The feminine excess: Can women who hear divine voices find a new social link?

Millenium

Volumn 30, Issue 1, 2001, Pages 93-109

  Žižek, Slavoj ^a  

^a Institute of Social Studies   (Slovenia)

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EID: 26444574320     PISSN: 03058298     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: None     Document Type: Article

References (33)

1. Peter Conrad, A Song of Love and Death (London: The Hogarth Press, 1989), 183.
2. Siegrfried Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996).
3. Susan Buck-Morss, Dreamworld and Catastrophe (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000), 144.
4. Susan Buck-Morss, Dreamworld and Catastrophe ( Ibid., 144.
5. See Michel Poizat, Variations Sur la Voix (Paris: Anthropos, 1998), 115-30.
6. Christa Wolf, Cassandra. A Novel and Four Essays (New York: Farrar, Straus ans Girou, 1988), 222-23.
7. Søren Kierkergaard, Fear and Trembling (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985).
8. Jacques Derrida, Adieu à Emmanuel Levinas (Paris: Galilee, 1997), 87.
9. G.W.F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 288.
10. F.W.J. Schelling, 'Die Weltalter: Fragmente', in Urfassungen von 1811 und 1813, ed. Manfred Schroeter (Munich: Biederstein, 1946, reprint 1979), 13.
11. Sophocles, 'Antigone', in Sophocles, trans. David Green (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1991), 332-35.
12. Aeschylus, The Oresteia, trans. Robert Fagles (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1977), 572-85.
13. Wolf, Cassandra, 222.
14. Hekabe sees her entire family destroyed and herself reduced to a slave; Medea, who sacrificed all, her country, for the love of Jason, a Greek foreigner, is informed by him that, due to dynastic reasons, he will marry another young princess; Phaedra is unable to resist her all-consuming passion for Hippolytus, her stepson.
15. As to these two series, see Nancy Sorkin Rabinowitz, Anxiety Veiled: Euripides and the Traffic of Women (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993).
16. Judith Butler, Antigone's Claim (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), 40.
17. Judith Butler, Antigone's Claim Ibid., 81.
18. Hegel, Phenomenology, 288.
19. Butler, Antigone's Claim, 38.
20. However, even here, one should bear in mind that there are mothers and mothers. The continuing reference to the figure of the Mother in Brecht's work, from the 'learning plays' to The Caucasian Chalk-Circle, the epic play about the antagonism between the biological mother and the actual-emotional mother, is as a rule passed over in silence by the commentators. In Jasager, the first in the series of learning plays, it is on behalf of the Mother, in order to bring medicine to her, that the small boy joins the expedition over the mountains in the course of which he loses his life. The reference to Mother then disappears in The Measure Taken, the key learning play, only to return even more directly in Mother, the ultimate learning play, and, at the same time, the first epic drama, based on Maxim Gorky's classic revolutionary novel. This figure of the Mother is not the standard Oedipal Mother who keeps her child in the closed incestuous link, but the 'revolutionary' Mother who is educated by her son and, at the end, supports and takes over the son's social engagement. This Mother is to be opposed to a series of other Mother figures: the passive-aggressive Mother of silent self-sacrifice for her family and children, the conservative Mother standing for the stability of Home, but also the 'postmodern' Feminist mother who raises her children in a tolerant spirit, while pursuing her career, or the Deep Ecologist 'Earth Mother'. Crucial in Brecht's Mother is the song in praise of the third Thing (Lob der Dritten Sache). The mother keeps, or rather regains, her son in the very act of losing him 'through the third Thing'. They are close to each other by way of being close to the third Thing (in this case, of course, their common struggle for Communism). This paradox of maintaining proximity in the loss itself is, of course, that of symbolic castration, so it is the Mother herself who is here the bearer of castration, for example of the replacement of herself as Thing (das Ding) with the common symbolic Cause (die Sache). See Bertolt Brecht, Die Mutter (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1980), 60.
21. The parallel is here clear between the triple accusation against Joan and the three dimensions of the royal authority mentioned by Louis Marin in his outstanding Le Portrait du Roi. the Real, the question of blood: is he the 'true' King, the true descendant of his parents, and not a false pretender, the Imaginary, the splendour of the King's public appearances, destined to mesmerise his subjects, the Symbolic, the official titles with which the King is endowed. See Louis Marin, Le Portrait du Roi (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1987).
22. Edward Lucie-Smith, Joan of Arc (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 2000), 116. Did he not, with regard to the eminent status of this phrase in the French national memory, Lacan implicitly referred to it when, in 1979, after dissolving L'École Freudienne de Paris, he addressed his call for the new organisation with 'À tous ceux qui m' aiment'? In both cases, the transference is directly mobilised. This love is not psychological in the usual sense, not an affair of emotions, but 'objective', inscribed into the very texture of socio-symbolic relations: the Leader is BY DEFINITION, irrespective of his/her actual properties, 'beloved'.
23. Lucie-Smith, Joan of Arc, 278.
24. They stripped her naked and then left near her bed, to which she was chained, only men's clothing, thus compelling her to use them in order to avoid the sexually embarrassing situation of being exposed to her guards who taunt her all the time with obscene remarks and threats of rape.
25. Ibid., 275.
26. Ibid, 67.
27. Regine Pernaud and Marie-Ve;ronique Clin, Joan of Arc: Her Story (London: Phoenix Press, 2000), 109.
28. Jacques Lacan, On Feminine Sexuality (New York: Norton, 1988), 111.
29. Joseph P. Hodin, Edvard Munch (London: Thames and Hudson, 1972), 88-89.
30. Wolf, Cassandra, 264.
31. Wolf, Cassandra, Ibid., 298.
32. Wolf, Cassandra, 298. Ibid.
33. Wolf, Cassandra, Ibid., 3.