The Sacred and the Feminine: Imagination and Sexual Difference (New Encounters: Arts, Cultures, Concepts) by Griselda Pollock

The Sacred and the Feminine: Imagination and Sexual Difference (New Encounters: Arts, Cultures, Concepts) Reviews

• 
  samantha

  (pollock hard carries)
  
  Editors Preface
  o The Politics and Ethics of Indexicality and Virtuality— a challenging exploration of both the imaginary and the semiotic in relation to embodiment, materiality, sociality and history itself.
  o The sacred is not synonymous with the divine, even if the ways in which religions conceptualize the divine render it sacred. Nor is the feminine synonymous with women or social constructions of gender. Grasped theoretically and analytically, the feminine points to ways of thinking and principles of social organization around the eternal challenge of human responses to living and dying, and the making sense of the times, generations, sexualities and bodies involved in these defining processes.
  o The collection is both an art-historical engagement with and theoret- ical response to the published correspondence between Julia Kristeva and Catherine Clément titled The Feminine and the Sacred
  o Clément opens with the suggestion that ‘the sacred among women may express an instantaneous revolt that passes through the body and cries out.’ Kristeva resists such hystericization and considers ‘life as the intimate visage of the sacred’. As their arguments unfold through proposition and counter- proposition, revealing deep rifts between their underpinning cultural imaginaries, they seek to disentangle the sacred from issues of belief and religion in order to explore the sacred as a facet of human subjectivity: ‘an unconscious perception the human being has of its untenable eroticism: always on the borderline between nature and culture, the animalistic and the verbal, the sensible and the nameable? What if the sacred were ... the jouissance of that cleavage?’
   Kristeva’s position is to place the sacred, therefore, between life and meaning, to which she believes women have a particular and overdetermined relation through both the psychic freight of becoming mothers and the disposition of the feminine in terms of a phallocentric symbolic within which the feminine subject is a figure, not of exclusion, but of disillusion and hence less prey to unquestioned belief.
   For Clément the sacred does not lend itself to such privileging. Rather it blows the roof off sexual difference, playing figuratively through forms of ambivalence: bisexuality or hybridity playing between purity and defilement.
  o we must surely resist this degradation of the problematic relation of the sacred in human culture and sexual difference to a comforting recreation of a sacred feminine: a mythically divine woman.
  o Here, the sacred is imaginary space, borderline, cleavage, alterity,
  o Freud’s sacred
   He sees it defined fundamentally by a prohibition that sets something apart from use
   Prime exemplars here: incest taboo and exogamy
   The sacred inscribes into culture the ‘will of the primal father’ a figure of terrifying omnipotence and selfishness.
  o The pun of the title off sacred and profane: By placing the feminine in the position of the profane in the oppositional pairing, sacred and profane, we wish also to open a space to question the claim made by Julia Kristeva that there is a special intimacy between the feminine and the sacred, while accepting that the sacred is a fascinating area of research for transdis- ciplinary feminist studies that wish both to examine the genealogies of the feminine and the sacred and critically to explore new relations be- tween body and language, the sensible and the verbal, based not on being set apart, but on being the active and embodied, hence psychically differenced makers of meaning.
  • 1. Sacred Cows: Wandering in Feminism, Psychoanalysis and Anthropology by Pollock
  o This paper eavesdrops on an epistolatory conversation between two women.
  o A legacy of British colonialism in India, the phrase, sacred cows, refers to any thing or opinion considered beyond question, too holy to mess with, not up for discussion. The origins relate to a principle of the sacred maternal
  o the visual and verbal relay between cows and ho- liness is an inscription of the deep resonances between the sacred and the feminine which I shall track through psychoanalysis and anthropology to feminism: each field respectively figuring histories of the social bond and of subjectivity nestling inside religious and pre-religious systems of thought and fantasy THESIS
  o Kristeva writes to Clement of the sacred: Not religion or its opposite, atheistic negation, but the experience that beliefs both shelter and exploit, at the crossroads of sexuality and thought, body and meaning, which women feel in- tensely but without being preoccupied by it and about which there remains much for them—for us—to say. Does a specifically feminine sacred exist?
  o Kristevan sees women begetting biological life: zoë, in Greek, and men begetting bios, life as a meaningful socio-historical existence, shaped by affect and signification. Giving life and giving meaning.
  o Clement offers: the sacred cow in India is the envelope of the universe, since it is within the sewn skin of a cow that the first man was born. Male, that goes without saying. The cow is thus maternal and enveloping, granted. The Hindus draw the consequence. Everything that falls from the cow is not only sa- cred but useful ... The Hindus, however, are perfectly logical, since, in the mother, everything is good. As you can see, the ma- ternal component cannot exempt itself from secretions, however fetid they may be
  o The question they circle is whether there is a specificity of the feminine in relation to this crossroad between human consciousness and imagination on the one hand, and the mysteries of life and death on the other, between thought and body, corporeality and meaning.
   SEMANALYSE: encounter of psychoanalysis and semiotics
  o Powers of Horror
   The architecture of Kristeva’s brilliant and much abused ‘essay on abjection’ maps out three, successive ‘moments’ that are interwoven strata in histories of both religion and subjectivity and the supersession of the former by the emergence of the latter
  • 1. The archaic era of the sacred. This is a moment of communal ‘acting out’
  • 2. Polemical displacement of Judaic sacrificial negotiation of defilement (otherness) by the Helleno-Christian mystery religion which internalized a concept of (original) sin, interiorizing rather than sacrificially purging abjection. The psychologization of sin
  • 3. The Hellen-Christian legacy is displaced unto writing—literature. Powerful, communally dispersed anxieties around life and death, the body, its drives and limits, its anxious perplexity before inside/outside, self and other produce both the subject of psychoanalysis and a psychoanalysis of the subject
  • The religious imaginary, as a veiling and very erudite, late development in human culture, is shaped around love for, bonding with, and exile from, powerful figures of otherness, or the Other as figures of power encountered in both human infancy and in the foundational moments of cultural human becoming.
  o we have heard many times about the waning of the sacred under the smashing pressures of Modernity. At the same time, we have also seen that traces of the sacred constantly burst forth, registering its strange heritage of intensities of violence, jouissance or undecidability in a variety of places: the voice, and music, visual representation, poetry, politics, and above all in drama with its foundations in ritual.
  o In the weekly portion, Chukat, Numbers 19, we have the description of a ritual that has mystified Jewish scholars down the ages. It is a ritual for dealing with corpse-impurity within a complex system of ‘ritual purity’ that structured the ancient Judaic concepts of order, morality and justice. It describes a ritual that has several strange elements. The sacrifice in this ritual atypically involves a female animal— which is unique since among such large animals, a bull or a bullock is usual. The female animal must furthermore be ‘without blemish’, thus never having been put to work or to a bull. She is a kind of ‘virgin’ or parthenos with all the difficulty of understanding that term as being not chaste but still singularly and totally herself, not part of any production or reproduction system. She is feminine for herself. She must be red. She must be entirely burnt up, including all entrails, dung and specially all her blood; normally blood is shed and splattered on the altar while the bled meat of larger animals feeds the priests. Her ashes must be taken outside the Temple and the city where they are com- bined with cedar, hyssop and scarlet wool and made into a red ‘water’ that is then used to free people from the most extreme impurity: con- tact with a corpse.
   A structuralist would explain tact with a corpse. In structuralist analysis, this would be explained thus: when a living person touches someone who has moved into another state, its opposite, death, the living person must be purified—brought back into the world of the living after this contact with difference through the opening of the boundary between two states. Only this complexly and ritually created red ‘water’ is efficacious against such a rent in the fabric of communal and individual life.
   BUT THE RITUAL ITSELF MUST BE ADDRESSED. IT WAS SPECIFIC FOR A REASON
   Events such as birth, death, ill- ness, puberty—that is, transitions of any kind—open the symbolic frontiers between settled and changing states of being. These attract taboos and rituals for managing the dangerous effects of change. Child- birth and menstruation will be central features of any purity system since the mystery of human life, like the mystery of life itself, will at- tract the maximum sense of awe, anxiety and respect for its inexplicable potencies.
   Psychoanalysis proposes that to become a subject, we must confront an symbolic Otherness (language and the Name of the Father) and effect separation from an archaic, chaotic confusion with an unarticulated Otherness that Bracha Ettinger will track in Lacan as ‘Woman-Other-Thing’. Each subject is required to individuate (know a boundary of its own inside/outside, self/other) from a confusion with, and extreme depend- ency, on the archaic m/Other(ness)—inexplicable because as the infant confronts its world and others, it has no means of deciphering what these Others project, and ‘insert’ into ‘it’. The infant’s encounter with the world of Otherness is, therefore, necessarily traumatic, in this logic, registering real effects in the becoming subject excessive to its own not- yet-formed psychic apparatus for dealing with such ‘input’.
   THE INITIATING AND INITIAL TRAUMATIC ENCOUNTER IS WITH M/OTHERNESS: THE MATERNAL-FEMININE
   So beyond any thought about thinking women dirty or unclean, we can now reapproach the rituals associated with purity and impurity as a semiotic system, the production of rules and the rituals associated for dealing with the inevitable life-processes that, disturbing them, cause them to come into existence. Impurity thus refers to an experience of encounter with the most heavily freighted zones of experience at the indelibly entwined social/subjective threshold: life and death and the way in which this gives rise to a concept of the feminine. Nothing in the ancient world is derived; it is always constitutive within a meaning system, so there is no danger of essentialism or biological determinism.
   Ancient def of VIRGINITY: ‘female fecundity owing nothing to the male’.
   ON THE RITUAL: Maccoby, therefore, proposes that the ritual of the Red Cow involves a relation between the person who has been made impure by contact with the dead undergoing a kind of ritual re-birth through symbolic re-immersion in the menstrual blood of life. With all our cult of spilt blood, murder, we forget the fertile, life-giving blood specific to the female body. The ritual of the Red Cow produces, therefore, ‘living water’—‘the active moisture of the Earth itself’.
   Ettinger’s The Red Cow Effect: The Metramorphosis of Hallowing the Hollow and Hollowing the Hallow’
  • She takes the ritual’s ambivalence in description as a figure through which to propose a way to think the feminine beside the phallic rather than before, something necessarily superseded in the patriarchal history of religion (culture) or of the phallicized history of the subject.
  • Ettinger’s phallic paradigm: he logic of the Father-God system: a binary logic of clearly demarcated separations and divisions—on/off, inside/outside, absence/pres- ence—that cannot tolerate passage or ambiguity, sharing or connection, hybridity or plurality. The ambivalence of passage between life and death, between one stage and another, or the perverse ‘contagion’ of contact across a boundary, such as the living with the dead are the stuff of phallically re-ordering rituals.
  • Yet, as Maccoby revealed, the potency of the Red Cow lay precisely in its ambiguity; the purifying renders im- pure and purification comes from contact with what in another context is impure-making.
  • Ettinger makes a specifically feminist contribution by ex- posing the masculine narcissism that has expunged from thought any meaning for the feminine except as its negated other, used, emptied, feared, degraded.
  • If the human forces meaning through the encounter with otherness and the forming of a sense of self, what we are dealing with are two paradigms (at least)
  o 1. the castration paradigm based on the necessity of separations culminating in that performed by the Symbolic which ‘castrates’ all subjects, obliging a sacrifice, a giving up of something precious of oneself in order to be accessioned to the signifying, familial and social order defined by the Law of the Father. In this model, the initial dyad of Other and Child, Mother and Child in which the Mother includes all Others and carers, yields under the Father’s Law. His name (nom)/prohibition (non) denies the Mother to the Child: the incest taboo. To escape the Father’s wrath, the child (neutral at this point but not for long) sacrifices corpo-reality in exchange for a relation (having or being) to the patriarchal Father’s signifier: the Phal- lus. This incorporates into its symbolic function as signifier the sacrificed real of the penis (standing for the jouissance of the infantile sexual corporeality shaped by the pulsations and topographies of the drives).
  o 2. Matrixial paradigm. This is not alternative to the phallus, not before it, but beside and behind it.
   The Matrix and its figure, metramorphosis, can be approached through a close reading and reworking of Lacanian concepts such as objet a— his formulation of the psychic remnant of archaic modes of experi- ence, from the corpo-real, sensory and perceptive zones that are inscribed as the invisible scars of the cutting out of the subject from the cloth of undifferentiated experience of pre-verbal intensities and pre-objective elements.49 For Lacan, the mother’s voice, touch, gaze, and breast leave only the trace of their absence in this invisible underside of the emerging subject.50 The objet a can also be tracked through the ambiguities of the ritual of the Red Cow—defined in the Hebrew lan- guage with its sexed imagination and grammar as a she-law: Ettinger takes real notice of the formula Chuka, a femininized rendering of the normal, masculine word Chok: a rule. She-laws do not obey the same logic: they are not just the subordinated feminine of the phallic logic.
   Any subject must sacrifice some of his jouissance to have access to the Symbolic. Lacan defined what is sacrificed as objet a. For Lacan and the phallic system, woman is the objet a of the masculine subject and the infant in the womb is woman’s objet a.
   Woman is sacrificed to become unsignifiable Other-Thing for the phallic law. But through me- tramorphosis and the hypothesis of the matrixial supplementary stra- tum, available to both men and women subjects, irrespective of gender or sexual orientation, we can suggest that there is another kind of sacrifice of which the Red Cow is her emblem:
  • These all refer to Ettinger’s definition of the matrixial stratum of subjectivity as subjectivity as encounter, a severalized capacity for trans-subjectivity bequeathed by its conditions of becoming in the pre-birth incest of feminine sexual specificity as always at least several, sharing between partial and unknown grains of subjects-to-be mutually transformed by their un-cognized encounter. Thus this feminine event in the real is the basis for a principle or a dimension of human subjectivity creatively severalized at a shared borderspace. The price to pay for this borderlinking and sharing between unknown elements of irreducible otherness that are nonetheless co-affecting and co-emerging is the impossibility of not, once fragilized, sharing the trauma of the unknown other, non-I, of not processing something of the non-I while the other may be processing parts of me.
   the phallic and the matrixial paradigms are not symmetrical or opposites. The matrixial introduces a differencing economy for encountering alterity. In the phallic paradigm otherness is either something I can assimilate to identity, identification, incorporation or it is to be repudiated, threat and anxiety policing the borders between self and other. I can either recognize as like me or fear what is different. In the matrixial, without effacing difference and distinction, borderspaces that can become thresholds are posited which allow transmissions that register differently in each partner through their radical, irreducible un- known-ness that, none the less, exists simultaneously with connectivity and co-affecting. This is because, unlike the phallic paradigm, where the self is cut out from the cloth of the archaic Other and becomes a subject under threat of castration—separation—legislated by the Symbolic Other (language/culture), the Matrix traces through registers of fantasy and thought (imaginary and symbolic) alliance, covenant, and connectivity always-already containing difference and the co-emergence of the several: subjectivity as encounter (rather than the phallic model of fusion versus separation)
   In the matrixial model which opens from severality and contingency, the I and the unrecognised non-I are partners in a temporary, un- predictable and unique covenant, in which each participant—sub- jects and objects—is partial and relative in a composite, joint space. The non-I is not Other, but, like the I, is a becoming-in-ter-with and therefore, a clear cut between the living and the dead, the pure and impure, so basic in the Phallus is beyond the matrixial scope; a voyage [niddah] between the