The Hysteric's Guide to the Future Female Subject (review)

268Women in French Studies spectators and as authors of spectacle extend from the world of films into our own everyday experience ofour lives. Varda's films have taken a more personal turn in the 1990s, as she has turned directly to depicting the life ofher husband Jacques Demy. Smith considers the intimacy and sense ofdesire in these films, particularly how Varda's own desire is implicated in the memory-images she creates of the recently deceased Demy in Jacquot de Nantes. Though Varda's latest film, Les Glaneurs et la glaneuse, was released after the publication of this book, that film as well explores the way in which "gleaning" or recuperation of images by an artist or filmmaker is a process of creating memoryimages from the discarded, perhaps somewhat disheveled relics of the past. Kristine ButlerUniversity of Wisconsin-River Falls Juliet Flower Maccannell. The Hysteric's Guide to the Future Female Subject. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000. ISBN: 0-8166-3296-0. Pp. 328. $18.95. Juliet Flower Maccannell's captivating study is devoted to elucidating the processes by which the girl becomes woman today, her relation to contemporary society, and the potential for a "free" female subject tomorrow. The book's ten chapters, which can be read either alone or in close relation to each other, are organized into two parts corresponding to the darker side of the girl's challenge and its lighter, more promising side. Grounding her approach in the theories of Sade, Freud, and Lacan, Maccannell carefully gathers elements in the construction of a feminine ethic from works of art, fiction, and theory, as well as from social scenes of confrontation—from the extreme piercings of"modern primitives" to state sponsored genocide—with the explicit aim ofunmasking and undoing the causes ofbrutality. The text's primary concern, however, rests with the contemporary girl and her developmental options. The Hysteric 's Guide constitutes a major attempt to bring the ethical to the sexual in Women's Studies as it searches for methods the girl might use to escape from the bedroom (where Sade's liberation of total jouissance left her) and enter the public sphere. In search ofthe female subject's freedom, Maccannell suggests we move beyond a basic rebuffto patriarchal ideology, beyond a simple rebellion against the Mother and her 'morality,' and beyond what she refers to as "a Butlerian commitment to surface" (264). The author chooses instead to renew Freud's contract with the hysterics and to listen to the significance in their silences: "Imbedded in these silences that Freud found eloquent were the points where the social contract was failing the women, if not everyone" (182). It is precisely because the hysteric has frozen up during her halting progress toward a social and sexual identity that she can serve as a privileged site for a psychoanalytic investigation into the girl's struggle to become woman. Ofprime importance for Maccannell's analysis are the various forms the superego can take for the girl. Whereas Freud's superego is often interpreted to refer uniquely to the voice of official morality (the father's or society's "No!"), the obscene superego is the voice that urges enjoyment but punishes Book Reviews269 for it later. Although psychoanalytically and traditionally tied to the Mother, this voice is no longer a maternal attribute, according to Maccannell. Instead, "a perverse, sadistic figure that is both conflated with and distinct from the Mother stands between her and the girl" (11). After the Father and the Mother, the third figure the girl now must face, en route to becoming a woman, is the pervert: the one who, ever since Sade, dismisses the Law as irrelevant, (including the law of sexual difference), and who thereby comes to represent the sadistic superego. Rather than deny her pleasure, the sadistic superego promises the girl fulfillment. In the process, it forecloses "her need to join society, the world of others, of other subjects in which her joys would be restricted" (18). The potential for a free female subject rests, Maccannell contends, on the girl's ability to recognize, to know, to relate, and to respond to this sadistic superego. Certain passages in this demanding but highly...