Wanting Word of Woman, Subversive Speech of Simile: Ecriture féminine and the Erotics of Rhetoric

Abstract

Intcncxts, Vol. 3, No. 1,1999 Wanting Word of Woman, Subversive Speech of Simile: Ecriture feminine and the Erotics of Rhetoric Shirley Sharon-Zisser T E L A V I V U N I V E R S I T Y The relationship between language and femininity, and in particular between language and the female body, is akey concern that features prominently, if sometimes differently, in the French femimst theories of Helene Cixous, Luce Irigaray and Michele Montrelay. This concern, how¬ ever, does not originate with those French feminist theorists or their con¬ temporaries; nor is it peculiar to female thinkers on language. Rather, the relationship between language, femininity and the female body has preoc¬ cupied (male) thinkers from the very beginnings of amost pervasive tradi¬ tion of reflection upon language in the West: that of rhetoric.As this article shows by means of comparing the notions of asubversive feminine lan¬ guageproposedbyCixousandIrigaray(anddifferently,byMontrelay) withnotionsoflinguisticform(mostprominentlythecategoriesof“fig¬ ure”andof“simile,”inparticularthecatachreticsimile)inthewntingsof Aristotleandofearlymodernmalerhetoricians,therudimentsofCixous notion of ecriture feminine^ Irigaray’s notion of le parler femme and Montrelay’snotionofparoledefemmecanbefoundintheverycanonof rhetoric that these French feminist theorists explicitly set out to defy. The notions of feminine writing set forth by Cixous and Irigaray, as well as, differently, by Montrelay, serve in this article as points of departure for an analysis of the discourse of rhetoric that, while produced within apa¬ triarchal culture and sometimes overtly hostile to women in its articidations and preferences, also betrays an irresistible attraction to the feminine and the maternal. The article shows that the feminine and maternal are in¬ scribedintorhetoricalcategoriessuchasfigure,simileandcatachresisthat are shunned, demeaned or abjected^ by the rhetoricians, but that as abjected categories do not cease to challenge and fascinate the system that produces and abjects them (Kristeva, Powers of Horror 2, 4). During the many centuries when these abjected feminized rhetorical categories were being produced and re-produced within patriarchal socie¬ ties, by male rhetoricians, and as part of amale linguistic imaginary largely predicated on “sameness” and the singularity of the “father” as the center of signifying systems,^ they were conceptually and practically unavailable to women as forms that could confer subject status upon them. During those manycenturiesof“speakingsameness”(Irigaray,ThisSex20S),thespace 3 3 3 4 I N T E R T E X T S made available to women in theories of language was largely that of struc¬ tures such as the division between first and second person pronouns in syn¬ tax that, as Irigaray argues in “When Our Lips Speak Together,” “divid[e] too sharply” between an implicitly male subject and an implicitly female object, thus foreclosing the possibility of inter-subjective amatory ex¬ change {This Sex2\^). One of the important contributions of the feminist theories of language of Luce Irigaray, Helene Cixous and Michele Montrelayhasbeentoopenup ,conceptuallyaswellaspractically,linguisticspaces wherefemalesubjectivityandfemaledesirecanbearticulated.Asthisarti¬ cle shows, another important contribution of those feminist theories of language is that they make it possible not only to “invent alanguage” in whichwomen’sdesireandpleasurecouldbearticulatedandthatwouldbe different from that outlined in the male tradition of rhetoric (Irigaray, This Sexr214), but also to rediscover vrithin ±at tradition those forgotten forms inwhichwomen’sdesireandpleasureareinscribedbutwhichthecondi¬ tionsofsocialandconceptualhistoryhadmadeitimpossibleforwomento appropriate. What the reading of the male rhetorical tradition in the light of the requirements that Irigaray, Cixous and Montrelay posit for alan¬ guageofafemalesubjectofdesireandpleasureoffersisnotapossibilityof reconfiguring the male linguistic imaginary but of casting light upon those sitesofthisimaginarywheresuchdesireandpleasurearealreadyinscribed andwhichhadalwaysbeenitssitesofnostalgicfascination.Itistowardsthe rediscoveryofthosesitesoffemininedesireandpleasurewithinrhetoricby means of the theories of Irigaray, Cixous and Montrelay rather than to¬ wards acritique of those theorists’ understanding of the gendering of rhetoricortheirpossiblecomplicityinitsseeminglyunivocalphallocentrismthatthisarticleseekstopointtheway . Montrelay’sUombreetlenomidentifiesfemininityasthesiteofaninfi¬ nite,archaicjouissance(53-55),^oftheOne-ness(53)ofprimalfusion (44).4Thisidentificationgivesrisetoanimportantquestion:ifthecate¬ goryofthe“feminine”isidentifiedasthatof3ljouissancewhichisOne,infi¬ nite and archaic, is it not also, therefore, located in what Montrelay de¬ scribes as the “unexplorable” zone of Shadow [Ombre] (66).> If the “feminine”issituatedwithintheunexplorableShadow,doesitnotalsore¬ sisttheanalysisthatproceedsfi-omtheseparatingscissionsoftheName [Now]—that is, of language—that dissect the archaic One into discrete signifiersandformsofsignification ?Ifthefeminine,likethediscourseofmys¬ ticismwhichIrigarayidentifiesasoneofitseffects,isalliedwithpsychicfor¬ mations “where consciousness is no longer master” (Irigaray, Speculum 191) does it not then inevitably “elude ...linguistic classification” (Montrelay 29) and become “the ruin of representation” (66)? For Lacan, firom whose theory of language the conceptions of lan¬ guage of Irigaray, Cixous and Montrelay derive but also differ, this ques¬ tion would be arhetorical one. In Lacanian terms...