My mom and dad wear glasses, both my siblings wear glasses but my eyes are fine. The optometrist said that it could be I inherited by mother's farsightedness but that I corrected my eyes by reading. She was excited to prove something about 'nature versus nurture,' but what she did was force an awareness on me whenever my eyes blur what's in the foreground or when it blurs the background, because I'm scared of over-correcting my vision into nearsightedness now. I didn't know I was almost always looking at what's up close. I don't even like podcasts but I tried to listen to one so I could stop blurring what's far away, and I've been trying to watch YouTube videos while looking at the screen as little as I possibly can.
Obsessive neurosis belongs to men. That's when you want to be the master over your own desire, when the Other wants you to to desire so bad that you renounce all excess, intensity, extremes for a careful balance you control. The liberal feminist's model of woman is an obsessive neurotic. She wears makeup because she chooses to feels beautiful. She chooses to shave because hair feels uncomfortable (ugliness hurts). Her desire is liberated, but it is also under her control. What she misses is the mirror that is staring straight at her: she doesn't look down at her body when she dresses up, it's the third-person reflection in the mirror that gives away her beauty. She is only aware that makeup sits on her face at all because the third-person is aware of it. The third-person owns her desire.
The anti-choice anti-liberal feminist is also an obsessive neurotic. She sees the other woman dressed for the "male gaze" and scoffs at her willful imprisonment. "Willful" because this feminist's abstention from choice does not negate her faith in will, or a better choice. Her strong will guides her away from the temptations of men and makeup and the razor, her political lesbianism will never please that man in the third-person (are straight people okay?), and she will roll her eyes when she's told that lesbians have it easy but will still believe that she at least has one foot outside the patriarchy. The average man that passes her on the street jerked off to lesbian porn to help him sleep last night. He thinks it's cute when women pretend to be men. As long as desire means lack, castrated women will invest value in the Phallus -- whether she shows it by begging for it in bed or acting like she has it in another woman's bed, the choice is up to her.
Three beautiful and obsessive women. I can be just as obsessive as a man when I try to strike a controlled balance between my long and short gaze, and as much as a heterosexual woman who wants what men want because it's what she wants, and as much as the lesbian who wants what men have because it's what women don't have. All of us accuse the other of not controlling her desires enough: that woman is brainwashed and passive and empty and powerless and I'm not. All the while, we are careful to ignore the huge and inescapable elephant in the room, the men that are supposedly the most powerful and free-willing and yet are easily excused when they're incapable of speaking up against a misogynist remark. The smell of their iron un-willingness to ever even do the least in the interest of women's liberation is so oppressive that some self-proclaimed feminists will punch down on transgender women before they even approach the Sisyphean boulders that are the men in our lives.
Men are obsessive. When women are obsessive, they are acting like men. The eye exaggerates its difference from touch: we are in control when we see, and that's what's so scary about the dark. We lose control when we touch what escapes the security checks of our eyes. When I was stung by a jellyfish, it almost didn't hurt at all. But I was too nervous to swim in that same water again because there was something that could touch me that I couldn't see, something that could penetrate the safe shell of my skin and inject sensory information on the other side, my inside, like a virus injecting viral DNA. Julia Kristeva in Powers of Horror is dissatisfied with the easy explanation that leprosy is made impure in the Old Testament because it was so dangerous for nomads at the time. Leprosy is impure because it visibly rots the border of the skin, the border between inside/outside, psychological/biological, soul/material. Impure is fluid, transitory, intensive touch, and pure is what separates from the impure to impose the cold distance of the Eye whose optics divide, differentiate, reflect and reverse on a rational plane of symmetry.
Even though it was film theory that tautologically grafted "male" to the "male gaze," the gaze was always deeply phallic. Eyesight grants the position of third-person. It's only when the baby sees their "I" in the mirror that they separate from the personless, impure Mother-substance made of milk and soft clay skin and the goo in the womb and the amoebic placenta-Lamella. But the third-person is cold and distant, so the baby hangs on from the umbilical cord. My dad brags that he cut my umbilical cord. The Father later forces his scopophilia on the baby when he displaces its desire with baby's second Representation. Infantile desire cannot be represented, but my eye that conspires with my hand to write, that makes the hand that touches the hand that represents, is compelled to say that infantile desire is the force which plugs together the freely floating organs in mother-water mother-space before their organization by the gaze of the x-ray. Breastfeeding mouth-breast, eating mouth-anus, screaming anus-mouth, crying tear-duct-skin.
The father represents Real desire as a symbol, a metaphor: the boy's desire for the the Mother-fluid is really desire for his penis in his mother's vagina, desire for un-separation is really the boy's desire for his uncastrated penis, the forbidden fruit is really sex, the blue curtain is really sadness, your dissatisfaction with a society organized around the multinational flow of capital is really childhood trauma, a lesbian's attraction to women is really her wish to be a man, and the word is really the thing. Men are obsessives because they are like former gifted kids. When they are young, they are made the heroes of their father's stageplay rich with symbols and literary depth. The myth goes that the primal Father hoarded all the women and so his sons were exiled as weak beta-omegas. These sons then killed their father, and they made the democratic decision to redistribute the women equally among brothers, and they will regulate it by prohibiting incest. The modern son that was just threatened with castration now aspires to be a glorious, upstanding citizen of brotherhood by virtue of not having sex with his mother. But the son will grow up and realize that he's no more exceptional than everyone else. And a society of men that maintain scopophilic distance from one another by mediation of women turns out to depress him, actually, so he will overcompensate and take manosphere testosterone pills and chase that great but lost masculine dream-theater.
Marxism modernized the myth of brotherhood. I wrote about it in my essay on Andrea Dworkin's Right-wing women: the proletariat might be oppressed and humiliated, but they have a historically proven drive toward their liberation, and their revolution is as destined to them as the princess is to the knight. Until Nazi Germany exposed a tendency in the hero to get excited for more oppression, sometimes. The line would then be that it's only the illusion of propaganda holding him back, and it won't be until May 68 when it's admitted that the working man has some of his own investments in his repression: the real admission here is that men aren't so far away from the women they believe masochistically desire their own abuse and rape. This is why leftist men resist feminism. I would think that the reader who clicked this title and read this far knows about this Dworkin quote: "Many women, I think, resist feminism because it is an agony to be fully conscious of the brutal misogyny which permeates culture, society, and all personal relationships." Marxist literature has been sold to the working class as a source for hope, but feminist literature is mostly hopeless. Leftist men resist feminism because its hopelessness appears impractical and useless, just as much as a communist revolution seems impossible and naïve to liberals.
The reason that women are not obsessive neurotics is because we were never promised the symbol. Women couldn't internalize the law after the threat of castration because there was nothing there to castrate to begin with. The Phallus that promised to be a metaphor for some deeper meaning was always empty. When men are neurotic, they are pretending to be men and they don't know it; when women are neurotic, they are pretending to be men and they know it. Luce Irigaray in her Speculum of the other woman:
"it is true that in their highest moments -- when they are most like the male sex, naturally -- women aspire to that sublimity. they rarely, however, rise above the level of exchanged sensations, of communal daydreams; at best they express opinions on events in the city, or merely pass on the opinions that are making the rounds. therefore women are incapable of realizing whether some idea -- Idea -- in fact corresponds to themselves, or whether it is only a more or less passable imitation of men's ideas."
The symbol or the metaphor promises to the little boy that his superficial surface really hides something deeper. Women confront the emptiness of their performance from the start. Susan Sontag in her essay "Death of tragedy" said that the overestimated Greek tragedy must always follow a hero that isn't self-aware. Oedipus isn't his actor, he is king and he believes it. Modern theater was invented when self-awareness was invented: Hamlet acts like the prince, Hamlet acts like he's insane, Hamlet acts like he loves or doesn't love Ophelia, Hamlet acts in a play in a play. The Oedipus complex does not symmetrically map onto the psychological development of a little girl because woman is Hamlet.
Irigaray, again:
"Woman's castration is defined as her having nothing you can see, as her having nothing. In her having nothing penile, in seeing that she has No Thing. Nothing like man. That is to say, no sex/organ that can be seen in a form capable of founding its reality, reproducing its truth. Nothing to be seen is equivalent to having no thing. No being and no truth. The contract, the collusion, between one sex/organ and the victory won by visual dominance therefore leaves woman with her sexual void, with an 'actual castration' carried out in actual fact."
Sight is so desperate to make differences, distinctions and separations that it will sometimes compromise on the distance it guarantees only to make mixtures and flows all the more traumatic and repulsive. It's so traumatic for the child to walk in on their parents having sex because they see the father seduced by the borderless woman, the man that would castrate them if they returned to the Mother, too. When I was little, and my dad scolded me for picking my nose, I said that I saw mom pick her nose, too. He said that was okay because nobody saw her. Manners are a matter of not being seen when you want to touch and make contact with impure mucous-substances, that's why sex is private, too.
Men created a symbolic order dictating manners and rudeness, right and wrong, pure and impure, and it made them miserable and they disavowed it onto women instead. It used to be that women were animalistic seductresses that couldn't help themselves without the guidance of a husband. Now, men can be disgusting and shirtless and horny because if they acted too much like men -- like socialized creatures -- that would make them women (that's why men in history seem to be so feminine). Men pretend they are men but don't know it, so they don't want to appear too performative. But women pretend to be men and they know it, so they can be as performative as they like: the most womanly thing a woman can do is act out the pact of brotherhood, follow the rules of society and be polite and beautiful and pure and virginal and self-repressive and be accused vain and superficial. That's why masculinity is the androgynous default. Women wear pants but men don't wear skirts because pants are more natural, authentic, practical; unperformative. Drag was right to make theater out of femininity. Irigaray:
"for she can be only known and recognized under disguises that denature her, she borrows forms that are never her own and that she must yet mimic if she is to enter even a little way into knowledge. and when she does this, she will no doubt be stigmatized, after the fact, for owing her power of seduction to deceptive appearances."
After every violent upheaval of the organization of production from the bronze age to the industrial, the Historical Materialists of the last two centuries were excited to announce that they discovered a pattern destined to repeat. The problem is that their economics is limited to the values assigned to those lifeless resources extracted from the Earth, which Bataille criticized when he proposed a general economics and not only a political one. A structure of values that has survived every redistribution of the means of production is the phallic one. Capitalist Realism pales against the apocalyptic impossibility of imagining a world without patriarchy. There is no feminist imagination because images have already been invested in and monopolized by the Phallus and his Eye, an image will always take the abundant flows of sunlight that rain on the Earth, those excesses of impure intensities which please the giggling, barely blind baby, and organize its light on an optical plane to make erect Representation and rigid Clarity.1
From what I know, the most successful failure at a feminist image is the 1919 short story "Munitions!" by J.G. Sime. Literature to Julia Kristeva is a "descent into the foundations of the symbolic construct" which "amounts to retracing the fragile limits of the speaking being," where "'subject' and 'object' push each other away, confront each other, collapse and start again -- inseparable, contaminated, condemned, at the boundary of what is assimilable, thinkable: abject." Literature is the great failure of speaking what is unspeakable. "Munitions!" is about working women when men are at war. It's absolutely unforgiving about women's joy while men are at war:
"She smiled so that a woman opposite smiled back at her; and then she realized that she was smiling. She felt life streaming to her very finger-tips. She felt the spring pass through her being--insistent and creative. She felt her blood speak to her--say things it never said when she was walking softly in the well-ordered house she helped to keep for five long, comfortable years. 'Selfish to leave me.' That was what the lady of the house had said to her. 'Selfish--you're all selfish. You think of nothing but yourselves.'"
Absolute feminist selfishness. The story's failure is that the women remain ultimately useful -- if you want to argue that assembling munitions so men can kill each other is useful -- but it gets so close, it circles the periphery of a fluid sociality that ebbs and flows and erodes its Pure, symbolic borders until it overflows with those impure mixtures of placenta and menstrual blood:
"Then suddenly the flock of women rose--felt in the bosoms of their shirt-waists for their cigarettes and matches--surged to the door--talking--laughing--pushing one another--the older ones expostulating. And, massed together in the slushy road, they stood, lighting up, passing their matches round--happy--noisy--fluttered--not knowing what to do with all the life that kept on surging and breaking in them--waves of it--wave on wave."
Lacan said that the problem with neurotics, whether obsessive or hysteric, is that they ask too many questions. The obsessive asks: what is being? And the hysteric asks: what is sexed being? I think it's about sex for them both, actually, because you are what you are because you see, and the first thing we see is the castrated woman without the Phallus. Eyesight begins when we differentiate one thing from another, and the first differentiation is sexual difference. Obsessive men just avoid the heart of the matter because men pretend to be men and they don't know it, and women pretend to be men and they know it.
In the preface of The Accursed Share, a book that argues for an economics based on abundance, excess and waste rather than utility and a lack of resources, Bataille questions whether he is not defeating the point and serving the pursuit of human knowledge by writing. I don't think writing and literature is really useful. It set out to acquire knowledge, but it more generally produces a landfill of wasted paper and ink and ideas and data read by no one. Like literature to Kristeva which fails to say the abject, Jean-Luc Nancy in his "Inoperative Community" writes that literature is literature when it interrupts itself, when it sets out to a myth or a goal or a narrative -- a use, and it fails. The useful heterosexual woman is ashamed of her attraction to men and proves that only the Phallus grants individuality, interiority and free will. The useful lesbian is ashamed of her willfully oppressed counterpart and proves that fucking women is an expression of power, self-control and freedom. I have even seen the gay transgender man made useful when he once identified as a lesbian but testosterone increased his attraction to men, bringing shame to lesbianism by proving that it's repressed desire for the Phallus by detour. Every supposed escape from the patriarchy will be made an investment in the Phallus one way or another. My essay set out to prove that the category of Woman and Man must be destroyed, but I did it with the Eye born from sexual difference, and its symbols which can serve nothing but widening the impossible dark gorge between Man and Woman. It's useless.
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