Helene Cixous would say that when, “ringing in the Feminine hour … I believe that I can say that I am a woman only because from time to time, I have experiences that belong to that universe.” Karl Marx wrote, “It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness.” Fredrick Nietzsche went where Marx would not, and existentially pushed the variable of individual will power.
As Luce Irigaray puts it, “we struggle against forms of others, and we are still subject to conditioned social rules that we confuse with freedom: hence a single sex or gender dominance, which still faces limitations;” transformation starts with rules on language; sexual liberation implies linguistic transformations (Irigaray). Transformation starts with will power to overcome forbidden acceptance of separation. Irigaray emphasizes that discourse is sexed. “How could discourse not be sexed when language is? Just as lexicon is sexed, differences between men’s and women’s discourses are thus the effect of language and society, society and language.” Perpetuated without even realizing it, we need laws to valorize our differences but also to overcome religious and civil myths (Irigaray). Liberating our subjective potential and sexual difference is necessary “as long as sex is for biological continuation, not for cultural praxis.” One has to celebrate higher semblances and spiritual release. He or she cannot be reduced to complementary functions, “don’t restrict yourself to describing, reproducing and repeating what exists, but know how to invent or imagine what has not yet taken place" (Irigaray).
It is possible to start and create change with changing everyday language and by paying attention to how we speak and listen to one another. Julia Kristeva in a letter to Catherine Clement collected in the book The Feminine and the Sacred, addresses bald truths: “The bald truths of Marquis de Sade are bothersome. But all religions, using the trenchant effects of language in various and less conscious ways, celebrate the sacred as a sacrifice. They admit that this sacrifice is the one that inscribes language on the body” (Kristeva). Forbidden acceptance seems to root within language and institutional culture, which also format religious beliefs on gender appropriation. Julia Kristeva and Luce Irigaray are two key postmodern philosophers. However, Kristeva and Irigaray, though they are often linked together when academics discuss contemporary female French theory, the two differ from one another (as does Helene Cixous).
Kristeva and Irigaray stand at different pillars in their analysis. Luce Irigaray stands amongst the crowd within the sphere of her struggling sisters, while Kristeva seems to stand at a platform of scientists, who dissect human society, with medical tools pulling apart male and female identities. Yet both have played significant roles in the protest against the dominant system. Irigaray reinforces that women cannot be gathered into one volume of understanding human gender, “Women are thus in a position of specific exploitation with respect to” exploitation of the body, matter and the symbolic process that governs over the body (Irigaray). On the effects of culture, she notes, “if the unconscious were both the result of the acts of censorship of repression forced upon us in and by a certain history, and also a yet-to-come-into-being, the reservoir of a yet-to-come, your repudations, acts of censorship and misrecognitions, would seem to fold the future back into the past.”
The folding the future back into the past would reduce the future or the yet-to-be to a subject already subjected to an unspoken language of repetition. The belief and semblance of the individual would be limited from free will and would be seduced into a precondition determining a false truth, or a bad faith, as Nietzsche would call it. Reducing the self to a Lacanian symptom would leave identity in the hands of a mental health institution from a Freudian tower that never understood women or humans from the start. The dominant mainstream indoctrination of defining women and men (and minorities) to limited universals seeks to silence alternative scenarios. Not listening to other perspectives or possible realities, a selective memory, allows language to dominate culture.
Julia Kristeva alluded this to a masquerade, as with femininity, the masquerade of society wrapped with a political economy, where profit seeking institutions, whether it be fashion magazines, apparel, and consumer corporations, or whether it be the church (more dominant in previous centuries) dominate the majority of society to maintain a false objectivity. This masquerade of false objectivity has for a backdrop a void. For Kristeva, proper nouns and proper names are meaningless. They are an imaginary representation that the institutions of psychiatry and psychology followed in suite of Christianity in denying women of the sacred (Kristeva). “The true-real falls outside the framework of what is considered intelligible or plausible in the socialized space of symbolic order. Like Foucault and his use of the word ‘discourse’, Kristeva’s ‘semiotic’ theory focuses on the real outside of gender, race, class, or creed, but on the way individuals and masses have been controlled by these forced outside words over self will, and hidden is the metaphysics of her thesis: exposing the unsaid in the social contract. ... (to be continued)...
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