Machiavelli's Sisters: Women and "The Conversation" of Political Theory
Linda M. G. Zerilli
Political Theory, Vol. 19, No. 2. (May, 1991), pp. 252-276.
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MACHIAVELLI'S SISTERS
Women and "the Conversation" of Political Theory
LINDA M.G.ZERILLI 

Rufgers Unrversiry 

If one IS a woman, one IS often surprised by a sudden splitting of consaousness, say In
walklng down Whitehall, when from belng the natural Inheritor of that avilization, she
becomes, on the contrary, outslde of it, alien and critical.
P o L r r r c A L THEORY, 17IS OFTEN SAID, is a conversation- a transhistorical
dialogue that links the voices of the present with those of the past
In a discourse concerning the meaning of public life. The seductive promlse
of a common Inheritance which transcends the contingency of ~ndividual
existence and extends an invitation to joln In a shared symbolic language is
celebrated in Machiavelli's famous letter to Vettori, dated December 10,
1513:
In the evenlng, 1 return to my house, and go Into my study. At the door I take off the
clothes I have worn all day, mud spotted and dirty, and put on regal and courtly garments.
Thus appropr~atelyclothed, I enter Into the anclent courts of anclent men, where, bang
lovlngly received, I feed on that food whlch alone IS mlne, and whlch I was born for.
For four hours I feel no boredom and forget every worry. I do not fear poverty, and death
does not terrify me. 1 glve myself completely over to the ancients. 1 have written
down the profit I have gamed from thelr conversation, and composed a little book De
~ r r n c r ~ a t i b u s . ~
For Machiavelli, to enter the conversation is to leave behind the mudspotted
world of daily life and to seek reprieve, nourishment, and immortality
AUTHOR'S NOTE. I would like to thank the particrpanrs m my "Political Theory and Gender"
graduate seminar at Rutgers Unrversify as well as George Shulman, Benlamm Barber, John
Seery, Tracy Strong, Michael Rogln, and especially Pat Moloney for their critical readings of
earlier versrons of thrs essay.
POLITTCALTtIEORY, Vol. 19 No. 2, May 1991 252-276
0 1991 Sage Publications, lnc.
252
Zerilli / WOMEN AND POLITICALTHEORY DISCOURSE 253
In the dream of a common language. To find his place in this conversation,
the theorist takes temporary leave of his own "house" and, on the threshold
to that otherworldly realm of his "study," strips off the dirty clothes of his
everyday existence and dons the "regal" mantle of what we now call political
theory. It is only then, "appropriately clothed," that he can nurture himself,
and, by the same token, h ~ screative project, De Principatibur. That project,
although rooted In the h~storicalcontext of sixteenth-century Italian society
and politics, IS conceived ("I give myself completely over to the ancients")
and then gestates In the intellectual company of those ancient men before it
can be delivered to the world In the form of a "gift" to Lorenzo de Medici.
Partic~pationIn the conversation, then, produces a gift: It is the gift of the
theorist to his soaety, the gift of theory to politics. It IS the gift, perhaps, with
which Machiavelli hopes to raise himself, once again, to the public, historical
stage of Florentine politics. But before the theonst surrenders the gift of h ~ s
"little book," and thereby of himself, to the world outside his study, he has
had to fash~onhls self as a political th~nker-a self whlch, while shaped by
his earlier diplomatic mlsslons, was wrought largely In exile In his quasimystical
experience of a more timeless form of gift-giving: the fraternal
exchange of words occasioned by h ~ sdaily journey into "the ancient courts
of ancient men."
Indeed, withln the discursive space of the study, the courteous and mutual
exchange of words, as gifts, obtains a fraternal community of unique and
symbolicdimens~ons.For the "gift" as a form of counterpresentation, argued
Marcel Mauss m h ~ scelebrated Essai sur le don (1925), induces an elaborate
web of soc~alrelations known as the symbolic order. When understood In
George Bataille's rewriting of Mauss, the experience of gift giving as
expenditure or dkpense is one In which the self gives fully, completely:
"mystical states which effect a momentary dissolution of self-awareness to
the point of s~mulatlngdeath."3 In Mach~avelli'swords, that condition isonly
possible In the masquerade of the "study": "I feel no boredom and forget
every worry. I do not fear poverty, and death does not terrify me." Thus it is
here In the symbolic world of the study, feeding on the conversation of men,
that Machiavelli can forget his origlns in the house, his maternal debt, and
glve blrth to h~mself,to that other lmmortal part of h~mself-the political
theonst.
But In suggesting, as Norman 0.Brown writes, that "the fraternity is the
m~ther,"~that the "journey of initiation" ends In the fraternal exchange of
gifts In a study In whlch men replace by becomlng then own mothers, I have
introduced all too qulckly a trope (the gift of theory) which must, and will
be, elaborated carefully. To situate my reading of the Mach~avellianmoment
254 POLITICALTHEORY / May 1991
of political discourse on more familiar terraln, then, let us reconsider thls
famous passage from a different angle.
Instead of speculating on the conscious and unconscious meanings that
those "courts" mlght have had for the hlstorlcal Machiavelli, we mlght read
hls self-representation less as a clue to the enigmatic character of his "expenence"
and more as an Invitation to thlnk through hls academic positioning
as a trope, as a cherished fraternal figure whose transposition to the more
regal realms of the study has become synonymous with what Sheldon Wolin,
citing the example of Machiavelli, has called the "perennial dialogue" of
political t h e ~ r y . ~The exchange of words with the fathers and the weight of
the past shape as well the contemporary theor~st'slmage of what it means to
enter and to learn about the conversation. Much like his sixteenth-century
ancestor, today's "h~storicallymlnded theonst," writes Wolin, "is engaged In
the task of political ~nltiation."~Respecting the traditional "boundaries" of
political discourse, thls reverential sage Introduces "new generations" to
those same texts that gave hls predecessors "the sense of travelling in a
familiar world where the landscape has already been explored."' It IS a
discursive world whose "common" and "symbolic language.. .enables one
user to understand what another is saying," just as it compels each speaker
to constraln hlmself with~nthe limits of an exlsting "political vo~abular~."~
What the vivid example of Mach~avelliteaches us, argues Wolin, is to respect
the historical terms of discourse: "Of all the restra~ntsupon the political
philosopher's freedom to speculate, none has been so powerful as the
tradition of political philosophy itself. In the act of philosophizing the theorist
enters Into a debate the terms of which have largely been set bef~rehand."~
But what if the political theorist is a woman?
In poslng such a question, thls essay Invites political theorists to reconsider
the fraternal rite of passage ("initiation"), that is, Wolin's rewriting (and the
commonly accepted understanding) of the great Machiavellian metaphor
of the conversation, from the position of the woman who speaks but who
refuses to forget or deny her material origins and activities in the house; a
woman who Interprets that derlded domestic space not as a debilitating,
"mud-spotted" condition of immanence but as "pregnant" with political
meanlng; a woman who experiencesnot a comforting sense of the "familiar"
when she traverses the Wolinlan political "landscape" but Woolf's "splitting
of consc~ousness,"wh~chstands as a powerful reminder that she is no
member of the club, rather a crlmlnal whose very presence IS transgressive.
If this female conversant does not despair of, but plays with, her status as an
alien speaker, it is because she has no desire to adopt the priestly stance of
her fathers nor to engage in the fraternal rites of passage that secure their
woman -
political
theorist
woman's
split
consciousne
ss
Zerilli / WOMEN AND POLlTICALTHEORY DISCOURSE 255
cultural authority. Yet she knows that when she dresses consczously like a
man, shedons the regal robes of political theory not to shore up but to disrupt
the terms of the fraternal masquerade. In this essay, then, I ask political
theorists to consider what it means to intervene in the conversation as a
feminist.
CROSS-DRESSING
To explore the different strategies that feminists use when they enter the
conversation, I would like to begin with the important exchange between
Mary Dietz and Jean Elshtain on the politics of maternal thinking." At stake
in the debate, as we shall see, is the significantly different interpretation that
the authors give to the feminist slogan "the personal is political"- a fundamental
proposition which, as Teresa de Lauretis writes, "urges the displacement
of all ...oppositional terms, the crossing and recharting of the space
between them.""
In addressing themselves to a community of political theorists (Dietz to
the readers of Political Theory and Elshtain to readers of the short-lived
journal Democracy), the authors (much like the author of this article) must
negotiate the very terms of discourse wh~chWolin argued to be constitutive
of the "speculative horizon" of political theory. Those terms organize the
discussion around the maternal, affective values of the family and the private
sphere, on one hand, and the civic, impersonal relations of a political
community, on the other. Although both theorists want to rethink the relations
of public and prlvate spheres, I argue, they are ultimately faced with making
a choice between the two, a choice wh~chcompromises their efforts to rethink
the relationship of the house to the study. At the risk of oversimplifying their
positions, I will focus on Elshtain's and Dietz's very different readings of
Sophocles' Antigone. My discussion will introduce, if only briefly, a third
interpretation of this text -that of Luce Irigaray - in an effort to complicate
the political conversation.
The contrasting ways in which Dietz and Elshtain understand the
"personal is political" is suggested by their very different approaches to
Sophocles' text. The tragic figure of Antigone, Elshtain argues,'* embodies
the conflict of private and public understood as feminine (caring) versus
masculine (instrumentalist) values of community. Antigone, she contends,
takes up the position of women and articulates a maternal discourse, rooted
in the values and practices of the family, to contest the arrogance and violence
of the state, represented by Creon. For Dietz, however, the drama might be
political
theorist -
feminist
256 POLITICAL THEORY 1May 1991
read as "illustrative of two opposlng political vlewpolnts: One is of Creon,
who represents the state and centralized power, and the other is of Antigone,
who represents the customs and traditions of a collective civil life."13Whereas
Elshtaln would revalue the derided language of doxa,I4 the ancient word for
"mere oplnlon," D~etz~nslststhat the language of the household and of
mothers cannot be extended into but must be itself transformed by public
discourse if it IS to be politically meaningful. For Dietz, then, Antigone IS
first and foremost a "citizen". She "transcends the pnvate/public split because
she embodies the personal made political. Through her speech and her
action, she transforms a matter of private concern into a public iss~e."'~
But, we m~ghtask, are not the languages of Antigone and Creon more
tragic, more mutually exclusive than either Elshtain's or Dietz's reading of
them would suggest?
The work of Sophocles, writes Irigaray, "marks the historical brldge
between matr~archyand patriarchy."16 The visible bond of blood that "a
matr~archaltype of lineage ensures" is giving way to "the privilege of the
proper name,"" to a family and a state organized around the invisible: the
legal fiction of paternity. But, in Sophoclean tragedy, "the power of the
father's name" has not yet triumphed; on the contrary, "had its right already
been In force," the-name-of-the-father would have "prevented Oedipus from
committing murder and incest."18 Likew~se,if "Antigone does not yet yield
to the law of the city, of its sovereign, of the man of the family," says Ingaray,
it IS because "another law is still draw~ngher along its path: identification
with her m~ther."'~However, the mother -towhom Antigone's actionsspeak
but whom her words can never reach In Creon's city -is not that domesticated
figure represented by the patrlarchal "maternal deal";^' it is the
"woman-mother (fernrne-rnere)"2'whose anclent murder Antigone refuses to
forget: a repressed matricide whlch haunts the terms of discourse in Creon's
patrilineal and patnarchal vision of the state. Antigone's discourse IS not only
cnminal but su~cidalin a political city whlch recognizes only the masculine
voice and, what Irlgaray calls, its logic of the "~elf-same."~~Thetragic nature
of her speech, then, derives from its alleg~anceto the maternal relations of
blood rather than to the paternal fiction of a name. Because they do not
recognize the same law -Antigone acknowledges only that of the mother,
Creon appeals to that of the father- they do not share a common language:
"between her and the king, nothlng can be sa~d."*~AsJosette Feral comments,
Antigone articulates the unspoken in speech, her maternal debt, by living and
dying a virgln: She denles "the woman that she is in the name of the mother
whlch she will never be."24
Zerilli / WOMEN AND POLITICALTHEORYDISCOURSE 257
Follow~ngIrigaray,then, to reclaim Antigone, as Elshtaln does, as"guardian
of the prerogatives of the oikos,preserver of familial duty and honor,
defender of children,"= overlooks the fact that Antigone's crime takes her
far from that social world in which "human life is nurtured and protected
from day to day." Likewise, to Interpret her, as Dietz does, as a citizen who
stands for an alternative "political ethos"26neglects the doubled figure of the
tomblwomb to wh~chshe is condemned and to whlch she condemns herself.
Antigone, writes Ingaray, defies all "the inventions of men," patriarchal
family and state, "by/in her relationship to Hade~."~'In contrast to Elshta~n's
maternal herolne, Ingaray's daughter of Jocasta doesnot revalue but "refuses
her condition as a woman," and she pays for this transgression with her life.
And In contrast to Dietz's public citizen, Antigone stands not for a "collective
clvil life," In wh~ch"citizens are not intimately but politically involved with
each other";= she refuses any discourse whlch resolves "all (blood) ties
between ~ndiv~dualsInto abstract un~versality."~~
If Elshtain and Dietz translate, finally, the foreign, dissonant vo~ceof
Antigone lnto the more familiar, reassur~ngvolce of mothers andlor citizens,
it is because their readings have been "framed," so to speak, by the larger
political conversation: a "perennlal dialogue" whlch requires that the authors
articulate femlnist politics by situating themselves in relation to the accepted
terms of debate @ublic/pnvate), and by defending a particular reading of
canonical texts." As a specificfemlnist strategy,however, this taking of sldes
In the conversation may be necessary for those traditionally excluded voices
of women who, to use Michael Oakeshott's phrase, seek to "galn a proper
hearing."
Oakeshott's lmage of the conversation as a "meeting-place of various
modes of ~ m a ~ i n l n ~ " ~ 'suggests as it begs the problems Involved for women
who would enter the dialogue. When one voice controls or monopolizes the
terms of discourse, Oakeshott rightly warns, the terms of speaking not only
make it "difficult for another voice to be heard, but it will also make it seem
proper that it should not be heard."32The danger is that "an excluded voice
may take wing agalnst the wind, but it will do so at the risk of tumlng the
conversation into a dispute. Or it may galn a hearing by imitating the volces
of the monopolists; but it will be a hearing for only a counterfeit ~tterance."~~
However appealing h n Image, Oakeshott's playful metaphor of speaking
-when it is lnvoked as it has been by scholars to describe the nature of
political conversation- both obscures the historical conditions that have
shaped the "perennlal dialogue" and Invites a critical reappraisal of an
academic community that gives women a hearing only when they conform
need of
feminist
political
theorists to
situate
themselves
in a
"perennial
dialogue"
258 POLrnCAL THEORY 1May 1991
thelr words- as I now am conforming mlne -to the historically accepted
terms of the debate. But by accuslng Dietz and Elshtain of not transforming
those terms I too r~skparticipating in the scholarly sleight of hand which
allows political theorists to pretend to listen but which silences, finally, the
more radical tones of femlnist discourse. My critical reading of the debate
risks overlooking the ambiguities and subtle transformations which femlnists
effect whenever they enter alien territory. As Mitzie Myers has written,
"subordinate groups like women must shape their world views through .
recelved frameworks" since "if women's alternative or counterpart models
are not acceptably encoded in the prevailing male idiom, female concerns
will not recelve a proper hearing."" For Oakeshott, we have seen, thls
imitation of the "dominant voices" amounts to a "counterfeit utterance."
Myers, however, who 1s attentive to political questions of sexual difference
and language, understands the problem of counterfeiting oneself somewhat
differently: "Since female models characteristically operate in terms of
strategically redefining and rescrlpting traditional markers, the lingustic
surface of such sexual pronouncements" (as the "maternal" or the "female"
citizen) "must be carefully scrutinized for imperfect integrations, submerged
conflicts, covert messages- for all the meanings which hover ir~terstitially."~'
To remaln attentlve to Myers's sensitive formulation of the difficulties
involved for women who must insert themselves within accepted idioms if
they are to be heard is to raise the problem of conversation in what Mikhail
Bakhtin calls "dialogic" terms.36I will return to the dialogic character of
language, that IS,its orientation towards another, in the conclusion to this
essay. Here, I want only to polnt out that Bakhtin's understanding of how the
language of any locutor anticipates the response of its addressee Invites us
to pay more attention to the act not only of speaklngbut of listening, and how
feminist political discourse, as Bakhtin writes of rhetorical discourse, may
try "to outwit possible retorts to itselT3' by clothlng itself in traditional garb,
by mask~ngits meanings in acceptable idioms: those of the study. But the
question remains as to whether wrapplng oneself In the classic texts can, In
fact, enable femlnists to pose the questions that they need to ask when they
Insist that the personal is political.
I find the femln~stuses of masks-for instance, Elshtain's and Irigaray's
very different elaborations of Antigone's maternal discourse or Dietz's
articulation of her public discourse -helpful when they pant to the amblguities
of any text. When femlnists Inhabit traditional texts to make them speak
their silences or to disrupt conventional interpretations, their masquerade
becomes politically significant In its challenge to the cultural authority of
political theory. Yet I hesitate when this critical if playful approach to classic
Zerilli 1WOMEN AND POLITICALTHEORYDISCOURSE 2-59
texts becomes a femlnlst project of reclamation. When, in wearing the mask
of the political theory fathers to articulate feminist politics, the femlnist
masquerade works to prop up the historical conversation, feminists may
become complicit in the very process by which a "tradition of discourse"
recuperates their insights to shore up itsown boundaries. Moreover, the limits
of the canonical economy for thinking through critical political questions of
gender become evident when the voices of femln~stsbecome submerged In
those of the theorists who are ~nvoked,consciously or not, to give women
the cultural authority to speak. The moment m whlch tnhabtting the masculine
voice of a text gives way to htding behind that voice is not always
evldent; remaining aware of the danger, however, is important for those
critics who deploy the classic texts to disrupt their modes of enunciation and
address, in which man is the sole term of reference. However important are
their texts, the political theory fathers simply cannot pose the same order of
questions -of the politics of sexual difference-which have been generated
by the feminist movement.
My point is not to deny the mportance of femlnist rereadings nor is it to
suggest that fem~nistscan free themselves from the oppresswe categories of
the conversation simply by refusing to read canonical texts. As Christine
Froula has written, for femlnists to refuse the Great Books neglects the fact
that "we have been reading the patriarchal 'archetext' all our live^."'^ What
is needed, she argues, are feminist critical strategies that question and
reimaglne "the structures of authority for a world in which authority need no
longer be 'male' and coercive nor silence 'female' and subversive, in which,
In other words, speech and silence are no longer tied to an archetypal -and
arbitrary -hierarchy of gender."39
In what follows I want to examine a related yet alternative feminist
rhetor~calstrategy for intervening In a conversation whlch 1s organized
around the arbitrary significations of gender: mimicry. Mimesis, we shall see,
can be an effective strategy for disrupting a modern conversation which now
admits women as conversants but whose unspoken symbolic terms requlre
that, when women speak, they continue to disguise themselves as men and
deny their orlgins in the house. For the mimic takes seriously the unstated
conditions of her speech: the masquerade of femininity.
MIMICRY
Ingaray's claim that Creon and Antigone have nothing to say to each other
points to even more complex -and disturbing-problems of language than
260 POLITICAL THEORY / May 1991
those suggested by the preceding discussion of the difficulties feminists face
when speakingto a community of political theorists. In her cnminal rewriting
of Lacanian notions of a phallogocentnc symbolic order, Irigaray elaborates
the mutually exclusive character of feminine and masculine discourse and
goes so far as to argue that women cannot enter a conversation, any conversation,
without counterfeiting themselves because women and men do not
stand in an equal relationship to language. As we shall see, following
Irigaray's account of language, the problems involved for women who would
enter the political conversation lie not in the latter's historically androcentric
exclusivity nor In its specificity as a particular tradition of discourse (as
political discourse) but, instead, in the universal symbolic rules of discourse
itself. To unpack the complexity of women's alien status m the symbolic
contract, however, we must look first to Lacan's rewriting of Freud as it
elaborates the complex relationships between the Name-of-the-Father and
femlnlnity.
Lacan takes up Freud's 1920observations of the Fort!lDa! game played
by his grandson to illustrate how language is used to recreate "the presence
and absence of persons and things."@The word is but "a presence made of
absence"; with words, "absence itself gives itself a name.'*' In entering the
symbolic order, as Terry Eagleton glosses Lacan, "the child unconsciously
learns that a sign has meaning only by dint of its difference from other signs,
and learns also that a slgn presupposes the absenceof the object it signifies."42
Lacan links the "symbolic function" to the paternal prohibition ("the name
of the that is, to theplace of the father as the disruptive third term
in the mother-child relation. Thus the child's efforts at symbolization take
place In the context-not only of the comings and golngs of things, of
persons, and, specifically, of the b~ologlcalmother- but within a symbolic
order whose paternal law prohibits the incestuous, undifferentiated relations
of mother and child." Lacan emphasizes the centrality of the father and,
specifically, the castration complex in the constitution of the speaking subject
because only paternal law can break the preoedipal ~maginaryd~ad.~'AsAnn
Rosalind Jones has written, "Lacan calls language le Nom du Pere (the
noiname of the father) to emphasize the father's double role in the acculturation
of the child: he prohibits the exclusive pre-verbal mother/child bond
and he takes center stage in the child's fantasy, as the representative of
language and society.'*6
The castration narrative, observes Domlnlck LaCapra, also tells the story
of fetishism: "It begins with a non-event, a disavowal of perception, a refusal
to see what IS there."47 The fetish "is itself the narclssistically invested
surrogate for the phantasmatic lost totality" (the maternal phallus)-"a
Zerilli /WOMEN AND POLITICAL THEORY DISCOURSE 261
totality that never exlsted and whose magin nary constitution requlres a
conversion of absence into loss on the basls of a nonpercepti~n."~And "to
castrate woman," as Irigaray mockingly writes of the FreudiadLacanian
narrative, "is to inscribe her in the law of the same desire, of the desrrefor
the Woman IS but a mlrror for the male ego; she is the "foundation
for this specular duplication, giving man back 'hls' image and repeating it as
the 'same.' "The glrl thus enters into the castration complex in the same
way as the boy, like a boy. She 'comes out' of it feminized by a decision,
which she is duty bound to ratify, that there cannot be a nothing to be seen.""
If, in Lacan's words, "lafemme r ~ ' e x u t e ~ a s , " ~ ~it is because her symbolization
is impossible in a system of representation which refuses to recognize
female sexual difference and which converts it, instead, into a nen a voirthe
absence of a phallus.53
Yet if a woman can enter the symbolic order only if she conforms herself
to the masquerade of femininity, Ir~garaysuggests, so too can she mock the
male vo~cethat erases her own efforts at self-representation by deliberately
assumlng the position of the mimic. Although that position is assigned to
women in a patrlarchal libidinal economy of what Irigaray calls
"hom(m)osexualite," the male desire for the same, mimesis can be deployed
by the female speaker "to recover the place of her exploitation by disc~urse."'~Mimicry
enacts a defamiliarized version of femininity; it is a
rhetorical strategy that alms to convert female subordination into an affirmation
of the "fernin~ne"through a parodic mode of speakmglwriting. The
mimic searches out the unspoken In discourse in her effort to reveal theoretical
speculation as "specul(ariz)ation": theory as a fetish for the phallus
(Freud), and both as fetishes for the missing woman (Irigaray)-for the
"femme-mere" whose ancient murder is covered over by "representational
epistemologies that privilege evldence derived from the (male) gaze."55
"Political philosophy," writes Wolin, "constitutes a form of 'see~ng',''~~
and it is from hls own particular "angle" @. 23) of vlsion that the theorlst
may broaden but never destroy the "speculative horizon" that bounds those
who would participate in the perennial dialogue. However, the creative
dimension of the theonst's language, he suggests, Issues m part from the
power of his "vision" (p. 18), of his "imagination" @. 19), in short, of the
gaze with which he would "render political phenomena intellectually manageable"
by seeing and presenting them In "what we can call a 'corrected
fullness' " (p. 19). "The gaze," writes Irigaray, "is at stake from the outset.
Don't forget, In fact, what 'castration,' or the knowledge of castration, owes
to the gaze."" "The idea that a 'nothng to be seen,' a something not yet
subject to the rule of visibility, of specula(rlza)tion, might yet have some
262 POLITICAL THEORY /May 1991
reality, would Indeed be intolerable to men."" The theoretical activities of
male philosophers must push all that exceeds and threatens this reflexlve
circularity Into an "omitted ba~kground,"~~ of politicalthe "unthought"
discourse.
"By an act of thought the theorlst seeks to reassemble the whole political
world. He alms to grasp present structures and relationships and to re-present
them In a new way";60he seeks to "transcend hlstory" @. 19), to "fash~on
political cosmosout of political chaos" (p. 8),writes Wolin. Yet such activity,
comments LaCapra, ralses "an obv~ousquestion . [as to] the extent to
which the ideal of prov~dingcomprehens~veaccounts or global theor~esthat
'bnng orderto chaos' entailsphantasmatic investment^."^' And sothetheorist
must theorize (theory -from the Greek theorla, from theoros, "spectator,"
from thea, a "view~ng").~~Situated withln the ex~sting"speculative honzon"
of the conversation (speculate -from specere, to see, look, from specula, a
lookout, wat~htower)~'the theor~stas seer casts out a "net7' of Inherited
"concepts and categor~es"from h ~ stower in the study, a "particular net," says
Wolin, whlch "bnng(s) Into play a prlnclple of speculative exclus~veness
whereby some political concepts are advanced for consideration and others
are allowed to langu~sh"(p. 21). Tumlng presence into absence, he remalns
thereby the potent master of h ~ slnslght; he IS not blinded by what he m~ght
see; he circumscribesh ~ sfield of v~sion.Yet,like the fetish, the phantasmatic,
his theory also turns absence into presence; he "epitomizes a soclety by
abstracting certaln phenomena and providing ~nterconnectionswhere none
can be seen. Imaglnat~onIS the theonst's means for understanding a world
he can never know in an intimate way" (p. 19).
If partlcipatlon In the "perennial dialogue7'produces the "gift" of theory,
if it glves the theorist "the sense of travelling In a familiar world where the
landscape has already been explored," then Irigaray suggests that this symbolic
landscape (and its gifts) IS familiar Insofar as each traveller has left at
the threshold to the political conversation the mud-spotted clothes of h ~ s
material beginnings In the or~gnalhome of the mother, the maternal gift, and
donned the robes woven from the father's language: "So every enunciation,
every affirmation,will develop and certify the recovery of the obliteration of
the Immutable connection of the belng to the material mother."64 When
conceptualized as a k~ndof ~ildungsreae,6'then, in which the theorist as
speaklng subject -like the boy of Lacan's castration narrative -crosses the
metaphor~calthreshold by renunciating his desire forthemother (noli tangere
rn~trern),6~the rite of passage ("initiation7') Into the "legitimate heritage" of
the study translates the "private" relations of sexuality and the home Into a
Zerilli / WOMEN AND POLITICALTHEORY DISCOURSE 263
nonobject, a "noth~ngto be seen" that can have no status in the political
conversation except that of disorder.("
Just as the figure of the absent mother asks us to reth~nkthe relationship
of the house to the discursive world of the study, so does Irigaray's trope of
"hom(m)osexualite" ask us to consider the etymology of the word "conversation,"
wh~chderlves from the Latin conversatio, meanlng "intercourse" "soc~al"or
"sexual." While the latter s~gnificationIS now used only in the
legal phrase "cnminal conversation" (i.e., adultery as grounds for divorce),
Ir~garay'spost-Lacan~ancritique of language ralses the question of whether
a woman can enter political theory qua conversation qua language as anyth~ngbut
a criminal -as an adulteress, as a homme manque, or as any other
expression of the male desirefor the same. From her perspective, for a woman
to enter the symbolic order IS to become caught within the "specular log~c"
of patriarchal discourse, to watch herself transfigured from the "little girlwho
is (only) a little man" (Freud) Into the mother who is only a "maternal Ideal."
For if men exchange the gift of words in the study, woman, Freud tells us,
patiently awaits the "gift" of a child in the house, the "seed" man gives her
to compensate for her childish "perils envy."6s
In the vlew of Irigaray, then, Oakeshott's ideal metaphor of the conversation
as a nonhierarchical medley of voices must, for women, remain an
impossibility, for, as language, the dialogue IS always already monopolized
by the masculine volce. Women can partic~pateIn the conversation only if
they accept their fraudulent status as speak~ngsubjects; they cannot join in
the ex~stingexchange of words as gifts because, as Evi-Strauss and Carole
Pateman have shown ~tis women who are the most preclous objects of
exchange. Consequently, for women, mim~cryIS not the condition of speaking
when the conversation breaks down; it is the only mode of spealung
available to a woman within the phallogocentnc rules of the conversation
itself.70
Irigaray's deliberate use of mimes~s,then, is directed not at gaming a place
for women in existing discourses, in the conversation, but at "jamming the
theoretical machinery" of patnarchal systems of representation which are
"excess~velyun~vocal."~'Her alternative conception of woman's "style" of
speaklng@arlerfemme)72would "put the torch to fetish words, proper terms,
well-constructed forms." Implicitly refut~ngsuch "oculocentnc" metaphors
for writing as Wolin's "v~sion,"
thls style does not privilege slght; Instead it takes each figure back to its source, wh~ch
IS among other thlngs tactile. It comes back In touch with itself In that o n g n without
ever constituting In it, constituting itself in it, as some sort of
Only then, she argues, will a language be possible which does not define the
femlnlne "as lack, deficiency, or as Imitation and negative Image of the
s~bject";'~and only then, her work suggests, will the relations of the house
not be left to "languish"In political discourse nor the relation to the maternal
body be expressed as the uncanny disorder of women.
Irigaray nghtly draws our attention to the fact that, as Monique Plaza
writes, "it 1s not a genulne difference of the sexes which regulates the
patriarchal system." Her work, then, is important for political theorists
because it asks them to reconsider what relations have been consigned to that
"omitted background," whlch they cannot (or refuse to) see from their tower
In the study, and IS Important for feminlst political theorists because it invites
us to conslder what 1sat stake for feminists In refusing the "meta-language"
of Western
But, we mlght ask of Irigaray, would the femlnist critique of political
discourse be identical with that of her critique of language tout court? Is
language, In fact, the monolithic totality that she (and Lacan) make it out to
be? If, as Plaza inslsts, "women are not the object, 'woman,' of the masculine
disco~rse,'"~then is women's status in language as alien and must her
discourse be as different, as Ir~garaysuggests? Finally, does not political
discourse offer alternative modes of speaking for feminists who are neither
content to play the mimic nor eager to establish "true differences" between
the sexes?
In what follows, I turn to another vlew of how indiv~dualsenter a dialogue
whlch suggests that it IS precisely because the sheer arrogance of any
statement can be revealed by the interlocutor as ridiculous that language
offers the possibility of a genuine exchange of competing ideas: J.G.A.
Pocock's model of the "language polity." In contrast to Irigaray, Pocock
insists that parody enables a far more democratic form of conversation.
Intimat~ngthat women need not be condemned to repeating Echo's gesture,
Pocock's speech act theory of language holds that all oppressed speakers can
"play ..(thelr) way out of the role which language assigns" them.77But to
play Pocock's language games, a woman may have to consent to more than
the masquerade of sameness, of sexual indifference.
(VERBAL)RAPE
"There is something unilateral about the act of communication," writes
Pocock, "which does not take place between consenting adults. By spealung
words in your hearlng, . . . I impose on you information that you cannot
Zerilli / WOMEN AND POLITICALTHEORY DISCOURSE 265
ignore." This "act of verbal rape-this penetration of your consciousness
without your consent," IS "my" attempt "to determine what your response
will be." However, if "we have shared a medium of communicationconsisting
in a structure of shared conventions, you have more of the freedom that
comes of the prior consentto the form that my acts took" (emphasisadded)."
What makes language such a forceful yet plastic medium for political
communication is the fact that no speaker can assume the statusof "Humpty
Dumpty" @p.33-34). For "institutionalized language-structures" make meaning
"relatively uncontrollable and hard to monopolize" @. 35).
On Pocock's speech act theory of the "language polity," to be assigned
the position of the other in the context of another's linguistic performance,
to have one's subjectivity denied and violated by another's words, need not
condemn one to the Immutable and oppressive status of the Absolute Other
for an authoritative subjectwho speaks.The multiplepossibilitiesthat inhere
In the very nature of language as communication, arguesPocock, insure that
the same utterances that define the other of any speech act as the Other for
the speakercan be turned on the latter himself:They canbe invokedto contest
the speaker's authority. Pocock's understandingof the ambiguitiesthat make
possible such acts of interpretation,however, 1sfundamentallydifferent from
that of Lacan and Irigaray. For Pocock finds ambiguity not in the instability
of the (masculine)spealungsubject but in the "fnctions" that emergebetween
the "intentions" of the speaker and the social context of his "performance."
In Pocock's vlew, ambiguity is the discrepancy that emerges between the
(conscious) meaning intended and the meaning produced in the "two-way"
structure of cornmun~cation.~~
Pocock wants to "slow down the power act" @. 36)" in politics by
diffusing the clash of conflicting interests through the play of ambiguities In
political discourse. He would contain potentially radical politics and differences
of meaning within what J. L. Austin calls "the total speech act in the
total speech situation."" But the stress on intentions in speech act theory, as
Jacques Derrida has argued:' conceals what Eagleton call, the "unhealthily
juridicial" preoccupations of speech act theorists to control "who is allowed
to say what to whom in what condition^."^^ As Christopher Norris notes,
Derrida does not deny that there is an intentional aspect to language, but he
refuses the claim of those, like Austin, that "philosophy can lay down the
rules of this procedure by explaining how language should or must work if
its workings are to make good sense."84
However, if speech act theory would lay down such lawsby excludingthe
effects of the "structural unconscious" of any text," the poststructuralist
account of language suggeststhat the very dependence of political discourse
266 POLITICALTHEORY /May 1991
on the figural resources of language opens up a somewhat different set of
concerns. As Derrida has demonstrated in hls reading of Austin, the most
revealing passages of an argument may be those metaphors that appear at
first glance to be penpheral to the "real" meaning of any spoken or written
statement. Thus it is often in the margins or the footnotes that a text reveals
the contradictions whlch challenge its claim to endunng truth.
On closer examination, then, Pocock's startling metaphor of rape, as the
act that initiates human conversation, may reveal some unintended, unconscious
meanings. Speech as verbal rape suggests that there lurks in Pocock's
"language polity" that unquestioned category of sex which enables the author
to speak of "the utterance" in the language of sexual violation. But the
provocative metaphor that Pocock chooses to talk about the "real" meaning
of ambiguity In language could be turned on the speakerlauthor himself. As
the Red Queen said to Alice: "When you've sald a thing, that fixes it and you
must take the consequences." As Pocock translates this fable for his readers:
"We can interpret her as meaning that to use language you must make
commitments" (p. 34). From a slightly different angle, the Queen's words
suggest that when you use language to describe a thing- in Pocock's writing,
the thing called language- you have not only "performed upon yourself' but
on others; "you are inescapably perceived as hav~ngperformed in ways
defined by others' acceptances of the words you have used" @. 34).
So-called "female" readers of Pocock's performance may ask him to take
responsibility for the commitment that 1s hls utterance. Of course this
"penetration of [our] consc~ousnesswithout [our] consent" may be Pocock's
self-proclaimed "attempt to determine what [our] response will be"; but it
may also have unintended consequences. Pocock would contain the ambiguity
of meanings, of those consequences, in the meta-theoretical claim that
speaking subjects must first "consent" to their violation, to specific symbolic
structures, if they are to contest the act of "verbal rape." But must we accept
those "shared conventions" that presumably give us the right to dispute
the violence of the author's linguistic performance? What happens to the
conversation if we question fundamental conventions, such as "men" and
"women," that make verbal rape much more than a figure of speech?
"The English language contains no thlrd-person pronoun without gender,"
writes Pocock In what amounts to an apologetic footnote. "In writing of the
authors m the history of political discourse, most of whom were men, I am
unembarrassed to find myself using the masculine pronoun." However, he
qualifies, "when it comes to the authorsof that history, a host of distinguished
names occurs to remlnd me that it might just as well have been the femin~ne."'~For
some curious reason, this reader of Pocock's utterance is re-
Zerilli / WOMEN AND POLITICALTHEORYDISCOURSE 267
mlnded of Freud's remarks that the scholarly discussion of femininity has
been made possible by the work of "several of our excellent women colleagues."
However, those colleagues who had accused the male analysts of
be~ngunable "to overcome certaln deeply rooted prejudices against what was
fem~nme"lost thelr critical author~tywhen it came to scholars like Freud:
"We. . standing on the ground of bisexuality ...had only to say: 'Thls does
not apply to you. You're the exception; on thls point you're more masculine
than ferninir~e'."~'
Now some of us "women" who would pursue (what Pocock citing
Oakeshott calls) "the ~ntlmatlonsof a tradit~onof behavior" (p. 43) might
contest the claim that "most" of the speakers "in the history of political
discourse" were men (Whose hlstory? Who are the exceptions?). If Pocock's
rlddle IS "Why weren't there more women In the history of political discourse?",
the feminist question IS "Why don't we know more about them?"
At least part of the answer can be found In the political "conversation" as an
academic fiction. Further, we women scholars who are graciously lncluded
as "authors of that history" rnlght also refuse the claim that we are "more
masculine than feminine." We mlght wonder if we can, in fact, occupy
positions In language, such as the masculine third-person pronoun, without
eraslng ourselves as subjects. We might worry about the hidden implications
of a pluralist political conversation that repeats our absence as anclent
members of the clubwhile affirmingour scholarly contributionsand our rlght
as scholars to read and to comment on the privileged texts-that is, of course,
if we agree to accept Pocock's "shared conventions" or Wolin's "tradition of
discourse." For what, one might ask, does it mean for the modern "female"
conversant to affirm her status as a speaking subject by claiming the masculine
positlon in a conversation? What can ~tmean for a woman who is a
political theorist to participate in the political conversation by inserting
herself as neuter in a dialogue that has been described as a rape?
To articulate a theory of the "language polity" that fails to take account of
sexual difference in its enunciation and address repeats the infamousapology
of Evi-Strauss to his feminlst crltics that women are not only slgns but sign
p r o d ~ c e r s . ~ ~This indifference to lssues of gender, speech, and power elides
the klnd of cntical questions that mlght be posed about metaphors, like verbal
rape, and about the "equal access" of men and women to institutionalized
structures of a language that "has no third person pronoun without gender."
In contrast to Pocock, feminists have not been content to apologize for
oppressive linguistic traditions but have asked what the latter can tell us about
language as a political means of communication.
268 POLITICALTHEORY 1May 1991
THE CONVERSATIONAND CULTURALAUTHORITY
"In the midst of an abstract discussion," wrote Simone de Beauvoir in The
Second Sex, "it is vexing to hear a man say: 'You think thus and so because
you are a woman.' " However, she added,
I know that my only defense 1s to reply:"I th~nkthus and so because it its true," hereby
removtng my subjective selffrom the argument. It would be out of the question to reply:
"And you th~nkthe contrary because you are a man," for it 1s understood that belng a
man 1s no peculiarity.8y
Beauvoir's "defense," in this passage, articulates the paradoxical relationship
In which feminists stand to discourse: being and not being a "woman." If the
woman who would speak IS effectively silenced by belng shut up in her
femininity, the defensive claim to "truth" merely repeats the effacement of
self by affirmlng the masculine claim to the un~versal.~~
However, contends Monlque Wittig, Beauvolr's efforts to avold sliding
Into the masculine shifter by affirmlng "I am a w~man,"~'no matter how
ambiguously stated, grants the condition of both "being" and "not being" a
"woman" on androcentric terms. For the "woman" that qualifies the "I" in
such a statement must dissolve the claim of the speaker to her subjectivity.
"Language as whole gives everybody the same power of becoming an
absolute subject,"92writes Wittig. "But gender, as an element of language,
works upon this ontolog~calfact to annul it as far as women are concerned
and corresponds to a constant attempt to strip them o f . ..their subjectivity."y3From
Wittig's position, then, women must question the "what goes
without saylng": the "shared conventions" of language (Pocock) wh~ch
assume as ontolog~calthe socially and discursively constructed categoriesof
"men" and "women."y4 For in the context of a conversation, Wittig would
argue, those conventions do not glve to women "the freedom that comes of
the prlor consent to the form" that another's verbal act takes. Grounded as
they are in the exchange of women and heterosexist notions of the subject,
such conventions result in verbal and physical rape."
If Wittig's own strategy for contesting oppressive symbolic structures of
language seems to be an unnecessarily negative one (i.e., a refusal to repeat
the terms woman/women), Bakhtin's dialoglc theory of language suggests at
least one reason why these words-as well as those of "public" and "private"
-pose such difficulties for feminists. "The word in language is half
someoneelse's," writes Bakhtin; it doesnot "exist in a neutral and impersonal
language ...but rather it exlsts In other people's mouths, in other people's
Zerilli I WOMEN AND POLITICALTHEORY DISCOURSE 269
contexts, servingother people's intentions: it is from there that one must take
the word, and make it one's own." Yet "not all words for just anyone submit
easily to this appropriation. many words stubbornly resist, others remain
alien, sound forelgn In the mouth of the one who appropriated them and who
now speaks them."96
Following Bakhtin, then, one could argue that the problem of the conversation
for feminists who must use historically oppressivewords which resist
a more critical transfiguration of then meaning (madwoman, public/private)
is far more complex than Pocock's "language polity" makes it out to be and
far more politically continge~tthan psychoanalytic approaches to language
suggest. Because language "is populated -overpopulated -with the mentions
of other^,"^' no word is neutral and all words bear the traces of meanings
given to them by others who use words to conceptualize "specific world
views, each characterized by its own meanings and val~es."~'
Yet if words, at times, "stubbornly res~st"the critical appropnation of those
who would challenge the social relations words represent and re-present as
necessary, even natural, so too does the dialogic nature of language resist the
"centnpetal" (unifying) forces of such "unity In diversity" notions asWolin's
"tradition of discourse." For "the centr~petalforces of the life of language,
embodied in a 'unitary language,'" writes Bakhtin, "operate in the midst of
heteroglossia."* The latter, which refers to the "centrifugal, stratifying
forces" of language, IS possible because there is no language (as Lacan would
have it) but only languagesand that at any given moment in history, the dream
of a common, univocal, unitary, or official language is being challenged by
the so-called "low-genres," be they Bakhtin's examples of the everyday and
theatrical speech of street fairs, of clowns, and of irreverent literary forms
(satire)"' or contemporary feminist discourses and challenges to the
canon. As Peter Stallybrass and AUon White (following the insights of
Bakhtin) have written: "Discurslve space is never completely ~ndependent
of socialplace and the formation of new kindsof speech can be traced through
the emergence of new public sites of discourse and the transformation of old
ones.""" And feminism, as a political movement, IS engaged In precisely that
hnd of transformation of discursive space, of what counts as public discourse.
Bakhtin's notion of heteroglossia, of "speech diversity," invites political
theonsts to affirm that "all languages7'-including that of their cherished
conversation -are "masks" and that "no language .. [can] claim to be an
authentic, incontestable face."Io2But in contrast to pluralistic dreams of "the
conversation" -which actually work to contain conflict within an agreed on
(by whom?) field of meanlng- Bakhtin's dialoglc theory insists that because
language, as languages, is always "ideologically saturated" and the site of
270 POLITICAL THEORY 1May 1991
political struggle, those speakers who wear the mask of common sense, of
reason, of a "tradition of discourse" oftentimes elide responsibility for their
own meanings, their own interests. Posing as reverential sages, they pretend
to defend the virtue of political theory, the Integrity of the conversation, but
what they are, in fact, doing when they police meaning is defending their
own cultural authority for which they refuse to make themselves accountable.'03
The mask of tradition as conversation, then, is but a subterfuge, an
artifice invented by an academic interpretive community to evade the kinds
of questions that feminists pose when they state that the personal is political.
Feminists err, however, when they seek recognition in the official languageof
any academiccommunity; instead, they might play out the dissonant
and affirmative possibilities which inhere in the alien role assigned them in
the univocal fantasy. Feminists cannot reclazmbut must transform a political
conversation that inscribes their absence as women and as speakingsubjects.
However, if feminism's site(s) of discourse is not the study, neither is it the
house, for feminists refuse the "public/pr~vate"distinction which the Machiavellian
metaphor of conversation both assumes and constructs as the
condition of speaking for masculine subjects. And when feminists refuse
to wear any one mask (mother or citizen) or to search for a core self behind
the mask (female or male), and when they refuse to speak any one discourse
(that of the "maternal" or that of "the tradition"), their voices will effect such
transformation.'@'
If political theonsts wonder why they should listen to these volces,
Bakhtin suggests at least one answer. In contrast to the "authoritative discourse"
that Wolin's "historically minded theorist" has made of the study,
feminist discourse, when it refuses to adopt a priestly stance, offers the
possibility of what Bakhtin calls an "internally persuasive discourse": "When
someone else's ideological discourse is internally persuasive for us and
acknowledged by us, entirely different possibilities open up.'"'' Unlike the
"authoritative word," writes Bakhtin, the "internally persuasive word" is not
"static;" its "unfinishedness and the inexhaustability of our further dialogic
interaction with it" make this word political.
In conclusion, then, we might say that when feminists open the door to
the study, the conversation might, at times, sound the same, but it cannot be
the same. Indeed, the feminist masquerade may create a scene of subversive
dimensions. And she who knows that the "tradition of discourse" is but one
mask, one mode of speaking, occupies neither the bisexual terrain of scholarship
granted by Freud nor the sexually indifferent and presumably equal
position of speaking in the "language polity" of Pocock; instead, the theatrical
presentation of self in traditional costume questions the very naturalness
Zerilli / WOMEN AND POLITICALTHEORY DISCOURSE 271
of the male self that makes an exclusive claim to political language. Within
its "fantastical encasements," to borrow Terry Castle's phrase,106this self is
a fiction whose "authenticity" may turn out to be nothing but a disguise that
protects its fragile identity; that is, when what was taken to be a regal, natural
pr~vilegeis mocked by a simple question: "Halt! Who goes there?"107
NOTES
1.Virgln~aWoolf,A Room of One'sOwn (New York: Harcourt,Brace &World, 1929),169.
2. Quoted rn Sheldon Wolin, Politics and Viton: Continuity and Innovation ur Political
Thought(Boston: Little, Brown,1960),22-23. Seealso,Niccolb Mach~avelli,"Letter to Venon,"
December 10, 1513; The Prrnce and Other Works, edited by Allan H. Gilbert (New York:
Hendncks, 19411,242.
3. The quotation IS from Michtle Richman, "Sex and Signs: The Language of French
Femrn~stCriticrsm," LanguageandSfyle 13(Fall 1980):62-80,at 63. Seealso,GeorgesBataille,
Vrrtons ofExcess, edited by Allan Stoekl (Minneapolis: Un~versityof Minnesota Press, 1985),
esp. 'The Notion of Expenditure," 116-29.
4. Norman 0. Brown, Love's Body (New York: Random House, 1965),34.
5. Wolin, Politics and Viton, 22.
6. Sheldon Wolin, "Political Theory asa Vocation,"Amertcan PoliticalSctence Revrew 63,
no. 4 (December 1969):1062-82,at 1077.1am rndebted to Joe Romancefor porntingout Wolin's
use of a confess~onalword, "initiation," to describe the "vocation" of political theorists. Thls
gender-laden metaphor, I will argue, suggests more than the distinction that Wolin explicitly
draws between the conceptually r~chapproaches of political theonsts and the h~storrcally
~mpover~shedmethodolog~esof political sc~entists.
7. Ibld., 23.
8. Wolin, Politics and Viton, 23.
9. Ibld., 22.
10. 1 examlne the follow~ngessays: Mary Dietz, "Citizenshrp with a Fem~mstFace: The
Problem with MaternalTh~nk~ng,"Political Theory 13(February 1985): 19-37;and Jean Bethke
Elshtarn, "Antigone's Daughters," Democracy 2 (1982): 46-59. Although Elshtan's article,
"Reflections on War and Political Discourse: Realism, Just War, and Femrusm In a Nuclear
Age," appeared with Dietz's In the same Issue of Polirical Theory, I have chosen to focus on
Elshta~n's1982 essay, largely because Dietz's essay takes the latter as a departure pornt for her
critique of maternal thnkrng.
11.Teresa De Lauretis,Alice Doesn 'I: Femrnrrm, Semiotics, Cinema (Bloommgton: Indiana
Unrversity Press, 1984), 56.
12. Jean Bethke Elshtan, "Antigone's Daughters," Democracy 2 (1982): 46-59.
13. Dietz, "Citizenshrp with a Femrnrst Face," 29-30.
14. Jean Bethke Elshta~n,"Femn~stDiscourse and Its Discontents: Language, Power, and
Meaning," rn Femrnrrt Theory, edited by M. Rosaldo and B. Gelpr (Ch~cago:Unrversity of
Chrcago Press, 1981), 130.
15. Dietz, "Citizensh~pwith a Femrnrst Face," 28-29.
272 POLITICAL THEORY / May 1991
16. Luce Ir~garay,Speculum of he O~herWoman,translated by Gillian G. Gill (Ithaca, NY:
Cornell Unlversity Press, 1985), 2 17.
17. Ibld., 216, 217.
18. Ibtd, 217.
19. Ib~d.,218, 219.
20. Freud's patriarchal elaboration of the "superego" that "results from the sham death of
deslre for the mother," writes Ir~garay,replaces "a mother" with the "idea of the mother," with
the "maternal deal". "Better to transform the real 'natural' mother Into an ldeal of the maternal
function whlch no one can ever take away from you" (Speculum, 81).
21. lr~garayrefers here to that murder whlch Freud forgets In h ~ sTotem and Taboo:a murder,
as Margarete Homans writes In Bearrng the Word(Ch~cago:Unlversity of Ch~cagoPress, 1986),
whlch "is necessary to c~vilization."In Ir~garay'svlew, Homans continues, "thls more anclent
murder 1s represented by the myth of the murder of Clytemnestra by her son In revenge for
the murder of Agamemnon" (p. 2). See Ir~garay,Le Corps-a-corpsaver la mere (Ottowa: Plelne
Lune, 1981), 15-16. Chr~stineFroula makes a slmilar polnt ln her essay "When Eve Reads
Milton: Undolng the Canonical Economy," Cr~ticalInqurry 10(December 1983): 321-47, 337.
But the murdered mother mlght also be Antigone's own mother and Oedipus's mother-wife:
Jocasta. For on learning of her crlme, Jocasta hanged herself, and Oedipus put out h ~ seyes and
left Thebes with h ~ sdaughter Antigone.
22. Ib~d.,220. See the following section for a discuss~onof the "self-same."
23. Irlgaray,Speculum, 218. On the same polnt, see Ir~garay,"Questions," In ThrsSer Wh~ch
IsNot One, translated by Catherine Porter (Ithaca, NY: Comell Unlversity Press, 1985). 155.
24. Ir~garay'sreading here 1s ~nterpretedby Josette Feral, "Antigone or the Irony of the
Tribe," translated by Alice Jardine and Tom Gora, Diacritics 8 (Fall 1978): 2-14, at 2.
25. Elshtan, "Antigone's Daughters," 55.
26. Dietz, "Citizensh~pwith a Femlnlst Face," 29.
27. Ir~garay,Speculum, 218.
28. Dietz, "Citizensh~pwith a Femlnlst Face," 31.
29. Ir~garay,Speculum, 220.
30. For example, In her otherwise compelling and powerful critique of maternal thlnklng,
Dietz finds herself in the curlous position of defending the political theory fathers agalnst soclal
femln~stslike Elshtaln: Arlstotle, who was "without question, wrong to restrlct women to
the household," but whose vlew "forms no necessary part of hls argument concerning politics
and citizensh~p,"and Sophocles, who, "despite h ~ svlews on women's silence, [is] such a
vlstonary tragedian." "Citizenshlp with a Femlnlst Face," 29
31. ~ i c h a e lOakeshott, The Vorceof Poetry ~nthe Conversation ofMankind (London: Bowes
& Bowes, 1959), 11.
32. Ib~d.,15.
33. Ibld.
34. Mitze Myers, "Reform or Rum: 'A Revolution In Female Manners,"'Studies ~nEighteenthCentury
Culture 11 (1982): 199-216, at 202.
35. Ib~d.
36. "The word In livlng conversation 1s directly, blatantly, or~entedtoward a future answerword:
it provokes and answer, antiapates it and structures itself In the answer's direction.
Formlng itself in an atmosphere of the already spoken, the word IS at the same time determined
by that whlch has not yet been sa~dbut whlch IS needed and ln fact antic~patedby the answering
word. Such IS the situation In any livlng dialogue," writes Mikhail M. Bakhtin, "Discourse In
the Novel," In The Dialogrc Imagrnation, translated by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holqu~st
(Austin: Un~versityof Texas Press, 1981), 280.
Zerilli 1WOMEN AND POLITICALTHEORY DISCOURSE 273
37. Bakhtin, "Discourse rn the Novel," 353.
38. Christine Froula, "When Eve Reads Milton: Undolng the Canonical Economy," Critical
Inqurry 10 (December 1983): 321-47, at 343.
39. Ibld.
40. The child, who when it throws and retneves a cotton reel and utters, respectively, Fort!
then Do! (therehere), writes Lacan, plays and replays "the presence and absence of persons and
thrngs." Sigmund Freud, "Beyond the Pleasure Prlnc~ple,"(1920) Standard Edition, 18:14-17;
Jacques Lacan, "Function and Field of Speech and Ianguage," ~ c r i t s ,translated by Alan
Sherldan (New York: Norton, 1977). 65, 109 n. 46.
41. Lacan, "Function and Field," 65.
42. Teny Eagleton, Literary Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983). 166.
43. Ibtd., 67.
44. Ib~d.As Jacqueline Rose writes rn "Femrn~neSexuality: Jacques Lacan and the ecole
freudienne," Semality Ln the Field of V i ~ o n(London and New York: Verso, 1986). "Iacan's
position should be read agalnst two alternative emphases: on the actual behavror of the mother
alone (adequacy or Inadequacy) and on the literally present or absent father (hrs tdealisation
andior defic~ency)"@. 63). Lacan writes that he will introduce the expressron "paternal
metaphor" to "make the link between the Name of the Father, In so far as he can at times be
mlsslng, and the father whose effective presence 1s not always necessary for hrm not to be
mlsslng" (quoted In Rose, "Femlo~neSexuality," 62).
45. The "phallus forb~dsthe child the satisfaction of hts or her own des~re,wh~ch1sthe deslre
to be the exclusive deslre of the mother" (Lacan quoted In Rose, "Femlnlne Sexuality," 61)
46. Ann Rosalind Jones, "Julia Krrsteva on Femlnlnity: The Llmits of a Semlotic Politics,"
Femrnlst Rev~ew18 (Winter 1984): 56-73, at 57. See also Jaques Lacan, "The Signification of
the Phallus," ~ c r i t s ,281-91.
47. "For 'in the beglnnlng' the vaglna IS foreclosed-a derealized reality. It 1s replaced by
another reality whlch 1s 'percelved' as absent-someth~ng one 'knows' should be there: the
pen~s,"writes Domlnlck IaCapra, "History and Psychoanalys~s,"In The Tr~al(s)ufPsychoana1ysrs,
edited by Frangolse Mellzer (Ch~cago:Unrversity of Chrcago Press, 1987), 9-39, at 28.
48. Ib~d.,29.
49. Ir~garay,Speculum, 55. Psychoanalytic notions, like castration, says Ir~garay,are part of
male unrversalism: "Since the recognition of a 'specific' female sexuality would challenge the
monopoly on value held by the masculine sex alone, In the final analys~sby the father, what
meanrng could the Oedipus complex have In a symbolic system other than patriarchy?" Ir~garay,
"The Power of Discourse," 68-85, at 73.
50. Ir~garay,Speculum, 54.
51. Ibld., 50.
52. "Woman" here refers to "The Womann- "There 1s no such thlng as The woman, where
the definite article stands for the unrversal." "The woman can only be written with the The
crossed out." Jacques Lacan, "God and the Joulssance of The Woman," Femrnrne Sexuality,
edited by Jacqueline Rose and Juliet Mitchell (New York: Macmillan, 1982), 142.
53. Woman's "nothrng to be seen" IS a nothrng "that mrght cause the ultimate destruction,
the splintering, the break In therr systems of "presence," of "re-presentation" and "representation";
a hole In men's srgnifylng economy" that threatens "the process of meamg, domrnated
by the phallus- that master s~gnifier."Irrgaray, Speculum, 50.
54. Irtgaray, "The Power of Discourse," 68-85, at 76.
55. Mary E. Hawkesworth, "Femtn~stRhetonc: Discourses on the Male Monopoly of
Thought," Political Theory 16 (August 1988): 444-67, at 450.
274 POLITICAL THEORY / May 1991
56. Wolin, Politics and V i ~ o n ,17. Page references will be cited m the text.
57. Ir~garay,Speculum,47.
58. Ib~d.,50.
59. The phrase, whlch 1sWhitehead's, reads as follows: "Each mode of cons~deration1sa
sort of searchlight eluc~datingsome of the facts and retreating the remainder Into an omitted
background" (quoted In Wolin, Politics and Vls~on,22).
60. Sheldon Wolin, "Political Theory as a Vocation," 1078.
61. LaCapra, "History and Psychoanalysrs," 29.
62.Thrs IS taken fromJane Gallop, TheDaughter'sSeduction(Ithaca,NY:CornellUnlversity
Press, 1982). 58.
63. I am Indebted to Pat Moloney for polnting me to the Oxford English Dictiomry on the
meanrngs of "speculate."
64. Irrgaray quoted In Mon~quePlaza, " 'Phallomorph~cPower' and the Psychology of
'Woman'," Ideology and Comc~ousness4 (Fall 1978): 5-36, at 11.
65. See LaCapra, "History and Psychoanalys~s,"28.
66. Ingaray, Speculum,210.
67. Be it Rousseau's "disorder of women" or Macb~avelli'sForhma.
68. Ingaray, Speculum,74-75.
69. Claude UVI-Strauss,TheElementary StructuresofKinshp, translated by Bell, Sturmes,
and Needham (Boston: Beacon, 1969); Carole Pateman, The Sexual Contract (Stanford, CA:
Stanford Unlversity Press, 1988). For Ingaray's dixuss~onof the exchange of women, see
"Women on the Market" and "Commoditiesamong Themselves," both In ThrrSex Wh~chIsNot
One, 170-91, 192-97, respectively.
70. Hence Ir~garaylnslsts on the need for developing alternative modes of speaklng such as
parler femme: modes whlch seek to subvert structures In whrch women like words are nothlng
more than tokens to he exchanged.
71. Ingaray, "The Power of Discourse," 78.
72. Parler femme 1s Ingaray's alternative mode of spealung whlch, however, cannot be
defined. Woman's sexual pleasure, she contends, 1smultiple, plural, and so 1sher style: "She IS
~ndefinitelyIn herself." Her language, In whlch "she sets off in all directions," leaves" 'hlm' to
discern thecoherence of any meaning."Parlerfemme connects with mlmlcry In that both subvert
logic, reason, and the code with whlch men would order the heterogeneous sonal world and the
heterogeneity of femalejoulssance (see Thrr Sex Whrch Is Not One, 28-31, 78-79). Needless to
say, both strategies are h~ghlycontroversial and the subject of intense debate within femlnlsm.
73. Ingaray, "The Power of Discourse," 79.
74. Ibrd., 78.
75. Irlgaray, "Questions," 144.
76. Plaza, " 'Phallomorph~cPower'," 25. Ingaray's alternative mode of speaklng, Plaza
accuses, retuns the oppressive notion of asexual div~s~onwhrch depends on the very naturalistic
criter~ashe condemned In her critique of Western culture's rdea of Woman. "It 1s as abus~veto
define a woman by a man as to pmtulate her radical difference from hlm" @. 26).
77. J.G.A. Pocock, "Verhalizmg a Political Act: Towards a Politics of Speech," Political
Theory 1(February 1973): 27-45, at 42. Further page references to ths essay will be cited In the
text.
78. J.G.A. Pocock, Krtue, Commerce, and History (Cambndge: Cambndge Unlversity
Press), 19.
79. Pocock notes that our language IS not our own, that "each of us speakswith many voles,
like a tribal shaman In whom ancestor ghmts are all talking at once" ("Verbalizlng," 31).
Zerilli 1WOMEN AND POLlTlCALTHEORY DISCOURSE 275
However, thls 1s about as close as he comes to any suggestion that there m~ghtbe unconscious
forces at work when we speak.
80. "I prefer my politics verbalized," he writes-quite simply because "an act of power
verbalized . 1san act of power mediated and mitigated" @. 34).
81. Quoted In Eagleton, Literary Theory, 119.
82. See Jacques Demda, "Signature Event Context," Glyph, vol. 1 (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1977), 172-97;John R. Searle, "Reiterating the Differences," Glyph,
vol. 1, 198-208; and Demda's response to Searle, ''Lmited Inc. abc," Glyph, vol. 2 (1977).
162-254.
83. Ib~d.,119.
84. Chnstopher Noms, Derrufa(Cambndge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987). Demda
writes: "What 1s limited by iterability 1snot Intentionality but the character of bemg conscious
or present to itself' ("L~mitedInc.," 249, quoted In Noms, 179).In emphasulng the recoverable
nature of ~ntentions,moreover, speech act theorists also conceal the relations of power In
interpretive communities whlch authonze the speech of some and deauthonze that of others.
85. It excludes the effects of that unconsc~ousby stressing the possibility of recovering (if
~ncomplately)the Intentions of a speakerlauthor, and by emphasulng the need to "get h ~ s
meaning right" (Dernda, "Llmited Inc.," 213). See, for example, Pocock's quarrel with psychoanalytic
readings of Edmund Burke's RefIectiom In Virtue,Commerce, and History.
86. Pocock, Wrtue, Commerce, and History, 7.
87. Sigmund Freud, "Fem~n~nity,"New InlroductoryLectures on Psychoanalysrr, 103.
88. Quoted in MichCleRichman, "Sex and Signs: The Language of French Critic~sm,"63-64.
But th~sresponse, argues Richman, assumes that when women speak, they emit the very same
slgns as men.
89. Simone de Beauvo~r,TheSecondSex, translated by H. M. Parshley (New York: Vintage,
1952), xviii.
90. For Beauvolr, however, the solution to ths dilemma 1snot parler femme quite slmply
because there can be no unambiguous volclng of the "female self," of the heretofore unrepresented
"femlnlne" position In language, because there can be no gendered self that does not split,
once agaln, the "female" subject who speaks Into self and Other.
91. Ib~d.,xvii.
92. Monlque Wittig, "The Mark of Gender," Feminrst Issues 5 (Fall 1985): 3-12, at 6.
93. Ibld., 6.
94. lmplicitly refuting the critique of Ingaray, Wittig's theory of language is one whlch
refuses to Identify the category of the subject with the masculine. For women, however, to make
a clalm to subjectivity through language reqlures that they negotiate the particular and the
un~versalIn a far more radical way than that suggested by Beauvou: They must use language In
ways that "un~versalizethe po~ntof vlew of a group condemned to belng a particular."
95. For the symbolic structures that reproduce "sex" as a "fetish," as a "myth~cformation,"
are connected to the soclal structures that perpetuate the sexual dommation of women. See
Mon~queWittig, "The Trojan Horse," FemrnrrtIssues 4 (Fall 1984): 45-49.
96. Bakhtin continues, "They cannot be ass~milatedInto h ~ scontext and fall out of it; it 1sas
if they put themselves in quotation marks agalnst the will of the speaker" ("Discourse In the
Novel," 294).
97. Ib~d.,294.
98. Ibld., 292.
99. Ib~d.,271.
100.lb~d.,esp. 272-73.
276 POLITICAL THEORY 1May 1991
101. Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Tranrgressron (Ithaca,
NY: Cornell Unlversity Press, 1986), 80.
102. Ib~d.,273. On the uses of language as masks, see Harold Alderman, Nietzschek Gifi
(Athens: Ohlo University Press, 1977).
103.Alderman makes a similarpolnt aboutthe subtext whlch allowsfor the creative response
of the reader. Without thls, we have only "the book In itself' myth whlch 1sperpetuated through
the exegesls so der~dedby Nietuche. Th~smyth 1s "a mask which absolves the reader from
taklng full and explicit responsibility for h ~ sexeges~s"(Nietzschek Gifi, 12).
104. On thls polnt, see Helene Keyssar, Fem~nrstTheatre (New York: Grove, 1985). The
"emphas~son transformations enr~chesand clarifies the femlnlst slogan 'the personal IS political'.
Drama that p~votson recognition scenes, where the goal IS to stand still and 'know thyself'
IS essentially conservative" @. xlv).
105. rbld., 345.
106.Terry Castle, Masquerade and Civilization: The Carntvalesque In Eighteenth-Century
English Culture and Fiction (Stanford, CA: Stanford Unlversity Press, 1986),4.
107. The phrase IS Nietzsche's In h ~ sThe Use and Abuse of History, translated by Adr~an
Collins (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1979),30.
Ltrda M. G. Zerilli IS an Assrstant Professor m the Department of Political Sclence at
Rutgers Un~versity.She haspublished intheareas offem~ntstpoliticaltheory,continental
philosophy, and Frenchfemtnut theory.