from Alterity, Misogyny & the Agonistic Feminine
Antigone: I stand convicted of impiety,
the evidence, my pious duty done…
Chorus: The same tempest of mind
as ever, controls the girl. [1]
Despite the fact that gender identities are in increasingly complex conversation with biology and cultural construction the reductive force of patriarchy, with its sidekick misogyny, remains the catastrophic constant.
– S. M. Quant [2]
I
This essay is conjectural and conversational. Conversational with other texts, other minds; but also among the importantly divergent logics of poetry and discourse, discourse and exploratory essay. Decades ago, skeptical about the force of a strictly woman-centered feminist theory whose reactive stance seemed to corroborate the secondary status of the feminine in the age-old M/F binary, I was struck—in a sense, saved—by the realization of a gender and genre transgressive experimental feminine rooted in embodied female experience but integral to all struggles (personal, sociopolitical, ethical, and aesthetic) with the cultural coercions of an ubermasculine hegemony. At the time I was in the process of writing “Rethinking Literary Feminism: Three Essays onto Shaky Grounds” in response to an invitation from scholars Lynn Keller and Cristanne Miller for their collection Feminist Measures: Soundings in Poetry and Theory.[3] A short version of the present essay (a continuation of that earlier rethinking) was delivered as a talk for “Constructive Alterities in Feminist Ecological Poetics,” April 9, 2016, a panel organized by Angela Hume with Brenda Hillman and Evelyn Reilly for “Poetics (The Next) 25 Years”—a conference sponsored by the Poetics Program at SUNY Buffalo.
Writing from the perspective of the modernist rejection of transcendental romanticism, Theodor Adorno noted that “the unresolved antagonisms of reality reappear in art in the guise of immanent problems of artistic form.”[4] The major “antagonism” of interest was between ideologically based “official thought” and the freedom and independence of mind necessary for creativity. Looking for a discursive form that could, like certain poetries, resist (in my view) implicitly masculine “official thought,” particularly in Germany, Adorno argued on behalf of the exploratory essay in the French tradition—oddly, without crediting either France or Montaigne. Nonetheless, his characterization of the essay has affinities with an agonistic poetics of the experimental feminine insofar as both are necessarily at odds with the patriarchal “law of the father.”[5] The productively contentious agency of the experimental feminine gives it a dialogic expansiveness that allies it with poethics of queer values and interventions, along with others cast into shadow realms of alterity by self-reinforcing cultural supremacies. The poethical wager that is Adam Pendleton’s “Black Dada” is a case in point.[6] What happens when you substitute “feminine” (or “queerness” or “Black Dada”) for “the essay” in this quote from Adorno’s “The Essay as Form”?
Emancipation from the compulsion of identity gives the essay something that eludes official thought. … The essay’s innermost formal law is heresy. Through violations of the orthodoxy of thought, something in the object becomes visible which it is orthodoxy’s secret and objective aim to keep invisible.[7]
In the midst of complex global crises, including dire threats associated with climate change; in recognition of a contingent futurity shared by all us creatures of the self-organizing genius of evolution; in grave, and necessarily humorous, consideration of our anthroposcenes, anthroposcenities; carried along by historical developments that continue to be dominated by default masculine values—I must continue to query what has been / is / can be the agonistic efficacy of experimental feminine dynamics. This question is all the more necessary to the extent that it eludes simple answers, even as it wagers on the constructive alterity of feminine agency.
[…]
IV
Comparing man and woman generally, one may say that woman would not have the genius for adornment, if she had not the instinct for the secondary role. (Nietzsche, “Apothegms & Interludes”)[29]
Man is the measure of all things, including woman.
(Addendum to Apocrypha, author unknown)
Ancient Greek and Judeo-Christian cultures have bestowed a potent legacy of alterities. Preeminent among them, from the patriarchal point of view, is the indelibly stained otherness (threatening unknowability) of the woman/female/feminine. Although the philologic of female alterity is dualistic and should, therefore, be reciprocal, it has been conceived as dramatically asymmetrical. “Sche,” Eve, the female, the feminine, the girl, the woman carrying both the child and the original sin, is alterity, not only in theological contexts but in philosophical traditions. Not surprising in Nietzsche, who generously distributed misogyny across binary sexes: “In the background of all their personal vanity, women themselves have still their impersonal scorn—for ‘woman.’”[30] But it is, at least initially, surprising in the renowned ethical philosopher Emmanuel Levinas.
For graduate students in literary and cultural criticism, Levinas is considered a source of primary importance for both ethical theory and the concept of alterity. Now and then I’m asked whether poethics is “Levinasian.” The short answer is no. The longer version is my strong disagreement with the ethical implications of Levinas’s asymmetrical formulation of feminine/female alterity. In 1946–47 lectures published as Time and the Other, Levinas locates “the feminine” as “absolute alterity” on a remarkable, quasi-deductive continuum the significance of whose arc begins with the overwhelming existential threat of death (the end of Time) for the male subject. It proceeds to recover “futurity” as an active accomplishment of “the father” through use of the embodied “feminine” as reproductive vessel. Levinas has a worldview whose values are, like Foucault’s, found in masculine agency. The role of “the feminine” is remarkably, if not entirely, passive. Alterity is identified as the “mystery” of the feminine and the “mystery” of death in disconcertingly close proximity. The sole value of “the feminine,” is that it can be plucked from the shadows of its own alterity to facilitate an eros that enables survival of the male ego. That survival, which is in effect the reproduction of the male ego, is equated with the survival of civilization itself. Time and the Other might as well be titled “Civilization and the Feminine.”
[Note on language: Levinas in Time and the Other crisscrosses from a necessarily womb-bearing “feminine” to “feminine” as cluster of characteristic traits—what he calls “mode of being.” A question for French scholars of French philosophy: why not two words—femme (woman) v. féminin (traits)? (The word “féminin” that indicates gender in grammar is amusingly a masculine noun.) As I have indicated, I distinguish these importantly different ontologies by using different words—the biological “female,” vs. “feminine” for cultural traits, and forms of behavior strongly associated with the biological female but which can be expressed by persons of any gender. We need to consider how conflating “female” and “feminine”; “male” and “masculine” have perpetuated the invidious F/M binary.]
Levinas terms the father’s use of the “feminine” to activate paternity “fecundity.” Although fecundity unquestionably requires the sexual presence, if not cooperation, of the female-feminine, the creative force itself is not feminine. It is not her fecundity, not her maternity that Levinas is talking about. It is instead quite explicitly his paternity that ensures futurity via the birth of “the son” whose identification with the father makes the continuation of historical Time possible. The birth of the son, the legacy of paternity, bestows value on the feminine only as necessary “other” in relation to Man-and-God’s fraternal twin projects: Civilization and Time. Almost needless to say, this is a messianic vision in which the feminine will always be accessory to the great event. And of course the messiah will never be a woman. Levinas’s argument in his own words:
It is thus not according to the category of cause, but according to the category of the father that freedom comes about and time is accomplished.… I began with the notions of death and the feminine, and have ended with that of the son.… Plato did not grasp the feminine in its specifically erotic notion.[31]
Can it be that only the threat of death—the extinction of the ego of the father—legitimates the value of the feminine? That the sole significance of the feminine is as a vehicle of potentially messianic reproduction? That the feminine/female contributes nothing to futurity in its/her own right? The idea that “female is to male as nature is to culture” is deeply embedded in Levinas’s theologically based ontology of sexuality and gender. The Aristotelian prototype of a secular ethical domain—one that can benefit from cultural change—is missing. The feminine remains trapped in the mind of the “ancient misogynists,” rationalizing her subjugation with turbulent philosophical rhetoric. The fundamentally reductive import of passages like these are awash in phantom eloquence:
What is the alterity that does not purely and simply enter into the opposition of two species [male and female] of the same genus? I think the absolute contrary contrary (le contraire absolument contraire) whose contrariety is in no way affected by the relationship that can be established between it and its correlative, the contrariety that permits its terms to remain absolutely other, is the feminine.[32]
Is there any ethical thought in this characterization of the feminine, or is it purely theological? The cultural construct of the “absolute other” has always been a target of fear, rage, oppression, violence, erasure of independent recognition and agency. The “absolute other” is a problem demanding strategies of management and control which often lead to the violent banishment, occupation, or extermination of the “absolute other.” Docile and utilitarian bodies of women and peoples of color, a compliant natural world—these are the operational goals of unreconstructed (and white supremacist) patriarchal society.
Simone de Beauvoir and other feminist theorists were outraged by Levinas’s treatment of the feminine, his frank assignment of helpmeet status to woman—ever ready to stimulate ejaculatory prowess and receive the sperm. Not to say that Levinas himself addresses the bodily mechanics of his metaphysical fable, an account arrestingly similar to Apollo’s in the Eumenides of Aeschylus:
The mother is no parent of that which is called
her child, but only nurse of the new-planted seed
that grows. The parent is he who mounts. A stranger she
preserves a stranger’s seed, if no god interfere.
I will show you proof of what I have explained. There can
be a father without any mother.[33]
In her critique of Levinas, de Beauvoir pointed to the complete absence of female consciousness or ego in his discourse “which is intended to be objective, [but] is in fact an assertion of masculine privilege.”[34] She and many other feminists derived energy from this and put it to use in revolutionary feminist analysis, de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, the great pathbreaking example. Here is Levinas’s response to his feminist critics:
I do not want to ignore the legitimate claims of the feminism that presupposes all the acquired attainments of civilization.… In the most brutal materiality, in the most shameless or the most prosaic appearance of the feminine, neither her mystery nor her modesty is abolished.… [The feminine] is not merely the unknowable, but a mode of being that consists in slipping away from the light.… Hiding is the way of existing in the feminine, and this fact of hiding is precisely modesty.[35]
Levinas, to my knowledge, never disavowed this view of the feminine function consonant with most orthodox religious beliefs originating in ancient and medieval world cultures. There is always a primal asymmetry—only one “absolute other,” and that is woman. Levinas did, in a puzzlingly abstracted manner, address “maternity” in later work—without mentioning “woman,” the “feminine,” or the “maternal.” In Otherwise than Being, or, Beyond Essence, maternity is “the complete being ‘for the other’…the very signifyingness of signification.”[36] In “Revelation in the Jewish Tradition,” there is a corporeal evocation of maternity, again with no woman on site: “But man is also the irruption of God with Being…. Man is questioned at his judgment by a justice which recognizes this responsibility; mercy—the rahamim—the trembling of the uterus in which the Other (L’Autre) gestates with the Same, God’s maternity, if we can call it that.”[37]
Some feminist scholars have attempted to defend Levinas against accusations of sexism by pointing to this odd “revelation” of maternity as metaphysical principle. Jacques Derrida, echoing de Beauvoir intentionally or not, responds by noting the masculine nature of philosophical metaphysics. In “Violence and Metaphysics: An Essay on the Thought of Emmanuel Levinas” he writes that Levinas, abjuring the Greek and Joycean “feminine logic” or “woman’s reason” of Ulysses, is essentially a philosopher of the masculine mind. The Levinas text he mentions is entirely coherent with Time and the Other in that respect:
On this subject, let us note in passing that [Levinas’s] Totality and Infinity pushes the respect for dissymmetry so far that it seems to us impossible, essentially impossible, that it could have been written by a woman. Its philosophical subject is man (vir)…. Is not this principled impossibility for a book to have been written by a woman unique in the history of metaphysical writing? Levinas acknowledges elsewhere that femininity is an “ontological category.” Should this remark be placed in relation to the essential virility of metaphysical language? But perhaps metaphysical desire is essentially virile, even in what is called woman. It appears that this is what Freud (who would have misconstrued sexuality as the “relationship with what is absolutely other,” TI), thought, not of desire, certainly, but of libido.[38]
Derrida, whose playful feints at philosophical orthodoxy I see as enacting an agonistic feminine poethics of the philo-literary essay, says on the last page of “Violence and Metaphysics” that “alterity had to circulate at the origin of meaning, in welcoming alterity in general into the heart of the logos” (153). He clearly sympathizes with Levinas’s view (borne, one hopes, of self-knowledge) that hypocrisy is “not only a base contingent defect of man, but the underlying rending of a world attached to both the philosophers and the prophets” (153). It turns out that there are many more in the room. Add poets, women, drag queens, the entire queer spectrum, and other biocultural barbarians to the cohort rending historical orthodoxies. If alterity is at the heart of logos—the multifaceted abundance of language as form of life—it must implicate all gender variants as primary subjects. The putative, tacitly assumed or strenuously theorized, equilibrium of masculine hegemony and feminine alterity—well-oiled mechanism of everyday life in most contemporary societies—must continue to be challenged, in the academy no less than in the marketplace of images supporting the habitus. Even as students of philosophy, literature, and cultural criticism (docile or done for in pursuit of graduate degrees) are sent to insufficiently challenged canonical figures for guidance.
For the moment, however, I want to take up Levinas’s interesting assertion of the feminine as contrariety: “the contrariety that permits its terms to remain absolutely other, is the feminine.” He’s right on that point. The feminine is contrary to the masculine in its patriarchal and hegemonic forms. That is the alterity of the feminine. It is, however, in a reciprocally other relation to masculine domination. As such, feminine contrariety can be transvalued into the agonistic feminine, an active principle of ethical responsibility, biocultural agency. A formerly sepulchered feminine alterity empowers and transvalues itself into agonistic principle with real-world responsibilities, countering misogyny, racism, every sort of xenophobia, the pillaging of the planet. That is the ethical imperative not surprisingly missing in Time and the Other. The agonistic feminine as I’m suggesting it is not metaphysical; it is a fully embodied dynamic whose agency operates in a continually developing complex relation to the hegemonic masculine. That dynamic of gender/genre order-disorder has possibilities as conversational agon affecting the choreography in between F/M polarities. Might a frankly agonistic reciprocal alterity, with the creative energy it generates between (and possibly exceeding) polarities, become the beating heart(s) of a reconstructed biocultural logos?
Notes:
[1] Antigone, trans. Elizabeth Wyckoff, in The Complete Greek Tragedies: Volume II Sophocles, ed. David Grene and Richmond Lattimore (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1959), 190.
[2] S. M. Quant, Manual for Desperate Times (Washington DC and Paris: Pre-Post-Eros), forthcoming.
[3] Feminist Measures: Soundings in Poetry and Theory, ed. Lynn Keller and Cristanne Miller (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994). I later included “Rethinking” in my volume of interconversational essays, The Poethical Wager (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), along with further development of the idea of an experimental feminine in “The Experimental Feminine” and “The Scarlet Aitch: Twenty-Six Notes on the Experimental Feminine” (linked to Hawthorne’s protagonist, Hester Prynne).
[4] Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 1970, trans. C. Lenhardt from the second German edition, 1972, ed. Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann (London and New York: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984), 8.
[5] As Jacques Lacan and others following Freud have aptly put it.
[6] Adam Pendleton has drawn this charged phrase from Amiri Baraka’s poem “Black Dada Nihilismus” and recharged it in his own manifesto, “Black Dada,” to expand its generative possibilities into a complex working aesthetic that guides the investigative energies of his work. See Pendleton’s Black Dada Reader (London: Koenig Books, 2017).
[7] Adorno, “The Essay as Form” (written 1954–58), in Notes to Literature, vol. 1, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 17, 23.
[…]
[29] The Philosophy of Nietzsche (New York: The Modern Library, 1954), 466.
[30] Nietzsche, 455.
[31] In Emmanuel Levinas, The Levinas Reader, ed. Seán Hand (Oxford UK & Cambridge USA: Blackwell, 1992), 52–53.
[32] Levinas, The Levinas Reader,48.
[33] Page duBois alerted me to this passage in Sowing the Body, 33. She quotes the first four lines, to which I add the next three, from Richmond Lattimore’s translation in The Complete Greek Tragedies: Volume I, Aeschylus, ed. David Grene and Richmond Lattimore (University of Chicago Press, 1959), 158, lines 658–63.
[34] Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex (New York and Toronto: Knopf, 1993), xiv, fn 3.
[35] Levinas, The Levinas Reader, 49.
[36] Levinas, 98.
[37] Levinas, 202.
[38] Derrida, “Violence and Metaphysics: An Essay on the Thought of Emmanuel Levinas,” in Writing and Difference (University of Chicago Press, 1978), 320–21, n92. “TI” is Derrida’s citation to Levinas’s Totality and Infinity.
§
Fig. x Detail: Angel & Angle of Attention, Simone Martini, Annunciation, 1333.
Wikimedia Commons
Thumb in Book
In Simone Martini’s Annunciation the Virgin Mary holds her place in a book she’s clearly impatient to get back to. Quite likely Aristotle’s Problemata. Judging by position of thumb and pages in, she may be reading the long section on melancholy. Much to ponder for a young girl suffering unwanted erotic attention. (Note lettristic god-sperm spewing toward ear she’s attempting to cover.) Sadly there’s little to instruct or comfort Mary in Aristotle. His melancholy is the manly mark of genius and wit. Yet, she—the iconically “alone of all her sex”—is portrayed by Martini as melancholic figure. In the long meanwhile between then and an eternal now, canonic accounts of Mary’s history document by omission the accuracy of Martini’s instincts. In the aftermath of the historical scene, the Christian Bible will devote only five brief mentions to Mary’s life.
V.M. at a glance, New Testament:
- Annunciation. See Fig. x
- Nativity—birth of Jesus.
- Wedding at Cana—Mary is the one who notices the wine is running out.
- Mater Dolorosa.
- Dormition—“The Falling Asleep”—aka, Assumption.
§
“Alterity, Misogyny & the Agonistic Feminine” was first published at Jacket2.org where it can be accessed in its entirety; “Thumb in Book” is from The Misogyny Variations.