1st Global Conference
Thursday 14th October - Saturday
16th October 2004
Salzburg, Austria
Session 8b:
Sexualities and Theories
Chair: Erik Huneke
Desire—less—ness
Fiona Peters
Department of Cultural Studies, Bath Spa University, United Kingdom
"Put another way, it means that there are lives not sustained by desire, as desire is always for objects. Such lives are based on exclusion."
What
might it mean not to desire? Is desire, especially sexual desire, an
innate ‘given’ or is it, on the contrary, constructed?
Is it possible to function as a non-desirous human being? And, would
that be the same or closely aligned to, the situation of the asexual
person? In other words, does the asexual individual ‘lack’ desire,
or is that desire merely displaced onto other objects?
This paper will
hopefully instigate a discussion of some of these questions. In the
quote above, Kristeva argues that the life not based on desire is a
life of exclusion. I will be exploring the nature of that exclusion
and considering what might take the place of desire. According to contemporary
psychoanalytic theory, desire may become displaced by a crippling and
constitutive anxiety, one that clings to its function of keeping the
subject at a distance from the object, especially a possible love – object: ‘…anxiety
occurs not when the object – cause of desire is lacking; it is
not the lack of the object that gives rise to anxiety but, on the contrary,
the danger of our getting too close to the object and thus losing the
lack itself. Anxiety is brought about by the disappearance of desire.’Thus
anxiety (expressed as lack of desire) functions as a mechanism to keep
the object (the love object, the sexual relationship) etc, at a distance.
Read psychoanalytically, the non – desirous individual is not
lacking something constitutive and pre – given. Instead of fantasy
existing as confirmation of a pre – existent latency of desire,
it in effect creates it: ‘It is only through fantasy that the
subject is constituted as desiring: Through fantasy, we learn how
to desire.’Thus those
who do not learn to desire are fundamentally threatening to the rest
of the desiring universe. Excluded from full appropriation into the
symbolic universe, to be non – desiring challenges the very status
of our conception of the human subject as a necessarily sexual animal.
Gender Trouble in the Classroom
Margaret Breen
Department of English, University of Connecticut, Groton, CT, USA
No abstract is presently available
Gendercide and Hystery
*Malynne Sternstein and **Anne
Flannery
Slavic Languages and Literatures and The College
Affiliate, Germanic Studies,
University of Chicago, USA
** Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures,
The Johns Hopkins University, USA
In a recent lecture entitled, "Why I Love Jane
Austen" , Wayne Booth grounded his love in his sense of the author-Austen,
as the person-Austen. He fortified this sense of her accomplishment-her
ability to seize herself and be seized by others as a self-with an
anecdote.
I met Saul Bellow on the street, Booth said, and asked him what
he had been up to recently. He said he had been editing a book
he had just recently written, Herzog, for four hours a day. I
said to him, "Why would you need to edit a book for four hours
a day?" "In
order to erase every last piece of myself," he replied.
Is Booth's adoration not, in actuality, an admission of a love of Austen's
hysteria? In other words, doesn't Booth love Austen's full subjectivity,
'What is in her more than herself'? By the same token then, isn't
Booth's gentle indictment of Bellow's self-erasure not an aversion
to Bellow's over-exposure of the self?
In our paper we take this essential
dilemma of self-erasure and relate it to the problem of female writing
and females writing. Such erasure affects both work that we have come
to regard derogatorily and culturally as "Female writing",
or "sentimental writing",
that is, writing by women and men who are pretending not to be women:
writing by women and men who "fashion themselves a paper phallus," to
borrow a phrase from Hélène Cixous, and writing by women
that re-invests in the idea of woman writing as woman, that is to say, écriture
feminine, or, to put it more colourfully by borrowing again from Cixous,
writing in mother's milk.
In our argument, the paper phallus
and mother's milk do the same work of veiling woman. And veiling
woman famously does the work of hiding the fact that she is not there. What écriture
feminine and Shoshana Felman's more recent theory of women's reading
and writing as the product of biography does not account for
is the productive lack of woman as hysterical subject and of writing
as hysterical discourse. The full potential of "excess visibility" resides
in its being a product of lack, and not of fingerprints.
Just as erasure results in exposure, the repression of Hysteria has
resulted in Sentimentalism. Previously, Hysteria has been defined as "feeling
too much.." Fear of writing as woman, by women and men,
has resulted in the stigmatization of Hysteria as perversion:
For Lacan, perversion designates
a very precise subjective attitude that is an attitude of
self-objectivization or self-instrumentalization.
Whereas the typical hysterical fear is to
become a tool of the other.
So the basic constituent of subjectivity is hysterical: I don't
know what I am for the other.
Hysteria, or neurosis in general is always a position of
questioning.
It is the Voice of the Hysteric, not woman, that has been silenced. If
this Voice is to be heard, it can come only through a reinstatement
of the Hysterical as discourse.
To test this hypothesis we have chosen,
in this paper, to focus on Travel Writing (we will discuss works by
Gretel Ehrlich, Rita Golden Gelman, Paul Theroux, Simon Winchester,
amongst others). Arguably,
It is only in travel writing that we have an intersection of genres
(Fiction, Non-Fiction, Autobiography, Biography, Literature), a combinatory
manner of assessing the I and the Other. In travel writing, the
Other is essential, whether it is made by the author or out of the
author. As the I and the Other are concentrated in the redounding
of traveling and writing, it is in this movable "I" that
we can see the disunion between Hysteria and its perversion.
