This article was downloaded by: [The University of Manchester Library]On: 12 October 2014, At: 01:41Publisher: RoutledgeInforma Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH,UK

ParallaxPublication details, including instructions for authorsand subscription information:http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/tpar20

To Inscribe in the Feminine:A Kristevan Impossibility? orFemininity, Melancholy andSublimationGriselda PollockPublished online: 03 Dec 2010.

To cite this article: Griselda Pollock (1998) To Inscribe in the Feminine: A KristevanImpossibility? or Femininity, Melancholy and Sublimation, Parallax, 4:3, 81-117, DOI:10.1080/135346498250136

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/135346498250136

PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE

Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all theinformation (the “Content”) contained in the publications on our platform.However, Taylor & Francis, our agents, and our licensors make norepresentations or warranties whatsoever as to the accuracy, completeness,or suitability for any purpose of the Content. Any opinions and viewsexpressed in this publication are the opinions and views of the authors, andare not the views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of theContent should not be relied upon and should be independently verified withprimary sources of information. Taylor and Francis shall not be liable for anylosses, actions, claims, proceedings, demands, costs, expenses, damages,and other liabilities whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly orindirectly in connection with, in relation to or arising out of the use of theContent.

This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes.Any substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan,sub-licensing, systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone isexpressly forbidden. Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found athttp://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditions

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

The

Uni

vers

ity o

f M

anch

este

r L

ibra

ry]

at 0

1:41

12

Oct

ober

201

4

parallax , 1998, vol. 4, no. 3, 81± 117

To Inscribe in the Feminine: A Kristevan Impossibility?or Femininity, Melancholy and Sublimation

Grise lda Pollock

Certain contemporary thinkers consider, as it is wellknown, that modernity is characterised as the ® rst epochin human history in which human beings attempt to livewithout religion. In its present form , is not feminism in theprocess of becoming one?

`Women’s Time’, Julia Kristeva1

The belief that `one is a woman’ is almost as absurd andobscurantist as the belief that `one is a man.’ I say almostbecause there are still many goals which women canachieve: freedom for abortion and contraception, day-carecentres for children, equality on the job, etc¼ . Therefore,we must use `we are women’ as an advertisement or sloganfor our demands. On a deeper level, however, a womancannot `be’; it is something which does not even belong tothe category of being. It follows that a feminist practicecan only be negative, at odds with what already exists sothat we may say `that’ s not it.’ and `that’ s still not it.’

`La femme ce n’ est jamais cË a’ , Julia Kristeva2

Preface

In the course of the conference, several related questions emerged about femininity,aesthetic practices and religious culture within the thought of Julia Kristeva. One ofthe questions raised by speakers from the ¯ oor addressed the gendering of sublimation,while another questioned the tortured relations of feminine possibility and women’shistorical participation as artists in the aesthetic project of art in general, and morerecently, the avant-garde. Yet another questioner asked to understand better the roleof rethinking religious thought and art within the context of a secular intellectualtradition. As the last speaker, I was relieved to recognise these shared concerns withthe paper I was preparing to deliver on women, artistic practice, and Julia Kristeva’s

parallax1353± 4645/ 98 $12´00 Ñ 1998 Taylor & Francis Ltd 81

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

The

Uni

vers

ity o

f M

anch

este

r L

ibra

ry]

at 0

1:41

12

Oct

ober

201

4

writings on the historic function of the avant-garde in relation to the unholy trinity ofState, Family and Church. My question, like that of a member of the audience, wasaimed at the contradiction between Julia Kristeva’s theoretical attention to femininityand the absence of consistent analysis of aesthetic practices by women. My method,however, was not to assume an unbridgeable disagreement between feminist interestsin art made by women and Kristevan statements on feminism or on femininity as apositionality within the linguistic function. What would it be like to take seriouslyKristeva’s political heresy not only that woman cannot `be’ but that the `woman artist’equally is not on the plane of being? Put another way, can we escape the phallocentricconstructions of the feminine through creativity, rather than remaining within them,a predicament signi® ed precisely by the internal contradiction of the neologism: womanartist. The term artist is not neutral and if we wish to enable ourselves as feminists tosustain the revolutionary potential of the feminist revolt we cannot hide in the pseudo-religious comfort of the signi® er Woman, linked as it has been by Lacan to the beyondof all thought and meaning, with Jouissance, Other and Thing. As of this moment,some of the peculiarities of psychoanalytical discourse o å er a provisional means tothink through and with the necessity of this exile.

Part I

Let me approach this question through a short story and a painting.

In a convent high in the hills above ® elds blue with the ¯ owers of ¯ ax seeded fromthe Holy Land, nuns spin and weave linen for the nuptial beds of royalty and nobility.Treasured in the same convent are small cuttings from these noble sheets, eachbearing the stains of virginity-proving blood, each framed under its armorial bearingsand mounted beneath a dynastic name. A slow procession of elderly, mantilla-c ladwomen make regular pilgrimage to this `museum’ of `women’s art’ , to read uponeach blooded page stories of marriages, intrigues, children, alliances, the rise andfall of famous houses, the memories of disappeared girlhoods. But one canvas meritsspecial notice, attracts more gazes, incites the most profound contemplation. `Theframe is as ® ne as any, and as proudly carries the golden plate with the royal crown.But on this plate no name is inscribed and the linen within the frame is snow-whitefrom corner to corner ± a blank page.’3

The story can be read in many ways. One view would see the bodily signatures ofroyal princesses framed within the narratives of patriarchal society: sexes used andclaimed as objects of dynastic exchange and the social power of men. The blood isboth the ink with which the contract between men is signed and the trace of women’ sonly entry into culture: bleeding into art, painting with their wounded bodies asSusan Gubar argues.4 Within such a gallery, what does not enter signi ® cation `inblood’ via circuits of woman as o(a)bject, appears blank. Yet it is by the unswervingloyalty to that `truth’ , as the story teller calls what silence reveals, that visitors aremoved to the greatest contemplation of other stories ± that might be traced uponan only apparent ly uninscribed surface, that might be projected upon its always openscreen. It is in that radical moment of what o å ers no representation to vision thatanother kind of gaze peeps through, to touch, move and surprise rather than capture

Pollock82

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

The

Uni

vers

ity o

f M

anch

este

r L

ibra

ry]

at 0

1:41

12

Oct

ober

201

4

Figure 1. T he S al t B ox , Avis Newm an, 1989 (Lisson Gallery , London).

the viewer, in an uncanny exchange with the unknown and unknowable, unnamedother, whose non-presence is not exactly absence, although through the stillunmarked bed sheet, this other `she’ is not part of a unitary, phallic order of meaningproduction that can only make sense through either/or, present/absent, used/vir-ginal, self/other, mark/no mark. Perceived ins ide the visib le emptiness, `it’ ± an inscrip-tion in/of and from the feminine ± impinges across the threshold of viewing, anda å ectively reconnects with the once lived subjectivities that are thereby called intoco-emergence with the empty page at this momentary opened borderline of being/non-being and meaning/non-m eaning. The feminine, signalled here by the problem-atic of the blank page, but not metaphorically represented by it, is somewhere beyondthe object, the framed `painting’ that stands for art as an achieved statement, yet itis folded into the visible: and rather than positivist dreams of representation ofwomen’ s meanings, I want to track this paradox of inscriptions in the feminine.

T he B lank Page , for this is the title of the short story by Izak Dinesen, celebratesneither silence nor bleeding as a female cultural virtue and it does not o å er eitheras the basis for an oppositional feminine aesthetic. It brilliantly creates a multipleimage, hinged both to the blankness that veils the dissidence of the feminine in thephallocentric text and to the possibility of meanings `otherwise’ that press frombehind that screen upon its heterogeneous surface to reach out and lure anotherkind of awed, shocked, wondering, uncanny looking and knowing that we mighthypothesise contacts what the artist and analytical theorist Bracha LichtenbergEttinger has proposed as a non-visible, non-phallic, matrixial stratum of subjectivity.5

Both solacing in the annulment of a mastering, Oedipalising gaze, and disturbing in

parallax83

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

The

Uni

vers

ity o

f M

anch

este

r L

ibra

ry]

at 0

1:41

12

Oct

ober

201

4

its encounter at another level with what is not seen optically but a å ectively, this non-image displaces the scopic regime of the West which ± with its hitherto exclusivelyphallic psychoanalytical theories ± projects as the only way to de® ne sexual di å erence.

The `blank page’ turned back through the prism of some recent art made by womenreconnects painting to the materiality of its practice as a mark of a bodily referenceto the invisible speci® city of a feminine body that leaps from materiality ± whatBracha Lichtenberg calls corpo-reality ± to the Symbolic without the dis ® guringfantasy of the image ± `of Woman’. On the blank page, there is no ® gurative orindexical representation, however minimal, no fetishising icon to commemorate mas-culine dread of (his own) lack. The blank page is without the bloodied sign of whatpatriarchal logic de® nes as woman’s wounded, castrated and thus castrating condi-tion. Some theorists suggest that the sacralisation of the blood of virginity is, at onelevel, a cultural relic of the matricide necessary for the heterosexual man to separate,individuate and eroticise the very corporeal domain from which he once emerged.As Julia Kristeva has argued in P ow ers o f H orro r, the masculine subject undergoes acrisis because of the loss of the union with the maternal body. This crisis producesan inarticulate rage against any identi ® cation with what breaks the ® xed borderlinesupon which `his’ subjectivity will be then structured: inside/outside.6 That is to say,any transgression such as is represented by the abject ± death, blood, disease, de-generation ± appears to threaten a de-structuring of the boundaries de® ning andcontaining subjectivity and will be phobically resisted.

Woman, however, as a fantasy, and in her erotic and reproductive life cannot be limitedto such a clean division of inside and outside. Thus Woman seems to present to phallo-centric thought the impossible problem of a human ® gure for whom such boundariesdo not apply, a division which, none the less, is the basis of phallic subjectivity and,apparently, meaning itself. At the much later, Oedipal level, the archaic con¯ ict aroundthis division takes the fantastic, imaginary form of rage against the mother ± now sexuallyde® ned ± who represents a compromise to masculinity’s separation and to a narcissisticgrasp of ego identity. As the once inside, expelled waste of a maternal body, how cana man come to love the very `hole’ represented by and representing the mother. Therituals of virginal de¯ oration ± often performed by an elder or socially privileged male± and the ceremonial display of the virgin’s blood raise to the cultural level of a signthe condensation of both the dread of the abjected maternal body and the sadisticmastery of that fear folded into heterosexuality.7

So, to return to the blank sheet, what might the representation of the ab sence of suchblood be, when imagined by a text `in the feminine’? Kelly Oliver comments: `InP ow ers o f H orro r Kristeva describes how the child, there always the male child, mustsplit his mother in order to take up his socially prescribed sexual identity. The motheris split in two: the abject and the sublime’.8 Thus I discern two potential, related routesthat inscribe masculinity’s troubled but constitutive relation to the maternal. Theyleave us with the question of the feminine relation to abjection and sublimation.

Lacan’s Sublimation

Might the blank page ± imagined as the transgressive presence in the patriarchalmuseum that, none the less, attracts and solaces our gaze ± be an image, if not of,

Pollock84

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

The

Uni

vers

ity o

f M

anch

este

r L

ibra

ry]

at 0

1:41

12

Oct

ober

201

4

but calling forth, the spectre of a feminine sublimation with its inevitable but shiftedtraces of the never completely lost but still distancing maternal? Might it be one thatin its historic and poetic moment ± the early twentieth century ± and in its authorship± a Danish woman modernist Karen Blixen, using a male pseudonym ± managesboth to acknow ledge and to displace the feminine object that marks the emptinessthat, for Lacan, veiled the Thing that is the core of (masculine) sublimation. ForFreud, sublimation referred to a kind of transposition of an excess of the sexual intosocially valorised activities: artistic creation and intellectual enquiry. Following Klein,this displacement/transposition would also involve sadistic and destructive drivesagainst the mother’ s body being countered and inverted into restorative and reparat-ive activities. Lacan, however, raises sublimation to the basis of ethics.

Thus, the most general formula that I can give you of sublimation isthe follow ing: it raises the object ± and I don’ t mind the suggestionon the play of words in the term that I use ± to the dignity of theThing.9

In analysis the object is a point of imaginary ® xation which givessatisfaction to a drive in any register whatsoever.10

The object is elevated to the dignity of the Thing as we de® ne it inour Freudian topology, insofar as it is not slipped into but surroundedby a network of Z iel e (aims).11

Lacan uses the image of a vase to elucidate his complex thought about sublimation andthe Thing; the Thing is always veiled and can only be moved around; the object ismade to represent the existence of the emptiness that is at the centre of the real that iscalled the Thing, this emptiness as represented in the representation presents itself as anihil, as a nothing’ . Creation, says Lacan starts with a hole. The object, however, istherefore, always a refound object which fantasises about an original loss that the existenceof an object alone allows to enter into our ® eld of experience or a å ect:

The object is by nature a refound object. That it was lost is a con-sequence of that ± but after the fact. It is thus refound without ourknowing, except through the re® nding that it was ever lost.12

We come again upon a fundamental structure, which allows us toarticulate the fact that the Thing in question is, by virtue of its struc-ture, open to being represented by what I called earlier, in connectionwith boredom and prayer, the Other thing. And that is the secondcharacteristic of the Thing as veiled; it is by nature, in the re® ndingof the object, represented by something else.13

Uncertainly, I draw from these enigmatic statements some threads that connectvaguely with my short story : a creation of some kind of sense of a provisional andretrospective meaning around an absence that is rather an ab-sense; meaning derivedsomehow from the unsigni ® ed that none the less impinges into the ® eld of visibility,but by an intimation of an almost-encounter rather than by sight. I also surmise

parallax85

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

The

Uni

vers

ity o

f M

anch

este

r L

ibra

ry]

at 0

1:41

12

Oct

ober

201

4

something about representation never being o f anything, that is, a given reference;it is always part of an econom y, encircled by the aims of the drive, but never a directhit. In cultural studies, we have generally focussed on one of the pathways withinthis econom y between the real that is unsigni ® able and the means of an absencefunctioning as the condition of our being signi ® ed as a subject: that is, fetishism assubstitution and disavowal. Fetishism places all our analyses, however, within the® eld of Oedipus and its binary ordering of sexual di å erence by the phallus, thesigni ® er of castration. Fetishism keeps us within the law of castration. Under thepressure of the still open question of femininity, and of feminine subjectivity, wehave, however, been driven theoretically not only behind, but beyond and beneaththis Oedipal screen to excavate more than what Freud allegorised as the Minoancivilisation of the mind that lay behind Mycenean patriarchy. It is not suæ cient torevalorize the pre-Oedipal alone, for that inevitably nestles within the Oedipal whichretrospectively de® nes its merely preliminary character. But if the non-Oedipal is tobe anything more than an idealising move that only appears to suspend the Oedipalby appealing to a general structure of non-d i å erentiations and non-sexualising separa-tions and rifts, that are, of course and none the less, phallic, we need to take up thechallenge of Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger to theorise a modifying undercurrent, aparallel substratum of subjectivity that will allow us to imagine not the feminine asalways and already within phallic sexual di å erence, but a sexual di å erence from thefeminine.14 This point is critical. The desire to escape the logic of Oedipal sexualdi å erence in order to be able to articulate sexuality and subjectivity beyond itsheterosexual paradigm by imagining non-sexuating experiences of division and sep-aration, as proposed by Laplanche for example with his theory of seduction, stillrenders it impossible to theorize the feminine. On the other hand, to suggest, as doesBracha Lichtenberg Ettinger, that there might be a sexual di å erence from the femin-ine, rather than the feminine being the negative cipher of phallocentric sexual di å er-ence, leads us to imagine a way of thinking subjectivities and sexualities beyond theOedipal/pre-Oedipal pairing.

It has come to my attention, belatedly, that going by way of interest in both anarchaic moment of the subject’s process and a supplementary ordering of subjectivity,sublimation o å ers another pathway that touches on issues of politics, aesthetics, ethicsand femininity.

Part II Vermeer’s Sublimity

First of all, I have to admit that I do not really understand the concept of the sublimein art but it keeps cropping up a lot. I had an experience of it and I want to shareit with you. I was shocked with myself. Standing before a painting ± a real one; itwas by Vermeer ± I spontaneously said to myself: this is sublime. I want to knowwhat I meant, and if it has a relation to sublimation.

In 1996, a month before the conference, in a ® t of professional self-consciousness asa `supposed to be an art historian’ , I felt that I had to see the Vermeer exhibition(National Gallery of Washington D.C. and the Mauritshuis, the Hague). In conditionsakin to an early morning squeeze on London Transport’ s busiest line, I joined a

Pollock86

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

The

Uni

vers

ity o

f M

anch

este

r L

ibra

ry]

at 0

1:41

12

Oct

ober

201

4

pilgrimage which must have left most of Paris and Berlin empty that Sunday morning.In room s designed for a quiet game of royal cards, big enough to hang one paintingon each wall, compressed by incredible numbers of bodies, I shuƒ ed and struggled,craned and peered, to get near enough to see Vermeer’ s paintings. The whole thingwas made worse by the fact that these visitors did not conform to the normal habitsof the art loving public: they did not spend a maximum of 2.2 minutes before eachpainting here. No, each work collected around it a crowd of spellbound gazes, drawnin to what after all are often quite minimal, even empty paintings ± or shall we saypaintings that dare to represent absence and emptiness. Not a lot goes on and whatyou see is enigmatic. What were they all look ing at ± or rather looking for? Or ratherwhat were they ® nding, these modern followers of the troubadours, to invoke Lacanonce again? These paintings are at some level about love, which is as we have seenabout sublimation.15 Lacan quotes Picasso: `` I do not see, I ® nd.’ ’ What is found issought but sought in the paths of the signi ® er.’ 16 What relation did the kind of luringof these looks at Vermeer paintings have to what was and was not being seen throughthe paths of the signi ® ers ± all the details of plot and iconography and interpretationart historians traditionally talk about? Perhaps you might get a hint if I again mentionthe words veiled Thing ± emptiness ± represented by something else ± object=pointof imaginary ® xation. Lacan’s question: how can the relation of man to the signi ® er¼put him in relationship to an object that represents the Thing? Is the Thing alwaysthe maternal Thing? Or is the maternal the object that represents a Thing that thenis undoing/suspending sexual di å erence? The point of these questions and the analyt-ical vocabulary is to stress that psychoanalysis as an element of cultural analysis isan analytical theory about structures, signifying possibilities and subjective positionali-ties, not a cheap explainer of secrets about Vermeer’ s mummy and daddy.

Not all Vermeers are minimal. Some are very busy and full of visual incident, narrat-ive in structure, theatrical almost, anecdotal perhaps, the lure for the contemporaryart historian of Dutch art whose Bible is Jacob Katz. The version of `Vermeer’ onshow in 1996 was very selective: on view were those objects that inscribed in theexhibitionary space a particular fantasy sustained by certain works, masqueradingas a scholarly display of signi ® cant historical artifacts. It was not the discourse ofhistory ± seventeenth century Holland ± that we witnessed but a historical discourseof the present that, in its own symptomology, opened up the space to read a possibilityin those texts called `Vermeer’ : that kind of reading is my debt to Julia Kristevawhose readings of paintings by Giotto, Bellini and Holbein articulate the Marxistsemiotician’ s attentiveness to historical possibility while using psychoanalysis hingedto semiotics to decipher a history of subjectivity articulated through the spaces andsignifying systems of culture: the realm of aesthetic practice harnessed to thosedoubled and shifting histories of the social and of subjectivity.

What was I seeing?

Part of a room , a table, a painting on the wall, and a woman doing something likeplaying the virginals, making some lace, pouring some milk, or holding an emptybalance.

I make notes when I do these art history trips. Usually to cover over my perplexitybefore the complexity of the actual objects about which I am supposed to know. `It

parallax87

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

The

Uni

vers

ity o

f M

anch

este

r L

ibra

ry]

at 0

1:41

12

Oct

ober

201

4

is large or small, square or rectangular, dark or light.’ `The colours are very bright.’`Lots of blue and yellow.’ ± that sort of thing. Starting somewhere, however trivial,is always a simple way to get into the bizarre event that is a painting and the processof viewing not `it’ but what else `it’ ± the vase/object/signi® er ± frames. I attended,notated, studied and I was shocked. They were pretty good. They were beautiful.In fact they were stunning, these paintings. They were really satisfying. And theywere a gift for a feminist art historian running a seminar on Julia Kristeva. Theycried out for a Kristevan reading aÁ la Bellini crossed with Giotto. If blue was Giotto’ sjoy, how much more jouis sance was there in Vermeer’ s extended variations on bluethat allow us to trace that other level, a chromatic level, which intimates a jouis sance

beyond the identi ® cation, object, narrative meaning of a work in the paintings ofVermeer?

Julia Kristeva writes:

A possible hypothesis, follow ing Andre Broca’s paradox, would be thatthe perception of blue entails not identifying the object; that blue is,precisely, on this side or beyond the object’ s ® xed form ; that it is thezone where phenomenal identity vanishes.17

After pointing out that blue is probably the earliest colour a baby can perceive JuliaKristeva writes:

Thus all colours, but blue in particular, would have a non-centredand decentring e å ect lessening both object identi ® cation and phenom-enal ® xation. They thereby return the subject to the archaic momentof its dialectic, that is, before the ® xed, specular `I,’ but while in theprocess of becoming this `I’ by breaking away from instinctual, biolo-gical (and maternal) dependence.18

Blue thus perform s a dual task. Su å using the imaginary space of the painting or asparticular body, blue allows a dissolution of boundaries, the subject-object opposition,the positions of identity. Yet it also recedes, maintaining or creating a sense of distancethat stretches out a tenuous coloured mist of longing and barely articulated desire.Julia Kristeva also calls colour `Giotto’ s joy’ and his use of it is indicative of thebeginning of a long campaign waged in western art against theology. Appearing toserve religion, painting, she argues, gradually betrayed it. Firstly, painting abandonedreligious themes in the Renaissance, or rather diluted and transformed them insecular and profane garb, and, secondly, only painting abandoned religion’ s necessarynorms, representation. Colour introduces a joyous element bursting through thecon® nements of order and discourse represented in painting by perspective andarchitectonically calculated illusions of space secured to narratives by ® guration andillusionism. In pre-modern painting, colour battled with such order. In modernism,it ® nally escaped all bounds and began to imagine a painting practice around itself.Julia Kristeva, as others before her, excavates an elliptical genealogy that runs fromthe still subordinated chromatism of Giotto and Bellini to its self-conscious displayin Ce zanne, Matisse, Rothko and, for my money, Helen Frankenthaler. Finally, ina parenthesis, Julia Kristeva reminds us of the fact that the Giotto cycles were painted

Pollock88

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

The

Uni

vers

ity o

f M

anch

este

r L

ibra

ry]

at 0

1:41

12

Oct

ober

201

4

under the aegis of the Order of Merry Knights commemorating the Virgin (sublim-ated jouis sance found its basis in the forbidden mother, next to the Name of the Father)

The Solace of Repetition

After a while in the exhibition, I began to recognise a repetitive structure in Vermeer’ spaintings that rang the bells of the crude Freudian in me. Repetition has meaningother than lack of creative imagination, other than iconographic consistency, genericelaboration, historical belonging. Repetition, within the artistic ® eld, Jacqueline Rosereminds us, represents a psychic knot, `an insistence, that is, the constant pressureof something hidden but not forgotten’ , a place of recurrent return from which thereis no release, in which the anxiety generated in the belated recognition of loss canbe disguised through the surplus of aesthetic pleasure.19 But Lacan speci® cally makesa distinction between the return of the repressed ± neurotic symptoms andsublimation:

Sublimation, Freud tells us, involves a certain form of satisfaction ofthe T rieb e (drives and drifts) so as to mark the fact that the T rieb isde¯ ected from its Z iel , its aim. Sublimation is represented as distinctfrom that econom y of substitution in which the repressed drive isusually satis ® ed. A symptom is the return by means of a signifyingsubstitution of that which is at the end of the drive in the form of itsaim. It is there that the signi ® er takes on its full meaning, for it isimpossible without reference to that function to distinguish the returnof the repressed from sublimation as a potential mode of satisfactionof the drive¼ . The fact is that idealisation involves an identi ® cationof the subject with the object, whereas sublimation is something quitedi å erent.20

Now the art historical traditions that encase Vermeer are of several kinds: those thatcut the whole lot up to ® nd its meanings somewhere else in the so-called primarysource material called iconologies and emblem books: these argue for a massivelyallegorical interpretation of every spoon, shoe, and smile. Others take the wholething as the beginning of bourgeois realism and most of them ooh and aah over thepaintings, and, in smooth appreciative and connoisseurial tones, o å er up the writer’ spleasure in the aesthetic surplus o å ered by such luminous paintings; these disguisethe unashamed identi ® cation with the artist who is ® gured by all the signs of hisgenius thus discovered and declared. The genius artist becomes a means of bothenjoying and disavowing whatever pleasures and screened anxieties the actual can-vases as material and semiotic events provide. Neatly named, ® guration in the formof the textually manufactured artist ® gure `Vermeer’ packages within an anthropo-morphic and typically masculine image whatever the painting actually touched uponand, through chromatic decentring and desiring distanciation, ecstatically/su å eringly`enjoyed’ . (I use this poor English word to echo Kristeva’ s suggestion that the artistidenti ® es with the mother’ s jouis sance , which, she adds, has nothing pleasurable aboutit.) Art history is then a neurotic activity: idealising, identifying, trapped in the returnof the repressed, using the painting as substitution and screen.

parallax89

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

The

Uni

vers

ity o

f M

anch

este

r L

ibra

ry]

at 0

1:41

12

Oct

ober

201

4

So let me look again, without that apparatus, at my sense of recurring familiarity: isit insistence, the painting as neurotic symptom, or can I track a process of sublimation,a kind of circling and conversion that de¯ ects the drive and its object so as to tracethe hole around the Thing ± and what would it have to do with this myth of artisticgenius ± the male artist?

Let me run through a series of Vermeers and see the struggle to get it right.

Young W oman w ith a W ater P itche r (1664 ± 65). A woman in a house, near a window,behind her part of a map, held down by a large blue black knob. She stands behinda table that is partially represented. We are blocked o å from the actual space of thewoman by the table ± here I would wish for a rapid stream of images that visuallyremarked the presence of tables in Vermeer’ s painting, the occurrence of chairsempty and ® lled, of boxes opened and closed, letters read or written, jugs held orpoured. This oblique and untutored reading would reassemble the fragments asindexes of a scattered body haunting these paintings, a ghostly absence that lendsits uncanny presence to the manipulation of socially and artistically conventionalsigns.

Nothing we see in Vermeer’ s paintings of such objects or scenes was untypical if seenthrough the spectacles of the art historian of seventeenth century Dutch art. Aconcurrent exhibition in Vermeer’ s hometown Delft itself, aiming to complement theone-man display of `Vermeer’ in the Hague, revealed exactly how much JohannesVermeer (1632 ± 75) worked within the vocabulary of his exact historical time andplace. But this should not surprise us. Julia Kristeva’ s readings of paintings by Giottoand Bellini underscored her subtlety precisely by attending so carefully to thenecessity for precise attention to the social, historical and ideological context of theirpractice. Citing Matisse:

Our senses have an age of development which does not come fromimmediate surroundings, but from a moment in civilisation. We areborn with the sensibility of a given period of civilisation¼ One can’ tjust do anything. A talented artist cannot do just as he likes. If he usedonly his talents, he would not exist. We are not master of what weproduce. It is imposed on us.21

Kristeva later concludes:

A signifying econom y within an artistic practice, therefore, not onlyoperates through the individual (biographical subject) who carries itout, but it also recasts him as a historical sub je ct ± causing the signifyingprocess that the subject undergoes to match the ideological and polit-ical expectations of his age’ s rising classes.22

There is no doubt that in the 1640s ± 60s an artistic vocabulary was emerging forVermeer which was possible because of the relations between the signifying systemsof the culture and the subjectivity of the painter or the painter as subject, that is,the artist as someone subject to a psychic econom y partially related to, yet never

Pollock90

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

The

Uni

vers

ity o

f M

anch

este

r L

ibra

ry]

at 0

1:41

12

Oct

ober

201

4

autonomous from , the cultural and political econom y of the lived historical moment.So in the exhibition in Delft itself on the Delft Masters who were Vermeer’ s contem-poraries, the many topographies and topics of his paintings are repeatedly found inother workings. These revealed a historical and ideological investment in the domesticspace and the gestures of women within them, as Nanette Salomon has shown inher analyses of the issues of sexuality, national identity and the questions of spacein seventeenth century Dutch genre painting culminating with Vermeer’ s distinctivestrategies.23 I am not, however, setting this up in order to come out again with theidea of genius that makes Vermeer the best of this normative lot of seventeenthcentury Dutch contemporaries. But it is clear from any comparative viewing, thatsomething in some of the paintings of the name `Vermeer’ , are marked by a qualityof distillation that raises the domestic accessories of the bourgeois home of seven-teenth century Holland and their possible allegorical role in a new Protestant lan-guage of moral instruction and political ideology to a level that touches on somethingbeyond the very conditions of their semiotic existence and cultural circulation. Itmight be this which the historian, attuned by a sense of the history of both thesubject/subjectivity, and of culture as the ® nding of that historical contingency ofsubjectivity and its psychic forms, might address through the ® gures that are`Vermeer’ : Thore ’ s in the 1860s, Arthur Wheelock’s in the 1990s or a feminist’ s ata conference on the intersection of aesthetics, ethics and politics in 1996.

Julia Kristeva concluded her essay on Giotto with citations from both Friedrich Antaland Walter Benjamin, the latter serving to explain my elliptical purposes in thispaper. `It is not a question of presenting works ¼ in correlation to their own times,but rather, within the framework of the time of their birth, to present them to thetime that knows them, that is, our own.’24

Thus there is a fold in historical understanding that is always the re® nding of thelost object which art history fetishistically disavows by continuing to imagine the pastas a once real, and then lost, plenitude. If we imagine these paintings to be knowablein another way through the conditions ± historically delivered ± of our present,including feminism, what might such knowing yield?

Reading Vermeer

The `Vermeer’ on show in 1996 was largely paintings of women. Very few men wereallowed into these room s in the Mauritshuis to disturb the contemplative access tothe single female ® gure in her quiet enclosure. There were very few scenes of menand women together ± C hris t in the H ouse o f the T w o M ary s at the beginning and oneor two later scenes of music lessons. Mostly I was gazing at women who did not lookat me.

W oman w ith a W ater P itche r (1664 ± 5). I see a woman, she does not look at me. Shelooks elsewhere. This makes me watch her seeing elsewhere. To compensate for thelack of reciprocity ± so strikingly explored in Vermeer’ s painting: T he G irl w ith the R ed

H at (1665) the viewer looks her over. Her face becomes an object to be consideredas a painted image, her body a comportment for the intricate costume contrasting

parallax91

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

The

Uni

vers

ity o

f M

anch

este

r L

ibra

ry]

at 0

1:41

12

Oct

ober

201

4

deep blues and subtle lemon yellows that are too busily interstriped while coveredby too large and independent a collar and cap.

This is a ® ne Vermeer but it does not cut the bacon.

Let us try W oman w ith a P earl N eck lace (1664). A woman looks at herself in a mirrorwe cannot see as she puts on a necklace. Our pathway to her space is massivelyblocked by the empty chair and large ominous black carpet cleared from the tableand bunched on its edge. An extraordinary expanse of wall is left uninhabited.Technical examination of the painting by X-ray has revealed that originally a mapwas to be shown on the wall similar to the one that recurs in many of Vermeer’ spaintings. In addition there was a lute on the chair and these combined to ensure apretty standard iconographical reading of the image in terms of the ® gure of V rouw

W ereld : the map refers to the physical world, the lute to sensual love, the pearls andthe mirror to earthly vanities; all produce a negative moral in which woman is bothcaptured for and made the ® guration of the dangers of the earthy delights. ArthurWheelock writes in the catalogue: `By removing the map and lute he [Vermeer]transformed the character of the image into a poetic one evolving the ideals of a lifelived with purity and truth’ .25 This is the limit of such interpretation. See what Imean about either iconographic reductionism or poetic mysti ® cation. Formally, weare left with a blank space of inordinate pictorial proportions strung across which isthe gaze of the woman, made into a force that is absorbed, however, into a tinyrectangle that consumes light rather than re¯ ecting it. The mirror is a hole intowhich the gaze of the woman disappears, a perpetual present tense underlined bythe active looking registered on the woman’s face which is di å erent from the paradox-ical look of self contemplation in which the other at which one looks, which is oneself,is in the place of the other looking back. This same model with her elaborate bowsand smart citron coloured, fur-trim med morning jacket appears in A Lady W riting

(1665).

A picture looms over her head. She is seated on the chair. Her pearls lie on thetable and she stops her writing to look directly at the viewer. Have we gained bycapturing her attention at last? The look does not do a lot for us. For there is stilltoo much around it, so it remains a representation of a woman who was writing,look ing up at the imagined spectator. I am bored with that story , or else I know thatin that story , I am not being addressed by whatever her look is meant to signify.Whatever the deep drives this project is about have been too deeply encased in thevery generic conventions of a new kind of bourgeois art that would allow them, nonethe less, one day, to reach a perfect balance and take us through representation to`the object raised to the level of the Thing’ .

All of these rather inelegant descriptions of Vermeer’ s paintings of single women arepreambles for the one painting that hit me between the eyeballs, if I can be so crude.Everything about it is di å erent from the others in their genre even though the arthistorian could easily place it in the same category. This painting’s di å erence fromthe rest of its class are not just diversities: they mark the spot of a di å erence that isperhaps, Lacan’s sublimation.

Pollock92

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

The

Uni

vers

ity o

f M

anch

este

r L

ibra

ry]

at 0

1:41

12

Oct

ober

201

4

Figure 2. Johannes Verm eer, W oman H o lding a B alance, 1664 (National Gallery of Art, Wash ington).

W oman H olding a B alance (1664). Instead of a luminous interior, the room is partiallyshuttered allow ing a limited light to fall directly on the face, and bodice of thewoman, glinting a moment in the empty balances that were once thought to containgold because of that re¯ ected gleam. The box is open and the pearls are strewn.The table carpet/cloth is not a dark menacing shape but a subtly folded mass of ±when the light catches it ± dematerialising blue. The oddest and most incongruousthing is the shadow on the side of her head ± uncannily taking the shape of a hugehand spreading its ® ngers to embrace it.

The space behind the woman’s head is partly ® lled with a religious painting in theItalianate, almost DuÈ reresque, manner of a Last Judgment. In the blankness to itsleft is the nail and nail hole with which Mieke Bal begins her book on R eading

R em b randt .26 The woman is pregnant. Such a heretical thought was ® rst proposed in

parallax93

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

The

Uni

vers

ity o

f M

anch

este

r L

ibra

ry]

at 0

1:41

12

Oct

ober

201

4

1971 by Carstensen and Putscher and was developed by feminist art historian NanetteSalomon who linked her condition with a contemporary theological debate aboutthe moment a soul receives grace and salvation.27 In the 1996 catalogue, ArthurWheelock dismisses the whole idea because a `bulky silhouette is common in numer-ous paintings of the period’ and a `forward-thrusting stomach’ was evidently a desir-able one.28 So through a classic piece of positivist denial, the whole issue of sexuality,pregnancy, maternity, and desire is swept aside along with theology. Indeed it wasthe mid-seventeenth century fashion to wear such jackets but careful fashion-conscious looking at a range of women in paintings of this period reveals that thesejackets were generally worn belted. Besides pregnancy must have been a much moreregular condition of women.

For me, there can be no doubt that this is a pregnant woman, the jacket parting ina more than suggestive manner to expose her brown skirt highlighted by the sunshineto a vivid orange streak that no Freudian can refuse to suggest breaches the literalto evoke the sexuality of woman, the opened interior of parturition: that borderlineI mentioned earlier that might elicit either an abjecting or sublimating response.There is a precedent, probably entirely unknown to Vermeer so I am not playingiconography hunter here. The precedent is Piero della Francesca’ s P regnant M adonna

M adonna de l Parto (c. 1460, Monterchi Arezzo, Capello del Cimitero). Here there isthe doubled sense of opening as the curtains are swept aside by angels to reveal thegravid form of the inward-looking Madonna, her hand caressing both her pregnantform and pointing, in a gesture that refers to, but undoes the Pudica Venus’s famoushand, to the slit that allows us momentarily to imagine, without abjection, the femalebody as borderline, inside and outside. Just as the thought of this image sprang intomy head, so too did Mary Jacobus’ essay on `Dora’ , Kristeva and maternity. Jacobusalso illustrates this fresco to contrast it with the Dresden Madonna by Raphael thatappeared in `Dora’ s’ famous dream. Raphael’ s late formulation of mother and childcreated a single entity out of two ® gures, making itself a fetishising emblem of thatresumed unity, while Piero’ s vision creates an emblem of division ± ® guring thecondition of maternity not as symbiosis, or as completion by divine desire, but asinternal separation.’ 29 What does the mother give birth to, asks Jacobus? `Surely¼at once to herself and to an other, in a movement of di å erentiation imaging themovement which gives birth to meaning. To ® gure maternity as division is to acknow-ledge the process of separation which gives rise both to the subject and to language’ .30

If Raphael’ s Madonna services the fantasy of wholeness that underpins a masculinerepresentational and sexual econom y, so Jacobus imagines an alternative feminineeconom y in which the divided mother might be an emblem of the subject’s di å erencefrom itself through language and the unconsc ious. But that feminine econom y seemsonly accessible to masculine artists. So via a Kristevan rethinking of the fantasy ofthe mother as imagined for us through its cultural moment of ® xated representation:Catholic art of the early Renaissance ± we understand `the discourse of maternityas another name for the movement of parturition which (re)produces the subject inand of representation’ .31 But, you will be saying, what has this to do with Vermeerand his Dutch realism, bourgeois life, admittedly made allegorical. Can his paintingof a middle class pregnant woman really be of the Madonna of the Catholic West ±the icon that secures Christianity’s deep a å ectivity through its promise of the refoundand eternal mother?

Pollock94

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

The

Uni

vers

ity o

f M

anch

este

r L

ibra

ry]

at 0

1:41

12

Oct

ober

201

4

If the invocation of motherhood as separation were not clearly enough suggested bythe condensation in Vermeer’ s painting of both annunciation ± light falling on thegestational womb ± and parturition with the exposed streak of colour, turn yourattention now to the face. The woman is looking at her balance, but her eyes aredowncast, almost closed, creating a quietude upon that face that without entirelyclosing it allows it to hover between a gaze outward, that is contained by its objectof vision, and the inner gaze that forever excludes me as that gaze signi ® es a desireof which I am not a part. In my notes I wrote: `This is the face of the sublime. Thisis an extraordinary moment in visual representation. Vermeer has ® nally made aface that while signifying maternal feminine inwardness, and feminine maternal desireturned back within her self does not create a sense of anguish on the part of thebystanding spectator’ . As object of contemplation, it was exquisitely satisfying for itheld whatever of the maternal hitherto encoded in the female body and face at justthe distance that intimated loss but returned it to me as aesthetic perfection. Yet Iam seeing nothing. Her face is not an object like the woman with the pitcher for Iam not distracted either by its `realism’ nor by its painterliness as in the woman inthe red hat looking directly at me. Yet it is not a mirror for me. Neither does itcontain the rejecting force of Bellini’s distracted Madonnas. Something has beencalibrated to perfection in this image: and what that is, is not genius or greatness orgreat art. It is a relation between a psychic and an aesthetic econom y for which theiconographic centre of the painting stands as a momentary clue: balance. There isnothing being weighed but there is a balance being created. Or rather a thresholdachieved in which the elements of the social econom y of the sign ± meaning, repres-entation, social and cultural conventions which mark the historical moment of itsproduction ± meet with and provide a form for pressures, possibilities, anxieties andpleasures that march to another temporality, or even to none at all. For they comefrom the other scene that has come from the Thing via the object to the representationfrom which it then perpetually escapes, being the nothing that the whole objectmerely allows us to re® nd in the experience of being with the image.

I want to suggest a reading of the painting that can map art history onto feministcultural studies and into the beyond of a not-yet area of analysis. The Vermeerpainting appears as a moment in which the Catholic image of the Virgin, which forcenturies had been elaborated to carry into culture, in the service of Christianity,the face of the lost Mother, permitted the transformation of her uncontained body-liness into a sign, and produced a painful sublimation of the Mother, allow ing thesign to signify the maternal jouis sance , that, directed elsewhere, is, according toKristeva, necessary for us to experience the mother symbolically as love and aesthetic-ally as Beauty. The subject must consent to forego the closeness of the mother’ s bodyso as to (re) ® nd her (as) love ± the doing of both is the condition of being able topass into signifying subjectivity via the abjection of the maternal body and the cre-ation of a symbol to replace the lost maternal body in the symbolic notion of maternallove. It was this transport that enabled the ¯ owering of a certain kind of heterosexualmasculine creativity both identi ® ed with and experiencing itself passively loved bythe Mother that found a form of sublimation which we call Christian art during thefourteenth-sixteenth centuries. Vermeer was, however, a Catholic in a newlyProtestant country and, according to certain paintings, he was a devout one. At thebiographical, historical and sociological level Johannes Vermeer is a credible agent

parallax95

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

The

Uni

vers

ity o

f M

anch

este

r L

ibra

ry]

at 0

1:41

12

Oct

ober

201

4

for this further `sublimation’ of the iconography of Catholicism within bourgeoisProtestant prosaic representationalism. I am sure the art historians are right to assumethat part of the aim and success of the painting was its match with the publicdiscourses of theological debate which would provide the satisfaction for the sublima-tion in the form of socially validated achievement of cultural intelligibility. But inthe ® eld which feminism has made its own and our necessity to consider: sexualdi å erence and its psychic and semiotic econom ies, this image achieves both suchprosaic notions of sublimation and deeper ones through that ® lter it opens betweenthe languages of seventeenth century Dutch genre painting and what had hithertonestled in grandiose forms of Catholic Marian imagery; the maternal Thing.Vermeer’ s paintings of emptiness, and spaces ® lled by this register of the maternalfunction as the vacuole around which representation allows the object to rise to thelevel of the Thing.

Part III A Turn to the Feminine: Kristeva’s `Heresy’

Now you will clearly see my problem. The feminist art historian ® nds herself onceagain validating the great male artist ± w ith a fancy new script to be sure. But whatdoes it mean? And can I ® ll these empty balances with something that will con¯ ictless with my own am our propre as a feminist in art history/cultural studies interestedin women and aesthetic practices? The answer is no. Or perhaps, I should say, not yet.

Maybe I am ® nally acknow ledging Linda Nochlin’s wisdom in 1971 when she roundlystated that there are no female equivalents to Michelangelo or, I might add Vermeer.In fact, I think that we are daring to understand what that might mean as part ofthe transition in feminist theory from utopian opposition: let’ s ® nd our own heroines,to a critical understanding of that which blocks, represses and forecludes the femininefrom those of us designated, signi ® ed as women in phallocentric cultures.

I want to risk follow ing the Kristevan heresy that our dream of `women in art’ ismisdirected. If woman cannot `be’, can `women artists’ exist? Herein lies one of themajor resentments feminists repeatedly express against Kristeva’ s work. She does notwrite about the literature or art of women. Her heroes are all men: Joyce, Mallarme ,Lautre amont, Ce line, Proust.32 Admittedly she has latterly written about maternity,sexual di å erence and the feminine but without the positive endorsement of women’ screative participation in the great moments of cultural rupture to which she hasturned our attention. Where is the Kristevan reading of Berthe Morisot or MaryCassatt, Lee Krasner or Helen Frankenthaler to match her studies of Proust orPollock? De® ning femininity as the negativity that conditions the newness of anypractice, she seems to ® nd this structural force for revolution only in the writings ofmen who, as avant-garde artists and writers, could access this negativity because, Isuggest, creativity `in the masculine’ which is the only form we as yet theoreticallygrasp involves a sublimation that is the elimination of the feminine, its introjectionso as to inscribe himself as the master of his own creation.

What if Julia Kristeva is right? W om en cannot be artists. I say this as one person whohas dedicated my professional life to the demand that women be fully recognised as

Pollock96

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

The

Uni

vers

ity o

f M

anch

este

r L

ibra

ry]

at 0

1:41

12

Oct

ober

201

4

artists. I do not want to be misunderstood. Of course women are and have alwaysbeen artists and there is still an enormous task to produce the writing that ensurestheir acknow ledgement and e å ectivity within our cultural narratives. Women makeart sure enough, but as artists are they necessarily `women’ ± in the sense of thefeminine position in the psychic econom y of phallocentric sexual di å erence? Is con-temporary artistic practice with its complex legacies and transformations of the avant-garde project in the post-modern moment the possible space for the inscriptionof/from/in another sexual di å erence in the feminine that is necessarily unknowneven to the feminine subject?

The problem lies in the confusion of terms we use with the varied politics competingon this ambiguous theoretical terrain. There is the confusion between real women,here, Sojourner Truth style, revealing breasts and claiming wombs and dreading toomuch excess ¯ esh on the hips kind of women, and the psychic structures of masculin-ity and femininity that imperfectly match the corporeal accidents and geographiesof physical morphologies of which we are the complex, contradictory , unstable andalways perverse embodiments and psychic agents. For Julia Kristeva, femininity hasalways remained rigorously a linguistic or psychic position, abstracted to a degreethat frustrates our, my, feminist longings for somewhere to feel at home, a body, anidentity, a signi ® er, that would turn concrete and real and allow us to know who oreven what we are when we speak or act, make love, give birth, or give a lecture. (Apassing homage to Joan Riviere and all other intellectual hysterics.) But we mustresist this longing because it can only be the desire for an identi ® cation which is asimpossible as it is destructive: identi ® cation with the only place there can be: theMother, or rather the maternal body or her idealisation in pseudo-religious terms,as the Great Goddess. Both these ® gurations of the Maternal are inherently phallicsince this con® guration is premised on the severed dialectic of subject/(m)Other. InJulia Kristeva’ s work the distinction is crucial. Feminism, with its dangerous procliv it-ies towards religion might become a new cult of the Mother, but without abjectionor sublimation, the Mother will be either idealised, leaving us trapped in archaicformations around primary narcissism and ego constitution or she will be sadisticallydisavowed, leading feminism to be unable to function historically for we will not beable to tolerate older women, their success, or status. I am wondering if the relationsbetween femininity and creativity are caught, therefore, in an impossible contradic-tion ± which women persons have, none the less, negotiated, probably via hysteria,in order to be as creative as they have been: but it is not as `women’ that the feministart historian should unproblematically claim them. Neither as our prosaic `you knowwhat I mean when I say women’ nor in the rigorously theorised positionality`Woman’. As Julia Kristeva has argued, Woman is not¼ . Woman is not an ontolog icalentity, something one can be or relate to via the statement `I am¼ .’ She has arguedfor the feminine as a structural negativity, dissidence itself, the basis then of therevolution of sexual di å erence. For women persons to claim that they are or havethis womanhood (remember that other illusion: to have or be the phallus) is to permitthat revolutionary possibility to be always already coopted within the existing order,the phallically structured Symbolic ± big S ± a socio-econom ic-politico-cultural com-plex in historical time, which returns the feminine to a phallic concept: the Motheras the site of separation and division, or its dangerous, transgressive corruption thatleads back to psychosis.

parallax97

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

The

Uni

vers

ity o

f M

anch

este

r L

ibra

ry]

at 0

1:41

12

Oct

ober

201

4

According to a Kristevan analysis, the cultural terms on o å er for the production ofart have been structurally shaped by history in the possibilities and diæ culties of themother/son axis. The parallel for the feminine subject would have then to be adaughter/father axis which is the basis of so much of mediaeval feminine mysticism:a kind of holy incest practised by women mystics like Hildegard of Bingen, whocalled herself `a feather on the breath of God’ .33 That axis involves the identi ® cationof the daughter with the Father and with order, law, the symbolic, in relation towhich `she’, the submissive daughter, smuggles in her feminine jouis sance as mysticmasochism. In modern times, this option has not been available for perverse negoti-ation. Thus the nineteenth century models of feminism were so often driven bydaughters excluded from the realm of their fathers wanting their political place inthe bourgeois polis along with their brothers. A later, Marxist and Freudian genera-tion of feminism, revolted by such alignment with the bourgeois State and its limitedImaginary of class and race power, resists its Symbolic absolutely in the name of aradical di å erence, that draws its Imaginary force from our denied pleasures in theinevitable homosexual desire for the Mother. Either way we are still playing out theOedipal story . Thus woman/femininity is collapsed back into the maternal, where,it always was for the phallocentric order: i.e. maternity as abject or sublime lostobject and borderline is the only form of femininity’s representation under patriarchy,the only form we know of it, always structured as either the whole/hole of reassimila-tion of the cut/wound of division. Can there be a means of revolutionising sexualdi å erence to deliver to us `on the side of the feminine’ a signi ® cation of the femininethat is not synonymous with this concept of the maternal and not signi ® ed by sexualdimorphism and the visible body but creates another means of sublimation, whichFreud so often identi ® ed with creative and intellectual activity that is socially valorisedand thus valorising of its producers?

Studying art’ s histories allows us to map the relations between the stories culturetells and the forms for their telling. Through both we can discern the shapes of thoseaspects of the unconsc ious, that pass through the ® lters of signi ® cation, reciprocallyto constitute the known territories of the subject, and the accepted social domainsof subjectivity. Art can be seen now as an analytically interesting ® eld for the studyof the histories of subjectivity, but it is also a creative space where forms may emergeto imagine and thus shift the alignments and possibilities of the psychic that will thenhave social and political e å ects at both the level of the social and political collectivity,and at that of the Symbolic. Aesthetic practices, framed by a historically sensitivepsychoanalysis, is seen then as productive not re¯ ective; symbologenic in BrachaLichtenberg Ettinger’s phrase.34 Giotto and Bellini, and potentially Vermeer, repres-ent artistic practices that were at once legible within the cultural frameworks theythemselves articulated while their interest lies in the intimations, in their work, ofdirections and possibilities not adopted, authorised, validated or oæ cially sanctionedat the time of their own production. The direction culture took after them followedother tracks, leaving their work partially intelligible as its forerunner and yet derelictas its other, abandoned potentiality. These artistic practices were elements of emer-gent structures of feeling and formal dispositions that awaited a more complete revoltagainst the holy trinity: State, Church and Family to be once again caught up andknitted into a more culturally prevailing, realigning pattern. This brings me to JuliaKristeva’ s thesis on the avant-garde at the end of the nineteenth century.

Pollock98

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

The

Uni

vers

ity o

f M

anch

este

r L

ibra

ry]

at 0

1:41

12

Oct

ober

201

4

Modernism represented a break with the Catholic Christian hegemony that hadsolicited and produced most of Western art since the fall of Rome. But reroutedthrough its interest in the republican and Protestant seventeenth century Dutch,modernism also inherited a surreptitious assimilation of that earlier psychic baggageto a realist, proto-modernist and later secular paradigm. In the hands of many artists,who obsessively signed their passports to the avant-garde on their fantastic ® gurationsof classed, raced or prostitutionalised bodies of women, modernism ironically allowedthe leakage of even more archaic, so-called pagan, some called it `primitive’ , elementsof phallocentric fantasies of the maternal, producing the oppositions Carol Duncanso cannily read in the text that is the Cathedral/Temple story the Museum of ModernArt: woman as either monstrously dangerous or monstrously fertile.35

Let me quote Julia Kristeva from her essay, A New Type of Intellectual: TheDissident’ published in T el Q ue l in 1977,

Under these conditions, female `creation’ cannot be taken for granted.It can be said that artistic creation always feeds on an identi ® cation,or rivalry, with what is presumed to be the mother’ s jouis sance (whichhas nothing agreeable about it). That is why one of the most accuraterepresentations of creation, that is, of artistic practice, is the series ofpaintings by De Kooning entitled W oman : savage, explosive, funnyand inaccessible creatures in spite of the fact that they have beenmassacred by the artist.36

De Kooning exempli® es artistic creativity that enacts the modernist matricide. JuliaKristeva then poses the terrible question: what if these paintings, W oman, had beencreated by a woman? `Obviously she would have had to deal with her own mother,and therefore, herself, which is a lot less funny. That is why there is not a lot offemale laughter to be found.’37 In my recent analyses of Lee Krasner’s negotiationwith the cultures of art and sexual di å erence in the 1950s, K il ling M en and D y ing

W om en, I tried to challenge Kristeva’ s assumption by exploring the possibilities of`inscriptions in the feminine’ on the unprimed canvases of Abstract Expressionism.38

Mapping the public discourses on masculinity and femininity in the 1950s via thetwin icons of high art and popular culture, Jackson Pollock and Marilyn Monroe,I pondered on the predicament of painters such as Lee Krasner and HelenFrankenthaler and found within a completely di å erencing econom y of the gesture inpainting that, none the less, relates to the things Pollock and de Kooning were makingpossible, jouis sant , humorous but not murderous allusions to the co-emerging mater-nal, for instance Lee Krasner S un W oman I 1957.

My argument was that during the 1950s, painting was relieved, through thepossibilities of this new kind of painting as process, as enactment of the semiotic,of the tendency towards fetishism inherent in representation. Painting seemed to bererouted towards a di å erent psychic disposition: neurosis in the form of hysteria, acondition in which the relations to language and to sexual di å erence are renderedthe site of unanswerable questioning and creative ambisexualism. The male artistas hysterical achieves a cross identi ® cation with the maternal necessary for hiscreativity. The creative woman too is relieved of the burden of her cultural and

parallax99

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

The

Uni

vers

ity o

f M

anch

este

r L

ibra

ry]

at 0

1:41

12

Oct

ober

201

4

psychic feminisation as the image, lure of the look, and passive sexuality, and canimagine another place from which to identify with, and rival the creativity of thematernal ± not via the Father, but through the place of the imaginary son culturallysigni ® ed as the artist.39 Hysteria o å ers that model of shifting identi ® cations whichare psychically indi å erent to physical morphologies and socially determined genderidentities.

Feminism’s Exile

Had I read the article a bit more carefully, I would have found Julia Kristevaretreating from her own adamancy. She writes:

In any case far from contradicting creativity (as the existentialist mythwould still have us believe) maternity as such can favour a certain kindof female creation provided the econom ic constraints are not tooheavy, at least in so far as its lifts ® xations, and circulates passionbetween life and death, self and other, culture and nature, singularityand ethics, narcissism and self-denial. Maternity may well be calledPenelope’s tapestry or Leibniz’s network, depending on whether onefollows the logic of gestures or of thought, but it always succeeds inconnecting up heterogeneous sites.40

But here Kristeva is not just talking about the relation of the daughter to the Mother,i.e. the problematic site for our exploring what we might make of or as the feminine.She is raising maternity, woman’s perplexing and as yet unarticulated experience ofmaternity, which escapes the discourses of science and religion to threaten the womanherself with a psychotic loss of subjectivity, of which nothing can be signi ® ed, to thelevel of a theoretical/philosophical position which is another side of that issue: separa-tion, severality in which the child becomes the means of delivering the woman intosubjectivity through the necessary passages of splitting and separation that allow ofthe kind of loss that sublimation realises in another place.Let me try again:

While feminism continues to mistake its own sulking isolation for polit-ical protest or even dissidence, real female innovation (in whateversocial ® eld) will only come about when maternity, female creation andthe link between them are better understood. But for that to happenwe must stop making feminism into a new religion, undertaking orsect, and begin the work of speci® c and detailed analysis which willtake us beyond romantic melodrama and beyond complacency.

You will have understood that I am speaking the language of exile¼ .Our present age is one of exile. How can one avoid sinking into themire of common sense, if not by becoming a stranger to one’ s owncountry , language, sex and identity? Writing is impossible withoutsome kind of exile.41

Pollock100

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

The

Uni

vers

ity o

f M

anch

este

r L

ibra

ry]

at 0

1:41

12

Oct

ober

201

4

My current take on this passage is the necessity for two di å erent kinds of exile: thefeminist’ s self-imposed exile from `feminism’ ± the accumulating politics of identityand celebratory positivism ± in order to insist on a non-re ligious use of feminism’ sprovocation to thought: `For true dissidence today is perhaps simply what it hasalways been: thought . Now that reason has become absorbed by technology, thoughtis only tenable as an ``analytical position’ ’ that aæ rms dissolution and works throughdi å erences’ .42 The second kind of exile is that of the creative woman from whatculture proposes and languages posits as the place of Woman. The artist who is awoman is not then engaged in the re¯ exive con® rmation of that phallocentric fantasyshe is required to perform , the masquerade. Instead, she is exploring loss, exile anddesire from beyond the blank page. This means rethinking the relation of femininity,maternity, and creativity from what Lacan called, `the ladies’ side’.

Julia Kristeva concludes her argument by suggesting that the emergence of womenand children into discourse ± one of the major signs of modernity and its contradic-tions, an emergence that might be artistically signalled by a trajectory that runs fromMary Cassatt to Mary Kelly ± poses insoluble questions for those structures thatform the history of the West and end with the Death of Man and God at the sametime as the liberation of Women. Some will try again for Christianity which oncesolved the problem via a sublation of Death and o å ered Resurrection: what beyond,Kristeva asks however, do we imagine now except through madness? Some couldtry for a Renaissance ± the secular humanist solution focussed on a political ratherthan a religious leader; but the prince now works for the politburo or the corporation;capitalism, which the absolutist prince heralded, now owns us all. What is left is theexcesses of language ± ah I hear some sigh, the typical postmodernist, apolitical copout; art will save us. `Its all in the text.’ `What happened to real politics?’ A rt neverchanged anything.’ But the point is that it is no longer a matter of salvation in anyform , or the one-o å revolutionary moment. If the twentieth century has taught usanything, it must be that we have to go for permanent, critical, and ethical notionsof dialectical and multi-levelled change. Perhaps Julia Kristeva is saying that in thehistorical conjuncture shaped by the destructive forces of capitalism and a defuncttotalitarianism we must face the real revolutionary test: the restructuring of thepsycho-symbolic order of the West by ® nally breaching its Eurocentric homophobic,sexist, racist norm.

What feminism has to do with that depends, in part, on its own self-denial ± adisplacement of that generation that aimed for integration into the ® ctions of State,Nation, Polis. While feminism launches women and children onto the historical stageof politics, it can be betrayed, as indeed socialism has been, historically and theoretic-ally, by complacence, by collusion with or acceptance of the limits of the currentorder, by lack of imagination to grasp what is at stake and where the stake is in thebelated and un® nished business of the modernisation of sexual di å erence. JuliaKristeva’ s interest in the avant-garde moment is in no sense apolitical except in sofar as she wants semiotics and psychoanalysis to be allowed radically to rede® newhat the political is by its articulation with the ethical and aesthetic. These havebecome necessities since the political is rimmed by a statist Imaginary. Where did I® nally ® nd what I needed to read about sublimation ± but in Lacan’s seminar onthe ethics of psychoanalysis?

parallax101

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

The

Uni

vers

ity o

f M

anch

este

r L

ibra

ry]

at 0

1:41

12

Oct

ober

201

4

Feminism, Signifying Practices and the History of the Avant-Garde

The essay I want to consider ® nally is Julia Kristeva’ s introduction to La T raverse e des

S ignes , published in 1975, titled `Signifying Practice and Mode of Production’ . It isa condensation of the main arguments of her doctoral thesis: T he R evo lut ion in P oetic

Language (1974) in which she argued that the avant-garde breached the religiousimaginary that had hitherto provided a managed space for the strangely inter-connected trio: otherness, feminine jouis sance and the divine.

Julia Kristeva begins with the assertion of the inevitable interrelation between theorganisation of the social ensemble and the signifying means by which it is known,and by which it stabilises and perpetuates itself. The structures we live are knownto us through their representation, which in e å ect then determine our being. Hermove is to insert into sociological and econom ic analysis of social formations the roleof the Symbolic: language. The crossing point of the two is the speaking subject. Tounderstand her argument I must add one other building block. Julia Kristeva distingu-ishes between what she calls the unity ± the organisation of a social ensemble and itsmeaning systems; and what she calls proce ss , the resources in the body, the drives andfantasy, that precede and exceed the unity that tries to organise and de® ne them.Thus we have a model of a ¯ uid range of as yet unde® ned but predisposed andpredisposing possibilities for meanings ± she names this the semiotic ± which a systemof meaning tries to ® x, precariously building an order ± named the symbolic ± on aradically heterogeneous non-ye t-order/beyond-order that it tries to contain but whichis excessive to it, o å ering thereby the prospect of renovation and sometimes revolu-tion. This is the dialectic opposite to functionalist or hierarchical theories of thesocial. There is a relation between any order and its other, its excess. This can be acreative relation or, if damned up and overly repressed, it may become a psychoticor paranoid relation producing madness, terrorism or fascism.

The institutions of social and sexual order are the State and the Family which `holdtogether a certain type of relation between the unity and proce ss in the econom y ofthe speaking subject, at the same time, being consolidated as a result of this relation’ .The State tries to manage the forces and relations of production; the Family ensuresunity in the face of the process of drives and pleasure, associated with sexuality andreproduction. Hence the function of religion:

This unity, of state and family, is achieved at the price of a murderand a sacri® ce ± that of the soma, the drive and the process. This isrecognised by religion, which thus arrogates to itself the privilege ofrepresenting and of speaking the in® nite element the ensembleoppresses and yet demands to be spoken. Religion is here that dis-course that knows, as far as is possible, what is at stake in the relationbetween socio-symbolic homogeneity and the heterogeneity of thedrives at work within and upon the homogeneity. Complicit with thestate and the family to the extent that it restores their o ther to them,this religious discourse appears not only as the speculative (and oftenspecular) forms of what is unrepresentable in orgasmic pleasure

Pollock102

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

The

Uni

vers

ity o

f M

anch

este

r L

ibra

ry]

at 0

1:41

12

Oct

ober

201

4

( jouis sance ) and of what is uncapitalisable in expenditure of product-ive forces.43

Religion is the theoretical space where it is possible to think about language andcommunication: being neither social order nor social arrangement, it has a certainself-re¯ exivity because it knows not of that which it speaks to the social order, butspeaks about trying to speak the unspeakable. Religion is, none the less, a monitorof the edge or boundary, between order and process, system and excess, and workson behalf of the unity to canalise some of the process, the imaginary and corporealfantasies.

The complicity of State, Family and Religion far from crumbling with the comingof modernity, is, according to Julia Kristeva, consolidated by the triumph of thebourgeois revolution in the later nineteenth century. This is her striking novelty ±not to see secularisation as the dissolution of an age of Christianity, but to grasp thenineteenth century as the contradictory moment of its social sublimation. Thismoment of a religiosity that manages the excess not allowed into representation inthe tightening econom ies of production and reproduction: Victorian values, if youwill ± is however simultaneously contested by a new formation: art, which had beenprogressively seeking its independence from the very discourses and institutions uponwhich it was founded.

I should be more precise. We are talking about a radical rupture: the avant-garde,a breach with what had been hitherto an overt or subliminal religious art.

This complicity of family, state and religious discourse appears for the® rst time in the second half of the 19th century, follow ing the triumphof the bourgeois revolution, the consolidation of capitalism, and theaccompanying ful® lment of the Christian religion. At the same time,there also appears the subversive function of `art’ ± subversive becauseof the way it cuts through and reworks the frontiers of the socio-symbolic ensembles.44

Avant-garde culture, according to Julia Kristeva, is not just the latest chapter in thecontinuous narrative of the history of art. What happened in art, literature andmusic, as well as the many related intellectual trends like psychoanalysis, with thecoming of the avant-garde, constituted a break with fundamental concepts of whatthese practices were. I could be so bold and grossly state that Western art since theRenaissance had an intimacy with Christianity which shaped not just the contentbut the very plastic and aesthetic character of its representational ideologies andpractices. The theology of the Incarnation and the relation between a word madevisible and made ¯ esh provides the deepest drive towards the conquest of mimeticrepresentation based on the pictorial narrativisation of human ® gure compositionsand the development of gesture and pose to incite the appropriate a å ective receptionof these theological propositions through imaginary identi ® cations with an anthropo-morphic illusionism. Leo Steinberg has explored the problem to which this gave risein the central representation of Incarnation theology: the Madonna and Child.45

Steinberg was the ® rst to pay real attention to the remarkable feature of so many of

parallax103

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

The

Uni

vers

ity o

f M

anch

este

r L

ibra

ry]

at 0

1:41

12

Oct

ober

201

4

these representations: the prominent display of the young child’ s sex organs. If theword becomes ¯ esh, that becoming ¯ esh, becoming human involved the accessionto the postlapsarian fate: sexuality and thus to the ® guration of sexual di å erence.God does not just become Man; God is shown to become a man and that requiresthe signs of human mortality ± his sex. What theology veils in metaphoric language,the painter grapples with only at the point at which the artist’ s plastic resourcesachieve the means to provide a mimetic visual correlate for the theology. Theologicalincarnation becomes artistic representation.

In the tension between the two, between theological metaphorics and a kind of visualpicturing that works iconically ± that is by reference to something that looks likesomething you can imagine ± the seeds of the avant-garde revolt against religion canbe traced. Religion is a metaphoric discourse in so far as it must accept that it isspeaking in linguistic terms of that which de® es those terms, while yet can only beimaginable within them ± that is except for the excess which religious practice, ritualand experience allows into, but manages on behalf of the socio-symbolic ensemble,the social order: a å ectivity, intensity, mysticism, (dis)possession of the self. In defying,not as Greenberg argued, its servitude to literature, but its function as the representa-tional screen for religion, the avant-garde tries to accept the fact that art is art, thatrepresentation is a signifying system. The project of the avant-garde is to deal withthe irreparable dislocation between signi ® er and referent where the latter term itselfhas lost the transcendent meaning guaranteed by the religious viewpoint. Modernismreminds us endlessly that what is there is but signi ® ers and their subjectivising e å ects.Even in its semiotic nakedness, the play of signi ® ers a å ects us, touching somethingbeyond the signifying system that tries to harness it. But in coming to know that, artlost its faith in its ability as well as its need to provide the visualisation of an incarna-tion. Avant-garde art is, structurally, if never ideologically, atheist. Instead of tryingto provide the representation of God as a Body, it searched for the means to registerthe sacri® ced soma, the drives and pleasures of the subject. Ironically, but inevitablythis took the avant-garde in its predominantly masculinist character back to the lostMaternal body and her jouis sance .

Hegel prophesied the death of art, and indeed that containing function was displacedby modernism’s dissolution of the identity between sign and its referent, its dissolutionof the coherence of narrative, its embrace of play and the self-conscious manipulationof medium, its move towards the process dimension (pleasure, evocations of thebody, rhythm ) rather than the unity of a realised aesthetic totality. When you contem-plate a painting by Rothko, for example, a vast and palpating coloured ® eld, and® nd nothing referred to, you are not without anything to see. The visual deliversyou to the vibrations of the veils of superimposed and bleeding colour. The systemof painting creates a rhythm or a pulse that animates the surface. The scale of thework in relation to the viewer’ s body creates sensations of immensity and the erosionof boundaries, while its own diligent quoting of the frames that its colour seems toundermine restores an armature suæ cient for the simultaneous acknow ledgement ofjouis sance and an ordering of its otherness. At once sublime in its e å ects via scale andcolour, and the self-assertiveness of its made objecthood, the work has a presencethat undoes the ® xing of meaning and thus the identity and unity of the subject. Thesigni ® ers ¯ oat and thus does the viewer experience a release, a jouis sance that could

Pollock104

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

The

Uni

vers

ity o

f M

anch

este

r L

ibra

ry]

at 0

1:41

12

Oct

ober

201

4

be said to echo but displace into the real of the painting practice, the mystic experi-ence hitherto permitted only within and contained by the discourses of religiousauthority.

Art has not, however, taken over from religion, becoming a subliminal or secularreligiosity ± though there are many amongst the connoisseurs and art historians whotry to make it so, as Sarah Kofman has so clearly revealed in her reading of Freud’stheories of the aesthetic.46 Art ± in its historically novel dispensation as avant-gardeart, in fact, contests religion. Let me bring in Julia Kristeva again:

All religious discourse is hinged on the unique event, the solitary`thetic’ event which puts an end to violence by an act of violence ofits own and creates a system or structure of exchange and communica-tion, hence of signi ® cation.47

The binding of Isaac, misnamed by Christian theology as the sacri® ce of Isaac, fromthe Book of Genesis, provides a good example of the way in which the potential actof sacri® ce of Isaac stands to put an end to the o å ering of the ® rst born to the deity.In lieu of the actual literal death of the ® rst life, the ram is introduced as the symbolicsubstitute, introducing the means of symbolic signi ® cation for the obligations betweenGod and Man while allow ing a symbolic sacri® ce to continue as the means of theirensured communication. But there is more in this story , which the Christian theologyof the sacri® ce of God’ s `only begotten son’ rehearsed, even while undoing its symbol-ism in order to introduce a new, incarnated, literalised covenant that draws into theAbraham story the burden of sin from the older myth of Eve. (I am slowly gettingus back to women.)

Old Testament discourse gets closer [writes Kristeva] to the reality ofthis event when it suggests that it is to be attributed to the father, thesymbolic founder of family and communal genealogy. Judaism thusmakes the paternal function the support, along with the subject, ofsociality and symbolism, while at the same time, through its emphasison procreation, it casts light on sexuality and eroticism both at thelevel of their social necessity (community of men around their father)and at that of the transgressive ¯ owering (woman ± the other race,the silent support of the symbolic function, permanent appeal to aforbidden incest, object of anguished masculine identi ® cation).48

In the twin legacies of Judaism and Christianity ± and in their divergent routes ±Julia Kristeva, none the less, sees the recognition of the Father ± the paternal function± as paramount in the establishing of unity, the social order, which is justly termedphallocentric. The irony is that the ® nal achievement of the united front of State,Family and Religion occurring in the nineteenth century gave rise to the means ofrelativising the hegemony of all three, because they become susceptible toself-analysis, and thus to the speaking of that which they structurally made unspeak-able ± the feminine, rather than the fantasised maternal incorporated via the ® gureof the Madonna.

parallax105

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

The

Uni

vers

ity o

f M

anch

este

r L

ibra

ry]

at 0

1:41

12

Oct

ober

201

4

Modernity ± the legacy of seventeenth century Protestant rationalism and capitalism± with its newly secularised social forms of domesticity and idealised motherhood,desublimated the maternal other and made the social woman literally perform ametaphorical overfeminisation, the enactment of a sexual othering integral to thebourgeois order’ s self de® nition. The cult of domesticity and the determination tocontain women within the roles of motherhood and homemaker curbed the repres-entation ± not the signi ® cation ± of maternal desire ± that lost look , that look atsomething somewhere else whose painful necessity manufactures the very resistanceby means of which the child can abject the maternal body ± the real of a corporalitythat beckons back to psychosis and by means of which gap it can start on the journeyto a subjectivity sustained by the possibility of the mother’ s symbolic love. For mother-hood to function as a productive relation for the subject, I would contend the mothermust be shown to desire elsewhere ± her own sexual grati ® cations or her own intellec-tual and creative work. Modern ideologies have damned us all through the attemptto bind the look of the mother, signi ® er of her desire to the child who is then entwinedin a threatening envelope of maternal investment which only abjection in is mostextreme forms can explode: the horri® c or monstrous feminine.

Modernism as a culture, as I have argued elsewhere, is the revolt against that bour-geois overfeminisation that threatened to swamp masculine creativity: the violenceof its formal revolts marked the intensity of the threat. In the blank page of as yetunwritten possibilities created historically by the later nineteenth century avant-garde, women joined in the modernist project with some relief, hoping to escape theoverfeminisation that had, none the less, held some potentialities registered in theconsiderable ¯ owering of a self consciously feminine culture in the nineteenth century,a culture that could make femininity a topic, as we see in the work of Berthe Morisotor Mary Cassatt.49

According to Julia Kristeva’ s diagnosis, political modernism challenged the state andproduced the political rebel. The writer or artist challenged the social ensemblethrough a contest with language. A modernisation of sexual di å erence: feminism,challenged the Family. Feminism in all its awkward and comprom ised ways, has beenthe attempt `to introduce into the heart of symbolism and sociality the echo ofwoman’s unsaid; the rhythm that cannot be named, music of the semiotically tra-versed body, not yet, not enough, sign and society, vertigo of structures’ .50 Finally,psychological modernism in the form of psychoanalysis challenged the self-evidenceof religion. Why? Because psychoanalysis transposed to another discursive and theor-etical space the relations between sacri® ce, limit and excess that Judaism andChristianity had respectively formulated on the plane of religious thought and dis-persed to cultural formations of subjectivity. As fellow dissidents, feminism and psy-choanalysis made us responsible for our own imaginaries.

In the twentieth century we are then faced with twin prospects: a dissident intellectualself-consciousness and the awareness of the unconsc ious and beyond that mediateswhat we are and what think: thus there is no absolute truth, faith, transcendentalguarantee, whatever we believe for our own good or peace of mind. On the otherhand, the threat of fascism which already once overwhelmed Europe and utterlyrewrote its history and identity remains constant. Fascism is the parodic and grotesque

Pollock106

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

The

Uni

vers

ity o

f M

anch

este

r L

ibra

ry]

at 0

1:41

12

Oct

ober

201

4

longing for the totalisation of the ordered alliance of State, Family and (anti)Religion,in the perverse name of the phallic son who will not accept the submission of thedrives and their sublimation into socially determined forms, under the productivelaw of the Father. In place of the disappointing Father, the Hero is erected andadored as charismatic site of identi ® cation for the damaged ego. Fascism is a politicalenactment, therefore, of an anti-religion, inverting both the way Judaism andChristianity narrate the logic of subjectivity to us. Refusing the socially acceptablesublimation of violence, fascist and fundamentalist regimes canalise the unfettereddrives into a paranoid `acting out’ that was, and is, murderous as the boundarieso å ered by the law erode and are imaginatively, fantasmatically rewritten. Sacri ® cereplaced by a murderous excess of killing becomes the order of the day ± directedsymbolically as well as literally at the other who must die absolutely: especially theother that is `father’ to the son, as Judaism was represented in Western Christianity.There can be no religion in fascism since it allows for no dialectic and no tension.In fascism, furthermore, we recognise the absolute revolt of the phallic son againstthe revolutionary daughter, for fascism was also the modern antithesis to feminismand the avant-garde: both its joint targets, while the vital remnant of another order,Judaism was also to be extirpated. The religion of the unengraved Other, avant-garde textuality and dissident femininity ® nd themselves unexpectedly historical alliesin the late twentieth century.

Femininity and Alterity

What we now call the other, in social and anthropological terms, can be consideredunder this psychoanalytical rubric as structurally connected with the problem of thefeminine, which at the end of the nineteenth century emerged in sociopolitical andaesthetico-ideological forms. If the symbolic system relies upon the paternal function,it operates to de® ne and repress the maternal as its structuring other. Sublimationis then the mark of that substitution or erasure of Woman by Beauty. This allowsthe fantasy of the Mother as lost plenitude or castrating other to obscure the totalforeclusion of the feminine from the realms of sense, meaning and subjectivity.Religious thought and art in its direct or oblique modes has managed that repressionthrough the metaphoric ® guration of those elements of the feminine that, rare® edby their passage through phallocentric thought, come to function as the internalsupport of the paternal identi ® ed as order. The Virgin is that a å ective acknow ledge-ment of the maternal feminine and yet she is structurally placed as the `holy vessel’ ,the bearer of the father’s son who never knows her own interiority, sexuality ordesire. She is the spoken for and the spoken `feminine’ that negates feminine di å er-ence and renders her ever more complicit in support of the paternal function.

Any revolt of the feminine from these designated roles cannot be contemplated anymore than it makes any logical sense to struggle for women’ s equality ± how canyou be equal with that to which you are opposed as the structuring other, that whichmust be kept out of the Temple in order for there to be order at all. So we are forcedto contemplate not the equality of women as struggled for in the nineteenth century,and not the feminist return to religion as a revival of Neolithic goddess cults. Feminismsearches for something that acknow ledges what religion signi ® ed on society’s behalf

parallax107

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

The

Uni

vers

ity o

f M

anch

este

r L

ibra

ry]

at 0

1:41

12

Oct

ober

201

4

± and which can be otherw ise stated: allegorised in di å erent, and di å erencing, revolu-tionary terms. Thus we might turn to Emmanuel Levinas, a postmodern reading ofJudaism which never o å ered that inclusive negation of the feminine and a di å erentfeminist theorisation of the feminine. The moment of human ethical responsibilitythat arises with the coming of di å erence must be recognised to lie in the realisationof the feminine not as the di å erence: 0/1, but as a di å erence that from its ownpotentiality holds out the possibilities of realigning both human subjectivity andsociality. In a conversation with the artist and theorist Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger,Emmanuel Levinas was asked about his sense of the feminine as the foundation ofthe ethical ± which is where the religious question has migrated. Let me quote aconversation, in 1992.

B LE : I’d like to ask you a question about the alterity of the feminine.At one point you spoke of the feminine as a ¯ ight before the light.

E L : In other words: not to show oneself. A ¯ ight before demonstration.

B LE : I took it as a metaphor for a kind of movement of disappearance.Not to be ® xated by the look. For me, in the Matrix, a kind of with-drawing/contracting (re t irance) before the light of consciousness leadsto meeting with an unknown other. Is there an interiority that is notthe passage of the in® nitely exterior? What would Eurydice say? Canthe subject-woman have a privileged access to the feminine?

E L : I think that the heart of the heart, the deepest of the feminine isdying in giving life, in bringing life into the world. I am not emphasiz-ing dy ing, but, on the contrary, future .51

The feminine signi ® es a situation of subject/other that is not presumed to lie in the`apreÁ s-coup’ , the aftere å ect of phallic, Oedipal narratives where the feminine is theblank all from which the subject distinguishes him se l f by separations that culminatein the castration that recasts them all as sexuating cuts and splits. For Levinas thefeminine is that principle in which the future is imagined as the contemplation ofresponsibility towards an other in your eventual absence.

Woman is the category of the future, the ecstasy of the future. It isthat human possibility which consists in saying that the life of anotherhuman being is more important than my own, that the Other comesbefore me, that the value of the Other is asserted before my own. Inthe future, there is what might happen to me. And there is also mydeath.52

As usual these statements need to be read with considerable precaution and Levinas’interlocutor, Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger, draws out from the philosopher’ s sugges-tion the possibility of imagining `the feminine as a symbolic principle of creation, anethical space¼ Where are we going to look for the feminine, if not in the relationshipto the unknown aspects of the other, or in the relation to the other unknown becauseof its place in space and time?’ 53 What possible relation could we then imagine

Pollock108

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

The

Uni

vers

ity o

f M

anch

este

r L

ibra

ry]

at 0

1:41

12

Oct

ober

201

4

between the realms of representation and signi ® cation and this concept of thefeminine as a principle of a sexual di å erence from itself ± a subjectivising organisationof subjectivity’s relations to its others that is unassimilable to the model of subjectivityde® ned by castration, the cut, the division, the 0/1? If, as Levinas suggests thefeminine holds up to us the possibility of `that di å erence [¼ ] by which it is aæ rmedthat without me the world has a meaning,’ will we have to search both beyondrepresentation (Vermeer: pure sublimation of Woman as Beauty) and beyond abstrac-tion, in some new kind of aesthetic practice?

In this, the beginning of history, the moment of the unful® lled and continuous avant-garde we can ® nally pose the question: what access might women have creatively,through the aesthetic, to the feminine forecluded by a phallic Symbolic? How wouldwe and our societies be changed by such realignment? What would the mechanismsof such change, such work be if not what Julia Kristeva’ s Marxist semanalysis names`aesthetic practices’? Can her theorisations even let us imagine these questions?

One of the few places where women’ s speci® c psychic condition and cultural textsare considered by Julia Kristeva is the book B lack S un: D epress ion and M elancho lia,

where Kristeva provides some case studies of feminine melancholia and writes aboutMargue rite Duras. Depression, abjection/horror, love form the threesome of a å ects,which were the focus of Kristeva’ s related studies in the 1980s. The problematic offemininity is explored in all three; but here the stakes are revealed for the task forwomen to manage to become non-suicidal, non-rigid subjects seems enormous. JuliaKristeva writes:

For man and for woman the loss of the mother is a biological andpsychic necessity, the ® rst step on the way to being autonomous.Matricide is our vital necessity, the sine qua non condition of ourindividuation, provided that it take place under optimal circumstancesand can be eroticised ± whether the lost object is recovered as eroticobject (male hetero- and female homosexual) or it is transposed bymeans of an unbelievable symbolic e å ort, the advent of which onecan only admire which eroticises the other, or transforms culturalobjects into a `sublime’ erotic object.54

If none of these are achieved, a state akin to depression develops in which thematernal object is introjected and the matricidal drive is turned against the subject± putting the self to death instead of the imaginary mother. Defence against thisproduces an image of the mother as death-bearing. She is then attacked, harassed,represent ed. But, argues Kristeva, women cannot e å ect that inversion so easily becauseof a specular identi ® cation with the mother as well as an introjection of the maternalbody as the basis of an imaginary body schema of female sexuality and desire. Sothe hatred is locked up inside, creating no violence but `an implosive mood that killsme slowly and secretly, through bouts of sadness, permanent bitterness, silence, andmaybe sleeping pills that I take in smaller or greater quantities in the dark hope ofmeeting¼ ’ 55

Depression must surely be then the other face of sublimation for women; it is itspredestined failure and within the phallic regime our continuing predicament. Manic

parallax109

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

The

Uni

vers

ity o

f M

anch

este

r L

ibra

ry]

at 0

1:41

12

Oct

ober

201

4

defences against depression produce all sorts of signs of active life and social orintellectual productivity but they leave a problem: the inability to lose the maternalThing, the preference at heart for the corpse locked inside her, the possession ofsadness itself. Kelly Oliver explains this:

For women matricide does not ward o å suicide. For women matricideis a form of suicide. A woman cannot properly mourn the lost object.She cannot get rid of the maternal body. Kristeva woefully claims thatshe carries the maternal Thing locked like a corpse in the crypt of herpsyche. Thus what is at stake in the loss of the object is the loss ofherself, the loss of desire. `It is a question of becoming lack.’56

Julia Kristeva o å ers a pathway out of this predicament: analysis which she names acounterdepressant by revealing the secret `of the depressive course that causes themelancholy person to live with death’ . It allows loss to become signi® able as well aserotogenic. To achieve this women must be allowed symbolically as well as literallyaccess to the homosexual facet, the access to the original loves and pleasures so thatthey be imagined as lost, refound in objects that can supply the space of representationto the Thing. Yet within the Freudian-Lacanian paradigm as we inherit it throughJulia Kristeva, the price for the feminine subject is still a kind of hysteria. She eitherremains melancholic in her refusal to lose the maternal Thing or must becomehysterical by identi ® cation with the masculine process of loss which alone allows thesublimation of the mother and access to a creativity that is built upon that substitu-tion. There where she once was, comes the sublimated representation; as SigridWeigel writes, the myth of the creative subject is structurally masculine because ithas always been de® ned through the `exploitation and killing of the feminine’ .57

A Sublimation from the Feminine: A Matrixial Shift

Having dared to follow Kristeva in her heresy in order to take seriously what, in thecurrent phallocentric arrangements of subjectivity, impedes women’ s access to thefeminine that is the very condition of revolution and change, we can return with aquite di å erent formulation about what it might mean to become a woman and anartist, what relations might be possible between creativity and the non-Oedipal femin-ine, what the revolution in aesthetic practices might bring inside the visible. Far fromtrying to ® nd an equivalent to Vermeer to counter the idealised ® guration of mascu-line self grati ® cation which is Beauty in art history, I want to risk for a moment,accepting the heretical idea that such is the nature of the patriarchy, the phallocentricorder, that women’ s relation to the feminine as the organising object for creativityhas been structurally blocked by the melancholic ’s problematic of the retained deadmother or of the overwhelmingly present mother of semi-religious identi ® cation.Thus woman is o å ered melancholic a-symbolia or idealising narcissistic regressionas the grounds for her aesthetic inscriptions and we have seen these played out inart by women in the feminist era. It is necessary to rid feminism of the need to bedriven by the refound object ± old mistresses ± and to focus instead on the post-religious, the avant-garde potentiality created precisely by feminism as a social move-ment and a theoretical revolution at the psycho-symbolic level that makes possible

Pollock110

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

The

Uni

vers

ity o

f M

anch

este

r L

ibra

ry]

at 0

1:41

12

Oct

ober

201

4

Figure 3. Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger, Autist W ork 1 , 1993.

the re-® nding of a di å erent di å erence, a sexual di å erence from the feminine, andthus a shifted relation of the feminine to women as creative subjects. That projectcan only make sense if we see it in the terms proposed by Julia Kristeva, follow ingLacan, that Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger resumes, with a di å erence: that the feminineis not synonymous with women. What it is, is as still unknown to women as it is tothe core mystery for patriarchy. But it can be glimpsed peeping through the screenof the blank page, if we begin to read aesthetic practices made by women forinscriptions in/of and from the feminine, rather than for representations of thephallocentric encoding of its negated, sublimated maternal facets.

Melancholia, femininity and sublimation thus require a theorisation beyond thephallus, which has been intimated in a painting practice that, like that of Vermeeror Bellini, is lodged in both the historical semiotics and the psychic histories of its

parallax111

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

The

Uni

vers

ity o

f M

anch

este

r L

ibra

ry]

at 0

1:41

12

Oct

ober

201

4

moment: after Auschwitz, after the pervasive trauma of loss, death and unrecoveredmemory. I want to conclude with the juxtaposition of a theoretical elaboration andan aesthetic practice in which the relations between the feminine, loss and the sublimeare otherw ise imagined and thought. The key concept is that of the Matrix, whichis, like the Phallus, a signi ® er, that enlarges and shifts the Symbolic in alignmentwith a matrixial Imaginary to allow the forecluded unsigni® ed feminine into signi ® ca-tion and thus into thought and a å ect.

Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger writes:

In the phallic stratum, sublimation keeps Woman in a love relationshipat the price of her constitution at the level of the Thing. But in amatrixial stratum, the passageway back and forth between exteriorand interior, between Thing and Other, is open; the matrixial subject-ivity ± situated at the borderlines ± is a prisoner of neither one. TheWoman is both Subject and Other on the borderline of the Thing.The feminine non-equivalence marks the emergence of relations-without-relating between the sexes. Woman’s incarnation in the artwork is metramorphic.58

The Matrix is not a symbol of women, but a signi ® er for a feminine dimension ofplurality and the di å erence of the several in a joint or shared subjectivity.

A matrixial stratum of subjectivisation allows for a network of rela-tions-w ithout-relating leading to an awareness-becoming-recognitionof presence in absence, while the phallic stratum of subjectivisationallows for distinct alternations between subject and Other, relationsand non-re lations, presence and absence.59

Such a model of `subjective recordings in joint borderspaces’ with recurrent redis-tributions at the borderlinks based on the real of, and the fantasies incited by, somevery late prenatal moments allows us radically to rethink all the constitutive elementsof typical psychoanalytical narratives and categories including those of sublimationand melancholia at whose heart psychoanalysis places the loss of the maternal. Inhis late seminars, Lacan dared to imagine the `infant’s relating to the mother’ s bodyas an interior/exterior envelope’ , `a lost enveloping sphere of continuity’ betweenthe two. The theory of the Matrix gleans these theoretical seeds to cultivate theirinsights in a feminist theory that suggests that we can otherw ise imagine and inscribeboth the jointness and the inevitable losses within which subjectivity is constituted,but not through the paradigm of castration, substitution and thus sublimation.Lacan’s later theory posited the ob je t a as the `borderline mental inscription of theresidues of the separation from the partial object’ of our archaic beginnings as asubject. It is the verso to the recto that is the subject and must disappear for thesubject to be. The phallic ob je t a is marked as a loss of the object related to an organ(mother’ s breast, voice, gaze) by way of castration, the paradigm of absence/presence.Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger proposes a matrixial ob je t a, `not based on the loss ofthe object related to the organ by way of castration, but on a loss by way ofthe transformations of the relations-without-relating into either relations or

Pollock112

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

The

Uni

vers

ity o

f M

anch

este

r L

ibra

ry]

at 0

1:41

12

Oct

ober

201

4

non-re lations’ .60 Thus from the matrixial point of view, `being together with theunknown precedes being alone, and therefore, as a sexual di å erence pertaining tothe feminine, the matrixial object is a ® gure of borderline absence.’ 61 Links are lost,refound, circulated or shared.

A matrixial encounter a å ecting instances of space-time-body in a min-imal di å use fashion engenders joint (even though not the same) trau-mas and phantasies which seep into higher psychic levels. Thus,expelled from the sym bo li c, a stain in the im aginary , and a `hole’ in thereal, the matrix, as well as Woman, is not destined or doomed toforeclosure. P re - O edipal and non- O edipal sub l imation of the matrixialco-emergence and of the feminine-becoming-maternal instances parti-cipate in `becoming woman’ for both masculine and femininesubjects.62

Another sublimation conceived from the feminine suggests a totally di å erent structureof sublimation which is not about socio-cultural adaptation that allows the loss ofthe maternal to be signi ® ed in art as Beauty. Going by way of Kant’s other concept,the Sublime, Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger draws out another aspect: `object-idealisation linked to the drives¼ where no imaginary representation can correspondto ideas and visible representation in art can only hint at the unrepresentable’ .

Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger’s prolonged artistic encounter with the traces of femin-ine subjects encountering death in the hell of fascist genocide return us to the issuesof repetition, art and solace that I ® rst introduced in the discussion of Vermeer’ sW oman w ith a B alance . In this work of traue rarb e it, the viewer, with the painter whosepresence is evoked by the rhythm of the brushstrokes that repeatedly touch thetransient moment of passage between presence and absence, here and there, nowand then, I and non-I, life and death, is a witness to an event without a witness, whonow becomes a witness without an event.63 The image rephrases a photograph whoseoriginal conditions of existence would make us its viewers both witness and colluderin the genocidal gaze of the murderers.64 The image ± index of a lost moment beforea death ± is passed through a photocopier whose photocopic dust, evoking the Jewishashes of this catastrophe, almost traces the loss that is, and is represented in, thephotograph. The anguish of loss is not in the image itself, but in the practice of itsrestaged encounter where to look is to feel, to become unable to bear the traumathat, none the less, is transmitted to a viewer through the aesthetic process of metra-morphic painting. The charged a å ect of the painting, in which modernist colour isallowed now to carry its subjectivising freight with subtle references knowinglyincluded to Rothko and to Raphael, works at the borderspace between the cominginto and fading out of visibility that produces what Christine Buci-Glucksman hasnamed `images of absence’ . Not the uncanny blankness of the blank page nor thesublime realisation of Vermeer, this practice creates an unforeseen aesthetic experi-ence dissolving this binary.

Traces, then, a theatre of memory, where images of words and imagesof things intersect in the pure disappearance of the visual. To the pointwhere non-p laces and borderline situations replace the classical

parallax113

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

The

Uni

vers

ity o

f M

anch

este

r L

ibra

ry]

at 0

1:41

12

Oct

ober

201

4

Figure 4. Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger, Autist W ork 7 , 1993/4 .

`places’ of remembrance. Copying, e å acing, veiling, covering by layersand superimposing, emptying and suspending ± the whole art ofquivering that inhabits Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger’s work ends upby creating what I would call im ages o f ab sence , distributed by the inten-tional haphazardness of signs.65

Christine Buci-Glucksman suggests that this painting becomes a lure, making usconfront loss and pain, while puzzling about love that is, none the less, incited inrelation to the unknown and unknowable other. Beyond the Lacanian knot of thephallocentric unconsc ious: Woman, Other, Thing, this painting touches the Thingthrough an annulle d gaz e .

Pollock114

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

The

Uni

vers

ity o

f M

anch

este

r L

ibra

ry]

at 0

1:41

12

Oct

ober

201

4

This gaze is not nothing, even if it shatters our amnesia into im ages o f

ab sence . Could this annulled, un® nished, pre-human gaze be the gazeof projection-disjunctions of image-making from a lost, forgottenalmost unattainable world? This place, this loss, this destitution of aBeing-in-distress, Infans or lost, leads us back to the `I -non-I’ of whichBracha Lichtenberg Ettinger speaks in her writings. Constitutive het-eronom y of the intimate-anonym ous, heteronomy of memory itself,where the material is mourning for the thing.66

Thus from the aesthetic practice hinged between melancholia and sublimation ±between sadness and creativity can be derived a theorisation that pushes beyond thephallic blockage that Julia Kristeva’s work so intensely reiterates. As feminine subjects,we twist and turn to adjust and negotiate the confusing pathways phallocentrism o å ersus. From the moment of modernism in which Joan Riviere, in the 1920s, diagnosed thetravail of the woman intellectual and her defence in the masquerade as she tried tonegotiate her creative agency and rivalry, to the high point of structuralism in the 1970swhen Julia Kristeva aligned semiotics and psychoanalysis to identify the negativity offemininity and its inaccessibility for women, to the 1990s, when Bracha LichtenbergEttinger daringly pursues grains of late Lacanian thought through to a radical theoriz-ation of the feminine, the twentieth century provides a long history of feminist thoughtas revolution in just the careful and necessary terms of Julia Kristeva’s most recent workon la re volte’. It is in the necessity of acknowledging a genealogy of feminist thought,that I have wanted to work through and with her enormous intellectual contribution tofeminism to its limits, and to a beyond that is, logically, to be found in that overdeterm-ined covenant between the aesthetic practice of `painting after painting’ in `history afterhistory’ and post-Freudian, post-Lacanian psychoanalysis, where aesthetics, ethics andpolitics convene.67 Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger’s theories and practice perceive a mat-rixial shift in sublimation that can be quoted as a conclusion, and in anticipation of partof a future issue of parallax :

The art-work extricates the trauma of the matrixial other out of ``pureabsence’ ’ or ``pure sensibility’ ’ , out of its timelessness into lines of time,and the e å ect of beauty is to allow wit(h)nessing with non-visible eventsof encounter to emerge inside the ® eld of vision and a å ect you.68

Notes

1 Julia Kristeva, `Wom en’s Time’ , T he K riste va4 Susan Gubar, `` The Blank Page’ ’ and Issues ofFemale Creativ ity’ , in N ew F eminis t C riticism , ElaineR eade r, Toril Moi (ed .) (Oxford : Basil B lackwell,

1987), p.208. Showalter (ed .) (London: Virago Press, 1986),p. 292 ± 313.2 Julia Kristeva, `La femme, ce n’est jamais cË a’ ,

in N ew F rench F eminisms , Elaine Marks and Isabelle 5 Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger, `M atrix andMetram orphosis’ , D i å erences 4/3 (1992) and T hede Courtivron (ed . and trans.) (Brighton:

Harvester Press, 1981 (T e l Q uel, 1974)), p .137. M atrixia l G az e (Leed s: Fem inist Arts and HistoriesNetwork at the University of Leed s, 1995).3 Izak Dinesen [Karen Blixen], `The Blank Page’ ,

Las t T ales (Harm ondsworth: Penguin Book s, 1986 6 Julia Kristeva, P ow e rs o f H orro r: An E ssay on

A b jection , Louis Roudiez (trans.) (New York :(1957)), p .104. The original Danish writes blankas unwritten. Columbia University Press, 1982).

parallax115

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

The

Uni

vers

ity o

f M

anch

este

r L

ibra

ry]

at 0

1:41

12

Oct

ober

201

4

7 See Sigmund Freud `On the Taboo of Virginity’ , 27 Nanette Salom on, `Verm eer and the Balance ofDestiny’ , in E ssay s in N orthern E uropean A rt P re sentedO n S exuality (Harm ondsworth: Penguin Book s,to E gb ert H averkamp- B egeman on his S ix tieth B irthday1977), pp.261 ± 83; Mary Jacobus, `Judith,(Doorn sp ijk, 1983), pp.216 ± 21.Holofern es, and the Phallic Wom an’ , R eading28 Wheelock , J ohannes V e rm eer, p .144.W oman: E ssay s in F eminis t C riticism (London:29 Mary Jacobus, `D o ra and the PregnantMethuen,1987), pp.110± 36.Madonna’ , R eading W oman: E ssay s in F eminis t C riticism8 Kelly Oliver, `The Abject Mother’ , R eading K riste va

(London: Methuen, 1986), p.147.U nravelling the D oub l e B ind (Bloom ington: Indiana30 Jacobus, `D o ra and the Pregnant Madonna’ ,University Press, 1993), p.61. Here Freud’ s thesisp.147.on the universal tendency to debasem ent in the31 Jacobus, `D o ra and the Pregnant Madonna’ ,sphere of love is rearticulated via a developedp.147.analytical framework.32 This is less true in the later 1990s as Julia9 Jacques Lacan , T he E thics of P sy choanaly sis 1 9 5 9 ± 6 0 ,Kristeva has written abou t Margue rite Duras andJacques-A lain Miller (ed .) (London, Tavistock andis work ing on a series of studies of wom enRoutledge, 1992), p.112.intellectuals in the twentieth century . But that it10 Lacan, T he E thics o f P sy cho analy sis, p .113.has taken so long serves only to con ® rm the11 Lacan, T he E thics o f P sy cho analy sis, p .112.justness of her analysis of the diæ culties of ® nding12 Lacan, T he E thics o f P sy cho analy sis, p .118.the frameworks and terms within which to be able13 Lacan, T he E thics o f P sy cho analy sis, p .118.to articulate our understanding of fem ininity,14 Again I am draw ing on the theorizations ofintellectuality and creativity.Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger, see `With-in-Visible33 Barbara Newm an, S ister o f W isdom : S t. H il de gard’sScreen’ , in I ns ide the V is ib l e, Catherine de ZegherT heol ogy o f the F eminine (Berkeley : University of(ed .) (Boston : MIT Press, 1996).California Press, 1987). Luce Irigaray , `Plato’ s15 Lacan, T he E thics o f P sy cho analy sis, p .118.Hystera’ , S peculum o f the O ther W oman, G . Gill16 `If the pleasure regulates human speculation(trans.) (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985).

w ith the law of the lure right through the immense 34 Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger, `Wom an-Other-discourse that isn’ t to simply made up of what it

Thing’ , M atrixia l B orde rlines (Oxford : Museum ofarticulates but also of its action ± insofar as it is

Modern Art, 1992).dom inated by that search which leads it to ® nd 35 Carol Duncan, `The MoM A’ s Hot Mom as’ , inthings in signi® ers ± how then can the relations of

A es the tics and P ow e r (Cam bridge: Cambridgeman to the signi® er to the extent he can manipulate

University Press, 1993), pp. 189 ± 210.it, put him in relationship with an object that 36 Julia Kristeva, A New Type of Intellectual: Therepresents the Thing? We thus com e to the question Dissident’, T he K riste va R eade r, Toril Moi (ed .)of what a man does when he makes a signi® er.’ (Oxford : Basil B lackwell, 1987), p.297.Lacan, T he E thics o f P sy cho analy sis, p .119. 37 Kristeva, A New Type of Intellectual’ ,17 Julia Kristeva, `Giotto’s Joy ’ , D es ire in L anguage pp.297± 98.Leon Roudiez (ed .) (New York : Columbia 38 Griselda Pollock, K il ling M en and D y ing W omen, inUniversity Press, 1980), p.225. Fred Orton and Griselda Pollock, Avant- G ardes and18 Kristeva, `Giotto’s Joy ’ , p.225. Partisans R eview ed (Manchester: Manchester19 Jacqueline Rose, `Sexuality in the Field of University Press, 1996).Vision’ , S exuality in the F iel d o f V is ion (London: Verso 39 The suggest ion of the artist as hysteric derivesBook s, 1986), p.228. from Clare Pajaczkowska’ s reading of Guy20 Lacan, T he E thics o f P sy cho analy sis, pp.110± 11. Rosalato’ s work E ssais sur l e S ym bo liq ue (Paris:21 Kristeva, `Giotto’s Joy ’ , p.219. Gallimard , 1969) in her `Structure and Pleasure,’22 Kristeva, `Giotto’s Joy ’ , p.232. B lock 9 (1983) (reprinted in T he B lo ck R eade r in23 Nanette Salom on, `From Sexuality to Civility: V isual C ul ture (London: Routledge, 1996)). `IfVerm eer’ s Wom en,’ in V e rm eer S tudie s, Ivan Gaskell authorship means paternity, being ``an artist’ ’ is a(ed .) (Wash ington: National Gallery of Art, 1998) com prom ise identity forged by the adult ego as aand `Verm eer’ s Wom en: Changing Paradigms in way of mediating his fantasy of being a wom anMid-Career,’ in T he P ractice o f C ul tural Analy sis , and of creating, and ``art’ ’ is a male hysteriaM ieke Bal (ed .) (Stanford : Stanford University institutionalised and contained within soc ial struc-Press, 1998). tures of representation’ , p.43.24 Kristeva, G iotto’ s Joy ’ , p.234. 40 Kristeva, A New Type of Intellectual’ , p .298.25 Arthur Wheelock , J ohannes V e rm eer (Zwolle: 41 Kristeva, A New Type of Intellectual’ , p .298.Waanders Publishers, 1996), p.154. 42 Kristeva, A New Type of Intellectual’ , p .299.26 Mieke Bal, R eading R em b randt: B ey ond the W ord 43 Julia Kristeva, `Sign ifying Practice and Mode ofI mage O ppos ition (Cam bridge: Cambridge University Production’ , Geo å rey Nowell Sm ith (trans.),

E dinb urgh M agaz ine, 1 (1976), p.65.Press, 1990).

Pollock116

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

The

Uni

vers

ity o

f M

anch

este

r L

ibra

ry]

at 0

1:41

12

Oct

ober

201

4

44 Kristeva, `Sign ifying Practice and Mode of 59 Lichtenberg Ettinger, M atrix , p .71.60 Lichtenberg Ettinger, M atrix , p .61.Production’ , p.65.61 Lichtenberg Ettinger, M atrix , p .62.45 Leo Steinberg, T he S exuality o f C hrist in R enaissance62 Lichtenberg Ettinger, M atrix , p .62.A rt and in M ode rn O b l ivion (Chicago: University of63 The form ulation of an event without a witnessChicago Press, 1996 (2nd edition)).is from Dori Laub, An Event Without a Witness:46 Sarah Kofm an, T he C hildhoo d o f A rt: A n

Truth, Testimony and Survival’ , in Dori Laub andI nte rpretation o f F reud’s A es the tics , Winifred Wood hullShoshana Felman, T estim ony : C rises o f W itne ssing in(trans.) (New York : Columbia University Press,L ite rature, P sy cho analy sis and H is tory (New York :1988).Routledge,1992 ). Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger has47 Kristeva, `Sign ifying Practice and Mode ofshifted this in her work to suggest that as gleanersProduction’ , p.66.of history after `the event’, we are witnesses without48 Kristeva, `Sign ifying Practice and Mode ofthe event.Production’ , p.66.64 I have developed this argum ent in my essay ,49 See Griselda Pollock, M ary C as satt ± Painter o fAbandoned at the Mouth of Hell: Painting asM ode rn W omen (London: Thames and Hudson,Second Look which Does not Kill’ , in D octo r and1998) and my D i å erencing the C anon: F eminis t D es irePatie nt/ M em ory and Amnesia , Marketta SeppaÈ laÈ (ed .)

and the W riting o f A rt’ s H is tories (London:(Pori, F inland: Taidemuseo, 1997).Routledge, 1999).65 Christine Buci-Glucksman, `Images of Absence’ ,50 Kristeva, `Sign ifying Practice and Mode ofin Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger M atrixia l B orde rline,Production’ , p.67.L es C ahie rs des R egards, 5/13 (1993).51

T im e is the B reath o f the S pirit: E mmanuel L evinas in66 Buci-Glucksman, `Images of Absence’ , p.16. For

conversation w ith B racha L ichte nb erg E ttinger (Oxford :a fuller analysis of this gaze, see Bracha Lichtenberg

Museum of Modern Art, 1993), p.11.Ettinger, T he M atrixia l G az e (Leed s: Fem inist Arts52 Lev inas and Lichtenberg Ettinger,T im e is theand Histories Network Press, c/o Department of

B reath o f the S pirit, p .11.Fine Art, 1995).53

T im e is the B reath o f the S pirit, p .11. 67 These terms developed in my paper `Gleaning54 Julia Kristeva, B lack S un: D epre ssion and in History ’ , in G enerations and G eographies in the V isualM e lancholia, Leon Roudiez (trans.) (New York :

A rts : F eminis t R eadings , Griselda Pollock (ed .)Columbia University Press, 1989), p.28. (London: Routledge, 1996) are part of an analysis55 Kristeva, B lack S un, p .29. of the tactical signi® cance of a return to painting56 Oliver, R eading K riste va, p .63. after modern ism in the light of a historical plane57 Sigrid Weigel, Topographie der G es chl echte r (1990), that is `after Auschwitz’ which catastrophicallycited by Rosi Huhn, `M oving Omissions and transform ed the possibil ities of the representationHollow Spots into the Field of Vision’ , in Bracha of the body and landscape in Western art.Lichtenberg Ettinger, M atrix- B o rde rline s (Oxford : 68 Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger, `TransgressingMuseum of Modern Art, 1993), p.9. with-in-to the fem inine’ , paper presented to the58 Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger, M atrix: A S hift symposium, L eonardo ’ s G lim lach (L eonardo ’ s S m ile) ,B ey ond the P hallus ( ® rst given as a lecture at T he University of Ghent, 16 December 1997, to appearP o int o f T heory , conference at the Belle van Zuylen as `Traumatic Wit(h)ness-Thing and MatrixialInstitute of the University of Amsterdam , 1993) Co/in Habit(u)ation’ , parallax , 10 ± 5/1

( January 1999).(Paris: BLE Atelier, 1993 (lim ited edition)), p .71.

Griselda Pollock is Professor of the Social and Critical Histories of Art, andDirector of the Centre for Cultural Studies at the University of Leeds. She hasrecently edited G enerations and G eographies in the V isual A rts: F em inist R eadings (Routledge,1996) and, with Fred Orton, Avant - G ardes and Partisans R eview ed (Manchester UniversityPress, 1996). The appearance of M ary C assat t ± Painter o f M odern W om en (Thames andHudson, 1998) and D i å erencing the C anon: F em inist D esire and the W riting o f A rt ’ s H is to ries

(Routledge, 1999) are imminent.

parallax117

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

The

Uni

vers

ity o

f M

anch

este

r L

ibra

ry]

at 0

1:41

12

Oct

ober

201

4