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Feminist criticism
domains; it includes women’s psychological repression at the level of the uncon‑ scious as well. And it is here, in each woman’s personal psychology, that she must learn to liberate herself if women’s materialist liberation is going to have any lasting foundation. For a woman can’t be liberated in any meaningful way if she doesn’t know that she needs to be liberated. And for many French psycho‑ analytic feminists, the possibilities for women’s psychological liberation must be investigated at the site at which most, if not all, of their psychological subjuga‑ tion occurs—language—because it is within language that detrimental patri‑ archal notions of sexual difference (what patriarchy believes are the essential, or inborn, differences between women and men) have been defined and continue to exert their repressive influence. For instance, Hélène Cixous argues that language reveals what she calls patriarchal binary thought, which might be defined as seeing the world in terms of polar opposites, one of which is considered superior to the other. Examples include such hierarchical binary oppositions as head/heart, father/mother, cul‑ ture/nature, intelligible/palpable (that which can be understood by the mind versus that which can be felt by the body), sun/moon, and activity/passivity. Oppositions like these organize the way we think, and for each opposition Cix‑ ous asks, “Where is [the woman]?” (91). That is, which side of each opposition is assumed to define some aspect of the female? Clearly, according to patriarchal thinking, the woman occupies the right side of each of these oppositions, the side that patriarchy considers inferior—heart, mother, nature, palpable, moon, and passivity—while it is assumed that the male is defined by the left side of each opposition, the side that patriarchy considers superior: head, father, cul‑ ture, intelligible, sun, and activity. “Traditionally,” Cixous notes, “the question of sexual difference is treated by coupling it with the opposition activity/pas‑ sivity” (92). In other words, patriarchal thinking believes that women are born to be passive while men are born to be active because it is natural for the sexes to be different in this way. Thus, if a woman is not passive, she is not really a woman. Of course, it follows that women are naturally submissive to men, that men are natural leaders, and so forth. For Cixous, women will not learn to resist patriarchal thinking by becoming part of the patriarchal power structure, that is, by obtaining equal status and equal opportunity in current patriarchal society. For women’s acquisition of power within the existing sociopolitical system would not adequately change the system. Indeed, the result would be that women would become more like patriarchal men because they would learn to think as patriarchal men have been trained to think. Instead, she argues that, as the source of life, women are themselves the source of power, of energy. We therefore need a new, feminine language that undermines or eliminates the patriarchal binary thinking that oppresses and silences women. This kind of language, which Cixous believes
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