Risking Difference: Identification, Race, and Community in Contemporary Fiction and Feminism

1 The Politics of Envy in Academic Feminist Communities and in Margaret Atwood’s The Robber Bride

20 RISKING DIFFERENCE 20 Chapter 1 The Politics of Envy in Academic Feminist Communities and in Margaret Atwood’s The Robber Bride Opening this book with a study of envy enables me to focus on the primary intensity of the desire for identification and to show the often unacknowledged workings of that desire both in community dynamics and in the relations between individuals. As Lacan defines it, envy springs from the desire to be an other who is perceived as lacking nothing, as completed and fulfilled by the possession of the object a. This other appears to have a heightened vitality and self-possession forever denied the subject. While later chapters unfold the complications in relations between white feminists and feminists of color that derive from the will to identify with the other’s supposed self-sufficiency and wholeness, here I deal with a different feminist problematic: the denial of envy, a primitive form of identification, in the name of an ethic of sisterly support. My examples combine reports from contemporary academic feminists with a fictional model of the threat that envy poses to feminist community : Margaret Atwood’s The Robber Bride. I argue that denying the existence of envy between women in order to preserve feminist solidarity actually undermines solidarity and that envy, along with other hostile feelings generated by the uneven distribution of power between women, needs to be theorized and integrated into the feminist ethic of mutual support. In Seminar VII, Lacan offers a distinction between envy and jealousy through an anecdote drawn from St. Augustine’s Confessions. Augustine reports seeing a little boy bitterly eyeing his infant brother at the mother’s breast. This is envy, Lacan says—not jealousy: “invidia [envy] must not be confused with jealousy” (S VII 116). It is not what the baby has that his older brother wants: he has no desire for breast THE POLITICS OF ENVY 21 milk. What he wants is to be the figure of completion he sees before him. I want to make the same distinction: envy focuses on being, not having; envy targets what the other is, not what the other has; it is a form of identification.1 “True envy,” says Lacan, is “the envy that makes the subject pale before the image of a completeness closed upon itself, before the idea that the petit a, the separated a from which he is hanging, may be for another the possession that gives satisfaction, Befriedigung” (S VII 116). In the small boy’s vision the breast stands in for the object a, completing the baby and thus enabling it to experience a closed circuit of “jouissance”—a total instinctual satisfaction. For Lacan, then, envy is the desire to be the other insofar as the other is perceived as self-complete and in possession of an untrammeled jouissance. Behind the Lacanian structure of envy lies the subject’s relation to the object a. Subjectivity is founded on lack: entrance into the symbolic order of language and social law enables one to become a subject, but the price of entry is the sense of losing some part of an originary wholeness, some piece of instinctual satisfaction. That loss is figured as the loss of a part-object—of a part once integral to one’s body. Lacan explains the function of the object a in a matheme that represents the fundamental fantasy, the unconscious basis of desire: S /a. The barred S represents the subject who has been depleted, on entry into the symbolic , by the deletion of the “object a,” that part of the self that gave him or her (the illusion of) completion. The subject remains in a relation of attraction/repulsion () to the lost object a. The “a” is a paradoxical object, “both that which is lost . . . and the trace of this loss, that which remains as a left-over to remind the subject of the lost jouissance” (Evans, “Jouissance” 26). This structure founds the unconscious ; and from the unconscious it generates desire—desire for the ever-unattainable lost object. Because the fundamental fantasy, S /a, is indeed fundamental to the unconscious of all subjects, everyone is susceptible to the suspicion that someone else is able to actualize the fantasy of jouissance, to enjoy possession of the object a. This suspicion takes the form of the belief that the other is able to enjoy a heightened state of vitality, fulfillment, and jouissance. Lacan says in Seminar VII...