Phallocentrism and Logocentrism: Relating to Feminisms

Many feminisms, as examples of such "revolutionary standpoints," have the contradictory goals of "showing the limits of identification" and maintaining themselves as an "ontological discourse about revolutionary subjects," or as politics of feminine identities, selves. The relationships of feminisms to the "mainstyles" of deconstruction and psychoanalysis should be seen as invariably ironic, if these two "mainstyles" are seen as committed to the subversion of identitarian logics of ontology (deconstruction) and firmly embedded in an androcentric one (psychoanalysis). I have argued for this reading of "mainstyle" Freudian theory as androcentric, but this would be somewhat of an oversimplification of "mainstyle" deconstruction since it generally promotes the irony of playing double games. Inasmuch as a feminism is embedded in identitarian logics, however, any relationship to "mainstyle" deconstruction would have to be ironic given that it is always plays at least one game of disturbing such embeddedness.

One question of feminisms’ relationships to these "mainstyles" becomes: can all identitarian logics be described as phallocentric? Are there non-phallocentric forms of logocentrism? What are they? Is logocentrism always phallogocentrism? A related way of phrasing this question is whether sexual difference should be situated as the "absolute ethical difference" or whether it should be "accorded an ontological privilege," as Elam describes other feminists as doing (Ela94 118). I have argued throughout that sexual difference as male/female cannot be ethical in a Levinasian sense since it is one of the primary modes of reducing the Other to more of the Same by creating (op)positionalities of ideal binaries: the "first" level of the actual phallic function. The question of ontological privileging, however, has not been addressed and is very much related to, if not the same as, its corollary: whether logocentrism is always phallogocentrism.

Allow me to take a few steps back at this point and return to Kermode’s distinction between myths and fictions:

Another useful distinction Kermode makes in The Sense of an Ending is between old and new modernism:

Kermode associates Pound, Yeats, Eliot, and even Joyce with this older phase, and claims that "we can without difficulty convict most of these authors of dangerous lapses into mythical thinking…. All, in different ways, venerated tradition and had programmes which were at once modern and anti-schismatic" (Ker66 104). I would add Freud to this list of literary myth-makers: his own traditionalist modernism also has its roots in the period of the Great War, and its flowering also came later.

Joyce will be Kermode’s exception to the other modernists because

In crude terms, we might consider modernism in both forms as reactions against the failings of the Positive Concords of the Judeo-Christian tradition of "the West." Freudian theory is modernist in that it rejects the Positive Concord, but what might have first appeared as a potentially schismatic fiction evolved into a myth of Negative Concord, as Kermode suggests was the case with the works of many modernist writers. The magical trope of Freudian theory–the one that transforms the apparent schism of the Freudian unconscious or "scene of writing" into the basis of a Negative Concord–is, of course, castration. Castration transforms difference into identity. The concept of "difference" here should be generalized to include chance and the différance of Derrida’s adestinational linguistics. Freudian theory, therefore, is a particularly powerful old-modernist fiction-as-myth, a Negative Concord of "castration-truth" veiled in the schismatic language of materialism and modernism.

What Foucault describes as the "hysterization" of early modernism–that is, the modernism of and before the old modernists, modernism in its broadest sense–could then be seen as analogous to Freud’s Negative Concord of "castration-truth" in terms of their functions: both were discursive modes that dealt with a certain insecurity regarding sexuality and sexual difference by securing the place of woman. Foucauldian hysterization put woman in her place by pathologizing her as sexual, thus rationalizing the medical-psychiatric policing of women. Freud’s treatment of "hysteria" was much in the same vein, and his "castration-truth" of oedipal psychoanalysis would share in hysterization’s pathologization of woman (her "peculiar sexuality"; for Lacan, the symptom of man) and, therefore, in the general policing of woman that this kind of misogyny promotes. The waning of "hysteria" after the turn of the century to some extent might be attributed to a shift between the types of paradigms needed to keep woman in her place: the early modernist Foucauldian hysterization replaced by the late ("old") modernists myths of Negative Concord. As the structures of patriarchal Positive Concords crumbled, the insecurity of place, particularly of sexual place, came to the fore. Freudian theory, in the guise of a schismatic theory, would appeal to those impatient with and cynical towards the authority of Positive Concords, while also appealing to their love of patriarchal traditionalism and insecurity regarding sexual place or identity. "Castration-truth" presents itself as schismatic, but "le manque à sa place" (Der87a 425).

Many feminists seem to be attracted to psychoanalysis because they see it as "fiction fitting where it touches," and where it touches, according to them, would be something like the workings of patriarchal power and its sexism. The confusions here seem to be between whether "castration-truth" is indeed a truth, and whether psychoanalysis itself is an example of "castration-truth" being used as a mode of reducing the Other to more of the Same. Furthering the confusion is the debt of the latter point to psychoanalysis: the interiority of psychoanalysis to the criticism or deconstruction of it as "castration-truth." Since castration-truth seems to be a dominant ontological mode of reducing the Other to the Same, it is easy to see how it could be mistaken for truth, the only game in town, or the privileged form of ontological difference. The question becomes: does psychoanalysis reveal this truth or is it an example of such a reduction? Or is it to some degree both?

At least partially, we might attribute this confusion to the singular effectiveness of castration as a modernist trope of difference-into-identity. What trope performs this necessary reduction of logocentrism as well? Even if we don’t cling to logocentrism and its subject as a truth, a myth–as many feminists do in order to maintain their "revolutionary standpoints" with "the constructive tools of ontological discourse" they see as necessary–and we accept logocentrism as a necessary fiction, does this fiction have to be in the form of "castration-truth"? If there are only fictions, does this primary fiction become a truth of sorts? Does the necessary fiction of logocentrism have to be phallogocentrism? Is there another trope as successful as "castration" for creating a myth of Negative Concord through the reduction of the Other to presence/absence? Doesn’t phallogocentrism still perform this reduction if it is seen as the only fiction available, the only game in town, the only way to get it "wrong"? This seems to be the confusion of Lacanian feminists such as Copjec, as I argued in chapter two: they mistake their sexual "difference" as a specific "failure" of "the sexual relationship," but, beyond simply failing to see that Lacan’s linguistics is a mythology based on "castration-truth" and the sexual "difference" determined by it, they seem blind to how Lacan has established this fiction as the lie that speaks the truth, and how this truth is phallocentric.

Is difference best or most fundamentally represented by male/female? Is not this (op)positionality always a mode of dissimulating difference as différance, as I have argued? Is this (op)positionality not always a mode of reducing the Other to more of the Same? And therefore a mode of denying difference? Also, is male/female always the primary (op)positionality of this reduction? Should this "difference" be privileged over others? Over other binaries? Is it the origin of the "drive of the proper"? Is this "difference" of male/female primordial? That which establishes the home and economy? A Heideggerian "Being-at-home" that is primordial, if not as primordial as "Not-being-at-home"? Is "castration" always the primary trope of such "difference" and reduction? Does castration-truth fiction indeed correspond to the most primary aspect of the "drive of the proper"? Would not life/death or presence/absence be contenders for this position as privileged ontological difference?

One answer to many of these questions might be: only if phallogocentrism is the only game played, and only if "one must resist" by playing only this one game. For many feminists, psychoanalysis explains the way patriarchy works. But how does language work? Is it destinational? What about chance? Can any such masterplotting, or any plotting in general, really constitute a fiction that "fits where it touches" without negating chance, as Kermode argues with respect to Joyce? Isn’t this idea of correspondence itself logocentric? Is the unconscious structured like a destinational language, or is it (un)structuring like language and différance? Can patriarchy "work" the way Freud and Lacan theorized if the unconscious does not work the way they theorized? If language does not work the way Lacan theorized? No, but these psychoanalyses themselves work the way patriarchy works if "patriarchy" here is understood as a reduction of the Other to more of the phallic Same, and this process of reduction is understood as phallogocentrism. As I have tried to show here, there is more to learn by what they do than what they say. But, as I argued above, the analysis of what they do owes some debt to what they say, which accounts for much of the confusion I am trying to address here.

Perhaps, if the modernist sensibility must have a schismatic-appearing, fiction-appearing myth of Negative Concord, then "castration-truth" fictions will appeal to such sensibilities as the only fictions. In Lacan’s Negative Concord, there are only fictions, yet there is also alienation. This fiction of alienation is the specific lack of what is transcendentally authentic: there is only one, very specific fiction for Lacan, one lie that tells the truth. "Fiction" works as a category for Lacan because there is a truth about which lies can be told. Copjec, a Lacanian feminist, writes the following under the assumption that psychoanalysis "says" the truth about language, rather than performs a "castration-truth" reduction of the différance of language to more of the phallic same:

Bisexuality is not a "deconstructionist" concept. Her misunderstanding of "mainstyle" deconstruction reaches even new heights as she continues:

The confusions this passage "falls into" are too many to address all of them here. Yet what might these a priori "sexual signifiers" be except for transcendental signifiers of man and woman? The sexual "difference" that "deconstruction" denies, and the very distinct way "this failure takes place," would be man/woman and castration respectively. We might simply say that, unlike Copjec, "deconstruction" does not know in advance how any failure will take place. It only knows that the failure can take place in a way Copjec does not know, has not predicted with her destinational linguistics. Copjec’s foreknowledge can only mean we are dealing with a destinational linguistics, which would certainly cancel out the undecidability Lacanian psychoanalysis certainly needs to learn from "mainstyle" deconstruction. In other words, this deconstruction knows that the signifiers of sexual "difference" and "sex" cannot be predetermined, are not transcendental, and do not constitute the structure of any certain "failure"–a very specific "failure" that functions as the proper detour, which allows for the successful return, a destiny.

Undecidability and dissemination cannot be reduced to a preprogrammed failure, or lack of success. Any "failure" that reinforces the "place" of lack would be a success in terms of reinforcing and re-establishing what is obviously a version of the actual phallic function and "castration-truth." And any "failure" of words or "the" sexual relationship–as if there were only one–that maintains two (op)positional transcendental categories does not embrace undecidability. The so-called failing of language in Lacan always seems to end up reestablishing the type of "complementarity" that Jacqueline Rose, a Lacanian, argues is the foundation of the "ultimate fantasy": "It is when the categories ‘male’ and ‘female’ are seen to represent an absolute and complementary division that they fall prey to a mystification in which the difficulty of sexuality instantly disappears?" (Mit82 33)–and the "difficulty" of language when it is the basis of an oedipal destiny and the letter’s inevitable return reestablishes this proper. Copjec mistakes Lacanian psychoanalysis as a theory of undecidability and (sexual) difference, rather than as a sexist determinism that negates chance and difference, a phallocentric ontotheology, and the performance of a powerful mode of phallogocentrism in need of deconstruction.

The question still remains, however: among logocentric games, is "castration-truth" the only game to play? Another way of putting this might be: is all subjectivity castration-based? An answer of "yes" would fit with Haraway’s notion of "survival" requiring the "dissolving of Western selves" (Har91 157). It would also fit with Derrida’s Nietzschean take on feminism in Spurs:

Inasmuch as feminisms play only one game, and that game is the game of constructing "revolutionary standpoints, epistemologies as achievements of people committed to changing the world" based on "ontological discourse about revolutionary subjects," and inasmuch as single games of ontological subjectivity are phallogocentric, then "[g]one the style" for those feminisms. Again, Elam criticizes Derrida as follows:

It is questionable, however, if any feminists had accepted the "acid tools" of the second game, this "ironic ally" in 1978, the year his book on Nietzsche was published. Inasmuch as all logocentrism of that time was "castration-truth" based, and inasmuch as feminisms were only playing the aforementioned singular games, then Derrida’s Nietzschean criticism of feminism would be justified. What seems most questionable to me is the first assumption: that all logocentrism of that time was "castration-truth" based–that phallocentrism is the only form of logocentrism, and castration its primary trope. This is seemingly an assumption shared by both Derrida and many feminisms.

A guiding question throughout this project has been what is the relationship between the two "mainstyle" theoretical jetties of psychoanalysis and deconstruction. Because phallogocentrism is figured here as "mainstyle" deconstruction’s primary "object" of analysis, and "mainstyle" psychoanalysis is argued as being even more phallogocentric than Derrida has argued, the relationship is one of radically different "analyses of repressions." What about the relation of these two "mainstyles" to feminisms? On the one hand, since Freudian theory cannot be simply reduced to phallogocentrism (specters of a more radical Freud would haunt any such reduction), Haraway’s "ironic allies" would seem to best describe the relationship of those feminisms interested in producing "revolutionary standpoints" while reproducing as little of the sexism which seems so difficult to escape while using psychoanalytic "tools of ontological discourse" (Har91 157). On the other hand, to read psychoanalysis in either its Freudian modes or its Lacanian modes as in any significant way "acid tools of postmodernist theory" would be to mistake the radical specters of Freud and Lacan for the "mainstyles" of their theoretical jetties. The lure of these psychoanalyses for feminisms may be that their "bedrock" is one of sexual "difference." But this "difference" is "castration-truth," and the "bedrock" is consistently "the repudiation of femininity" (XXIII 250): castration-truth is "sexual difference-into-identity," a negation of difference, a (the?) primary mode of reducing the Other to more of the Same.

Should the ontological difference of male/female be privileged? I will close by deferring to Diane Elam’s closing statement in Feminism and Deconstruction: Ms. en Abyme on the relationship of deconstruction and feminism: