French Feminism and Philosophy of Language

Author(s): Andrea Nye

Source: Noûs, Vol. 20, No. 1, 1986 A. P. A. Central Division Meetings (Mar., 1986), pp. 45-51
Published by: Wiley
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FrenchFeminismand Philosophyof Language
ANDREA NYE
UNIVERSITY
OF WISCONSIN,WHITEWATER

This paper argues for a reconsideration of French feminism by

philosophers. Philosophers should read Kristeva, Irigaray, Cixous
because of their contributions to philosophy of language as well as
to feminist theory. Lacan and Derrida, the fathers of French
feminism, have often been treated by American philosophers as ex-
otic, incomprehensible, frivolous, and irrevocably foreign. Although
their colorful ideas might be borrowed by literary critics, they could
hardly be allowed to break into the accepted historical sequence from
Locke, Berkely, and Hume, to Frege, Wittgenstein and Quine.
However, Derrida and Lacan in their theories of language address
themselves to questions foundational in both the British empiricist
and the American analytic traditions. Furthermore, they do so with
results bracing enough to advance Anglo-American philosophical
inquiry into language beyond its present stasis. Especially fruitful
is Lacan's and Derrida's attention to the speaking subject and the
intentional sources of language use.
Cixous and Irigaray push post-structuralist theory of language
one step further. As women, they must find inadequate the alter-
natives offered by both Lacan and Derrida for the speaking sub-
ject. According to Lacan, women have no stable place in a language
that is structured around phallic presence. Women are less willing
to give up regressive inter-subjectivity to become a subject or an
"I" that can objectify the physical world. Although Derrida claims
to be the champion of the feminine in language, his deconstruc-
tion, played with elegance, if not tediousness, is no solution.
Titillating, fun, naughty, it does nothing to finally relieve the anger
and frustration of women excluded from political power, in danger
from male violence, struggling to survive in a world of alien values.
Whether there is no escape from the Law of the Father but on-
ly a realization of his clay feet, or whether the only alternative is

45

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46 NOUS

a joyful play with the text, feminist causes are not advanced.
Either women remain semi-inarticulate, having only the mystic
resonance of Lacan's female saints,1 or they talk on and on, "mak-
ing their voices resonate throughout the corridors"2 of Academia;
in neither case, is there any hope of a practical result. Post struc-
turalism rules out, theoretically, both the possibility of a moving,
direct, expression of feminine experience, and the possibility of a
communication between women that would give them a common
cause and a common praxis. What passes for communication is possi-
ble only because, according to Lacan, all submit to the Law of the
Father, or because, according to Derrida, we can "play with" the
text of another as if it were our own.
The task for French feminism was to carve out a locus for
feminist speech and writing against the confines of post-structural
theory of language. This could only be done by reinstating the
possibility of expression and of communication. It is in this context
that Cixous' "ecriture feminine" and Irigaray's "parler-entre-elles"
can be reexamined fruitfully by philosophers, both as a feminist
strategy and as a contribution to philosophy of language.
In LaJeune NAieCixous calls for an escape from the oppositional
hierarchies of reasoned, semantically well-formed discourse. She
points out the controlling contrast, male/female, in any list of op-
positions such as Activity/passivity, Sun/moon, Culture/nature,
Day/night, Father/mother.3 Cixous does not view these as univer-
sal structures necessary in any meaningful language. Instead she
notes that they are "couples." In other words, semantic structure
is not an a priori grid of plus and minus semantic components,
but mimics the human institution of the male/female couple. Fur-
ther, she notes that these contrasts are kept in place only with
violence, as in the contrast between rich/poor, master/slave, or
civilized/primitive. Semantics is not a neutral analysis, it also cor-
responds to relations of oppression in the real world maintained
by force, a force applied by grammarians, linguists, philosophical
analysts, as well as by police and armies.
This view of semantic structure as mimicing social relations and
maintained by force demysticizes the authority of dichotomous mean-
ing. It allows Cixous to contemplate the possibility of another way
of speaking and writing. In her writing-and writing is the privileged
locus for this new language, because speech situations are still
dominated by sexist constraints that prevent free expression-Cixous
returns to the rhythm and tone of the human voice. She searches
for a language that can "speak the body."4 Not only may feelings
and emotions be directly expressed in such a language, but also
a speaker will be able to listen to others, and even to things, speak-

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FRENCH FEMINISM 47

ing themselves.5 This project, as pursued in works like l1la or Angst,

might seem to place Cixous as a poet and not philosopher. However,
this is to ignore the radical thesis she holds. It is not that one should
leave the philosophers to their philosophizing and write poetry, but
that a different kind of knowledge is possible and preferable. Ex-
pressive language, so long an embarrassment to linguists and seman-
ticists, is the medium for this new knowledge.
In Illa, Cixous does not make a futile attempt to maneuver in
the textual thicket of established theories on women, instead she
listens for some other train of thought to carry her from association
to association, from impulse to impulse. She looks in the very graphic
lines of a word on a page for a new insight. She resists the tempta-
tion to fit phenomena neatly into prearranged categories. Classifica-
tion is, for Cixous, a way to kill off the object of knowledge. She
tries to get back to a fresh seeing that allows the thing itself to speak
itself, and to impose its own rhythms on the consciousness.6 This
requires an abandonment of the masterful, unitary, self or "I" of
language. Instead the writer/knower is shaken by, traversed by,
vulnerable to, other views, other voices, other writings, other times.
The thinker does not marshal an impressive array of arguments,
but instead is an explorer, an undoer of pat thought. She does not
edit or censor to reach a preset goal when a conceptual problem
or tangle is encountered; she attempts to work through, in the
medium of language, not to a truth she already knows, but to a
truth yet to be discovered. Such a writing and knowledge is only
possible if words can carry the expression of those who speak them.
A similar approach is also used by Irigaray in a specifically
philosophical context. In her Speculumof the Other Woman,7she prac-
tices a new kind of commentary and analysis of philosophical texts.
She listens to what a philosopher says in his own words; she tries
to capture the tone; she questions him, amplifying what is only hinted
at, filling in blanks where he is reticent. She listens between the
lines for what is not said, and spins out the consequences of what
is said. She attempts to understand, and not only to understand
what the philosopher wants her to understand. She probes the deeper
implications and the deeper motivations of his pronouncements. Here
philosophical discourse functions, not as an ordered system in which
opponents may catch each other out in inconsistencies, but as a
medium of exchange. Irigaray teases out the incoherence, the sleights
of hand, the ambivalence inherent in the text, but the point is not
so much to prove Aristotle wrong as it is to find the weakness, the
place at which his thought could be transformed and surpassed, the
point at which it might provide the entry to a new perspective. Such
a treatment requires a new kind of philosophical style.

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48 NOUS

The question of style is central to the thought of Cixous and

Irigaray. Language is not a neutral instrument that can be used
to state a variety of facts and arguments, nor is style an embellish-
ment that should be avoided in philosophical or scientific writing.
Irigaray says:
If we continue to speak the same language, we are going to reproduce
the same story. Begin again the same stories . . . same discussions,
same disputes, same dramas. Same attractions, same ruptures. Same
difficulties, impossible to repair. Same . . . Same . . . Always the
same.8
Such a language, Irigaray continues, passes over our bodies, our
heads, loses itself, loses us. Our contemporary American philosophical
style, liberally laced with the stiffening notations of mathematical
logic, often is just such a mechanized, repetitive speaking. The
problems-of other minds, reference, truth-repeat themselves and
philosophical discussion is only another skirmishing according to
the rules of philosophical debate. Any other style is quickly con-
demned as too literary, too flowery, too emotional. Irigaray's style,
on the other hand, is likely to shock philosophical orthodoxy. She
does not use arguments. She pays attention to metaphors. She weaves
elements from psychoanalysis, literature, and myth, producing a
complexity bewildering to readers used to sequential linear argu-
ment. She comes to her subject as feminist partisan, with a par-
ticular passionate interest in and complaint about the material she
discusses. She writes with a particular hearer or reader in mind
to whom she speaks. What she institutes is not a duel, but a dialogue.
Although the participants in a dialogue may remain hostile, the point
is not, as in a duel, to provoke hostility to the point of murder.
Instead dialogue attempts to bring the difference to some sort of
evolution. Irigaray does not attempt to kill off the other's point of
view, but to reason, to mirror, to cajole, even to seduce it from
its obdurate, self-interested, if not stupid, rigidity.
Cixous, in discussing the Hegelian problematic of self/other and
master/slave, also tries a new style.9 She uses her own biography
as Franco-Algerian at the time of the Algerian war. Such an inter-
jection of the personal into a philosophical text would seem an im-
pardonable gaffe. However, Cixous' experience as neither French
nor Algerian at a time of intense conflict makes concrete and graphic
the hierarchial relations she describes and provides new insight into
their dynamics. Her explicit personal emotion and involvement make
the discussion more true and less subjective than if feeling had been,
in proper philosophical style, hidden behind a veil of objective
theorizing.

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FRENCH FEMINISM 49

Feminists had to recover from their post-structuralist fathers,

not only the possibility of expression but also the capacity to com-
municate in language. For Lacan and Derrida there is no question
of communication, what passes for communication, is, in Lacan's
case, an acceptance of the patriarchal authority represented by seman-
tic order, and in Derrida's case, the license to embroider the text
of another. In neither case do we penetrate to the thought or feel-
ing of others through words or answer them directly. At the same
time, it is the possibility of such a communication and such an
answering that Irigaray and Cixous place at the center of the
woman) s movement.
Cixous, for example, begins with the desperation of the woman
trapped in a language which dictates its law, its familial model, which
fixes things as something. Her struggle, however, is not always just
to get mystically beyond language to a more perfect union between
words and things. It is also to get past a meta-language dominated
by men, to a way of writing and speaking in which there can be
an "endless circulation of desire."10 Language can be a way to
establish
a rapport with another so I pass in the other without destroying the
other, so that I go to find the other where he/she is without trying
to bring all to me."
Thus the significant breakthrough of the woman seeker in Illa comes
when she reads these words written by the novelist Lispector:
I will write to you all that comes to my spirit with the least
surveillance possible.'2
With this invitation to a free, frank communication, Cixous can
now begin to speak. She can speak because there is someone to
speak to, someone who will listen and understand. Her mystical
speech with things is not so much a magical union between words
and things, as it is testimony to the possibility of communication,
a communication that requires an active listening and openness to
another.
Irigaray also sees the answer for women in an abandonment
of sterile male repetitive discourse for a "Parler-entre-elles." The
"merchandise" will begin to speak to each other.13 This will cause
a revolution in a cultural economy dominated by the exchange of
women. The language that women will speak among themselves,
however, must be different from the language theorized in philosophy
of language. It will not be centered around analytic semantic struc-
tures. Instead the anchor points will be exactly those elements which
linguistics and logic omit, the pronomial system of "I's," "you's"

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 50 NOUS

and "he's," "she's," and "it's. " In Passions Eldmentaires14 Irigaray

constructs dialogues in which "I's" and "you's" are put into mov-
ing relation. No longer is there one "I" whose suppression of any
"you" is elided in anonymous assertion. No longer is intentionali-
ty the embarrassment that must be covered in heroic feats of quan-
tification. Irigaray's "you's" and "I's" are the shifting positions
around which discussion moves.
Her coupling of tu/je points out the distinctive and crucial
linguistic functioning of "you." To say "you" is to establish a com-
plex relation with an "I", a relationship that implies a degree of
complicity and identity, as well as difference. The license of this
relationship allows one to speak for the other, to say for the other
what "you" cannot say for "yourself." The result is a plurality
that need not be reduced to unity. Instead language serves as the
medium of exchange, an exchange which always implies a mutual
advantage and which works to bring positions into relationship. The
speaker may then escape from the sterile categories one authoritarian
"I" must presuppose. So may the philosopher find new interest
in old philosophical texts. No longer is Plato our Frege, or Aristo-
tle, our analytic philosopher. Instead as Irigaray's "you," Aristo-
tle's and Plato's voices begin to be heard, voices which are in-
teresting, just because their fears, loves, hostilities have finally become
audible.
Rebelling against fathers is an ongoing project. Some of Irigaray's
and Cixous' inheritance has stood in the way of the full develop-
ment of these promising new perspectives in theory of language.
Briefly: 1. The tendency to criticize language, and not structuralist
theories of language that claim, by their own admission, only to
present a theoretical ideal, has forced French feminists into the pro-
ject of discovering "another" language. This has in turn necessitated
a removal from practical affairs, and provoked the charge that
Irigaray's and Cixous' approaches lead to feminist marginality and
impotence. It has also prevented the development of an alternate
account of language adequate to the facts of linguistic expression
and communication. This tendency could be checked if the fault
was seen not with language but with the theories of language that
impose one particular masculine problematic and structure.
2. Related is the concern that this "other" language of Cix-
ous and Irigaray is a mystic "woman's" language, embodying the
stereotypic feminine characteristics of irrationality and emotionali-
ty. If, however, their project is conceived as an attempt to restore
language in which one could express and communicate, that language
need not constitute a ghetticized and excluded women's speech. This
is not to dispute Cixous' and Irigaray's claim that women are in

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FRENCH FEMINISM 51

a privileged position as excluded and as the objects of patriarchal

language to force the restoration of such a speakable language.
3. Cixous and Irigaray also inherit from Lacan and Derrida
a confinement in the "prison house" of Western culture. They often
share the idealistic tendency of structuralist thought to ignore the
historical/social specificity of language structures. The structure of
Indo-European language becomes the structure of all civilized human
thought. Once this is accepted, the only alternative is to return to
pre-culture, to what is animal, psychotic, inarticulate. If, however,
not only the Law of the Father, but also the mirroring substitutive
functions described by both Lacan and Derrida are linked to the
history and development of a specific way of life and thought, other
more promising, and civilized, alternatives may be available.
Working through and beyond these problems may occupy the
next generation of feminist theorists in philosophy of language. What
they may discover about the speaking subject, about the societies
in which speakers do and could live, and about the possibility of
understanding in language, will, I am certain, be philosophically
interesting.
NOTES
'cf. Encore (Le Seminaire XX) (Paris: du Seuil, 1975), especially "Dieu et la jouissance
de la femme," p. 61ff.
2Derrida, Speechand Phenomena,trans. by D. B. Allison and N. Garner (Evanston,
IL: Northwestern Univ. Press, 1973).
3LeJeuneNie (Paris: Union Generale d'Editions, 1975), pp. 115-116. Further evidence
can be found in the fact that semanticists almost invariably illustrate component analysis
with the example of family relations. Words like, "mother," "father," "sister," "brother"
are taken as the model for the relation between componential and word meaning, as the
components, "male," "female" are factored out.
4The manifesto for this project is "The Laugh of the Medusa," trans by K. Cohen
and P. Cohen, Signs, Summer 1976 where Cixous describes an "6criture feminine."
5cf. Illa (Paris: des Femmes, 1980), pp. 134ff.
6An example of such a knowledge in the field of science might be the work of biologist
Barbara McClintock as interpreted recently by the philosopher of science, Helen Fox Keller.
7Recently translated by Gilliam Gill (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univ. Press, 1985)
8Ce Sexe qui n'en est pas un (Paris: Minuit, 1977), p. 205.
9La Jeune N&e, p. 127ff.
?0"Castrationor Decapitation," (Signs, 7 Autumn, 1981) p. 53.
""Le sexe ou la tete," Les Cahiers du GRIF, 13 Oct. 1976, p. 15.
'21l1a, p. 178.
'3cf. "Des marchandises entre elles," in Ce Sexe.
'4Paris: Minuit, 1982.

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