Sexual Difference in Popular Culture." Although Penley might object to my imposition...