Jacqueline Rose - Sexuality in the Field of Vision

Jacqueline Rose

First published by Verso 1986

This edition published by Verso 2020

Jacqueline Rose 1986, 2020

All rights reserved

The moral rights of the author have been asserted

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ISBN-13: 978-1-78873-862-0

ISBN-13: 978-1-78960-526-6 (US EBK)

ISBN-13: 978-1-83976-301-4 (UK EBK)

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For my mother

We would like to thank the following publishers and journals for permission to reprint these essays: Dora Fragment of an Analysis, m/f; Femininity and its Discontents, Feminist Review; Feminine Sexuality Jacques Lacan and the cole freudienne, Macmillan Press and W W Norton; The Imaginary and The Cinematic Apparatus Problems in Current Theory, Macmillan Press and St. Martins Press.

Many people are associated for me with these essays, whether through their encouragement, intellectual advice, or friendship and support. In particular I would like to thank Parveen Adams, Ben Brewster, Constance Penley and Peter Wollen. A number of groups and individual people have at various times been part of a crucial context of discussion and work or have offered detailed advice in relation to separate articles: the Lacan womens study group which met in London between 1975 and 1977; the women at the conference on The Cinematic Apparatus held at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee in 1978; the students on the Studies in Feminism course at the University of Sussex, especially in the year 1982-83, and Homi Bhabha, Jonathan Dollimore and Cora Kaplan. I owe a special debt to Juliet Mitchell.

Finally, my thanks, and much more, to Sally Alexander and Robert Young.

In her Tribute to Freud, the American woman poet H.D. writes of the one moment when Freud laid down the law during the brief analysis she conducted with him in 1933. This law (he does not lay down the law, only this once only this one law), coming from someone who still stands in the image of a patriarch with which feminism has not yet settled its accounts, was in fact no law, but a plea a plea that H.D. should never defend Freud and his work at any time, in any circumstance. Freud goes on to explain this plea with the precision of a lesson in geometry or of a demonstration of the inevitable course of a disease once a virus has entered the system. A law which takes the form of a plea that there should be no defence, or which hovers between geometrical precision and the course of a disease these are contradictions which we might expect from any discussion which has psychoanalysis as its object or which tries to place itself within its terms.

But there is something outrageous in Freuds demand that psychoanalysis cannot be defended on the grounds that defence will drive the hatred or the fear or the prejudice in deeper, since it snatches from the opponent the very rationality by which a critique, no less than a defence, of psychoanalysis should take place.psychoanalysis back fiercely into its own practice and leaves her with an impasse which H.D. will then resolve more or less and in her own waythrough literary writing, memoirs and, finally, a tribute. A tribute, we could say, is one possible response, and perhaps the only possible response, to the laying down of the law.

On the other hand, Freuds injunction and H.D.s place within it reveal a dilemma or set of problems in which all the essays that follow are equally caught. First, the problem of writing of psychoanalysis in a context which exceeds its primary institutional and therapeutic domain. Second, the problem of writing in the form of a defence with regard to something the psychoanalytic concept of the unconscious which brooks no defence and constantly breaks down the law. Third, the problem of writing as a woman within the terms and discourse largely of two men Freud, and then the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan who also saw his work as a tribute or return to Freud, as nothing less than the preservation of a tradition entrusted to our keeping. Scandalous for many other men of their time, they nonetheless embody the image of the patriarch whose insidious effects at the level of our psychic life they each attempted with more or less success to undo or defy.

The question which this introduction will attempt to address, therefore, is what could be the purchase of psychoanalysis outside its own specific domain. More specifically, the argument is for psychoanalysis in relation to feminism, and the importance of these together for the larger terms of contemporary political debate. We are in fact witnessing a moment when psychoanalysis is being assimilated into literary methodas it has been before at the same time as the critique of psychoanalysis outside the academy by feminists and others is being renewed or increased. Feminism inherits and inflects a set of political challenges to psychoanalysis with a long and complex history which this introduction will also attempt to trace. The point being not to serve the essays themselves, but rather to situate them within an ongoing history and set of problems which I see them as part of today.

against the transformation of Lacans theory into style (Lacanianism no less) and that view, which has been so influential outside of France under the brief of New French Feminisms, which sees theory itself as a masculine fantasy to which the only response for many women is the dissolution, not just of institutions, but of language itself.

For both writers, however, and despite the different personal decisions to which they individually came, the issue of institutional power is one in which the question of language and its limits is centrally at stake. On nest fou que de sens (Only meaning drives you mad or No madness without meaning), writes Montrelay the unconscious is the only defence against a language frozen into pure, fixed or institutionalised meaning, and what we call sexuality, in its capacity to unsettle the subject, is a break against the intolerable limits of common sense.

Franois Roustang has described the way that this problem how to create an institution in which the effects of the unconscious can be spoken without fossilizing into hereditary transmission and style has marked the whole history of the psychoanalytic In this case, however, it is clear that the question of the unconscious brings with it fantasies and images of sexual difference. Above all it leads to a question: how to situate oneself as a woman between the Christlike figure with its powerful and oppressive weight, and the too easy assimilation of the underside of language to an archaic femininity gone wild. That there is another scene to the language through which we most normatively identify and recognise ourselves is the basic tenet of Freudian psychoanalysis. But it is rarely demonstrated with such startling clarity how far the effects of the unconscious are tied into the key fantasies operating at the heart of institutions, and how these in turn are linked into the most fundamental images of sexual difference (adoration to the male, chaos or exclusion to the female) on which the wider culture so centrally turns.