"Brother Isom"/Speculum of the Other Woman/This Sex Which Is Not One

(Originally discussed on 4/28/20)

I hope everyone had a good week. Next week, we will meet on Tuesday at our usual time of 7pm EST on Zoom to discuss Hortense Spillers' 1975 short story "Brother Isom" and a couple of optional chapters selected from the work of the French feminist philosopher Luce Irigaray. Let's read the chapter "A Very Black Sexuality" and the brief sub-section "Free Association on Onanism" from Irigaray's first book, Speculum of the Other Woman (1974) and the chapters "Women on the Market" and "Commodities among Themselves" from her second book, This Sex Which Is Not One (1977). 

Irigaray developed a bit of a reputation as the "bad girl" of psychoanalysis in France during the 1970s while teaching and completing her second doctoral degree under the guidance of psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan at the Freudian School of Paris (Irigaray holds PhDs in philosophy and linguistics, which explains her interest in analyzing the concept of grammar as both a linguistic and social method of organization). Irigaray published her second dissertation as the monograph Speculum of the Other Woman in 1974; shortly thereafter, she was expelled from the Freudian School on the grounds that her work did not fulfill the program's vision of developing a "psychoanalytic science." This excuse has long been rejected by followers of Irigaray, who instead argue that Lacan expelled Irigaray for her explicitly feminist critiques of the masculine and patriarchal grammars which structure psychoanalytic thought. Irigaray might even say that the term "psychoanalytic science" is redundant because the lexicons of psychoanalysis and science are designed to confirm and reproduce the singular authority of a masculine speaking subject-- the "laws" which govern these disciplines are inextricable from the Law or Name of the Father. 

Speculum is a difficult, witty, and necessarily poetic text because of Irigaray's strategy of mimesis. Irigaray describes mimesis as the opportunity for women to "try to recover the place of her exploitation by discourse, without allowing herself to simply be reduced to it." Irigaray chooses the metaphor of the speculum not only because of its gynecological function as a method of peering into a woman's body, but also because of its translation as "mirror" in Latin.  Irigaray's play on the ideas of the speculum and the mirror is also the basis of her major critique of Lacan's articulation of the mirror stage. For Lacan, the mirror stage occurs for infants in front of a literal mirror. Subjects (initially as infants) must come to identify with the image of themselves they see in the mirror in order to begin the processes of Ego formation and language development. The "I" that infants use to represent themselves in writing and speech is determined by the moment of confrontation between subject and image in the mirror stage.

Irigaray's intervention is the idea that the "mirror" is actually woman, initially in the form of the mother and subsequently in the form of girlfriends, lovers, wives, etc. The unspoken assumption in Freud and Lacan's psychoanalytic language that the infant is always male (and heterosexual, and cis) is that which obscures woman's role as the back of the mirror or the screen upon which man's understanding of himself is always projected. For Irigaray, individuals do not come into their gendered selves or written/spoken "I" in a vacuum-- rather, the self is constructed in relation to others according to the dominant hierarchy or grammar of a given society. Thus, it would be impossible for women within a patriarchal society to articulate or imagine an "I" which is separate from woman's exploitation as a mirror or prop for the male Ego. Structurally, Speculum represents Irigaray's attempt to get out of this bind through her use of mimesis. She confronts and identifies her various "Fathers"--such as Aristotle, Plato, Hegel, and Freud-- by using their own words against themselves. She demonstrates that femininity and woman are "black holes" or interstices which must remain unknown and unspeakable in order for these men's arguments to make "sense." This unspeakability of the feminine within language also limits women's capacity to describe and experience desire within their own bodies. If language as we know it is designed to legitimate the power, desires, interests, and needs of men, it would be "irrational" or dangerous to develop a method of speaking/writing which questions not only the invisibility of women's desire in language, but also the seamless connection between the Phallus, the penis, the Father, masculinity, and authority. 

In This Sex Which Is Not One, Irigaray performs a similar mimetic critique of other "Fathers," including Lacan and Karl Marx. Irigaray's work in this text demonstrates how the intellectual frameworks or grammars of what we perceive to be some of the most radical schools of thought depend upon the reduction of women to commodities whose value only exists in relation to the men who wish to exchange them (an example of this is the transfer of women from the domain of their fathers to the household of their husbands). Furthermore, as commodities, it is difficult or even impossible for women to communicate with each other because each woman "lacks specific qualities of her own," the only qualities in her possession being those inscribed upon her by men. This dynamic can be compared to Spillers' notion of the "hieroglyphics of the flesh" from her 1987 essay, "Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe," which builds upon her questioning of the Father in "Interstices: A Small Drama of Words."

However, as we will discover next week, Spillers' interest in questioning the Father's authority and system of inheritance took root early in her career, particularly during the 10 years after the informal end of the Civil Rights Movement in 1968 following the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King. As early as 1971, Spillers published essays which analyzed the grammar and rhetoric of Black Southern sermons generally and the speeches of King specifically. She observed that the "grammar" of the Black church service (with its amen corner, male pastor at the pulpit, and rounds of call and response between the preacher and the audience) replicated methods of cultural transmission within Black communities. The male leaders/preachers learned and inherited rhetorical strategies of manipulating the language of the Bible to mold their Black audiences into subjects which would reflect and reproduce the preacher's position (as well as the secular Black man's position) at the top of the social and familial hierarchy. But where did that Christian language and the surnames of these Black male leaders come from? Who is their Father and why does he haunt us still? Spillers attempts, in a very surreptitious way, to answer this question in "Brother Isom," which she published in the popular Black women's magazine Essence in 1975. I would argue that Spillers performs a style of mimetic critique of Black male Civil Rights and religious readers that is analogous to Irigaray's critique of Freud, Lacan, Marx, etc. As you read, pay close attention to how the layers of the story unfold--how does the narrative of the dead patriarch Timothy Isom differ in the obituary/funeral sermon vs in the memories expressed by his wife, Miss Bertell? How does "Brother" Timothy Isom use his limited capacity to name to curate a narrative of his social success and phallic power? How and why do the other men in the story justify Isom's behavior, even in death? Why does Miss Bertell direct her rage toward Isom's lovers rather than toward her husband? And what roles do literacy and the legacy of American slavery play in all of this? 

I've attached copies all the Spillers and Irigaray reading to this email. The Speculum reading is pages 65-80 and the This Sex reading is pages 170-197. Let me know if you have trouble accessing the readings. 

Link to "Brother Isom": https://www.scribd.com/document/267152507/Hortense-Spillers-Brother-Isom