In her essay "Così Fan Tutti" analyst, linguist, and feminist Luce Irigaray takes up (and takes on) the western, psychoanalytic tradition by which woman is said to speak, to mean, only with palpable difficulty. If, as psychoanalysis instructs us, gender difference is born "in" language, and if, as common sense allows us, the law of language has been "for centuries" "prescribed" (87) by men, then the truly signifying female subject would seem an improbability. Notes Irigaray (in the words of Jacques Lacan): "There is no woman who is not excluded by the nature of things, which is the nature of words..." (ibid.)

It requires no great leap to turn from the laws of language to the language of law, from the logos that is the symbol of meaning to the logic that is its repository. Man's word bespeaks –and begets–the law that keeps woman outside the scheme of things. Subjected to the circular ratiocination through which meaning is standardized by a compulsory logic that has already determined it as such, woman presumably rests beneath and beyond "the real," inscribed within it only as the lack that guarantees its adequacy.

For Irigaray, the answer to the conundrum of the woman who seeks to mean lies in creatively seizing and appropriating her place of lawlessness. Woman's lack, marked by her tenuous relationship to the process of signification, is reimagined as excess; absence becomes omnipresence, quiescence—chaos: "Is it already getting around— [...] that women diffuse themselves according to modalities scarcely compatible with the framework of the ruling symbolics [?] Which doesn't happen without causing some turbulence, we might even say some whirlwinds..." (106)

When I reflect upon my own experiences as a woman who speaks to mean and means to write, I recall having effected a few whirlwinds of my own. When a teenager, I was cautioned to modify my prose style, whose program could best be characterized by a profusion of adjectives (often grouped in threes), an obsession with the semicolon, and an insistence upon never using a short word when a longer one would do. Today, as I aspire to signify within the parameters of the academy, my stabs at meaning are still deemed provocations by those I ask to interpret them. My textual analyses, for example, are sometimes called "dense" and insufficiently "logical." The legitimacy and specificity of such critiques notwithstanding, I do wonder if my style, as well as the stuff of which it is made, might be attributed to something other than carelessness or idiosyncrasy. Am I, by dint of my sex, a renegade apt to disrupt the stylistic and scholastic conventions (the laws) of critical discourse? Do I, as woman, resist the mandate to be understood?

Recently, at the close of a class I taught on the possibility of forging modern identity through artistic practice, I received a most uncharitable evaluation from a student, who complained of "learning nothing" and suffering as I "prattled on and on." Although I cannot verify its author, I suspect it is the same young man who was, throughout the tenure of my class, sullen, indifferent, and enamored of Goethe's hero, Faust. If resistance precedes dominance, then perhaps to prattle—"to talk (or write) much or idly," producing "the babble of a child"—is divine.

Now, as I begin a dissertation about the relationship between beauty and ethics in the poetics of the Harlem Renaissance, I am compelled to acknowledge the difficulty, not simply of woman speaking, but of woman speaking beauty. In her apologia for beauty, On Beauty and Being Just, Elaine Scarry laments its banishment from critical discourse. No longer in style within the halls of contemporary academe, beauty is still spoken but only illicitly—"in whispers." (57) A primary argument against beauty holds special significance for the woman who would expound upon it: political in nature, it asserts the burden of beauty for the woman wholly reduced to it and sometimes, endangered when urged to fulfill the desires it incites. (79) The gorgeous movie star is driven by unending and demanding scrutiny to drown her pain in booze and pills. The winsome school girl--robbed of her childhood by premature marriage...or worse. With this in mind, I might be justifiably persuaded to discard the discourse of beauty. Yet a less material, more formal narrative of beauty allows me to complicate the notion that its mere articulation hurts women.

In the eighteenth century, philosophers such as Immanuel Kant subdivided "beauty" into two categories: the beautiful and the sublime. While the sublime, thought "eternal," "principled," and "righteous," was characterized as male, the beautiful, thought "small," "gay," and "charming," was characterized as female and became, as Scarry relates, "dismissible." (83-5) A counter to the political argument against beauty here emerges; in contrast to a conventional feminist claim that beauty is too grave for woman to bear, a conventional philosophical line on beauty, epitomized in woman, attributes to it, an embarrassment of levity. If one adapts the Irigarayan innovation of turning less into more, one can strain the qualities of beauty: insignificance, gaiety, and charm to the celebration of "womanist" superfluity and sorcery. Philosophically (and historically) speaking, then, succumbing to an academic convention—whether feminist or misogynist—by which beauty is to be abandoned, may be abandoning both woman and the peculiar expressivity she makes possible.

Ultimately, we women come to the pleasure of withstanding and reshaping given formats of meaning (no matter from whom they derive). But can we not come to the pleasure of form? For in decrying the phallogocentrism of mainstream signification, Irigaray likewise decries "form," which she counts among an entire set of "values promulgated by patriarchal society and culture, values inscribed in the philosophical corpus..." (86) Irigaray's misrepresentation of "form" derives from her narrow interpretation of the "law" to which it bears resemblance–a move strengthened by her conflation of patriarchy with philosophy. Because she focuses solely on philosophy's seemingly masculinist predilection for transcendent objectivity, she ignores what it gives rise to in the way of improvisation and particularism. By turning again to the controversial discourse of beauty, I can revise Irigaray's narrative of form, which likens it to a normalizing "judgement" dictating the course of "nature" (107) and, in the process, challenge both her traditional characterization and her implicit gendering of law.

In philosophy, judgement, what Kant calls the "middle term between understanding and reason," posits no special law with regard to the nature of things but only, a "principle peculiar to itself upon which law [is] sought." (15) The offspring of judgement, aesthetic judgement, whose specific job it is to divine beauty, has an even more nuanced relationship to the real, for it does not even seek "knowledge" of a thing but simply yields to the form that marks its crystallization "within a subject" (71). If form is the desirous by-product of aesthetic judgement, then the desired object of judgement, law, is arguably a relative of form. Philosophically contextualized, law/form can be grasped, not as delimitation but as aspiration. Impartial until uniquely activated, law/form sculpts reality without itself containing (nor inducing) any essential mold, enacting a logic that is, in and of itself, only analogical.

To close—and to approach more nearly the issue of critical style and gender—I return to and rephrase the question I posed earlier: how can we women writers resist particular stylistic conventions without too hastily rebuffing the very notion of conventionality? Reframing the stylistic conventions-- the laws--of critical discourse as special kinds of forms enables us to perceive not simply their sovereignty but as well, their relationality, and thus, to honor them as the earth beneath our feet that is–ineluctably–tilled when we make tracks upon it.

Irigaray, Luce. This Sex Which is not One. Trans. Catherine Porter. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1985.

Kant, Immanuel. The Critique of Judgement. Translated, James Creed Meredith. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 1978.

Scarry, Elaine. On Beauty and Being Just. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1999.