P/S

Rachel Bowlby

Une Passante

To Baudelaire’s poem, “A une passante,” “To a Passing Woman,” there may be no more to add.

The deafening street around me was screaming.
Tall, slender, in heavy mourning, majestic grief,
A woman passed, with a proud hand
Lifting, balancing the garland and the hem;

Agile and noble, with her statue’s leg.
And I, tense like a madman, was drinking
In her eye, livid sky where the hurricane germinates,
The gentleness that fascinates and the pleasure that kills.

One flash ... then night!—Fleeting beauty
Whose look made me suddenly reborn,
Will I see you no more but in eternity?

Elsewhere, very far from here! too late! never perhaps!
For I know not where you are fleeing, you know not where I am going

O you whom I would have loved, 0 you who knew it!¹

Amid the clatter and din of the street, there she is; or there she was, no sooner there than gone, vanishing, disappearing, here only in what is now the loss of her.

But the poem brings her back: gone/here, fort/da: brings her back fixed and no longer fleeing, but fixed as one who flees, fleeting (“fugitive”), runaway (“tu fuis’).

He looked, she looked; I looked, you looked; there was an instant, it could have been forever, it is past.

You knew, “you who knew it,” you didn’t say. Silent woman who knows, whom he sees knowing, who will not (cannot?) say.

He looks at her, she looks at him. Two looks that make one? Or two different, incommensurable looks? Or one look, his that sees her seeing him (seeing her (seeing him ...)?

She brought new life (“made me suddenly reborn”), and is also a murderer (“the pleasure which kills”) coming in funeral garments, who fled away free ("Fugitive beauté,” “tu fuis’). Death-dealer and life-giver, a mother.

A twofold mother: “Moi, je buvais,” “I was drinking,” in her eye, nourishing eye and evil eye, “the gentleness that fascinates and the pleasure that kills.”

In mourning, she has lost someone; she transmits her loss to him, leaving him marked by her passing.

Anonymous: any woman, une femme. And also the one and only, the unique woman, love eternal, at first and last sight.²

Two women seen in one. The woman of the street. A fast (“fugitive”) lady. The whore, undomesticated, whose home is the maison de passe, the street inside. At the same time “noble” and unavailable, inaccessible: not to be approached. She is “majestueuse,” a queen or goddess with her statuesque leg.

From the third person, “a woman,” to the second, “you,” addressed at the end, "tot que j'eusse aimée!," you whom I would have loved, past unfulfilled conditional, if what? No answer, she disappeared, never to return, consecrated in the restoration of the imaginary moment when it might have been that she was there. Unconditional love: under no conditions could it be, its possibility is past, ruled out, from the start, and also without interference from external conditions of space and time, in eternity.

The timing puts her definitively in the past, as the one who passed, irrevocably, and yet will have marked him forever. She is out of time, no sooner here than gone, represented only in her absence. And out of time because only “in eternity,” in the timeless, will he see her again. There was a flash of light, “un éclair,” then darkness, “puis la nuit.” The snapshot of what looked like a woman, caught, taken, in an instant, remaining only in an image, the picture of her.

In the distance between them, only their eyes “meet”: otherwise they are apart. He is fixed, transfixed (“crispé”); she moves, “passed” across the field of his vision. On this separation between them, in space as in time, depends her perfection, and the unconditional quality of the love. This passante, a passante: we have not heard the last of her. She turns up again, and repeatedly, in Proust. Here is one such occasion:

The charms of the passante are generally directly related to the rapidity of the passing. It only takes night to be falling and the vehicle to be going fast, in the country, in a city, and there is not one female torso, mutilated like an ancient marble by the speed that carries us forward and the dusk which darkens it, which does not aim at our heart, at every corner on the way, in the depths of every shop, the arrows of Beauty, of Beauty of which it might sometimes be tempting to wonder whether in this world it is anything else but the complementary part added to a fragmentary and fleeting Passante by our imagination overexcited by regret.³

Proust's passante might be a direct descendant of Baudelaire’s. “Fugitive” once more, she is the fleeting impression, only there in the moment that she is already gone. She is statuesque, “comme un marbre antique,” both noble and dead, her own monument, like the “statue’s leg” of the sonnet. But the “mutilated,” “fragmentary” nature of Proust’s passante also, now, looking back, seems to have been shared by the “statue's leg,” just one leg, one part, singled out by Baudelaire. The “regret” here is like what is inferred from the poet’s “O you whom I would have loved,” her loss the condition for the desire of her, and for the conditional’s being necessarily in the odd time of the “past unfulfilled.”

The passante here seems to have moved on or away from her Baudelairean singularity, fixed now into a type: not a, but thepassante. There is not even a question, this time, of a look in return, from her. “Fugitive” still, her appearance is fleeting not because she passes—she may be quite stationary, in the back of a shop—but because he does—or “we” do, a community of (masculine) readers invoked for the occasion as sharing in, recognizing, this as a commonplace experience, and the appeal to whom is a further reinforcement of the generalization of the scene⁴ And if we ignore generic differences between lyric poetry and narrative prose, we could note that whereas the poem, in its title and in the concluding apostrophe (“O you ...”) is addressed to a particular passante, Proust’s narrator addresses “us” who are not passantes but viewers of passantes, on the subject of passantes, a general category. The generality of the experience, recognized as an example of a common type, removes its apparent uniqueness and irrevocability: one passante is like another in that she can be replaced, that another and another will figure in the same way, without there being any single constitutive event, even in retrospect.

Putting the two together, Proust's spectator appears to extend and confirm what was only a possibility in the Baudelaire poem. Quite explicitly, the passante is now (in every sense) a mere projection from the spectator.⁵ Her passing is really his, as he zooms by just catching sight of her; her partial and fleeting appearance belongs to the same phenomenon. Whence the hypothesis that Beauty might just be “the complementary part added to a fragmentary and fugitive passante by our overexcited imagination.” The “Beauty” is not out there, but born of “our” own “overexcited” imagination; it is added as the missing, “complementary” part to make a whole of what would otherwise be just the fragmentary vision. It is this addition, carried over to her from us, which completes her, raising her up to the heights of a capitalized essence. “Beauty” substantializes her fragmentariness and puts a stop to her disappearance, her passing (“fugitive”). It fits her to him, makes her in the image of his “overexcited imagination” prompted by her loss, “regret.”

The Eternal Passante

Seen in this light, the passante does not seem at all like a localized figure. And once she has been drawn out in this way, an identification to be projected potentially onto any woman, anywhere, we might take this still further and look at her as quasi-mythological, a timeless figure.

For there are in this scenario some rather familiar elements. First—in the beginning—there is she woman created out of an extra bit added on from and by the man. The rib is removed from Adam to make Eve, beautiful and whole, but made from a fragment. She is a lost piece of him, the primordial “complementary part”: in the beginning, they were one. But as long as she lives they cannot be reunited, for her very existence depends on their separation.

The Biblical genesis of woman is not the only mythical echo called forth by the passante. Baudelaire’s passante, irretrievably lost, is as though dead: in her disappearance, she passes on her loss to the poet. Like the widowed Orpheus, who descends into Hades in quest of Eurydice, he can seek her only in her death. And just as Orpheus can have her back only on condition that he does not look at her—one glimpse, and she will be gone—so the writing which brings back the passante can only follow after a sighting that is never to be repeated.⁶

“The” Woman, Encore

And if Baudelaire and Proust have said it already, perhaps Lacan says it some more, encore. For we seem to have been approaching a point where the passante has come to look indistinguishable from the psychoanalytic figure of femininity, in all her fantasmatic ambiguity.

Several features that may be glimpsed in the Encore seminars would seem to lend support to at least a partial identification of the Lacanian “woman” with the passante:

We could in theory write x R y, and say that x is the man, y is the woman, and R is the sexual relation. Why not? Only there’s this, it’s stupid, because what is supported under the signifying function, of man and of woman, are only signifiers completely bound up with the current-run [courcourant] usage of language. If there is a discourse which demonstrates this to you, it must be psychoanalytic discourse, in making an issue of this, that the woman will never be taken other than quoad matrem. The woman only does her job [entré en fonction] in the sexual relationship as the mother.⁷

There is no sexual relation, “Il n'y a pas de rapport sexuel.” The poet and his passante never meet, there is nothing more than what he sees in her. But at the same time, it is the fantasy of their complementarity, their being made for each other, which engenders the endless wish for their unity.

The mother: no getting away from her, but she has always left you. You, the man: from the moment that the mother turns out to be “a woman,” there is no going back, nothing for it but to seek her again, hopelessly, for what now seems to have been the perfect link is broken forever. So—the most usual outcome—“women,” one after the other, all the same in that they are not her, the one and only, but could or should have been, “O you whom I would have loved!” (You, the woman, a woman, too, from the moment that the mother turns out to be one. A different story, into which the passante seen by the poet enters rather as a problem of identification: to be or not to be [like] her.) “There is not the woman, the woman is not all [pas toute]."⁸“The” woman does not exist, the woman as perfect complement, but she is seen as potentially this, as truth, all, from the man’s projection. The “fragmentary” passante who would have been all is projected as all by what the imagination supplies to her appearance—both in that she is seen as lacking, and that she makes up for a lack in the man.

What leaves some likelihood for what I am putting forward, namely, that of this jouissance, the woman knows nothing, is that all the time we’ve been begging them, begging them on our knees—last time I was talking about women psychoanalysts—to try to tell us, well, not a word! We have never been able to get anything out of them.⁹

Who knows what she wants? Her jouissance may be other than phallic, but she won't say or can't. “O toi qui le savais,” you knew it but you said not a word. “If the libido is only masculine, the dear woman, it is only from where she is all, which is to say from where the man sees her, from nowhere but there that the dear woman can have an unconscious.”¹⁰ Only masculine libido, phallic organization of jouissance as far as it can be articulated. It is all seen from the masculine side: no desire, no imagining from her side can be represented.

Ça, a Woman

There is more to it than that. Sometimes it seems as if Lacan is also presenting the unconscious itself, and not only the (impossible) woman, as something not unlike a passante in one of her aspects:

Here we find again the rhythmic structure of this opening and shutting of the crack. ... The evanescent apparition occurs between two points, the start, the finish of this logical time—between that instant of seeing where something is always elided, even lost, of the intuition itself, and that elusive moment when, precisely, the grasp [saisie] of the unconscious does not end, where it is always a matter of a deceptive recuperation.¹¹

In my preceding statements, I have been continually stressing the, in a sense, pulsative function of the unconscious, the necessity of vanishing which seems to be in a sense inherent to it—all that, for an instant, appears in its crack seeming to be destined, by a sort of preempting, to close up again, the metaphor Freud himself used, to whisk away, to disappear.¹²

Like the passante—“one flash, then darkness”—the unconscious for Lacan is something that no sooner flickers into view than it is gone again. We might dwell for a moment on the striking similarities in the image. First, that is it indeed an image, a visual analogy: the unconscious is seen/not seen, appearing/disappearing—despite the fact that psychoanalysis is a practice whose medium is entirely one of words. The vanishing unconscious is also like the passante in that it is always ungraspable—in the very moment, the instant, you have it, it closes off again. And yet it is also what the analyst is seeking, endlessly, and by the very fact of its being “lost,” unattainable as such: no “recuperation” or recovery other than one that is deceptive, false in its appearance. It slips away, tricky and evasive (there are many different words for this: se dérober, évanouissante, évasif, élusif, élidé: it is quite an emphatic betrayal or escape). The impossible feminine apparition is not confined to the manifest consideration of sexuality and sexual difference, but seems to have passed or seeped into the depths of the psychoanalytic account of subjectivity, to produce a covertly gendered unconscious. Or overtly: “Eurydice twice lost, such is the most tangible image we could give, in myth, of what the relationship is of Orpheus the analyst to the unconscious.”¹³

So many representations from the masculine point of view, of the view as masculine: it is as if Lacanian psychoanalysis provided a culmination to the series of passante passages, exposing the terms of her (non)existence in all their intractability.

Pas Ça, Not That

“Une femme passa,” “a woman passed,” a woman seen from the masculine position; heard in a different way, “une femme, pas ça,” “a woman, not that,” no thank you. And if we hear “pas ça” in a different way again, we find the further objection: not the “ca,” the usual French translation of Freud’s “id”: “not the unconscious,” to which femininity sometimes, at moments, seems to be all but assimilated. If it is taken as a critical exposure of the structure rather than an admiring exposition of it, psychoanalysis seems to offer the perfect account of the cul-de-sacs of a femininity that is conceived simply as a projection of masculine desire. But it offers no immediate ways out, no other place, either female or neutral, outside the given patriarchal or phallocentric scene.

Impasse. Where do “we”—women? feminists? passantes?—go from here? No step seems possible. No step: pas de pas. Pas pas, papa: only the old patriarchal story. Unless we said no to all that and looked in a different direction altogether. Pas: a no that would also be a step? Or a step that would only represent a denial?

The Modern Passante

The Freudian/Lacanian line treats the woman/passante as the masculine fantasy of femininity, but other feminist approaches have taken different directions. For in another sense, the passante could be seen not as universal figure of fantasy, but as a preeminently historical figure, a woman of her time. |

Looked at in this way, Baudelaire’s passante comes across almost as a tableau of the experience of modernity. It is an anonymous encounter which takes place apparently in a large, modern city: the street, anything but a neutral background, is the first subject of the poem, and it is an active, shouting milieu where the couple themselves are silent. There is the fleeting, unforeseen event that shocks, and the peculiar temporality (the sighting is retrospectively fixed as having happened, irrevocable in that nothing will alter its significance, and also in that it cannot be recovered in its pristine originality, which is represented only insofar as it is past, or passed away).¹⁴

Proust's version is differently situated. Unlike Baudelaire’s flâneur, on foot, noises from the street surrounding him, the viewer here is traveling in a vehicle, and the sighting of the passante is an effect of his own speed, his own passage. The passante can be anywhere at all along the route, in town or the country; Baudelaire’s was a particular, urban passante. Proust’s passante is potentially ubiquitous, “dans la ville, à la campagne”: another of the passante scenes in A la recherche du temps perdu concerns the very type of the country girl, a milkmaid, seen from a train. If it is a crucial part of the poet’s experience that this woman emerges and disappears in the street, Proust’s narrator seems to be no longer restricted to this setting: the passante could be any woman, anywhere—or just anything momentarily seen “as” a passing woman. The train, the vehicle (horse-drawn here, elsewhere in Proust an automobile) expands the reach of the urban sighting, making the country, too, into a possible site for the glimpse in passing of an unknown woman. The landscape (itself an aesthetic metaphor, implying an externally placed spectator) is turned into a passing scene (cinema, the “moving picture,” is on the horizon already). And the vehicle in which the viewer is situated removes him from any sensory contact with the street itself: the scene in which passantes appear is a spectacle seen at a safe, and thereby even more untraversable, distance.

Taking this more historical line, two avenues of analysis open up, two feminist turnings. One would treat the passante as a distortion, symptomatic of the patriarchal misrepresentation or misrecognition of women in comparison with what they really are. Look again, look at her as she really is, and you will see something very different from what appears from the perspective of the masculine writer. The passante or woman is not that, not what she has been shown to be, seen through male eyes; instead, whether already or potentially, there are other, more true-to-life women concealed behind this view of her. This line of investigation might then look at the diversity of the women who actually walked the city streets or the country lanes in this period—of different races or social classes, but united by an oppression that subordinates them all as women, and/or which prevents the expression of their underlying femininity.

The second type of historical approach would not compare the passante with another, more accurate picture of women masked by her image, but would look instead at the conditions of representation that made it possible for the woman to be seen as a passante, and which, by the same token, might preclude the figure of the flâneur, the strolling spectator, from being represented as a woman.¹⁵ This approach would not presuppose a different, more realistic identification of the woman as other than a passante, but would, rather, explore the different discourses that construct and constrain various modes of identification, not consistently divided along a line of sexual division.

P/S

The passante: perhaps the most ancient and the most modern figure for a woman? Perhaps the figure who throws into confusion any easy distinction between the historical and the timeless, between changing conditions and eternal forms; or between the social and the psychic.

The fable of the passante I have just recounted and of the separation of psychic and social forms of analysis has been leading up, step by step, to one view of where m/f came in. For, looked at with hindsight (a backward glance, or postscript, to which we shall return), m/f's questioning of the figure of woman can be seen as having pointed feminist debates not only toward a distinction between psychic and social questions, but also toward the impossibility of leaving them at that. In thinking p/s, the psychic and the social, m/f refused to treat them as either/or alternatives, and at the same time insisted on the need to think each of them through, on its own terms. After this, the passante was never going to look the same again, nor were the eyes of the onlooker going to be simply identifiable as those of a man, or indeed of a woman.

The mysteriousness of m/f's name is a promise, or threat, of the disturbances of these categories. In a sense, the name might seem, provocatively, to flaunt the enigma of femininity in person. Some of its possible senses, clearly never meant to be fixed, are mentioned in the interview in the “Last Issue” given by an m/f now personified by Parveen Adams and Elizabeth Cowie, to a group of Dutch feminists. Male/female, masculine/feminine seem the most obvious; but mother/father, Marxism/Feminism, and even Michel Foucault are also raised as possibilities. There is also a hint of s/s, in its Saussurian and Lacanian versions, to suggest a semiotic or psychoanalytic orientation. At any rate, it is clear that m/f is no univocal figure, and no univocally female figure either.

Pas Ça Encore

From the beginning m/f project consisted of both a questioning of existing theories of feminism, and a building upon possibilities that had recently been opened up: via psychoanalysis (as an aid rather than a hindrance to feminist understanding) and via new methods of historical analysis. The principal target was the essentialism implied by the first of the two historical lines sketched above. Essentialism designated any theory or politics presupposing either a biological or a social unity of women: either their bodies or a consistently operating social “oppression” determines a unified group identity on the basis of which political demands “for” women can then be made.

m/f countered this with a double move, which involved both the psychical and the second of the historical lines. On the one hand, there was psychoanalysis, and a concept of a psychical reality that was different from social reality and that rendered problematic any simple reading of the political field. At the same time, the psychoanalytic disruption of the categories of masculinity and femininity as readily transposable to actual men and women challenged the justification for feminist demands in the name of a common identity, whether femininity was seen as the problem (a false identity imposed by patriarchal culture) or the goal (the chance of being real women at last), or both.

On the other hand, and against the same monolithic explanations, there was the notion of a multiplicity of sexual differences, set up in different ways according to the different discourses—the medical and the legal were the most often mentioned—in which they appeared. This second model, which was fairly explicitly taken from Foucault, and in particular from The Archaeology of Knowledge, made it possible to talk about social questions, but was not directly hooked onto the first.

Psychoanalysis gave “woman” as fantasy, as a construction without any essential identity based on either biology or ideology. The Foucauldian model gave “women” of many kinds, infinitely proliferated as different discourses set up particular categories, open to challenge and, by the same token, infinitely mutable.

Both lines were used strategically to unsettle the assumptions of other arguments that relied on unexamined notions of individual or social identity. Psychoanalysis was also examined in its own right, and internal arguments within psychoanalysis theory were presented and discussed on their own terms. The aim here again was to root out residual elements of biologism or normativity so that psy- choanalysis (and it was a Lacanian psychoanalysis that predominated) emerged as the theory that offered the most thorough challenge to any pinning down, by her body or by social norms, of the identity of woman.

Yet, although psychoanalysis lends itself very well to the undoing of all easy assimilations of femininity to femaleness, and of all invocations of a unified identity as one sex or the other, it does still require the sexual differentiation of bodies as the material on which the Oedipus complex and castration will have their effects, even though these effects will not necessarily follow the usual—anatomically predictable—paths. A girl who turns out psychically like a heterosexual man is not in the same situation, socially or psychically, as a boy to whom this occurs. But because of its anti-essentialist position, m/f at first refrained from emphasizing this aspect of psychoanalysis (which came more to the fore toward the end), preferring rather to concentrate on how psychoanalysis could be used as a means of criticising the notions of the body implied in other theories.

The separation of psychoanalytic from social concerns seems much less simple in view of the fact that so many manifestly feminist issues cut across these concerns issues of sexuality and social regulation, of violence against women, abortion, mothering, etc. This was part of the original argument for the pertinence of psychoanalysis to a movement articulating itself through the slogan “The personal is political.” But given this situation, it would be more difficult to maintain the strict separation of areas with their corresponding forms of analysis (a question that comes up explicitly in the interview published in the last issue). Psychoanalysis was never presented as providing answers or solutions on a political level, or as deciding, either a priori or in particular cases, whether or not different areas of concern should be regarded as provinces for psychic or social investigation, since it would always be a question of both. But nor was the notion of a multiplicity of heterogeneous discourses going to supply a theory or practice of something that could be unified as “feminism.” This notion did not allow any special rights to a concept of psychical reality either—since in these terms psychoanalysis, from which the concept was derived, could only be considered as one social discourse among others. In practice, psychoanalysis was exempt from treatment as one social discourse among others, because that would have made it impossible to use it as an account of a psychic reality fundamentally different from social reality.

It was its recognition of the difficulty of femininity and its lack of fixity that made psychoanalysis attractive to feminists; but psychoanalysis did not propose the means to a general resolution or reform (which would be outside its psychical territory), and could not be used as a basis for feminism other than negatively (“woman is not that,” “’woman’ is a fantasy”). Yet it was not clear that a Foucauldian analysis could yield a feminist politics either. If women were differently specified in different discourses, every response must be local and nothing could unify them all as “feminist.” But m/f—“a feminist journal”—certainly did want to maintain the political force of that word. Thus when Beverley Brown and Parveen Adams raise the question of how in a community of women the wish or choice to have a child can be assessed, they make clear that

There are no obvious right and wrong positions here. The organisation of these social relations will indeed affect women and mothers and what we are saying is that it has to be worked out from a feminist, not an individual point of view.¹⁶

The emphatic feminist has no given content or program but keeps its place as an opposing argument, here against the “individual” point of view.

The question of the nature or necessity of feminist groundings is raised directly from the beginning, but especially in the editorial for issue 5/6 and in the final interview of issue 11/12. It may be focused particularly well from the editorial of issue 4:

A further criticism has been that our analysis produces a political problem of the unity of the Women’s Movement. Clearly the Women’s Movement is not a coherent expression of oppressed womanhood or a universal condition, but itself a system of alliances between groupings of interests of mothers, workers, lesbians, battered wives, etc., and this does produce the problem of the basis for these alliances, a problem already recognized within socialist feminism. Once this is recognized, it is surprising that the very possibility of using the term “woman” across a range of constructions is itself raised as an insuperable problem unique to m/f.¹⁷

“Mothers, workers, lesbians, battered wives, etc.”—this particular collectivity is almost the exact antithesis of the passante, the negative of the fantasy of “woman.” These women do not flit by, a look but not a word; instead, they form a “heterogeneous” grouping of “a range of constructions” in the social, assorted “interests” with nothing to consolidate their common identity as women.

The fantasies of “woman” to be analyzed in the register of psychical reality; and/or a proliferation of “women” constructed through various distinct social discourses: this twofold feminist strategy of questioning might now be seen as having been both m/f's contribution and, perhaps, the point at which it left us divided as to how to proceed from there.

A New Passante?

And what if m/f was itself (herself?) a sort of passante, who briefly came and went, marking feminism forever in her passing? The final editorial: “The moment of m/f’s project has now passed.”¹⁸ And so, m/f, or several m/fs, passed, or passed away: for the body it constituted could only be conceived as a whole once the “Last Issue” had officially heralded its departure from the scene. What impression did she leave? And what impact will she make now, on her reappearance?

But was she, is she, a woman at all? For this doubt as to m/f’s sex was surely the greatest disturbance produced by its interrogation of psychic and social categories. If m/f as passante was not simply, recognizably, a woman, perhaps its effect was to make it impossible to see the passante in the same old ways: sexual identifications had undergone a kind of mutation. This is one crucial sense in which m/f both recalls the passante and complicates her representation: to the extent that m/f is a passante, it seems to have challenged the grounds on which the passante might clearly be seen as the figure of a woman. m/f now seems to have represented a turning point, a disruption of the assumed differentiations of male and female places. Not only was the identity of the woman less immediately ascertainable, but the reader as would-be double of the viewer, the theorist, or his/her object was no longer simply assigned to one sex either. For one thing, like feminist writings before, m/f had dislocated the ready positionings in taking up the place of the theorist. But this did not mean m/f was seeking to identify a woman, or indeed that it identified itself as being simply one or the other.

To all appearances, this disturbance of clearly marked sexual boundaries was the source of much of the criticism of the journal at the time of its first publication, taken up implicitly and explicitly within its pages. How can it be a good move, a valid step, for feminism to put in question the unity of women, the identity of women as a political group? Doesn't this just leave “us” in the lurch, without a collective, even less an individual, body to grow from or cling to? Without some anchor, some theory of a general oppression of women to steady its passage, is not feminism left adrift amid a sea of floating signifiers? Against which, painstakingly and methodically, m/f insisted, over and over again, on the need to distinguish between sexual divisions and sexual differences, a distinction that was related to the problem of how to conceptualize the relations between the social and the psychic, or of how to formulate a “feminist” politics when the very identity of woman or women was understood as being open to question. The force of the criticisms the journal encountered at the time and subsequently (for it continues to be read and debated), the way it was perceived as going too far, is itself some measure of what it did to shake up the set ways of feminist thinking that turned on an already given sexual division. Something was in the process of being changed.

But not in the same ways for everyone. For some who turned away from m/f to begin with, seeing in it the grotesque opposite of a positive image of woman, a sort of ugly sister bent on impeding the harmonious progress of feminism, the journal’s questions later came to seem important, even inescapable. Here the second look at a figure who could hardly have seemed more repulsive has revealed instead something irresistible that went unremarked in the rapid dismissal of the first glance or first reading.

And then there were those for whom, at the time, m/f was like a feminist passante in person, a fleeting apparition of something that seemed as if it might be going to answer to every hitherto unarticulated wish for something else. A momentary passing, a last glimpse, and then s/he is gone, “Fleeting Beauty/Whose look made me suddenly reborn.” m/f seemed to breathe new life into feminism, for those of “us” seeing in “her” a different and new way of putting the questions, turning or twisting the settled patterns of looking and thinking about where feminism might possibly be going. But if she made her mark then, indelibly and irrevocably, to look at her now “as she first appeared” would be quite impossible. To the extent that m/f’s new questions were taken up, taken in, she became part of feminism, part of us. That means that it is hopeless to try to see, from where we stand now, exactly what m/f was: for she is still here, part of the place from which we ask the question.

As with the changed evaluation on the part of some who initially rejected m/f, this complicates the question that would ask what the journal’s effect was, then, as definitively in the past, having happened once and for all. And for the very reason that s/he has become part of us, to see her again, now, might for such admiring readers produce a quite different impression from the one that is remembered as that of the first, formative view. If m/f has been fully incorporated into our ways of thinking, so that s/he is no longer separate as the new addition, out there, that we remember, it is likely that if she turned up once more, s/he would not live up to the memory of her youthful beauty, might even seem slightly aged or passé: to see a passante again might entail some unpleasant surprises that would detract from the image of her as perfect. (This is in fact what happens to Proust’s narrator, the one time he actually decides to chase a passante through the streets of Paris to get a second look. When he catches up with her, she turns out to be not a beautiful, unknown young girl but someone he knows very well, Madame Verdurin—an opinionated and unappealing old lady.¹⁹) And in this case the position is even more complicated. If the passante turns out to have lost some of the freshness for which we remember her, it is not because she has aged but because she has not changed one iota or one wrinkle. Yet this is also what makes her seem out of date for us who have changed, moved on—and changed partly through the mark that m/f herself made on us then.

And so, reading m/f again, now, ten years after the first issue, some things seem oddly distant. Parts of m/f return as though with a lag in their step: was this the one who looked so bright and promised so much? It seems to have something to do with the style. Rereading the early editorials, there is an impression of firm control, a sort of pedagogical decidedness that seems to brook no opposition or even reply,²⁰ and to reduce each sentence to the barest, most minimal bones of a discourse sternly connoted as plain. This raises questions, I think, about the rhetoric of feminist argument, which were not m/f’s concern at the time, and which perhaps show up in this way only now, when the first moment of the journal is past, and when some of the particular debates conducted or mentioned in its pages are no longer current. In these early statements of position, it is as if something in the nature of feminist argument was assumed to rule out the possibility of textual play or “give”: it is all solemnly declarative and strictly circumscribed. This is all the more striking, hard-hitting, in that the absence of play in the writing goes hand in hand, or at least side by side, with the advocacy of theories that refuse ideas of language as a straightforward, transparent medium of theoretical or political argument, as simply expressing one unequivocal thing. It is as though the exhilarating opening up of new questions in place of old protocols could only be achieved through a definitive form of declaration that partially shut them up again.

This might be connected to the intransigent styles of other left journals at the time, in whose context or terms m/f had to claim its right to a place and a hearing. Instead, or in addition, it might have to do with the very inadmissibility of m/f questions, whose lack of fit with feminist orthodoxies led to a form of statement that had to be all the stronger to get its point across. This raises the further question of the extent to which forms of writing or argument inflect the style of their response: m/f’s rejection of dogmas sometimes took quite a dogmatic form. This in turn probably had something to do with the “all or nothing” quality of the reactions for and against the journal at the time.

P.S.

m/f thus resists not only the obviousness of sexual division, but also the simple chronology of sequential time. There is no easy temporal distinction between its appearances as young or old, new or dated; by the same token, the journal cannot straightforwardly be either forgotten, dead and buried as “past history,” or brought to new life as though it had never had any previous existence. In one way, as we have found, its reemergence now, the passante returning, brings into focus as many further questions as did its first appearance. It is the first reader who is now more likely to be disappointed, and the later ones for whom m/f can appear, once again, in all its originality.

If the journal’s effects still, in both senses, “remain to be seen,” then that is itself a sign of the challenge that m/f made and makes to existing ways of looking. Coupled with the use of psychoanalysis, m/f’s anti-essentialist crusade undermined many of the then-accepted bases of feminism. That this was taken as a threat, as well as a promise, is suggested by the force of the criticism directed against the journal. m/f never declared its project to be one of proposing final answers, assumptions about which were part of what it identified as problematic in the contemporary women’s movement. That it was and is a source of new questions and new discussions is suggested by the appearance now of this volume, and the ambivalent legacy is in keeping with m/f’s enigmatic name and open questions. In one sense it left feminism without a leg to stand on, not even one, by pointing out the ways in which its apparent unity, a “whole” body of women, was not as complete and perfect as it might look.²¹ But this was also its great achievement, opening up feminist engagements that might not always involve the search for single (or even double) explanatory models. Not yet that, pas encore—m/f was not the last to be seen or heard of the question of woman, but the questioning of woman after m/f’s passing can no longer be what it was.

Notes

The poem is one of the collection Les fleurs du mal, and was first published in 1856.
“Love—not at first sight but at last sight,” from Walter Benjamin, “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” IlIuminations, trans. Harry Zohn, Schocken, 1969, p. 169.
Proust, A l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs, 11 (1918), 5th vol. of A la recherche du temps perdu, Flammarion, 1987, p. 87. An article by Francis S. Heck (“Baudelaire and Proust: Chance Encounters of the Same Kind,” Nottingham French Studies, vol. 23, no. 2 (May 1984) pp. 17-26), which I thank Diana Knight for pointing out to me, usefully describes some of the key passante episodes in Proust as influenced by the Baudelaire sonnet.
Many of the passante passages in Proust involve women (or jeunes filles) looking at women, but seen through the jealous look of the male narrator, who is never not overlooking the scene.
In another passante episode, Proust uses the word himself, as the narrator wonders if pleasure with a passante might turn out not to be something unknown, but “a projection, a mirage of desire” (A l’ombre, Il, p. 182).
Other partial mythological or epic echoes and sightings may then be suggested. In book 11 of The Odyssey, the first of the souls whom Odysseus encounters is his mother who, in her death, gives him hope to go on by telling him news from home. Three times he stretches out to embrace her, and “three times she flitted from my hands, like a shadow or like a dream” (Il. 206-208). The episode is echoed in The Aeneid, first in book 2 when the hero is vindicated in quitting Troy by the ghost of his wife Creusa (“Three times I tried to cast my arms around her neck where she had been; but three times, embraced in vain, the image fled my hands, like gentle winds or like a fleeting dream” [ll. 792—795]); and later when, like Odysseus, he is granted a descent into the underworld. Among the shades Aeneas sees is that of Dido, whose being in this place means that she did indeed kill herself when he left her. She appears out of the shadows, says nothing in answer to his questions but “flees back hostile into the shadowy grove” (Aeneid, book 6, Il. 472f.). A widow and a queen, this woman, like Creusa, is the one who must have been left behind for history to be made, as Aeneas pursues his mission of founding Rome. There must be no regrets, and her passing appearance, dead, puts her out of the way once and for all.
Lacan Le Séminaire, livre XX: Encore, Seuil, p. 36.
ibid., p. 13.
Ibid., p. 69, trans. Jacqueline Rose, in Juliet Mitchell and J. Rose (eds), Feminine Sexuality: Jacques Lacan and the école freudienne, Norton, 1982.
Ibid, p. 90.
Lacan, Le Séminaire, livre XI: Les quatre concepts fondamentaux de la psychanalyse, Seuil, 1973 p. 33. This volume is translated by Alan Sheridan as The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, Hogarth Press, 1977.
Ibid, p. 44.
lbid., p. 27.
This is the modernity of Benjamin (see note 2, above), partly developed out of Baudelaire’s own conception.
On the absence of representations of female /lanerie, see Janet Wolff’s suggestive article, “The Invisible Flâneuse: Women and the Literature of Modernity,” Theory, Culture and Society, Vol. 2, no. 3 (1985), pp. 37-46.
m/f 3, p.48.
m/f, 4 p.4.
m/f 11/12, p.3.
Proust, A l'ombre, II, pp. 87-88.
A“worst case” example might be this extract from the first editorial, describing one of three current “tendencies within Marxist feminism”:

Firstly, there is the attempt to argue that women as a consistently deprived social group constitute an economic class. And because of a certain position within Marxism which asserts that transformation will be effected when a class becomes conscious of itself as a class (a class for itself ) this position assumes that political changes in the position of women will be effected when women become conscious of themselves as a class. The consciousness of belonging to an oppressed class is seen to be the basis of political action. Against this argument it can simply be stated that class divisions cut across “women as a social group.”

Three substantial explanatory sentences and then suddenly that’s it—finished, dealt with (the paragraph ends there and the next goes on to a “second tendency”). The speediness of the dismissal seems to permit no further response: it is almost a reprimand, and the quailing reader is really put in no position to think she might reasonably pay attention to this line. This is even more noticeable because it is not clear that the point is established at all. The refutation is made “simply” by returning to the straight Marxist position that it is only the classical class contradictions that count, which is where Marxist feminist questions began in the first place.
If the problem of putting the psychic alongside the social was both m/f’s stumbling block and its most fruitful contribution to feminist debate, it might be worth glancing back at the fleeting appearance of a different kind of passante within its pages, one whose identity is not constrained by the impossible choice between an eternal, mythological fantasy of woman and a historically specific construction. The editorial of issue 4 mentions an article by Parveen Adams and Beverley Brown, but there is something funny about the reference. In the third issue, where it appeared, the article is entitled “The Feminine Body and Feminist Politics.” Now it has slipped into something a little less predictable: “The Feminist Body and Feminist Politics.” And what a slip! Has m/f suddenly blown its cover, let the bag out of the bag, revealing the truth by lifting up the petticoat of anti-essentialism for just a second? Perhaps this is the first and last time that anyone, reader or spectator, ever got a glimpse of this barely imaginable entity, the feminist body. For it has never been seen again, and though no one, feminist, woman or man, can remember what it looked like, it has assuredly left an indelible mark on the mind of every discerning reader. Love at first sight—who can doubt that the feminist body would have provided the answers to all our questions, had she but stayed awhile?