A Womb of One’s Own
It may be difficult to find a more anomalous moment of the French post-structural scene than when Kristeva, Cixous and Irigaray investigate the cave. A confluence of psychoanalytic uptrends, second wave feminism, revolutionary fervor from ‘68 and the new-found post-structural tool kit allowed these theorists to make a search ranging over the entire history of western thought, finding tears by which one might begin to unravel the labyrinth of man. One such handy tear, or entrance, was Plato’s Allegory of the Cave.
The cave, for Kristeva, Cixous and Irigarary, has multiple functions. The cave is at once a place of exile and also of sanctuary; one is left behind in the cave by the philosopher; and yet one can also inhabit the cave as a zone of safety, for the philosopher—thank god—has left the cave.
More so than a place, however, the cave is the body itself. This is crucial to recognize because it helps to locate the cave in space and time. Instead of the total “it’s all cave” thesis of the Plato/Christian/PKD axis—where, as Irigaray observes, the cave is isometric and mirrored one zone to the next—the cave-as-body is reduced to a point, no less universal, but much diminished in size; the body is a cave, but more specifically, the cave is the womb.
If Plato regards the light of “reason” as that which renders false the illusions of the cave, then Kristeva, Cixous, and Irigaray define the cave/body as that which always already threatens to disrupt the masculine symbolic order that seeks to suppress the dark and abject nature of the cave. In stark contradiction to the masculine fixation on firelight/daylight/pinklight, these theorists place an emphasis on darkness; you do not need sight or light to know that you have a body; in other words, the logos, or gnosis, the word, is unnecessary for the body to be known.
This idea is upheld in reverse by the notorious psychoanalytic koan, “the woman does not exist” (la femme n’existe pas). Kristeva’s take on this, as for Irigaray, is “woman is never that” ('La Femme, ce n'est jamais ça). In other words, la femme is a radical alterity and unnamable, always already beyond the categories of the male symbolic order. Kristeva: “By ‘woman’, I understand that which cannot be represented, cannot be said, which remains outside nomenclatures and ideologies.”
One has to look no further than the mythic status of the Virgin Mary flying across history in a heaven of light to see this erasure in action. The woman that appears under the glare of Plato’s sun is unreal, a purely formal apparition. But this light blinds women no less than men; so it is in the cave, her eyes adjusted to the dark, that the woman finds herself, beyond the scorching gaze of Plato’s reason.
This exteriority to received social structures makes the very darkness of the cave a sanctuary; Cixous: "I am so happy in the silky damp dark of the labyrinth and there is no thread." Cixous’s desire to remain in the cave is the desire to remain in the body as organism; to remain as close to the material processes of the body as she can. For Cixous this is where la femme and her jouissance is to be found.
Cultivating the appeal of the dark allows for the zone of the cave/body to be rehabilitated. For Kristeva in particular, the cave is not an entrapment, but is rather a private zone of development, begun in the amniotic fluid of the womb, and shared by mother and child. This zone is characterized by predating the symbolic order of the father; it is a charmed zone that resides at the margins of language. It exists prior to the law because of a certain kind of developmental intensity, what one might call Oceanic Feeling. Oceanic Feeling can be a synthesis of mother and child in which, for the child, a sense of oneness or boundlessness is the primary sense; this intensity, for the child, is literally psychedelic; the boundaries of the cave/womb have fallen away into the universe. This state can be a synthesis between mother and child, but it is also, for the child, a perilous region where moments of trauma will leave an indelible imprint that determines the adult psyche.
It should be made clear here that though not every woman has a womb (or wants one), every child has been delivered from one. This is the point where the womb becomes unilateral; the womb is—one of—the ultimate determinations for the human; the very foundation of the social link. It is Kristeva’s extraordinary claim that it is just this unilateral nature of the womb from which the symbolic order of the father erupts into existence, out of sheer recoil; “it is as if paternity were necessary in order to relieve the archaic impact of the maternal body on man.”
In this manner Platonism, Gnosticism and Christianity can be read as being reactionary to La Femme; the constructions of these giant glass and steel systems of patriarchic symbolic order, climbing up ever higher away from earth and into the cosmos, are a direct retreat from the body and the womb.
We can see now that this womb-power has two linked impulses that force upon the symbolic order of the father;
1. Oceanic Feeling: The power of synthesis between mother and child beyond the law; a psychedelic force of sheer mind development; the fecundity and plasticity of mental auto-creation forged in the womb.
2. The Powers of Horror: maternal force, tied to as it is to the stuff of the organism, is for Kristeva, Abject. This abject maternal force has the power to subsume all, resulting in psychosis when not mediated by the symbolic order. Abjection here is the uncanny field where body and organism, subject and object are folded over upon one another; it is the force of the body as Real.
Every philosophy is a wish to dominate the Real. But the Real as decided upon by philosophy is yet another illusion: the revenge of the Speculum Aenigmate that feeds back upon the social, leading it ever deeper into further dreams/nightmares, constricting world/caves. Concepts such as heaven, metaphysics, reason, private property, spirit, dialectics, being, technology, are hallucinations of the Real by the dominant male philosophy, dreamed up by a thought process recoiling from an organism that it cannot accept and yet nevertheless is trapped inside of.
How unfortunate for us, and for the planet, that this recoil from the body exacts such a high cost upon humanity and the biosphere.
And yet it is exactly the darkness of this cave, the generic nature of the body and the womb, that can perhaps provide solace and the possibility of a solution. For if, as Kristeva, Cixous and Irigaray argue, woman is an X—that is, the unilateral ground-zero of the human variable—then we also do not yet know what else woman—and by that we mean humanity—is capable of.
2001: Space Odyssey (1968)
