Gender trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity

bians tend to prefer monogamy and the like while gay men generally do not. Foucault responds by laughing, suggested by the bracketed
“[Laughs],” and he says, All I can do is explode with laughter.”
19
This explosive laughter, we may remember, also followed Foucault’s reading of Borges, reported in the preface to The Order of Things (Les mots et
les choses):
This book first arose out of a passage in Borges, out of the laughter that shattered, as I read the passage, all the familiar landmarks of my thought . . . breaking up all the ordered surfaces and all the planes with which we are accustomed to tame the wild profusion of existing things, and continuing long afterwards to disturb and threaten with collapse our age-old distinction between the Same and the Other.
20
The passage is, of course, from the Chinese encyclopedia which confounds the Aristotelian distinction between universal categories and particular instances. But there is also the shattering laughter of Pierre
Rivière whose murderous destruction of his family, or, perhaps, for
Foucault, of the family, seems quite literally to negate the categories of kinship and, by extension, of sex.
21
And there is, of course, Bataille’s now famous laughter which, Derrida tells us in Writing and Difference,
designates that excess that escapes the conceptual mastery of Hegel’s dialectic.
22
Foucault, then, seems to laugh precisely because the question instates the very binary that he seeks to displace, that dreary binary of Same and Other that has plagued not only the legacy of dialectics,
but the dialectic of sex as well. But then there is, of course, the laugh of Medusa, which, Hélène Cixous tells us, shatters the placid surface constituted by the petrifying gaze and which exposes the dialectic of
Same and Other as taking place through the axis of sexual difference.
23
In a gesture that resonates self-consciously with the tale of Medusa,
Herculine herself writes of the cold fixity of my gaze that seems to freeze (105) those who encounter it.
But it is, of course, Irigaray who exposes this dialectic of Same and
Other as a false binary, the illusion of asymmetrical difference which
Subversive Bodily Acts
131

consolidates the metaphysical economy of phallogocentrism, the economy of the same. In her view, the Other as well as the Same are marked as masculine the Other is but the negative elaboration of the masculine subject with the result that the female sex is unrepresentable—
that is, it is the sex which, within this signifying economy, is not one.
But it is not one also in the sense that it eludes the univocal signification characteristic of the Symbolic, and because it is not a substantive identity, but always and only an undetermined relation of difference to the economy which renders it absent. It is not one in the sense that it is multiple and diffuse in its pleasures and its signifying mode. Indeed,
perhaps Herculine’s apparently multiplicitous pleasures would qualify for the mark of the feminine in its polyvalence and in its refusal to submit to the reductive efforts of univocal signification.
But let us not forget Herculine’s relation to the laugh which seems to appear twice, first in the fear of being laughed at (23) and later as a laugh of scorn that she directs against the doctor, for whom she loses respect after he fails to tell the appropriate authorities of the natural irregularity that has been revealed to him (71). For Herculine,
then, laughter appears to designate either humiliation or scorn, two positions unambiguously related to a damning law, subjected to it either as its instrument or object. Herculine does not fall outside the jurisdiction of that law even her exile is understood on the model of punishment. On the very first pages he reports that her place was not marked out [pas marquée] in this world that shunned me And she articulates the early sense of abjection that is later enacted first as a devoted daughter or lover to be likened to a dog or a slave and then finally in a full and fatal form ass he is expelled and expels herself from the domain of all human beings. From this presuicidal isolation,
s/he claims to soar above both sexes, but her anger is most fully directed against men, whose titles he sought to usurp in her intimacy with Sara and whom she now indicts without restraint as those who somehow forbid her the possibility of love.
At the beginning of the narratives he offers two one-sentence

Download 0.76 Mb.

Share with your friends: