Review: Women and Madness: The Critical Phallacy

Reviewed Work(s): Women and Madness by Phyllis Chesler: Speculum de L'Autre Femme
by Luce Irigaray: Adieu [Le Colonel Chabert, suivi de el Verdugo, Adieu, et du
Requisitionnaire] by Balzac and Patrick Berthier
Review by: Shoshana Felman
Source: Diacritics , Winter, 1975, Vol. 5, No. 4 (Winter, 1975), pp. 2-10
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press

Stable URL: http://www.jstor.com/stable/464958

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 WOMEN AND MADNESS:
THE CRITICAL PHALLACY
SHOSHANA FELMAN
Shoshana Felman teaches French at Phyllis Chesler
Yale. Author of a book on Stendhal, WOMEN AND MADNESS
she is currently completing a book on
madness and literature. New York: Avon Books, 1973

Luce Irigaray
SPECULUM DE L'AUTRE FEMME
Silence gives the proper grace to
women.
Paris: Minuit, 1974
Sophocles, Ajax
Balzac
Dalila: In argument with men a wom-
an ever ADIEU [LE COLONEL CHABERT, suivi de EL
Goes by the worse, whatever
be her cause. VERDUGO, ADIEU, et du REQUISITIONNAIRE]
Edited
Samson: For want of words, no doubt, and annotated by Patrick Berthier. Preface by
or lack of breath!
Pierre Gascan
Paris:
Milton, Samson Agonistes Gallimard/Folio, 1974

I. WOMAN AS MADNESS Is it by chance that hysteria (significantly derived, as is well known, from
Greek word for "uterus") was originally conceived as an exclusively female
plaint, as the lot and prerogative of women? And is it by chance that even t
between women and madness, sociological statistics establish a privileged re
and a definite correlation? "Women," writes Phyllis Chesler, in her book W
and Madness, "Women more than men, and in greater numbers than their existe
in the general population would predict, are involved in 'careers' as psych
patients" [p. xxii]. How is this sociological fact to be analyzed and interpre
What is the nature of the relationship it implies between women and mad
Supported by extensive documentation, Phyllis Chesler proposes a confront
between objective data and the subjective testimony of women: laced with
voices of women speaking in the first person-literary excerpts from the
and autobiographies of woman writers, and word-for-word interviews with
psychiatric patients-the book derives and disputes a "female psychology"
tioned by an oppressive and patriarchal male culture. "It is clear that for a w
to be healthy she must 'adjust' to and accept the behavioral norms for her se
though these kinds of behavior are generally regarded as less socially desira
The ethic of mental health is masculine in our culture "[pp. 68-69]. "The sin
non of 'feminine' identity in patriarchal society is the violation of the incest tab
i.e., the initial and continued 'preference' for Daddy, followed by the app
falling in love and/or marrying of powerful father figures" [p. 138]. From her
family upbringing throughout her subsequent development, the social role a
to the woman is that of serving an image, authoritative and central, of m
woman is first and foremost a daughter/ a mother/ a wife. "What we con
'madness', whether it appears in women or in men, is either the acting out
devalued female role or the total or partial rejection of one's sex-role stereo
[p. 56].
In contrast to the critical tendency currently in fashion in Europe, through
which a certain French circle has allied itself philosophically with the controversial
indictments of the English "anti-psychiatry" movement, Phyllis Chesler, although
protesting in turn against psychiatry as such, in no way seeks to bestow upon mad-
ness the romanticized glamor of political protest and of social and cultural contesta-
tion: "It has never been my intention to romanticize madness, or to confuse it with
political or cultural revolution" [p. xxiii]. Depressed and terrified women are not
about to seize the means of production and reproduction: quite the opposite of
rebellion, madness is the impasse confronting those whom cultural conditioning has
deprived of the very means of protest or self-affirmation. Far from being a form of
contestation, "mental illness" is a request for help, a manifestation both of cultural
impotence and of political castration. This socially defined help-needing and help-
seeking behavior is itself part of female conditioning, ideologically inherent in the
behavioral pattern and in the dependent and helpless role assigned to the woman

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as such.
It is not the material, social, and psychological female condition, but rather
the very status of womanhood in Western theoretical discourse which concerns
Luce Irigaray in her recently published book, Speculum de I'autre femme. In con-
trast to Phyllis Chesler, Luce Irigaray interrogates not the empirical voice of women
and their subjective testimony, but the key theoretical writings of men-fundamen-
tal texts in philosophy and in psychoanalysis-which, in one way or another, in-
volve the concept of femininity. Her study focuses on the text of Freud's (fictive) lec-
ture entitled "On Femininity" and on the feminine metaphors in Plato's myth of the
Cave. A psychoanalyst herself, Luce Irigaray adopts the traditional feminist critique
of the male-centered orientation and of the anti-feminine bias in psychoanalytical
theory; but her elaboration and consolidation of these classical feminist arguments
is derived from the current philosophical methods of thinking developed in France
by Jacques Derrida and others in their attempt to work out a general critical "de-
construction" of Western metaphysics. According to Derrida's radicalization of the
Nietzschean and Heideggerian critiques of traditional philosophy, Western meta-
physics is based on the totalitarian principle of so-called "logocentrism," that is, on
the repressive predominance of "logos" over "writing," on the privileged status
of the present and the consequent valorization of presence. This presence-to-itself
of a center (given the name of Origin, God, Truth, Being, or Reason) centralizes the
world through the authority of its self-presence and subordinates to itself, in an
agonistic, hierarchical manner, all the other cognizable elements of the same episte-
mological (or ontological) system. Thus, the metaphysical logic of dichotomous
oppositions which dominates philosophical thought (Presence/Absence, Being/Noth-
ingness, Truth/Error, Same/Other, Identity/Difference, etc.) is, in fact, a subtle
mechanism of hierarchization which assures the unique valorization of the "positive"
pole (that is, of a single term) and, consequently, the repressive subordination of
all "negativity," the mastery of difference as such. It is by thus examining the mere
illusion of duality and the repressive way in which the polarity Masculine/Feminine
functions in Western thought so as to privilege a unique term, that Luce Irigaray
proceeds to develop her critical argument. Theoretically subordinated to the con-
cept of masculinity, the woman is viewed by the man as his opposite, that is to say,
as his other, the negative of the positive, and not, in her own right, different, other,
Otherness itself. Throughout the Platonic metaphors which will come to dominate
Western discourse and to act as a vehicle for meaning, Luce Irigaray points out a
latent design to exclude the woman from the production of speech, since the wom-
an, and the Other as such, are philosophically subjugated to the logical principle
of Identity-Identity being conceived as a solely masculine sameness, apprehended
as male self-presence and consciousness-to-itself. The possibility of a thought which
would neither spring from nor return to this masculine Sameness is simply unthink-
able. Plato's text thus establishes the repressive systematization of the logic of
identity: the privilege of "oneness," of the reproduction of likeness, of the repeti-
tion of sameness, of literal meaning, analogy, symmetry, dichotomous oppositions,
teleological projects.
Freud, who for the first time freed thought from a certain conception of the
present and of presence-to-oneself, whose notions of deferred action, of the un-
conscious, of the death instinct and of the repetition compulsion radically
undermine the classical logic of identity, remains, nevertheless, himself a prisoner
of philosophy when he determines the nature of sexual difference in function of
the a priori of sameness, that is, of the male phallus. Female sexuality is thus de-
scribed as an absence (of the masculine presence), as lack, incompleteness, de-
ficiency, envy with respect to the only sexuality in which value resides. This sym-
metrical conception of otherness is a theoretical blindness to the woman's actual
Difference, which is currently asserting itself, and asserting precisely its claim to a
new kind of logic and a new type of theoretical reasoning.
A question could be raised: if "the woman" is precisely the Other of any conceiv-
able Western theoretical locus of speech, how can the woman as such be speaking in
Engraving
this book? Who is speaking here, and who is asserting the otherness of the woman? If, after Pierre-Albert Brouillet
La Lecon clinique du Dr. Charcot, 1887
as Luce Irigaray suggests, the woman's silence, or the repression of her capacity to
speak, are constitutive of philosophy and of theoretical discourse as such, from what
theoretical locus is Luce Irigaray herself speaking in order to develop her own theoret-
ical discourse about the woman's exclusion? Is she speaking the language of men, or
the silence of women? Is she speaking as a woman, or in place of the (silent) woman,
for the woman, in the name of the woman? Is it enough to be a woman in order
to speak as a woman? Is "speaking as a woman" a fact determined by some biolog-
ical condition or by a strategic, theoretical position, by anatomy1 or by culture?
1 Freud has thus pronounced his fa-
What if "speaking as a woman" were not a simple "natural" fact, could notverdict
mous be on women: "Anatomy is
taker for granted? With the increasing number of women and men alike destiny."
who are But this is precisely the fo-
currently choosing to share in the rising fortune of female misfortune, itcushas
of the
be-feminist contestation.

3
diacritics/winter 1975
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 come all too easy to be a speaker "for women." But what does "speaking for
women" imply? What is "to speak in the name of the woman"? What, in a gen-
eral manner, does "speech in the name of" mean? Is it not a precise repetition of
the oppressive gesture of representation, by means of which, throughout the his-
tory of logos, man has reduced the woman to the status of a silent and subordinate
object, to something inherently spoken for? To "speak in the name of," to "speak
for," could thus mean, once again, to appropriate and to silence. This important
theoretical question about the status of its own discourse and its own "representa-
tion" of women, with which any feminist thought has to cope, is not thought out
by Luce Irigaray, and thus remains the blind spot of her critical undertaking.
In a sense, the difficulty involved in any feminist enterprise is illustrated by
the complementarity, but also by the incompatibility, of the two feminist studies
which we have just examined: the works of Phyllis Chesler and Luce Irigaray. The
interest of Chesler's book, its overwhelming persuasive power as an outstanding
clinical document, lies in the fact that it does not speak for women: it lets women
speak for themselves. Phyllis Chesler accomplishes thus the first symbolical step
of the feminist revolution: she gives voice to the woman. But she can only do so
in a pragmatic, empirical way. As a result, the book's theoretical contribution, al-
though substantial, does not go beyond the classical feminist thought concerning
the socio-sexual victimization of women. On the other side of the coin. Irigaray's
book has the merit of perceiving the problem on a theoretical level, of trying to
think the feminist question through to its logical ends, reminding us that women's
oppression exists not only in the material, practical organization of economic, social,
medical, and political structures, but also in the very foundations of logos, reason-
ing, and articulation-in the subtle linguistic procedures and in the logical processes
through which meaning itself is produced. It is not clear, however, that statement
and utterance here coincide so as to establish actual feminine difference, not only
on the thematic, but also on the rhetorical level: although the otherness of the
woman is here fully assumed as the subject of the statement, it is not certain
whether that otherness can be taken for granted as positively occupying the un-
thought-out, problematical locus from which the statement is being uttered.
In the current attempt at a radical questioning and a general "deconstruction"
of the whole range of cultural codes, feminism encounters the major theoretical
challenge of all contemporary thought. The problem, in fact, is common to the re-
valuation of madness as well as to the contention of women: how can one speak
from the place of the Other? How can the woman be thought about outside of the
Masculine/Feminine framework, other than as opposed to man, without being sub-
ordinated to a primordial masculine model? How can madness, in a similar way,
be conceived outside of its dichotomous opposition to sanity, without being sub-
jugated to reason? How can difference as such be thought out as non-subordinate
to identify? In other words, how can thought break away from the logic of polar
oppositions?
In light of these theoretical challenges, and in keeping with the feminist ques-
tioning of psychoanalytical and philosophical discourse, it could be instructive to
examine the ideological effects of the very production of meaning in .the language
of literature and in its critical exegesis. We therefore propose here to undertake a
reading of a text by Balzac which deals with the woman as well as with madness
and to examine the way in which this text, and its portrayal of feminine madness,
has been traditionally perceived and commented upon. The text-entitled Adieu-
is a short story first published in 1830, and later included by Balzac in the volume
of Philosophical Studies of the Comedie humaine.

II. THE REALISTIC INVISIBLE The story is divided into three parts. The first describes a mysterious domain
into which have inadvertently wandered two lost hunters: Philippe de Sucy, a for-
mer colonel, and his friend d'Albon, a magistrate. Anxious to find out where they
are, they turn to two women, the only human beings in the vicinity, but their ques-
tions meet only silence: one of the women, Genevieve, turns out to a be a deaf-
mute, and the other, an aphasic madwoman whose entire vocabulary consists of the
word "adieu." On hearing this word, Philippe faints, recognizing in the madwoman
his former mistress, Countess Stephanie de Vandieres, who had accompanied him
to Russia during the Napoleonic Wars but whom he has not seen again since their
separation on the banks of the Berezina River and whose trace he has ever since
been unable to recover.
The second part is a flashback to the war episode. Among the co
masses of the retreating French army, Stephanie and Philippe are fightin
unbearable cold, inhuman exhaustion and debilitating hunger, in the mid
snowy plains. Philippe heroically shields Stephanie in the hope of crossi
Berezina and of thus reaching and having her reach the safety of the oth

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free from the Russian threat. But when it turns out that only two places are left on
the life raft, Philippe leaves them to Stephanie and her husband, the Count of
Vandieres, sacrificing himself for the latter. The Count, however, never reaches the
other side: in a violent jolt during the crossing, he is swept overboard and killed.
Stephanie cries out to Philippe, "Adieu!": it is to be her last lucid word before
she loses her reason. For two years thereafter, she continues to be dragged along
by the army, the plaything of wretched riffraff. Mad and cast off like an animal, she
is discovered one day after the end of the war by her uncle, an elderly doctor, who
takes her in and sees to her needs.
The third part describes the combined efforts of the two men-the doctor
having been joined by Philippe-to save and to cure Stephanie. Stephanie, on see-
ing Philippe, fails to recognize him: her continuous repetition of the word "adieu"
implies no understanding and bears no relation to conscious memory. At the sight
of the "stranger" (Philippe), she runs away like a frightened animal. Following the
advice of the doctor, Philippe learns how to "tame" Stephanie by giving her sugar
cubes, thus accustoming her to his presence. Philippe still hopes that Stephanie
will some day recognize him. Driven to despair, however, by the long wait, Philippe
decides to hasten Stephanie's recognition of him by subjecting her to a psycho-
drama designed to restore her memory: he artificially creates a replica of the Rus-
sian plains and of the Berezina River; using peasants disguised as soldiers, he the-
oretically reconstructs and replays before the madwoman's eyes the exact scene of
their wartime separation. Stephanie is thus indeed cured: overwhelmed, she rec-
ognizes Philippe, smiles to him, repeats once again "adieu"; but at that very instant
she dies.
A current pocket edition of this amazing story (recently published by Gal-
limard in the "Folio" collection) insures, in two different ways, its critical presenta-
tion: the text is preceded and followed by pedagogical commentary-a Preface by
Pierre Gascar and a "Notice" by Philippe Berthier-which are supposed to "ex-
plain" it and "situate" its importance. It is striking that, of the three chapters which
constitute this short story-the discovery of the madwoman in the mysterious domain,
the war scene, and the scene of the cure-both commentators discuss only one:
the chapter depicting the war. The main plot, which consists of the story of a
woman's madness (episodes I and III), is somehow completely neglected in favor
of the subplot (episode Il), a historical narrative whose function is to describe the
events which preceded and occasioned the madness. The "explication" thus ex-
cludes two things: the madness and the woman. Viewed through the eyes of the
two academic critics, Adieu becomes a story about the suffering of men in which
the real protagonists are none but "the soldiers of the Grand Army." The Preface
indeed makes a great point of praising Balzac for "the realism, unprecedented in
' Quotations from the "Preface," the
tLe history of literature, with which the war is here depicted" [p. 9]2: "by showing
"Notice" and from Balzac's text are
us, in Adieu, the soldiers of the Grand Army haggard, half dead with hunger and
my translations; page numbers refer
cold, draped in rags, surging toward the pontoon bridge thrown across the Bere- to the Gallimard/Folio edition; in all
zina, he [Balzac] deals with the myth of military grandeur [...] a blow whose re-
quoted passages, italics mine unless
percussions extend well beyond the post-Napoleonic era" [pp. 10-11]. This sup- otherwise indicated.
posedly "objective" reading of what is called Balzac's "realism" in fact screens out
and disguises an ideological pattern of textual amputations and cuts, in which only
a third of the text is brought to the reader's attention. "Indeed," concedes the
Preface's author, "these scenes do not take up much room in [...] Adieu, where
most of the action occurs subsequent to the historic events which they symbolize.
But they suffice to give the war its true countenance" [p. 12]. As for the author of
the "Notice," he does not even seek to justify the arbitrary, disproportionate cuts
underlying his "explication"-by putting forward a truth "which suffices": "the
true countenance of the war." In line with the academic tradition of "selected pas-
sages," he proposes, simply and "innocently," literally to cut up the text, to extract
the second chapter, and truly materialize the operation of ideological extirpation
with a serene pedagogical confidence: "the second chapter, which can be isolated
from the work as was the story of Goguelat from the Country Doctor (cf. our edi-
tion of this novel in Folio) marks the appearance in Balzac's work of the theme
of the wartime disappearance of an officer who comes back many years later" [p.
266]. The story is here explicitly summed up as being exclusively that of a man:
that of "the wartime disappearance of an officer who comes back many years later."
It is, therefore, by no means surprising to see the author of the "Notice" taken
aback by the fact-to him incomprehensible-that in its second version this text
could have been, as he puts it, "oddly entitled" A Woman's Duty [p. 265]. Evident
in an abandoned title, but in the text neither seen nor heard, the woman does not
belong to the realm of the "explicable"; her claim to commentary is solely an inex-
plicable piece of knowledge, an unusable article of erudition.
It is just in this manner that the institution of literary criticism pronounces its
expert, professional discourse, without even noticing the conspicuousness of its

diacritics/Winter 1975 5

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 t_>t^].t$FI.<$!.category
ofg,.c.iChabert
[.rs.c]u.l.tffee.h:^agnrlidoofn.contai
i.ng,.shi."reali.dSs.te.non.whipesnvihasnoae,mlncswih.i"set[u'hiandspernatural
. he.mai.nr.c.dedthatl.unea.ts.hivs][eof.Iieln.so.fenot.tthements
.h".er.se.probl
a.ss.fooo.-cal.n[u]."rIe.tamsl.nite]sodadAdinotrtime"secs,ewuwhendoeortpernatural
,alhils.ryoe.tsnot[,i]t"arehdegreatxaatilsBai"tes:yrlz"Whisvea"idealcd'asentsohbydortofldee"nsColitsadtptoeiaceurinowirenelseust'to[h,;]
flagrant misogyrRy. To the sociological sexism of the educational system corresponds,
in this case, the naive, though by no means innocent, sexism of the exegetical sys-
tem of literary analysis, of the academic and pedagogical fabrication of "literary"
and critical discourse. By guiding the reader, through the extirpation of "explicable"
facts, to the "correct" perception, to the literal; "proper," so-called "objective" level
of textual interpretation, academic criticism conditions the very norms of "legibil-
ity." Madness and women, however, turn out to be the two outcasts of the estab-
lishment of readability. An ideological conditioning of literary and critical discourse,
a political orientation of reading thus affirms itself, not so much through the nega-
tive treatment of women as through their total neglect, their pure and simple omis-
sion. This critical oversight, which appears as a systematic blindness to significant
facts, functions as a censorship mechanism, as a symbolic eradication of women
from the world of literature. It is therefore essential to examine the theoretical
presuppositions which permit and sanction this kind of blindness.
We have seen that what is invoked so as to authorize the arbitrariness of the
curtailment of the text is the critical concept of Balzac's "realism": the realism of
war, "unprecedented"- as the Preface puts it --"in the history of literature." In the
context of this manly realism, the woman is relegated to non-existence, since she is
said to partake of the "unreal": "Beside the Berezina [...] Stephanie's carriage,
blocked among hordes of French soldiers savage with hunger and shock, becomes
the unwonted, almost unreal elements in which the whole absurdity of the situation
bursts out" [pp. 11-12]. What, then, is this "realism" the critic here ascribes to
Balzac, if not the assumption, not shared by the text, that what happens to men is
# more important, and/or more "real," than what happens to women ? A subtle
r \ boundary line, which gives itself as a "natural frontier," is thus traced, in the critical
vocabulary, between the realm of the "real" and that of the "unreal," between the

Sl. 7zx psychic phenomena, with Stephanie's madness, and even to parapsychic phenom-

XF , , devote infinitely more space to the supernatural, to the presence of the invisible

" he most striking realism, the marvellous is in fact only represented by the state of
semi-unreality which the main characters attain through the horror of their ordeal.
\ We here come across [ ] the romantic conception of the transfiguring power of
; . l rsuffering" [p. 14-17]. The "supernatural," as everyone knows, cannot be rationally
} - ' l explained and hence should not detain us and does not call for thought. Flattened
t , | out and banalized into the "edifying conclusion" [p. 17] of the beneficent power

i § t since it is but a "state of semi-unreality." Realism thus postulates a conception of

it t 1 "nature" and of "reality" which seeks to establish itself, tautologically, as "natural"
and as "real." Nothing, indeed, is less neutral than this apparent neutrality; nothing is
_:ws > less "natural" than this frontier which is supposed to separate "the real" from "the un-
_ : F real" and which in fact delimits only the inside and the outside of an ideological

=R I and an outside which is exclusive of madness and women, i.e., the "supernatural"
_J and the "unreal." And since the supernatural is linked, as the critic would have it,
_ V to "the presence of the invisible" [p. 16], it comes as no surprise to find the woman
predestined to be, precisely, the realistic invisible, that which realism as such is in-
herently unable to see.
Edvard Munch
The Lunatic, 1908-09 It is the whole field of a problematic, which defines and structures the invisible as
Munch-Museet, Oslo its definite outside- excluded from the domain of visibility and defined as excluded
by the existence and the structure of the problematic field itself. [...] The invisible
is defined by the visible as its invisible, its prohibited sight [. . .]. To see this invisible
[...] requires something quite different from a sharp or attentive eye, it takes an
educated eye, a revised, renewed way of looking, itself produced by the effect of a
"change of terrain" reflected back upon the act of seeing. [Louis Althusser, Lire le
Capital, I (Paris: Maspero, 1968), pp. 26-28; translation mine; Althusser's italics]

With a "revised" way of looking, "educated" by the "change of terrain"

brought about by the feminist interrogation, let us now attempt to reread Balzac's
text and to reinterpret its relation to the woman as well as to madness.

111. @'SHE? WHO?" From the very beginning the woman in this text stands out as a problem. The
opening pages present the reader with a series of abstract questions concerning a
female identity: the two lost hunters are trying to situate themselves, to ascertain

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the identity of the woman they have just glimpsed in the unknown place into which Man is the hunter, woman is
they have wandered: "Where the devil are we? [...]/She, who? [...]/Where are his game.
we? What is that house? Whose is it? Who are you? Do you live here? [...]/But
??, Tennyson, The Princess
who is this lady? [...]/She? Who? [...]" [pp. 148, 156, 159, 164].
The reader, too, cannot get his bearings: deluged with questions, at the same
time deprived systematically of information, not really knowing who is speaking,
much less about whom, he is in turn as lost in the text as the two protagonists are
in geographical space. The text thus originates in the loss of the very conditions
of localization and identification, in a general state of confusion from which, in an
almost anonymous manner, a recurrent question emerges: "She? Who?" The
feminine pronoun preceding any proper denomination, the ambiguous question
preceding any informative clarification, this preliminary inquiry takes on an abstractly
emphatic and allegorical character, and seems to situate from the start the textual
problematic within a systematic search for the nature of feminine identity. From the
beginning, however, the question reaches a dead end: addressed to the women
themselves, the query meets only silence, since both women here are deprived of
the ability to speak. Addressed to others, the question obtains only distant and
hypothetical answers: "But who is this lady? [...]/lt is presumed that she comes
from Moulins [...]; she is said to be mad [...] I wouldn't guarantee you the truth
of these rumors" [p. 164].
The allegorical question "She? Who?" will thus remain unanswered. The text,
nonetheless, will play out the question to its logical end, so as to show in what way
it precludes any answer, in what way the question is set as a trap. The very lack of
the answer will then write itself as a different question, through which the original
question will find itself dislocated, radically shifted and transformed.
"She? Who?" The women cannot respond: mad, they do not understand the
men's questions. Nor do the rational men understand the senseless words of the
women. But the women, though mad, understand each other. The doctor thus
interprets the friendship that seems to unite Stephanie and the peasant Genevieve:
"Here [...] she has found another creature she seems to get along with. It's an idiot
peasant-woman [...]. My niece and this poor girl are in a way united by the invis-
ible chain of their common destiny, and by the feeling that causes their madness"
[p. 196]. Understanding occurs in this text only on one side or the other of the
boundary line which, separating silence from speech, distinguishes madness from
reason. It is nonetheless striking that the dichotomy Reason/Madness, as well as
Speech/Silence, exactly coincides in this text with the dichotomy Men/Women.
Women as such are associated both with madness and with silence, whereas men
are identified with prerogatives of discourse and of reason. In fact, men appear
not only as the possessors, but also as the dispensers, of reason, which they can at
will mete out to-or take away from-others. While Philippe and the doctor under-
take to "restore Stephanie's reason," the magistrate, on the other hand, brags: "If
you should ever bring a suit to court, I would make you lose it, even if reason were
a hundred per cent on your side" [p. 150]. The three men in the story in fact sym-
bolically represent-by virtue of their professions: magistrate, doctor, soldier-the
power to act upon others' reason, in the name of the law, of health or of force.
With respect to the woman's madness, man's reason reacts by trying to
appropriate it: in the first place, by claiming to "understand" it, but with an external
understanding which reduces the madwoman to a spectacle, to an object which
can be known and possessed. "Go on, Sir, leave her alone," the doctor recom-
mends to Philippe, "I know how to live with the dear little creature; I understand
her madness, I spy upon her gestures, I am in on her secrets" [pp. 208-09]. To "spy
on" in order to "know"; to "tame" in order to "cure": such are the methods used
by masculine reason so as to objectify feminine madness, thereby mastering it. If
the madwoman is throughout the story seen as and compared to an animal, this
pervasive metaphor tells us less about Stephanie's delirium than about the logic of
her therapists. For the object is precisely to capture the animal and to tame it. Thus
we see the symbolic import of the initial hunting scene. A metaphorical parody of
the episode of the war and of its martial logic ("'Come on, deputy, forward!
Double time! Speed up [...] march over the ruts [...] Come on, march! [...] If you
sit down, you're lost'" [pp. 147, 151]), the opening scene of the hunt already sym-
bolically prefigures Philippe's attitude toward Stephanie: "Come on," cries Philippe
from the very first, not yet knowing whom he is talking about, but integrating as a
matter of course the woman into his hunter's mentality, "Come on, let's run after
the white and black lady! Forward!" [p. 157]. But the hunter's chase will here be
but the measure of the flight of his prey.
If masculine reason thus constitutes a scheme to capture and master, indeed,
metaphorically rape the woman, by the same token, St6phanie's madness is not
contingent on but directly related to her femininity: consisting, precisely, in its loss.
Several times Philippe, in fact, explicitly defines Stephanie's madness as the loss of

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 her womanhood. When the doctor advises him to tame her by feeding he
of sugar, Philippe sadly answers: "When she was a woman, she had no ta
sweets" [p. 202]. And again, in a burst of sorrow, Philippe cries: "I die a lit
every day, every minute! My love is too great! I could bear everything if
her madness, she had kept some semblance of femininity" [p. 208]. Madness, in
words, is precisely what makes a woman not a woman. But what is a "w
Woman is a "name," denied in fact to Genevieve in the same way as it is
to Stephanie: "Then a woman, if such a name can be applied to the undefin
ing who got up from under the bushes, pulled on the cow by its rope"
"Woman" is consequently a "definable being"-chained to a "definition" itse
plying a model, a definition commanded by a logic of resemblance. Even in
scene, Stephanie had already lost her "femininity." "[When] all rolled around h
she really resembled nothing [...] Was this that charming woman, the glor
lover, the queen of the Parisian ballrooms? Alas! even the eyes of her most
friend could perceive nothing feminine left in that heap of linens and rags" [p
If a "woman" is strictly, exactly, "what resembles a woman" ("she really re
nothing [...] nothing feminine left"), it becomes apparent that'"femininity" is
less a "natural" category than a rhetorical one, analogical and metaphorical:
phorical category which is explicitly bound, as perceived by Philippe, to a
Max Beckmann sexual stereotype, to the "definable" role of the mistress-"the queen of th
Crawling Woman, 1946 sian ballrooms." Of course, the "queen" here implies a king; the literal, p
Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art meaning of metaphorical femininity, paradoxically enough, turns out to b
culine property: the "queen of the Parisian ballrooms," "that charming wo
above all "The glory of her lover." "Woman," in other words, is the exac
phorical measure of the narcissism of man.
The Masculine thus turns out to be the universal equivalent of the opp
Masculine/Feminine. It is insofar as Masculinity conditions Femininity as
versal equivalent, as what determines and measures its value, that the text
adox can be created according to which the woman is "madness," while
same time "madness" is the very "absence of womanhood." The woman i
ness" to the extent that she is Other, different from man. But "madness
"absence of womanhood" to the extent that "womanhood" is what precis
sembles the Masculine universal equivalent, in the polar division of sexual
so, the woman is "madness" since the woman is difference; but "madness"
woman" since madness is the lack of resemblance. What the narcissistic ec
of the Masculine universal equivalent tries to eliminate, under the label "m
is nothing other than feminine difference.

IV. THE THERAPEUTIC FALLACY Such is the male narcissistic principle on which the system of reason, wit
therapeutic ambition, is based. For, to "restore Stephanie's reason" signifi
cisely, to reinstate her "femininity": to make her recognize man, the "love
"glory" she ought to be. "I'm going to the Bons-Hommes," says Philippe
her, speak to her, cure her [...] Do you think the poor woman would be
hear me and not recover her reason?" [p. 197]. In Philippe's mind, "to rec
reason" becomes'synonymous with "to hear me." "The cure of the m
writes Michel Foucault, "is in the reason of the other-his own reason be
the very truth of his madness" [Histoire de la folie a I'age classique (Par
mard, 1972), p. 540; translation mine]. Stephanie's cure is in Philippe's rea
"recovery" of her reason must thus necessarily entail an act of recognition

"She doesn't recognize me," cried the colonel in despair.

"Stephanie! it's Philippe, your Philippe, Philippe!" [pp. 200-0
"Her; not to recognize me, and to run away from me," rep
the colonel. [p. 201]
"My love," he said, ardently kissing the countess' hands, "I
Philippe." "Come," he added, [...] "Philippe is not dead, he i
here, you are sitting on his lap. You are my Stephanie, and
your Philippe." "Adieu," she said, "adieu." [p. 207]

Stephanie's recovery of her "reason," the restoration of her femininity as wel

her identity, depends then, in Philippe's eyes, on her specular recognition
on her reflection of his own name and of his own identity. If the question of
identity remains in the text unanswered, it is simply because it is never truly
in the guise of asking, "She? Who?", Philippe is in fact always asking "I?
a false question, the answer to which he believes he knows in advance: "
lippe." The question concerning the woman is thereby transformed into
tion of a guarantee for men, a question through which nothing is questioned,

8
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sole function is to insure the validity of its predefined answer: "You are my Steph-
anie." The use of the possessive adjective makes explicit the act of appropriation
focused here on the proper names. But it is from Stephanie's own mouth that Phi-
lippe must obtain his proper name, his guarantee of the propriety of his own iden-
tity, and of hers: Stephanie = Philippe, "You are my Stephanie, and I am your
Philippe." In Philippe's eyes, Stephanie is viewed above all as an object, whose role
is to insure, by an interplay of reflections, his own self-sufficiency as a "subject," to
serve as a mediator in his own specular relationship with himself. What Philippe
pursues in the woman is not a face, but a mirror, which, reflecting his image, will
thereby acknowledge his narcissistic self-image. "Women," writes Virginia Woolf,
"have served all these centuries as looking-glasses possessing the magic and de-
licious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size." Philippe, as
it turns out, desires not knowledge of Stephanie herself but her acknowledgement
of him: his therapeutic design is to restore her not to cognition, but to recognition.
To this demand for recognition and for the restoration of identity through lan-
guage, through the authority of proper names, Stephanie opposes, in the figure
of her madness, the dislocation of any transitive, communicative language, of
"propriety" as such, of any correspondence or transparency joining "names" to
"things," the blind opacity of a lost signifier unmatched by any signified, the pure
recurrent difference of a word detached from both its meaning and its context.

"Adieu," she said in a soft harmonious voice, but whose melody,

impatiently perceived by the expectant hunters, seemed to divulge
not the slightest feeling or the least idea. [p. 163]
"Adieu, adieu, adieu!" she said, without her soul's conferring any
perceptible inflection upon the word. [p. 200]

To this automatic repetition of senselessness and difference, Philippe in turn

will oppose another type of repetition designed precisely to restore resemblance
and identity: in order to cure Stephanie, in order to restore to her demented, dis-
located language its nominative and communicative function, he decides to re-
produce the primal scene of the "adieu" and thus to re-present theatrically the er-
rant signifier's lost significance, its proper signifie. Without her knowledge, Steph-
anie will literally be forced to play herself, to return to her "proper" role. Through
the theatrical set-up, everything will end up making sense: and, with all difference
thus erased, re-presentation necessarily will bring about the desired re-cognition.

The baron [de Sucy] had, inspired by a dream, conceived a plan to restore the
countess' reason. [...] He devoted the rest of the autumn to the preparation of this
s This suicidal murder is, in fact, a
immense enterprise. A small river flowed through his park, where in, the winter, it
repetition, not only of Philippe's mili-
flooded an extensive marsh which resembled [...] the one running along the right
tary logic and his attitude throughout
bank of the Berezina. The village of Satou, set on a hill, added the final touch to the war scene, but also of a specific
put this scene of horror in its frame [...]. The colonel gathered a troop of workers previous moment in his relationship
to dig a canal which would represent the voracious river. [...] Thus aided by his with Stephanie. Well before the story's
memory, Philippe succeeded in copying in his park the riverbank where General end, Philippe had already been on the
Elbe had built his bridges. [...] The colonel assembled pieces of debris similar to point of killing Stephanie, and him-
what his fellow sufferers had used to construct their raft. He ravaged his park, in self with her, having, in a moment of
an effort to complete the illusion on which he pinned his last hopes. [...] In short, despair, given up the hope of her
ever recognizing him. The doctor,
he had forgotten nothing that could reproduce the most horrible of all scenes, and
seeing through Philippe's intentions,
he reached his goal. Toward the beginning of December, when the snow had had then saved his niece with a per-
blanketed the earth with a white coat, he recognized the Berezina. This false Russia spicacious lie, playing precisely on the
was of such appalling truth that several of his comrades recognized the scene of specular illusion of the proper name:
their former sufferings. Monsieur de Sucy kept the secret of this tragic representa- "'You do not know then,' went on
tion. [pp. 209-10] the doctor coldly, hiding his horror,
'that last night in her sleep she said,
The cure succeeds. However, so as to fulfill perfectly her "Woman's Duty," to play "Philippe!"' 'She named me, cried
the baron, letting his pistols drop" [p.
her role correctly in this theater of the identical, to recognize specularly and reflect 2061.
perfectly Philippe's "identity," Stephanie herself must disappear: she has to die as
Other, as a "subject" in her own right. The tragic outcome of the story is inevitable, 4Here again, the ambiguous logic of
inscribed as it is from the outset in the very logic of representation inherent in the the "savior," in its tragic and heroic
narcissism, is prefigured by the war
therapeutic project. Stephanie will die; Philippe will subsequently commit suicide.
scene. Convinced of his good reason,
If, as ambiguous as it is, the cure turns out to be a murder, this murder, in its narcis-
Philippe, characteristically, imposes it,
sistic dialectic, is necessarily suicidal,3 since, killing Stephanie in the very enterprise
by force, on others, so as to "save"
of "saving" her,4 it is also his own image that Philippe strikes in the mirror. them; but ironically and paradoxical-
Through this paradoxical and disconcerting ending, the text subverts and dis- ly, he always saves them in spite of
locates the logic of representation which it has dramatized through Philippe's en- themselves: "'Let us save her in spite
deavor and his failure. Literature thus breaks away from pure representation: when of herself!' cried Philippe, sweeping
transparency and meaning, "reason" and "representation" are regained, when mad- up the countess" [p. 1821.

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 ness ends, so does the text itself. Literature, in this way, seems to indicate it
puissance to dominate or to recuperate the madness of the signifier from
it speaks, its radical incapacity to master its own signifying repetition, to "tame"
own linguistic difference, to "represent" identity or truth. Like madness and
representation, literature can signify but not make sense.
Once again, it is amazing to what extent academic criticism, completely
aware of the text's irony, can remain blind to what the text says about itself
quite striking to observe to what extent the logic of the unsuspecting "realistic" c
can reproduce, one after the other, all of Philippe's delusions, which the text
structs and puts in question. Like Philippe, the "realistic" critic seeks representati
tries, by means of fiction, to reproduce "the real thing," to reconstruct, min
and exhaustively, the exact historical Berezina scene. Like Philippe, the "real
critic is haunted by an obsession with proper names-identity and refer
sharing the same nostalgia for a transparent, transitive, communicative lang
where everything possesses, unequivocally, a single meaning which can be c
quently mastered and made clear, where each name "represents" a thing, w
each signifier, properly and adequately, corresponds both to a signified and
referent. On the critical as well as on the literary stage, the same attempt is
out to appropriate the signifier and to reduce its differential repetition; we s
same endeavor to do away with difference, the same policing of identities, th
design of mastery, of sense-control. For the "realistic" critic, as for Philippe
readable is designed as a stimulus not for knowledge and cognition, but for
knowledgement and re-cognition, not for the production of a question, but f
reproduction of a foreknown answer-delimited within a pre-existing, pre-de
horizon, where the "truth" to be discovered is reduced to the natural status o
simple given, immediately perceptible, directly "representable" through the t
intelligible medium of transparent language. Exactly in the same way as Phil
the commentators of Adieu are in turn taken in by the illusory security of a
ularly structured act of recognition. Balzac's text, which applies as much to
"realistic" critic as to Philippe, can itself be read as a kind of preface to its
Preface, as an ironic reading of its own academic reading.
For, what Philippe misrecognizes in his "realistic" recognition of the Ber
is, paradoxically enough, the real: the real not as a convergence of reflections,
effect of mirroring focalization, but as a radically de-centering resistance; th
as, precisely, Other, the unrepresentable as such, the ex-centric residue whic
specular relationship of vision cannot embrace.
Along with the illusions of Philippe, the "realistic" critic thus repeats, in tur
his allegorical act of murder, his obliteration of the Other: the critic also, in
own way, kills the woman, while killing, at the same time, the question of th
and the text as a question.
But, here again, as in Philippe's case, the murder is incorporated in an en
prise which can be seen as "therapeutic." For in obliterating difference, in er
from the text the disconcerting and ex-centric features of a woman's madnes
critic seeks to "normalize" the text, to banish and eradicate all trace of violenc
and anguish, of scandal or insanity, making the text a reassuring, closed retreat w
balance no upheaval can upset, where no convulsion is of any consequence. "
drive these phantoms firmly back into their epoch, to close it upon them, by mea
of a historical narrative, this seems to have been the writer's intent" [Preface,
By reducing the story to a recognition scheme, familiar, snug and canny, the crit
like Philippe, "cures" the text, precisely of that which in it is incurably and radic
uncanny.

Felicien Rops
From this paradoxical encounter between literature's critical irony and the un-
La Femme et la folie critical na'vete of its critics, from this confrontation in which Balzac's text itself
dominant le monde seems to be an ironic reading of its own future reading, the question arises: how
From L'Oeuvre grave et lithographieshould we read? How can a reading lead to something other than recognition,
de F.R. par Maurice Exteens, Paris, "normalization" and "cure"? How can the critical project, in other words, he de-
1928. tached from the therapeutic projection?
This crucial theoretical question, which undermines the foundations of tradi-
tional thought and whose importance the feminist writings have helped to bring
out, pinpoints at the same time the difficulty of the woman's position in today's
critical discourse. If, in our culture, the woman is by definition associated with mad-
ness, her problem is how to break out of this (cultural) imposition of madness
without taking up the critical and therapeutic positions of reason: how to avoid
speaking both as mad and as not mad. The challenge facing the woman today is
nothing less than to "re-invent" language, to re-learn how to speak: to speak not
only against, but outside of the specular phallogocentric structure, to establish a
discourse the status of which would no longer be defined by the phallacy of mascu-
line meaning. An old saying would thereby be given new life: today more than
ever, changing our minds-changing the mind-is a woman's prerogative.

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