WomenS Shad&s Inl. Forum, Vol. 16, No. 4, pp. 393-403, 1993 Printed in the USA.

02l7-5395193 s6.00 + .tm Copyrisht 0 1993 Pqamon Press Ltd.

FEMINIST GENEALOGIES A Personal Itinerary

TERESA DE LAURETIS Amsterdam, the Netherlands

SynopaIs-Feminist Genealogies is a glimpse at womens intellectual accomplishments from the 17th century to the present, seen from the perspective of a contemporary feminist critic. The ques- tion that runs through the lecture concerns womens desire for intellectual creation. The lecture outlines some of the conditions of knowledge that shape feminist thought today.

For Audre Lorde, in memoriam.

From A Room of Ones Own to The Wom- ens Room, from the Renaissance nunnery to the Victorian sitting room and the modern days private sphere, to the contemporary department of Womens Studies, womens in- tellectual and creative activity has been marked by a recurrent connection between knowledge and confinement, writing and si- lence. Even the current glossy image of the liberated woman, both wife and corpora- tion executive, mother and media star or, for that matter, literary theoretician, has not ob- scured the other, more seductive figuration of a desire, a knowledge, or a power vested in silence, madness, meaninglessness, mystical ineffability or absolute narcissism. The limi- tations and boundaries socially imposed on woman, at once real and imaginary, are topo- graphically represented in the four walls of a room, homemakers kitchen or madwomans attic, the convent and the brothel, the four sides of the screen, the cyborgs computer casing. These are historical and fictional forms of a constraint in and against which womens thought and creativity, fantasy and imagination have had to, and still must, de- fine themselves. For the freedom to pose questions in her own terms, the freedom not

The author wishes to thank Professor van Ginkel, Rector Magnificus of the University of Utrecht; the members of the university Board; Professor Wels. Dean of the Arts Faculty; Professor Rosi Braidotti, Dr. Maaike Meijer. and the members of the Womens Stud- ies Department.

to accept definitions and objective or subjec- tive goals formulated in the terms of patriarchal culture, is still denied woman to- day, and must be won and won again by women with strategies, political and textual, that both play with and refer back to the older forms of symbolic enclosure.

Allow me, therefore, to tell you a story. In the year 1678, a Venetian noblewoman

named Elena Lucrezia Comaro Piscopia re- ceived the first doctorate in Philosophy ever to be conferred upon a woman. She was the daughter of the Procurator of San Marco, who traced his lineage back to the Roman family of the Cornelii, whence the name Comaro, the very Cornaro family that gave four doges to the Venetian Republic, three popes and eight cardinals to the Catholic Church, and one queen to the Island of Cyprus - Caterina Cornaro - who is less famous for her political rule than for having been portrayed by Titian, Tintoretto, and Veronese.

The figure of Elena Lucrexia is conjured up for me today by these august surroundings and by the symbolic presence of two women to whom I owe my presence among you-two women under whose aegis and literally in whose name I now speak to you. One is AMa Maria van Schuurman, the first woman who was allowed to study at this very university, provided she remained hidden in a wooden room inside the lecture hall, screened off by a board with holes in it, as states the bro- chure of the Anna Maria van Schuurman Center for Advanced Research in Womens Studies, where I have the honor and the plea-

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sure to spend the 4 months of my visit in Utrecht. She was a contemporary of Elena Lucrezia, and their stories are rather similar, though Elena Lucrezia did get her doctorate in philosophy in 1678, the year of Anna Marias death.

The other woman is Belle van Zuylen, or Isabelle de Char&e, who lived in the eigh- teenth century, and after whom is named the professorship under which I now teach - Belle van Zuylen, who from her castle over- looking the lovely Utrecht countryside, wrote in French, not in her native language, just as I write and speak to you neither in Dutch nor in my native language, Italian, which was also Elena Lucrezias native language, even though she had to prove her knowledge in Latin.

My feminist genealogy begins, then, with these women whose especial talent for lan- guages went hand in hand with a very diffi- cult relationship to language, with the neces- sity of silence or linguistic exile. As a further token of such linguistic exile, Elena Lucre- zias story is told in English by the American scholar and bibliophile Monsignor Nicola Fusco, pastor of St. Peters Church in New Kensington, Pennsylvania. This is how the story goes.

Since she was a child, Elena Lucrezias prodigious scholastic achievements were en- couraged by her father. She was tutored in grammar, languages, mathematics, and mu- sic. By the time she was 26, she sang, played and composed music, spoke or translated from four modern languages and five classi- cal languages, including Hebrew, Arabic, and Chaldean, and participated in academic disputationes which gathered scholars and men of science from many countries to the Cornaro Palace in Venice. By the time she was 26, then, her father consented to let her move to Padua (where he owned another Cornaro Palace) so that she could continue her studies of philosophy, dialectics, astron- omy, and especially theology, near the Uni- versity (though not, of course, in it). At that time, the University of Padua, which had been founded in 1222, was among the most famous in Europe: Galileo Galilei had taught there, and Cardinal Bembo, Sperone Sper- oni, Scaliger, and Torquato Tasso all had de- served statues among which Elena Lucrexias own statue still stands today.2

Wanting public recognition of her learn- ing, her father petitioned the Rector that she be allowed to defend a thesis for the doctor- ate in theology. The reply of the Ecclesiasti- cal Authority, in the person of Cardinal Barbarigo, Bishop of Padua and Chancellor of the Theological Faculty of the University (now Saint Gregorio Barbarigo), was a flat NO-at first. What? A female doctor and teacher of Theology? Never! . . . Woman is made for motherhood, not for leaming.3 However, academic policy being as it was (way back then) tied to Real Politik, Saint Barbarigo saw the advantages of complying with what today would be called affirmative action, and allowed the Procurators daugh- ter to try for a doctorate in Philosophy. She did, and got her degree on June 25, 1678. She was 32 years old. Here is an account of the event written by her biographer, Mons. Fusco:

Anticipation of the forthcoming convoca- tion filled Elena Lucrezia with dread. She abhorred the whole idea. Her native mod- esty shrank from so public a display of her amazing learning and cultural understand- ing. In preparation for the ordeal she prayed incessantly, and received the sacra- ments as if she were preparing for death.

A half hour before the solemn program began, it was necessary for her confessor to appeal to her humility and urge her to submit. Finally she obeyed. . . . At the last moment, the multitude of guests and spectators was so large that the convoca- tion was transferred from Padua Univer- sity Hall to the Cathedral of the Blessed Virgin. The most distinguished personali- ties of Italy together with a great number of scholars from various European umver- sities filled the vast auditorium beyond ca- pacity - all eager to see and hear this first female aspirant to the highest academic honor.

The examiners showed no leniency be- cause of the applicants age, sex, or family standing. They allowed no superficial in- quiry. The,powerful prestige of the Uni- versity was to be augmented here, not di- minished. As question after question of the most difficult nature was answered by Elena Lucrexia, with a simple ease and dignity which won all hearts, cheer and ap-

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plause burst forth repeatedly from the great audience gathered to hear her.

The examination being satisfactorily concluded, Elena Lucrexia Comaro Pis- copia was invested with the Teachers Er- mine Cape, received the Doctors Ring on her fwer, was crowned with the Poets Laurel Crown, and was elevated to the high dignity of Magi&a et Doctrix Philo- sophiae-Master and Doctor of Philoso- phy. The whole assembly then stood and chanted a glorious Te Deum. (Fusco, 1978, pp. 37-38)

One may remark, parenthetically, that the entire event as described bears an uncanny re- semblance, in tone and in discursive and nar- rative strategies, to the accounts of witches trials that were also taking place during that same time, at the peak of the Counterrefor- mation, throughout the Catholic world. But at any rate, after such an ordeal, it is not sur- prising to hear that Elena Lucrezia died 6 years later, at the age of 38. And, her biogra- pher assures us, she died in sanctity, while ev- erywhere in Padua and Venice the people cried The Saint is dead! The Saint is dead! Under her usual clothes, he tells us, she wore the long scapular of the oblates [of the Bene- dictine Order]. . . . She had refused three or four advantageous marriages and secretly observed the monastic rule in all its austerity (Fusco, 1978, p. 34).

This, of course, is no longer surprising. Recent research on women writers in the Re- naissance has indicated that, at least in Italy, the great majority were either courtesans or nuns, of noble birth and highly educated families. But the question elicited by Elena Lucrezias both typical and atypical story is - why? Why this recurrent connection between intellectual activity and the nunnery (in its Elizabethan double meaning of cloister and brothel, the utterly spiritual and the basely sexual), between writing and silence, knowl- edge and confinement? Which madness most discreet did Elena Lucrezia cultivate in the sheltered garden of her nunnery? Could it have been simply the love of writing or, in the words of a postmodem critic, the plea- sure of intellectual order and beauty, the sur- prise of mind in struggle with itself, the de- light in language as it breaks and plays continuously on the edge of silence? Yet,

wonders the same critic, woman is hostile to the imagination (Hassan, 1983, p. 207). In- deed, even as late as the 19709, Sandra Gil- bert and Susan Gubar note, readers of Emily Dickinson were brooding upon the incom- patibility of poetry and femininity. If there was a connection between them, and one was certainly there in Dickinson, it had to be somewhere in her inner life, her biogra- pher, John Cody, surmises:

Had Mrs. Dickinson been warm and af- fectionate, more intelligent, effective and admirable, Emily Dickinson early in life would probably have identified with her, become domestic, and adopted the con- ventional womans role. She would then have become a church member, been ac- tive in community affairs, married, and had children. The creative potentiality would of course still have been there, but would she have discovered it? (Cody, 1971, in Gilbert & Gubar, 1979, p. xix).

While her biographer thus discusses the tormenting absence of romance in Dickin- sons life, another critic speaks of its presence and the fulfillment it finally afforded her: Most probably [Dickinsons] poems would not have amounted to much if the author had not finally had her own romance, enabling her to fulfill herself like any other woman. Neither critic, remark Gilbert and Gubar, imagines that poetry itself could possibly constitute a womans fulfillment (Gilbert & Gubar, 1979, p. xix).

But why, then, did so many others, like Elena Lucrexia, nurture their love of writing under their usual clothes? How did they live out the madness of their imagination born of fantasy between the boudoir and the altar? Were they, too, like the Saints of Jean Toomer described by Alice Walker- black women whose spirituality was so in- tense . . . that they stumbled blindly through their lives . . . creatures so abused and muti- lated in body [that they] stared out at the world, wildly, like lunatics . . . or quietly, like suicides; women who entered loveless marriages, without joy, who became prosti- tutes, without resistance, who became moth- ers of children, without fulfillment-were they, too, driven to a numb and bleeding madness by the springs of creativity in them

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for which there was no release? Or were they, as Walker suggests, moving to music not yet written, dreaming dreams that no one knew-not even themselves, in any coherent fashion (Walker, 1983, pp. 232-233)?

That women did not have other career opportunities may be a fact of history and sociology, but it does not explain the desire for a knowledge not useful, not exchangeable on the market, not even admitted (and in this sense Elena Lucrezias story was atypical). When we, feminist scholars of today, try to answer this question-which is the question of female creativity, of womens desire for in- tellectual creation, for formal or abstract knowledge, for poetry or theory- we find no answers in the past. For women, as for those societies Levi-Strauss designated as cold, there is no self-recorded history; there is only lore, mythical and anthropocentric represen- tations, literary and artistic figurations. And there we do find, not an explanation but rather a repetition of the enigma: the Sphinx, whose liminal position between language and silence, between human and nonhuman, is the source of its knowledge and power. That enigma is then reinscribed in the sibylline words of Cassandra and in the speechless smile of Mona Lisa, in Ophelias song and in the nothing of Cordelia; frozen in the quiet stare of Toomers saints or in the silent gestures of Charcots hysteric patients pho- tographed at La Salpetriere, and again sig- nalled by the no of Dora to Freuds thera- peutic explanation.

These are representations, to be sure, im- ages fashioned or constructed by men. They are nevertheless powerful images that fo- calize desire and identification for women as well as men. Like the femmes fafales, doomed heroines of the film noir genre, they are figures of power; a power we have come to associate with sexuality as uncontrollable, defiant of the Law, of the social institutions that seek to bind it, such as the family, and in excess of the textual strategies that are in- tended to contain it. But those representa- tions also inscribe another, more subtly se- ductive figuration: the possibility of a desire, a vision that is conveyed in a gaze mute as a great stone, a knowledge that shrouds itself in silence or (which is the same) in a private and self-directed language, in neurosis, mad- ness, narcissism, symptomatic behavior. And

are these not contemporary places of con- finement, analogues of the nunnery?

The association of women with madness and silence, the identification of femininity with a power that culture has been at pains to exorcise or neutralize, and language to elide, has been a recurrent topos of feminist literary criticism. Whether it writes of woman and her representation in the literary writings of men, or whether it writes as woman, propos- ing a notion of language in which womans radical otherness, her difference, is ex- pressed, contemporary criticism defines fem- ininity as the other side of masculinity, its re- pressed or radical other, and so, at best, unrepresentable: hence, the idea of feminin- ity as the limit, even the horizon of Western logocentrism.

The network of semantic complicities and conceptual incompatibilities in which the terms woman and madness both attract and repel one another in a tangle of metaphor and paradox is outlined by Shoshana Felman (1975) in a review of two texts of the 1970s that are paradigmatic, and in a way exem- plary, of a discourse of women spanning the Atlantic Ocean: feminist sociological re- search in the United States, represented by Phyllis Cheslers Women and Madness (1972), and feminist philosophical critique in Europe, represented by Lute Irigarays Speculum of the Other Woman (1985 [1974]). In response to Chesler, who argues that madness is imposed on women by an all-powerful social conditioning which makes them culturally impotent, dependent, and helpless, and hence that womens mental ill- ness is a request for help, Felman replies with a question both arrogant and necessary: to whom is this request addressed if not to men? and, were it heeded, wouldnt the very cure reinforce the symptom, the depen- dency it signifies? As for Irigaray, she argues, if woman is barred access to the theoretical locus of speech, from where can the state- ment of her otherness be uttered? Who is speaking here, and who is asserting the other- ness of woman? Felman asks. Is [Irigaray] speaking the language of men, or the silence of women? (Felman, 1975, p. 3).

This strikes me as a most appropriate way to put the question of feminist theory, as well as womens writing: Is it speaking the lan- guage of men or the silence of women? The

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answer I would give is: both. For the contra- diction specific to, and even constitutive of, feminist theory is precisely one that elemen- tary logic would identify as internal contra- diction. Felman is not quite so bold, and chooses to avoid confronting the contradic- tion that she so lucidly points out in the femi- nist texts. She concludes:

If, in our culture, the woman is by defini- tion associated with madness, her problem is how to break out of this (cultural) impo- sition of madness without taking up the critical and therapeutic positions of rea- son: how to avoid speaking both as mud and as not mad. The challenge facing the woman today is nothing less than to re- invent language, to t-e-learn how to speak: to speak not only against, but out- side of the specular phallogocentric struc- ture. (Felman, 1975, p. 10)

But, I will ask, can one ever, really, speak outside of language-neither as mad nor as not mad, neither as woman nor as man-if language itself is what constitutes those very terms as well as the ground and the play of difference between them? Precisely this paradox is at the heart of what Felman calls the phallacy of masculine meaning and what defines the status of discourses. Women are both defined by patriarchal dis- course and yet subjects of it. How can we, then, challenge that phallacy without con- fronting or engaging that paradox? For women to avoid that paradox, to avoid speaking as both mad and not mad, is simply to avoid speaking at all, and so to fall back into a silence which is not merely the unspo- ken, that is to say, the historical silence of women, but also the unspeakable, that is, the theoretical silence of woman, her nonexist- ence as a discursive subject. Hence the neces- sity to speak at once the language of men and the silence of women, or better, to pur- sue strategies of discourse that will speak the silence of women in, through, against, over, under, and across the language of men. And hence, too, the necessity to pursue, develop, or invent practices of language where gender is neither elided nor abstracted into pure dis- cursivity, but at the same time claimed and denied, posed and displaced, deconstructed and reconstructed.

The question of gender, traditionally elided in the study of literary language as well as in male criticism of womens writing, was first raised and subsequently established as a pertinent literary issue by feminist critics in the late 1960s. That critique is now familiar: By ignoring the question of gender, the critic simply reenacts once more the symbolic murder of the woman, the devaluation, re- pression, containment, confinement, silenc- ing of her speech that have been accom- plished again and again by Western litera- ture, art, science, and other discursive forma- tions. The edifying story of Elena Lucrezia may serve here as but a small example of how the silence of women has been traditionally constructed. Her two namesakes-Helen the beautiful, the face that launched a thou- sand ships/and burnt the topless towers of Ilium (as Marlowe wrote) and Lucrezia, the advocate of mans honor on whose dis- possessed and violated body was built the re- publican state-inscribe between them, as an absence, the woman who would be scholar and strive, like Faust, after knowledge. A larger sample of the ways in which her silence has been reinforced and standardized in modern times is given by Joanna Russ in her book How to Suppress Womens Writing (1983). And I will also refer you to the work of another woman, present in this room, to whom I also owe a debt of gratitude for the privilege of speaking to you today, I mean Professor Rosi Braidotti, whose book Patterns of Dissonance (1991, in Dutch, Beelden van de leegte) brilliantly analyzes the suppression of womens voices in the con- temporary philosophical discourse of fem- ininity.

But we must ask further: Is that silence of women nothing more than the effect of a sin- gle cause or intentionality? Whether we think of it as historical, theoretical, or both - as the repressive devaluation of womens speech imposed by a history of cultural and polit- ical domination, or as the impossibility for women to speak as subject of a discourse founded on the a priori exclusion of woman from the polis and the linguistic koir&- is the silence of women nothing more than the effect of logos, the patriarchal symbolic order, the language and the culture of man? And again, is the contradiction inscribed in that silence to be thought of solely as the re-

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sult of cultural marginality, a by-product of oppression and domination, or can that si- lence be thought of in terms of a specificity of womens material and semiotic existence, which I call gender?

To answer these questions, let me consider a text written by a woman, a text of fiction and not a hagiography in the manner of Elena Lucrezias story, but a kind of critical fiction, which is another name for what I also call theory.

Some 60 years ago, asked to give a public lecture on women and fiction, Virginia Woolf entitled it A Room of Ones Own, and so began:

But, you may say, we asked you to speak about women and fiction-what has that got to do with a room of ones own? I will try to explain. When you asked me to speak about women and fiction I sat down on the banks of a river and began to won- der what the words meant. (Woolf, 1929, P- 3)

They might mean, she speculates, simply a few remarks about Jane Austen, Fanny Bur- ney, the Bront&, George Eliot, Mrs. Gaskell (in short, the few female novelists then ac- cepted in the canon); or they might mean women and what they are like, or women and the fiction they write, or women and the fiction that is written about them; or all of these together. This last possibility is of course the most interesting, but has a fatal drawback, for in that case

I should never be able to come to a conclu- sion. I should never be able to fulfil what is, I understand, the first duty of a lec- turer- to hand you after an hours dis- course a nugget of pure truth to wrap up between the pages of your notebooks and keep on the mantelpiece for ever. All I could do was to offer you an opinion upon one minor point -a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction; and that, as you will see, leaves the great problem of the true nature of woman and the true nature of fiction unsolved. (Woolf, 1929, pp. 3-4)

Combined with subtle irony and rampant understatement, Woolf s rhetorical strategy

of direct address (But, you may say . . . w - the but anticipating the question(ing) of her title, setting up a dialogue, a divergence, an immediate objection to her speech by her audience) re-marks both the theme and the strategic gesture of her title, and like an echo chamber causes them to resonate and to ex- pand. It thus becomes quite clear that the self-effacement and de-negation conveyed by such disclaimers as I should never be able to . . . , or all I could do was . . . offer an opinion upon one minor point, are not mere formulas of scholarly propriety or womanly modesty. Less obviously but more adroitly than Elena Lucrezias shrinking, they serve to redefine the space of Woolfs inquiry, to mark a boundary within which she can focus on what she wants and likes to write and speak about (being paid for it!); a boundary which at the same time keeps out the things she does not want to deal with, the questions defined for her by others, in their terms, questions that might be inappropriate or sim- ply uninteresting to her (such as the literary canon and the true nature of women or of fiction).

Those disclaimers are obviously a strategy of discourse; I believe they are precisely a manner of speaking the silence of women in the language of men. Like the four walls of a room, like the convent and the brothel, they allow the speaker to be with and for her- self; they demarcate a space of unhampered movement of thought, perhaps desire, which may be nothing more and nothing less than the freedom to pose a question in her own terms. A freedom that paradoxically is paid for by surrendering the very thing one needs it for: by surrendering ones body to the clois- ter in order for it not to be owned by others, surrendering ones body to all men so as not to belong to one, or ones intelligence to mat- ters of no interest in order to pursue ones in- terests. In other words, surrendering part of oneself, indeed the greatest part: give up the house, for instance, in order to retain a room, the world for a cell, the vast public do- main for a small private enclosure; give up the forest for an oak tree, as Woolfs Orlando does, or, like Boccaccios heroine, for a pot of basil on the windowsill; or, like Alice Walkers Meridian, give up sexual pleasure for Usanctuary.5 Often, however, even this does not work, and the woman ends up not

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writing at all. She is then, Virginia Woolf imagines, Shakespeares sister, the Judith Shakespeare who died with child and never wrote a word.

This other paradoxical connection, for woman, of death and birth continually joined at the very core of her material exis- tence, is explored by Woolf across the spec- trum of British literary history and social landscape. It evokes the image of an empty center, a space of contradiction where oppo- sites seem to converge and cancel each other out: Birth and death, existence and nonexist- ence, like writing and silence, occupy and preempt that space. Yet it is only from there, from that space, that womens speech can come. However she may approach it, her subject, Women and Fiction, keeps eluding her until the heading on her notebook reads, WOMEN AND POVERTY.

What had our mothers been doing then that they had no wealth to leave us? Pow- dering their noses? Looking in at shop windows? Flaunting in the sun at Monte Carlo? . . . . If only Mrs. Seton and her mother and her mother before her had learnt the great art of making money and had left their money, like their fathers and their grandfathers before them, to found fellowships and lectureships and prizes and scholarships appropriated to the use of their own sex . . . we might have been exploring or writing; mooning about the venerable places of the earth; sitting con- templative on the steps of the Parthenon, or going at ten to an office and coming home comfortably at half-past four to write a little poetry. Only, if Mrs. Seton and her like had gone into business at the age of fifteen, there would have been- that is the snag in the argument -no Mary. (Woolf, 1929, p. 22)

The snag in the argument. Not only are death and birth the contradictory recurrence of each womans physical existence; but they de- fine her social, historical existence as well. The depth of Woolfs insight comes from her posing the economic question not in terms of class but of gender. She does so quite simply (and astonishingly) by assuming that wom- ens heritage, our cultural and financial in- heritance, must come from our mothers, who

could not earn or possess money whatever their class (let alone endow colleges as fathers did for their sons and would not for their daughters) - our mothers who bore thirteen children to ministers of religion at St. An- drews (p. 24), she remarks. And had they not done so, Mary Beton says to Mary Seton, you would never have come into existence at all . . )) (p. 23). Making a fortune and bear- ing thirteen children - no human being could stand it (p. 22).

Well before its beginning, then, womens existence is marked by gender, by a differ- ence at once sexual and social which simply cannot be understood by recourse to catego- ries such as class or poverty or fiction, which are not gender-specific. The assumption may have seemed naive, but is instead radical. It locates gender specificity precisely in that snag, that empty space of contradiction which inhabits women as both mothers and mothers daughters. In this sense, the death of the historical Judith Shakespeare and the birth of her utopian counterpart are not ter- minal points of a linear trajectory in an ob- jective history, but exist concurrently in the here and now of historical process; they exist subjectively as well as socially, and as contra- dictorily as do writing and silence, knowledge and confinement.

This is finally the value of the organizing metaphor of Woolf% text: A Room of Ones Own is the representation of a textual space at once public and private-a public lecture hall which her rhetorical strategy construes as a silent room and a space of writing; a pub- lished text in which the inscription of the sub- jects voice bears in itself the trace of a silence at the core of its (and its writers) material ex- istence. In other words, the text actually pro- duces the representation of its contradiction, and it is the contradiction of a female- gendered subject: the inscription of writing in silence and the inscription of silence in one speaking and writing as a woman. For, on the one hand, womans specificity and the speci- ficity of womens writing-which is the real issue of Woolfs lecture- cannot be ap- proached frontally, as it were, but only indi- rectly, negatively, tangentially or circuitously (women and fiction remain, so far as I am concerned, unsolved problems [p. 41, she states). On the other hand, the possibility, the very condition of speaking as a woman de-

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pends on the recognition of the contradiction which her speech must rapresent. Thus, too, the need for the initial disclaimers, the appeal to all the liberties and licences of a novelist, the appeal to fiction as poetic licence (Fic- tion here is likely to contain more truth than fact), and the primary disclaimer of all:

I need not say that what I am about to de- scribe has no existence: Oxbridge is an in- vention; so is Fernham; I is only a con- venient term for somebody who has no real being . . . Call me Mary Beton, Mary Seton, Mary Carmichael or by any name you please- it is not a matter of any im- portance. (pp. 4-5)

The I of the speaker, a womans speech it- self, is possible only as fiction, Woolf is say- ing (already in 1929). And this first indirect statement on the topic of women and fiction already bears the full weight of the subse- quent paradoxes the text will produce as it moves toward the construction of its real topic: the terms in which womans specificity may be articulated in language and in history. And that, of course, will be Woolfs state- ment about women and fiction.

Nowhere in the text, however, do the terms I, woman, and women appear as ob- jective, as facts: Women, including the speaker and her audience, appear throughout as a representation produced, held, and shifted by the tension between enunciation and address. At first enunciation and$address diverge: from the non-being of the speaking I (call me Mary Beton, Mary Seton, Mary Carmichael . . . it is not a matter of any im- portance), addressing a nonspecified you who will or will not recognize itself in the speaker (Lies will flow from my lips, but there may perhaps be some truth mixed up with them; it is for you to seek out this truth and to decide whether any part of it is worth keeping, p. 4), the enunciation shifts to Mary Beton and then to Woolf: Here, then, Mary Beton ceases to speak. . . . And I will end now in my own person (p. 109), making a peroration addressed to women (p. 114).

The audience so addressed is itself a repre- sentation inscribed in the text, another voice that speaks what has now become a paper read by a woman to women (p. 115), and that voice now speaks as we, signalling the

beginning of a movement whereby enuncia- tion and address will converge.

Young women, I would say, and please at- tend, for the peroration is beginning, you are, in my opinion, disgracefully ignorant. You have never made a discovery of any sort of importance. You have never shaken an empire or led an army into bat- tle. The plays of Shakespeare are not by you, and you have never introduced a bar- barous race to the blessings of civilisation. What is your excuse? It is all very well for you to say, pointing to the streets and squares and forests of the globe swarming with black and white and coffee-coloured inhabitants, all busily engaged in traffic and enterprise and love-making, we have had other work on our hands. Without our doing, those seas should be unsailed and those fertile lands a desert. We have borne and bred and washed and taught, perhaps to the age of six or seven years, the one thousand six hundred and twenty- three million human beings who are, ac- cording to statistics, at present in exis- tence, and that, allowing that some had help, takes time. (p. 116)

In this dialogue of I, you, and we, the text foregrounds its activity. It shows the working of the function of address as, precisely, a function; that is to say, the audience becomes a fictional character as well, speaking back as we. No immediate or natural bond is pre- sumed between the (female) speaker/writer and the (female) audience, between woman and women. Both the one and the others are fictional representations. Their bonding is not presumed but, on the contrary, con- structed and established by the discourse of the text, even and especially as its reference is a common bond of women in their lifes work.

Last, from this dialogue of I and we emerges yet another representation of wom- an, the poet who was Shakespeares sister, who died young and in silence but could be born again, to live and write her poetry in you and in me, and in many other women who are not here tonight, for they are wash- ing up the dishes and putting the children to bed (p. 117). This further representation is also put in the form of fiction, deliberately

GendOgitZS 401

framed as a faure of address, or rather a figure in which the functions of enunciation and address converge to delineate a common ground (a common life) and a shared pur- pose (I maintain that she would come if we worked for her).

Weaving together the story of Mary Bea- ton and the story of Judith Shakespeare in differently colored threads, the text con- structs a dialogic space of contradiction: Womens emergence to language and history is based on the non-meaning of language (I sat down on the banks of a river and began to wonder what the words meant) and on the non-recognition of official history (for even with money and rooms of our own, she ob- serves, we are to work in poverty and obscu- rity). The distance from language and the kinship with silence remain inscribed in the text, in the conversation among women, be it in the lecture hall or in the room of their own. Yet in that text, that space of writing, a sub- ject does speak, in its particular division, its engendered difference, its effort of represen- tation and self-representation. It is a space built on an empty center, a core of silence, a stillness, something that evokes the image of that bell jar that Sylvia Plath made into the objective correlative of her own madness. Yet that stillness, much like the eye of the tor- nado in Plaths novel, is an effect rather than an absence of movement: It is the meeting place of opposing drives, ego and death in- stincts perhaps, the snag in the argument of any logic or logocentric discourse-the con- tradiction, in Alice Walkers words, cruel enough to stop the blood. (Walker, 1976, p. 233)

But from that very contradiction, some- how, self-definition has become possible and a history of women can begin. For this text speaks of and to women, and constitutes them/us as members of an historically coher- ent group, which it defines both extrinsically and intrinsically; extrinsically, socially, by their effective exclusion from the polis, the city of knowledge, the library of Oxbridge, the university, the sacred turf of logos; and intrinsically, by a continuity of affective space, a kinship of mothers and daughters, a tradition of shared practices from one Judith Shakespeare to the other.

If A Room of Ones Own constructs a dis- cursive space in which not woman but women

are represented as a social and affective in- stance, as subjects possessed of a specificity and a history, with a common bond and pur- pose, it is precisely insofar as the text works toward constituting a community of readers and writers and speakers as women, and thus produces the terms of a critical discourse of women; in other words, it produces the con- ditions of feminist thought. For what the possibility of womens speaking to and about women inaugurates is not only the possibil- ity of rewriting history, as Woolf herself suggests (p. 47). What actually begins, for women, is history itself-though not a Hege- lian history, continually folding back over the past to totalize meaning and reaffm a universal truth as its ultimate signified, but rather a history always in process, here and now, and based in practice, contradiction, heterogeneity.

Since Woolf delivered her lecture, many women have taken up the kind of questions, historical and theoretical, she was asking, and in the very terms that she outlined. And while in 1929 the library shelves contained books written by men about women, today it is mostly women, in the Western world, who write about ourselves, often for other women, though not always. A very large body of work already exists, not only in fic- tion, poetry, and the arts, in criticism, his- tory, and the human sciences, but in theory as well: literary theory, film theory, psycho- analysis, cultural theory. But, you may ask, why theory? Why that most abstract of dis- courses, direct descendant of philosophy, from which woman has always kept at a dis- tance, as if to underscore the nonrelationship in language that suggested to Nietzsche the conceit of their identity?

Philosophy, as Braidotti argues (1991), has until very recently been in the business of system building, fully subsuming the real in the symbolic, ordering it in conceptual cate- gories, constructing walls of meaning, then cities and empires; making History (with a capital H). If we only think of the great men in the University of Padua at the tail end of the Renaissance - Galileo writing his Dialog0 dei massimisistemi, Tasso composing the last heroic epic of Christian deliverance, Bembo shaping the Italian language for the centuries to come in Prose della volgar lingua - we can- not but wonder: What indeed was Elena Lu-

402 TERESADELAURETIS

crezia doing there? Well, of course, she was not there. Whether in her fathers palace or in the nearby convent, she was outside the University, outside philosophy. What plea- sure or power or knowledge she might have derived from her studies, what desire, what madness most discreet did keep her wonder- ing near the gates, we can only speculate on the basis of our own desire, our own know- ingly ek-centric relation to language and his- tory. And of our own effort nevertheless to question them, engage them, re-examine them-in short, our own desire for theory, which is no building of systems but rather an excavation or an undermining of their foun- dations and an intellectual passion, as Braidotti puts it.

[This] desire for forms of investigation, expression and transmission of knowledge responds ( . . . ) to an ethical and political drive which is constitutive of feminist thought and which characterizes it above and beyond any of its thematics. It in- volves both the relation to the institution of knowledge, and also a different relation to theorization, production and writing. (Braidotti, 1991, p. 150).

I, too, believe that the fascination with language and theory, for feminist scholars, is the direct counterpart of that silence that has long marked, and continues to mark, womens material and intellectual existence. For us as for Elena Lucrezia, Anna Maria van Schuurman, Belle van Zuylen, Virginia Woolf, Alice Walker and others, critical writing, as well as all other practices of writ- ing and other expressive media, are ways of both escaping and resisting the confines and constraints imposed upon our sex. In this sense it is not a coincidence that so many women writers of science fiction create char- acters like cyborgs, not machines celibataires but rather spinster machines, who join the ranks of other mythical figures reclaimed by contemporary popular culture such as witches and monsters, amazons and vam- pires - figures at once of transgression and of new forms of community.

What we call feminist theory, in its various genres and styles of writing, combines the de- sire for abstract and formal knowledge with the narcissistic drive of a female-sexed body to self-affirmation; it joins the emerging pos-

sibility of political subjecthood to the cre- ation of new flgures of our destiny, figures of social subjects who are both female-sexed and desiring. A few years ago, before a read- ing of her poetry at Stanford University, ad- dressing her audience in a manner both like and unlike Virginia Woolfs, Audre Lorde said: I am a Black feminist lesbian warrior poet mother doing my work, And then she asked: who are you and how are you doing yours?

My own itinerary as a woman scholar in the university has been guided by the words of such women as by Ariadnes thread; a scat- tered, fragmented and yet historically em- bodied lineage of female thought and writing which my sometime compatriots, the Italian feminist philosophers of the Milan Womens Bookstore, have called a genealogy of wom- en, and others call by the name of feminism. That is neither a tradition nor a kinship of dispossessed mothers and daughters, but rather the trace of a discontinuous, elusive, and daily reconstructed feminist genealogy. Under these conditions, the journey is not easy and its destination not quite clear. There are times, indeed, when the past seems more hospitable than the future, or when old sto- ries are more comforting than new ones. Nev- ertheless, I will conclude my feminist geneal- ogy for today with the words of another woman who was never granted a doctorate in philosophy because she was in prison at the time when she should have completed her dis- sertation, but whose work has inspired two generations of women and men the world over, and whom I have the honor and the pleasure of counting among my colleagues and co-workers at the University of Califor- nia in Santa Cruz, Angela Davis:

The most difficult challenge facing the ac- tivist [she wrote, and I believe the same is true for the feminist theorist and teacher] is to respond fully to the needs of the mo- ment and to do so in such a way that the light one attempts to shine on the present will simultaneously illuminate the future. (Davis, 1990, p. 9).

ENDNOTES

1. The F&Ale van Zuylen chair is the official visiting professorship at the University of Utrecht. named after

Genealogies 403

the famed eighteenth century writer and scholar who, born in Utrecht, spent most of her life abroad. The pur- pose of the visiting professorship, which was set up in the early 1980s. is to attract to Utrecht outstanding scholars whose international reputation and innovative approach are of inspiration to the academic community. Gver the years, the Womens Studies programmes in Utrecht have managed to attract feminists to this chair. One of the few obligations of a Belle van Zuylen professor is to deliver a public lecture as a sort of inaugural address, which is meant to introduce to a broad audience the scholars field of research. What follows is the text of the inaugu- ral address delivered by Teresa de Laumtis in Utrecht, on November 13.1991.

2. Mons. Nicola Fusco, P.A. (1978). Elena Lucre& Cornaro Piscopia. @. 22) Pittsburgh. This is a commem- orative volume under the auspic& of the Hunt founda- tion, the University of Pittsburah. and the United States Committee for tie Elena L&&a Comaro Piscopia Tercentenary.

3. Or so reports her biographer, Mons. Fusco (pp. 35-36): In the second half of the twentieth century, the Roman Catholic Church abolished its sweeping veto. Today, in Europe, there are many female Doctors of Theology. In Elena Piscopias day, the Conventual Fa- ther Felice Rotondo, a teaching theologian at the Uni- versity of Padua. remarked: If the women are permitted to study Theology, why must they be denied the doctor- ate in that subject? As his supporters, he cited Duns Scotus (12661308), the Jesuit Aifonso &hneron (1515- 15%), and Cornelius a Lanide (1567-1637). Church lu- minaries. But Cardinal &barigi compron&ed with Fa- ther Rotondos view, reluctantly. Woman, he said. is made for motherhood, not for learning. However if the Procurator of San Marco insists. I am willing to modify the point and let his daughter become a Doctor of Phi- losophy. No textual reference is given for these words by Cardinal Barbarigo. In a letter, Mons. Fusco states that he is not writing a critical monograph but -a Profile, that is, a short story (cf. appendix, p. 95).

4. Polis = the public space where (male, white, prop- erty-owning) citizens are entitled to the exercise of politi- cal and social rights; koine = communal language.

5. Beingwithhim(. . . ) saved her from the strain of responding to other boys or even noting the whole cat- egory of men ( . . . ) This, then, was probably what sex

meant to her; not pleasure, but a sanctuary in which her mind was freed of any consideration for all other males in the universe who might want anything of her. It was resting from pursuit (Walker, 1976, pp. 61-62).

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Braidotti, Rosi. (1991). Patterns of dissonance: A study of women in contemporary philosophy. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Chesler. Phyllis. (1972). Women and madness. New York: Doubleday.

Cody, John. (1971). /ifrer great pain: The inner life of Emily Dickimon. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Davis, Angela. (1990). Women, culture and politicr. New York: Random House.

French, Marilyn. (1978). The womens room. London: Sphere Books.

Irigaray, Lute. (1985). Speculum of the other woman. (Gillian Gill, Trans.) Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Fehnan, Shoshana. (1975). Women and madness: The critical phallacy. Diacritcs, 34). 2-5.

Fusco, Mons.Nicola. (1978). Elena Lucrezia Cornaro Piscopia. Pittsburgh: The Hunt Foundation, the University of Pittsburgh and the United States Com- mittee for the Elena Lucrezia Comaro Piscopia Ter- centenary.

Gilbert, Sandra, t Gubar, Susan. (1979). Shakespea& sisters: Femintrr essays on women poets. Blooming- ton: Indiana University Press.

Hassan, Ihab. (1983). Passage from Egypt: Excerpt from an imaginary autobiography. Sub-Stance, 37/ 38, 192-211.

Plath. Sylvia. (1971). 7he Bell Jar. New York: Harper L Row.

Russ, Joanna. (1983). How tosuppress womens writing. Austin: University of Texas Press.

Walker, Alice. (1976). Meridian. New York: Pocket Books.

Walker, Alice. (1983). In search of our mothem gar- dens. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.

Woolf, Virginia. (1929). A room of ones own. New York and London: Harcourt Brace and World.