Psyche of Feminism: Sand, Colette, Sarraute

Introduction-Psychoanalytic Feminism:Sexual Difference and Another Love

Introduction Psychoanalytic Feminism Sexual Difference and Another Love Psychoanalytic feminism is a field that has only begun to emerge over the past three decades, and the question of what constitutes its approach is still being negotiated. Works by Luce Irigaray, Juliet Mitchell, and Sarah Kofman, as well as more recent explorations of the question of femininity in psychoanalytic theory such as Teresa Brennan's Interpretation of the Flesh (1992), Jessica Benjamin's The Bonds ofLove: Psychoanalysis , Feminism and the Problem ofDomination (1988), and those gathered in Richard Feldstein and Judith Roof's Feminism and Psychoanalysis (1989) have had an important influence , both in their content and in their spurring more scholars to attempt to speak frolll these two' discourses simultaneously. As J. C. Smith and Carla J. Ferstman point out in The Castration of Oedipus: Feminism, Psychoanalysis, and the Will to Power (1996), such attempts are still in an early phase. The authors hold that there is as yet no field deserving of the name "psychoanalytic feminism," for the relation between the two fields is a difficult one: The paradox of feminism and psychoanalysis is [...Jthat the explanations are in terms of phallic possession or lack, seduction, and castration, all of which seem to privilege the Oedipal structure [...].1 The relationship between traditional psychoanalytic theory and feminism, while important for each, remains ambivalent at best. (Smith and Ferstman 17) To begin with, then, I should offer a word on why psychoanalytic theory is so important for feminist thought, and vice versa. Psychoanalysis is fundamentally a discourse that explores sexuality and desire, and feminist theory one that interrogates 1 Introduction gender difference and identity. Psychoanalytic theory can offer to feminist thought insights into the psychical workings of gendered sexualities, especially in terms of the role of the unconscious in the formation of an "identity" that can never again (after psychoanalysis) be understood as solid or unified. Feminist theory, for its part, offers psychoanalysis its questions about and insights into difference, particularly sexual and ethico-political differences, leading to what Elizabeth Wright cans "a space for [the] transformations" of both fields (Wright, Introduction xiii).2 It will be central to my project of reading French women's writing to approach the literary texts having already begun to articulate a dynalnic relation between these two bodies of thought that, as I shall argue, are enriched when taken up together, and impoverished when separated. There is thus a need to review some fundatnental psychoanalytic and feminist notions and to rethink the most pressing concerns confronting psychoanalytic and feminist discourses, in order to present what may be a crucial intersection for the thinking of the two at once. In order to approach one such intersection, I will devote a significant part of this Introduction to an examination of the question of sexual difference in the works of Jacques Lacan and Luce Irigaray, works that have been central to debates within both psychoanalytic theory and feminist thought. I will attempt to show the importance for psychoanalytic feminism of what Irigaray calls an ethical sexual difference, and to explore the difficulties involved in thinking such a relation. The last part of this chapter will concern itself with two of the most critical of these difficulties: the question of feminine jouissance and the question of love, as they intersect in both Irigaray's and Lacan's thought. It is from these two questions that I will go on to pursue the writings of Sand, Colette, and Sarraute in the chapters that follow. By way of introduction, I will begin by briefly outlining the background, in feminism and in psychoanalysis , against which these questions have emerged. Feminism and Psychoanalysis Luce Irigaray's Speculum, de l'autrefemme (1974) and Ce sexe qui n'en est pas un (1977), and Juliet Mitchell's Psychoanaly2 Introduction sis and Feminism (1974) inaugurated specifically feminist engagements with psychoanalysis that went beyond an understanding of psychoanalysis primarily or solely as a discourse that posits or seeks to reinforce the inferiority of women (for example, Simone de Beauvoir's 1949 Le deuxieme sexe,3 and Betty Friedan's 1963 The Fen1inine Mystique). While Irigaray and Mitchell engage in a feminist approach to psychoanalytic theory, they choose to do so from within that theory, believing that psychoanalysis, especially when infonned by feminist thought, can offer critical insight into questions surrounding sexual difference. FrOIn the 1970s on, then, feminist writers begin to work within psychoanalytic discourse...