<<TRANSMATHOME

II           Making Femininity

The association of women, or the feminine, or femaleness with passivity and man/masculinity/maleness with activity has never been a simple one. The disjunction is unstable; as a reproductive animal, woman is conceived of as passive and receptive in relation to the activity and spontaneity of the man. Yet sexually she exerts an attractive force, although even this is not coherent, being intermixed with repulsion (the man feels repulsion, not the woman). The feminine has no necessary theoretical relation with women at all, but is rather attached to notions of genius. Christine Battersby, in an extended exploration of the relations of genius and gender, exposes the twists and turns in the value of the feminine, which are not limited to philosophy. ‘The medical texts imply (without ever making the implication explicit) that the human being who possesses genius will have the sexual organs of a male, but will also have feminine characteristics’.[343] Genius feminizes, but females have neither the mental or physical stamina for genius; feminine is not the root of feminism, nor attached to the female. The parenthetical remark about implication is also important, for it is these undercurrents which carry themes whose force is made redundant by the explicit structures erected on their ground. Part of the task of feminism in relation to philosophy is dissolving the certainty of these erections. Kant gives graphic expression to the contraries and contradictions and implications of philosophy’s women in a quote from Horace appended, inexplicably and unexplained, to a footnote in the Anthropology: ‘A beautiful woman above ends foully in a black fish’.[344]

Reconciliation of the wide distribution of functions designated female/feminine/womanly with passivity has generated acrobatic thought processes and incredible claims. Freud has become a classic example. In his lecture Femininity, he is cautious, advising against the decision to make ‘“active” coincide with “masculine” and “passive” with “feminine” ‘[345], citing the relation between mother and child as one in which females are active, and the restriction of activity in male spiders to ‘the single act of sexual union’[346] as problematic cases. Yet whilst Freud is prepared to accommodate ‘the influence of social customs, which...force women into passive situations’[347] he undercuts himself by attributing a preference for passivity to women, ‘on the basis of her share in the sexual function’[348] (without questioning to what extent this is also socially inscribed), and by making woman’s activity relative to ‘passive aims’. His opening summation of the puzzle of femininity reaches its height in his description of what is truly feminine as masochistic in nature. Social pressures serving only to develop these destructive trends, so making truly feminine passivity that of the victim.

Yet Freud’s advice against easy acceptance of the established mapping between the woman/man and passive/active oppositions comes to nothing: however complicated the distribution of activity and passivity become in the female - for example, the relation of little girls to their mothers is ‘completely ambivalent, both affectionate and of a hostile and aggressive nature’[349] - nonetheless the ‘turn towards femininity’ is signalled by a ‘wave of passivity’[350]. The girl turns to her father and, ‘with the help of passive instinctual impulses...which clear phallic activity out of the way’, may perhaps ‘turn out to be normal’.[351] Phew.

In both volumes of Capitalisme et Schizophrénie, Deleuze and Guattari talk of the theft of little girls bodies, and its necessity as preparatory to the theft of little boys bodies. ‘[C]esse de te tenir comme ça, tu n’es plus une petite fille, tu n’es pas un garçon manqué, etc. (stop behaving like that, you’re not a little girl anymore, you’re not a tomboy, etc.)’[352]. The creation of female femininity appears directly counter to that of male femininity. The former is a process of restriction, limitation, repression and prohibition, which serve to introduce the female body to its proper desires, the location of its proper sexual being, its truly feminine passivity. The latter, however, attaches to expressions of release, to the outpourings of genius and is close to madness.

But the point of this is not to engage in a debate with Freud concerning the development of female sexuality. His words ring bizarre in much the same way as, for example, Aristotle’s, when he proposes his flower-pot theory of reproduction, which also places women as both powerful and active, the potent materiality from which the logos grows, and as weak and passive, since women themselves lack the power of the logos growing inside her. What these discussions illustrate are the confusions and contortions which grow from attempts to reconcile the passive/active opposition with sexual or gender distinctions, and the mobility of characteristics attaching to each arm of the disjunction, as historical contingencies shift privileges and values. The easy leap from passivity to masochism; the assumption that, in children’s play, passivity is reacted against with activity, which annuls it, the degree to which this is successful serving as a basis for ‘conclusions as to the relative strength of the masculinity and femininity that it will exhibit in its sexuality’[353]; the characterization of the libido as constrained ‘when it is pressed into the service of the feminine function’[354]; the physiological equivalence of this constraint evidenced by the ‘small penis’, or clitoris[355]. Freud offers these and many more examples of the problems generated by the development of girls and women into proper passive feminine persons. 

Kant is no less happy with the equation of woman with passivity. ‘Her philosophy [Weltweisheit] is not to reason, but to sense [Empfinden]’.[356] The critical implications of this are not that women lack understanding, but rather that they lack the methodological capacity with which to systematize knowledge.[357] The architectonic ordering of transcendental relations is absent in the female, so whilst ‘the fair sex has just as much understanding as the male...it is a beautiful understanding’, rather than a rational one, and thus not only can she not contain chaos in a unit, as reason was seen to do in the discussion of the sublime, but her knowledge remains at the aggregate and random level, lacking pattern and systematicity.[358] She can neither build a house with an overlook, nor can does she have the reason to make the marks of permanence on her imagination and confirm the immortality of a soul. There is no rational compulsion attendant upon womens’ understanding which condemns them to formulate objects in general or morality, no diktak commanding the conversion of their intellects into Law. However, the problem is irresolvable by further interrogation of the intricacies and confusions of Kant’s comments directly bearing on either the beautiful or woman. What is at stake is a break in the understanding of production, which is the focus of Deleuzian critique. To return to the flower-pot, there is no account of the production of the all-powerful soil from which logos emerges as a secondary mode of production. In Deleuze’s terms, there is no account of the production of the unconscious - of how, for example, Kantian reason came to contain a unit of chaos, and it is this uncritical assumption of a power possessed by a subject, still functioning illegitimately in Kant, that passive synthesis forces into operation, with rigour and unKantian consequences.