Reading Unruly: Interpretation and Its Ethical Demands

6. Fidelity to Sexual Difference

129 VI Fidelity to Sexual Difference Marguerite Duras’s The Ravishing of Lol Stein Let us note in passing that Totality and Infinity pushes the respect for dissymmetry so far that it seems to us impossible, essentially impossible, that it could have been written by a woman. Its philosophical subject is man (vir). Jacques Derrida Emmanuel Levinas’s reception among feminists has been tumultuous from the outset. Jacques Derrida’s musings on the hypervirility of the author of Totality and Infinity point to one major objection leveled against Levinasian thought within feminist circles. Only a man, Derrida notes, could advocate an ethics that foregrounds asymmetry (nonreciprocity) as the condition for the ethical proper, and subordination to the other as its enactment. Compounding this displacement of a universalist framework affirming equality among the sexes—a position that might well be deemed detrimental to feminist ethics and politics—are Levinas’s actual writings on women, such as his problematic association of female alterity with “mystery”: “The transcendence of the feminine . . . is a movement opposed to the movement of consciousness , . . . and I see no other possibility than to call it mystery.”1 Simone de Beauvoir was perhaps the first to identify and critique Levinas’s masculinist blindness. In The Second Sex, she comments: “When [Levinas] writes that woman is mystery, he assumes that she is mystery for man. So this apparently objective description is in fact an affirmation of masculine privilege.”2 For Beauvoir, Levinas’s representation of woman effectively reduces her once 130 Fidelity to Sexual Difference again to an object of male philosophical investigation: “He is the Subject; he is the Absolute. She is the Other.”3 In the decades following Beauvoir’s groundbreaking work, feminist interpretations of Levinas have shifted and diverged. Though Levinas’s relevance for feminism remains a disputed matter, engaging with his thought has almost become unavoidable.4 Some continue to view Levinas’s ethical model as anathema to feminism,5 while Luce Irigaray and others have pursued a more dialogic engagement with his work, drawing heavily from Levinasian rhetoric, for example, in critiquing Western phallocentric thought: This domination of the philosophic logos stems in large part from its power to reduce all others to the economy of the Same. The teleologically constructive project it takes on is always also a project of diversion, deflection, reduction of the other in the Same. And, in its greatest generality perhaps, from its power to eradicate the difference between the sexes in systems that are self-representative of a “masculine subject.”6 For Irigaray, Levinas’s philosophy of alterity opens up the possibility of a radical ethics of sexual difference, an ethics that insists on the incommensurability between the particular and the universal.7 Irigaray grounds her ethics of sexual difference on the feminine’s “disruptive excess.”8 The title of her book already performs, as it were, the unruliness of the feminine. A sex which is not one does not itself mean only one thing; it refers to woman’s lack (her absence of ontology; according to the dictates of patriarchal ideology, she is not a full-fledged subject, fully whole) and to her doubleness (as opposed to the oneness of the phallus); she is multiple—the object of male discourse, and more (“She is neither one nor two”9 ). Likewise, to understand woman’s unruliness only ontologically (claiming that her anarchic being exceeds its containment within the symbolic order) deemphasizes the discursive supplement at work in Irigaray’s feminist calculus, which she articulates through her injunction to other women “to speak woman,” “parlerfemme ,” or translated less literally, “to speak feminine,” “to speak [as] woman,” and, punning on par les femmes, “by women.”10 Marguerite Duras’s 1964 novel, The Ravishing of Lol Stein, arguably engages in what Irigaray would later term parler-femme, subtly interweaving the psychoanalytic and feminist registers that were to form the explicit basis of Irigaray ’s hermeneutics. Radically rewriting the male fantasy narrative about female madness—the definitive example being André Breton’s 1929 surrealist 131 Fidelity to Sexual Difference autobiographic novel, Nadja—Duras’s new novel provided an unruly example that has repeatedly commanded the attention of critics drawn in by the ambiguities of its title and its disputed subject matter. Is this a novel “of” Lol Stein, a novel about a woman who desires to perpetually relive the night of her abandonment or/as ravishment at the ball of T...