Untimely Matter in the Time of Shakespeare

5. Touching Matters: Margaret Cavendish’s and Hélène Cixous’s Palimpsested Bodies

five Touching Matters Margaret Cavendish’s and Hélène Cixous’s Palimpsested Bodies Cleopatra [is] infinite intelligence, completely applied to making life, to making love, to make: to invent, to create, from one emotion to draw out ten thousand forms of beauty, from one joy ten thousand games. —Hélène Cixous, ‘‘Sorties’’ As for Cleopatra, I wonder she should be so Infamous for a Whore, since she was constant to those Men she had taken. . . . If they say true Love can dissemble, they may as well say Truth is no Truth, and Love is no Love: but the Lover delivers his whole Soul to the Beloved. Some say she was Proud and Ambitious, because she loved those had most Power: She was a Great Person her self, and born to have Power, therefore it was natural to her to love Power. —Margaret Cavendish, The World’s Olio Two women, from different times, from different worlds, touch in one body—albeit a body that is not one but multiple, palimpsested, polychronic. The scene? It, too, is multiple. Paris, 1975: the Algerian-French feminist Héle ̀ne Cixous brushes up against the Egyptian queen Cleopatra in the heterogeneous , intertextual body of Cixous’s écriture féminine. Antwerp, 1655: the exiled English writer Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, rubs shoul- Touching Matters 149 ders with Cleopatra in Cavendish’s labyrinthine gallery of the mind where, in her words, ‘‘so many creatures be, / Like many Commonwealths.’’1 Washington , D.C., 2008: Cixous joins with Cavendish in extolling the ‘‘infinite variety’’ of Cleopatra, or at least does so within the somewhat more finite variety of this chapter. My two epigraphs may seem to set up a circuit of identification that plays out as a transhistorical syllogism. Cixous is Cleopatra (North African queens both, celebrating female fecundity); Cavendish is Cleopatra (aristocratic women both, loving female power); therefore Cixous is Cavendish. It is precisely these assertions of identity that I want to resist, however, not least because Cixous and Cavendish also resist them. In Cixous’s ‘‘Sorties,’’ Cleopatra is not possessed of a singular identity but is rather a protean malewoman whose sex is not one: ‘‘the feisty queen, to whom everything is becoming —scolding, laughing, crying—at every instant another face, at each breath a passion, flesh struggling with a desire for more love, more life, more pleasure, at every moment, the queen with ten tongues; she spoke them all.’’2 Cixous claims not only to love Cleopatra but also to love like Cleopatra, embracing the other within herself. This embrace, which Cixous calls ‘‘Other-Love,’’ models plurality as an alternative to patriarchal fantasies of singular identity.3 Cavendish’s interest in Cleopatra also chafes against singularity . Like Cixous, Cavendish is drawn to Cleopatra as a figure of a particular kind of love—one where the Lover delivers his or her ‘‘whole Soul’’ to the Beloved. This is no fantasy of union or merger: rather, it bespeaks Cavendish ’s recurrent interest in the movement of souls from body to body, so that—at least in love—the body becomes multiple, populated by two or more souls. The love that Cavendish describes thus aspires not to singular identity but rather to a conjunction of differences: a literally touching relation between parts of an irreducibly plural self. As Sara Ahmed notes in a discussion of the queer plurality of the hand, ‘‘What touches is touched, and yet ‘the toucher’ and ‘the touched’ do not ever reach each other; they do not merge to become one.’’4 In this chapter, I tease out the touching relations between Cixous and Cavendish. Like Ahmed’s discussion of the hand, my account of these relations does not perform a merger or union. The two women may touch, but they cannot be made to speak in one voice: in addition to their different historical, cultural, and linguistic accents, it is impossible to reconcile Cavendish ’s royalism with Cixous’s radical democratism, or Cavendish’s pleasures of the rational soul with Cixous’s jouissance of the flesh. Yet, just as they 150 conjunctions both join with Cleopatra, so can they be invited to talk with each other. What particularly interests me is how their touching relations can be illuminated by their different theories of matter as itself embodying a touching relationality. Both Cixous and Cavendish understand all matter not just to touch otherness —other bodies, other...