Sexuality in the Field of Vision

by Jacqueline Rose

A brilliantly original exploration of the interface between feminism, psychoanalysis, semiotics and film theory.

Genres: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, Philosophy, Film, Nonfiction, Theory, Art

256 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1987

About the author

Jacqueline Rose, FBA (born 1949, London) is a British academic who is currently Professor of Humanities at the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities.

Rose was born into a non-practicing Jewish family. Her elder sister was the philosopher Gillian Rose. Jacqueline Rose is known for her work on the relationship between psychoanalysis, feminism and literature. She is a graduate of St Hilda's College, Oxford and gained her higher degree (maîtrise) from the Sorbonne, Paris and her doctorate from the University of London.

Her book Albertine, a novel from 2001, is a feminist variation on Marcel Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu.

She is best known for her critical study on the life and work of American poet Sylvia Plath, The Haunting of Sylvia Plath, published in 1991. In the book, Rose offers a postmodernist feminist interpretation of Plath's work, and criticises Plath's husband Ted Hughes and other editors of Plath's writing. Rose describes the hostility she experienced from Hughes and his sister (who acts as literary executor to Plath's estate) including threats received from Hughes about some of Rose's analysis of Plath's poem "The Rabbit Catcher". The Haunting of Sylvia Plath was critically acclaimed, and itself subject to a famous critique by Janet Malcolm in her book The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes.

Rose is a regular broadcaster on and contributor to the London Review of Books.

Rose's States of Fantasy was the inspiration for composer Mohammed Fairouz's Double Concerto of the same title.

(from Wikipedia)

Reviews

[Uğur · Rating 5 out of 5]

It would not be an exaggeration to say that the book is a masterpiece.

It is the most qualified, philosophical aspect I have read for a long time, and besides, it makes a great contribution to feminist theory both in sociopolitical, psychological and philosophical terms by interpreting psychoanalysis with feminist theory.

First of all, let me try to explain the book to you a little, starting from the psychoanalysis point, which is the main theme of the book. Our author chose to analyze Schneider's cine-psychoanalysis analysis based on Marilyn Monroe and her imagination, using feminist theory. Our writer, who wants to draw attention to how gender discrimination is attributed as a safe harbor in film terminology, tells us that these terms are the basis of the hegemonic language and feed the status quo, through a critique of the phenomena of "femininity" and "gender discrimination", based on Lacanian psychoanalysis.

Rose's following statement explains everything;
More than writing but less than an event, psychoanalysis continues to point to a moment that the endless play of language cannot capture, which cannot be explained by class, economy or power. This has always been the source of both the political significance and the difficulty of psychoanalysis. The place where this is most clearly expressed is feminism. Understanding the terms subjectivity, gender difference, and fantasy, avoiding both fixation and denial, is still very important work today, I think.”

Rose, which examines the feminist issues in the phenomenon of cinema by highlighting the discussion of cine-psychoanalysis theory, feminist theory and sexuality in the book, explains that in the discussion of sexuality in feminist theory, the cinematic image is accepted as the model of the representation that provides the structuring and continuity of gender discrimination. This is in direct continuity with the need to describe the political and ideological problem that feminism realizes with women's awareness of "perception" from the point of view of the construction of the image.

The problem is that the woman is a visual (arbitrary) spectacle... and at the center of the problem is the gender difference attitude of patriarchal thought, and getting help from psychoanalysis, according to Rose. Likewise, concepts constantly drawn from psychoanalysis aim to legitimize the problem of gender discrimination.

Rose sums it up like this:
“We need to ask how the relationship between this construction of the feminine and other forms of domination and subordination to which women are subjected can be formulated from within the cinema, using cinema.”

There is a very analytical language in the book, which can come back to you as long and tiring sentences. However, Rose tells us the truthfulness of this tiring book by saying, "Women do not avoid entering the most painful and dark aspects of their inner world."

Rose concludes an excellent book by stating that feminism must be able to find itself, that women must face their dark sides, and that if the feminine language is decisive, feminism must confront itself.

[Robert Wood · Rating 4 out of 5]

The book is split in two, between a set of conversations about Femininity and Representation, largely engaging with Freud and Lacan's investigations into feminine sexuality, and writings about film theory, dealing with the psychoanalytical turn. I was more interested in the first half of the text, which was focused on a defense of the feminist psychoanalysis, and the usefulness of the divided subject it conceptualized. Largely it made me realize that I need to finally break down and read the Lacan I have been avoiding up until now.

[Caris · Rating 4 out of 5]

I think one of the most powerful things a book can do for me is clarify a topic previously obscure to me while simultaneously hooking my interest right away. Very few books have given me the pleasure of this, and Rose’s “Sexuality in the Field of Vision” is now one of them.

I had no idea that feminist psychoanalysis existed until I read this book. I always carried the assumption in the back of mind, from years of indirect discourse, that psychoanalysis was inherently anti-feminist, entangled with all of the problematic trappings of a misogynistic and misguided Freud. Consequently, I also assumed that psychoanalysis was responsible for many of the ideas that feminism has historically responded to. Rose speaks to these misconceptions, and offers some compelling reasons as to why neither of them are necessarily true.

There were a few other firsts for me in this book. I had never really paid attention to media studies or aesthetics, nor had I read much about Lacan or semiotics. Not to mention Freud, George Eliot, or Shakespeare; the cultural discourse Rose engages with in this book can be quite a slog, but in a constructively challenging way.

This book is divided into two main parts: a historical deconstruction of psychoanalysis and its relationship to feminism; and an overview of film theory and how we can use it to understand the psychoanalytic study of sexuality (to describe it the best I can). The first part was more interesting to me personally, but that’s mostly because of my intellectual background. I think the project that Rose attempts to outline for feminist psychoanalysis is most aptly summarized in this statement:

“What distinguishes psychoanalysis from sociological accounts of gender is that whereas for the latter, the internalisation of norms is assumed roughly to work, the basic premise and indeed starting-point of psychoanalysis is that it does not. The unconscious constantly reveals the ‘failure' of identity. Because there is no continuity of psychic life, so there is no stability of sexual identity, no position for women (or for men) which is ever simply achieved. Feminism's affinity with psychoanalysis rests above all, I would argue, with this recognition that there is a resistance to identity at the very heart of psychic life. Viewed in this way, psychoanalysis is no longer best understood as an account of how women are fitted into place. Instead psychoanalysis becomes one of the few places in our culture where it is recognised as more than a fact of individual pathology that most women do not painlessly slip into their roles as women, if indeed they do at all. Freud himself recognised this increasingly in his work. In the articles which run from 1924 to 1931, he moves from that famous, or rather infamous, description of the little girl struck with her 'inferiority' or ‘injury’ in the face of the anatomy of the little boy and wisely accepting her fate (‘injury' as the fact of being feminine), to an account which quite explicitly describes the process of becoming ‘feminine’ as an ‘injury’ or ‘catastrophe' for the complexity of her earlier psychic and sexual life (‘injury' as its price).”

I know I’m going to return to this book for my own studies, and I’m excited to think about what avenues I might pursue with its insights. As a transfeminist, I’m especially interested in its implications for gender theory. It’s not a light read, and I think having some basic familiarity with Freud and feminist theory is necessary for this. But it’s absolutely worth the challenge.

[Maxwell · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow. Jacqueline Rose is such an incisive writer about such difficult and muddy material. I had read a bunch of Lacan/Lacanians, a bunch of Julia Kristeva, and then a bunch of Helene Cixous (écriture féminine etc)... and honestly I was getting lost between them. Now thanks to Jacqueline Rose I have a clearer understanding of sexual difference and the fantasies that pop up around the relation of representation and femininity. I feel so much better prepared to keep reading authors of this vein, probably some Luce Irigaray soon.

[Niccy]

I won’t pretend to have understood all of this, and I skipped the George Eliot chapter for fear of spoilers. I’m sure I’ll return to this.

[Michael · Rating 5 out of 5]

Indispensible; can't believe it took me this long to discover.

[Mariam Rawwas · Rating 5 out of 5]

One could claim that there were two main attempts by British psychoanalysts to forward an alliance with feminism, one in the '70s and the other in the '80s: Juliet Mitchell's Psychoanalysis and Feminism, and the text we find before us here, which could broadly be characterized as "Freudian" and "Lacanian", respectively. This difference could be ciphered as that between substance/content and structure/form. Therefore, Rose's critiques of Freud on his attempt to theorize feminine sexuality in the Dora case are precisely at those points where he attempts to provide it with a definite content. To the extent that she hesitates before Irigaray (and Derrida, et al.), it is on the same count. Rose reads Lacan's move as a sort of "ontologization" of the way in which androcentrism "overcodes" any approach to femininity (in a sort of "torsion"), and she therefore understands how Kristeva and Irigaray's attempts to "unburden" femininity from its linguistic constraints logically follow this conclusion, but she remains suspicious of any claims to a "primordial" femininity that would pre-exist repression, for the unconscious is an effect of language (and therefore cannot precede it), and because this would lead to a conflation of hysteria with schizophrenia (since the feminine, of course, cannot precede sexual difference). I will argue, however, that Irigaray already understands that the maternal body is not undifferentiated (given her discussion of the placenta in Je, Tu, Nous, a thematic which Brettinger will later tackle more explicitly in her concept of the matrixial), and that Kristeva remains distinct from Deleuze and Guattari. She therefore critiques vulgar feminist repudiations of psychoanalytic theory for a sort of "sociological Marxism," which center their claims around "what actually happens," an empiricist approach to the lives of women, and for a sort of "false consciousness" approach to ideology, in their claims that psychoanalytic theory merely reifies social constraints placed upon women, for she reads the unconscious as "indicating an irreducible discontinuity of psychic [and social] life" (a symptomatology). In a brilliant reading of George Eliot's Daniel Deronda, Rose's critique of ocularcentrism is brought to the fore: "sexuality in the field of vision" is femininity reduced to the androcentric gaze, an eliding of the simultaneous "knowing and not knowing" (like the notion of present absence) which makes of the unconscious a repository for sexual guilt. Critiquing T. S. Eliot's reading of Hamlet as not conforming to his notion of "objective correlative," she reads this surplus as precisely the force of the work. Rose carefully reads Kristeva's balancing act of placing the semiotic as extimate to the Symbolic, between psychosis on the one hand and linguistic capture on the other, and of abjection between the holy and the profane. Rose finally develops an approach to psychoanalytic film theory which is much more continuous with the work of Laura Mulvey (elliptical references are made), which makes me all the angrier that Copjec has been "recruited" by men (I would hope, without her consent) as a cudgel against Mulvey, to the repression of Rose.

[Leda · Rating 5 out of 5]

Complicated book but her insight is brilliant!! I will be thinking what I read for a long time and honestly, I will also be trying to fully comprehend it because I am not there yet. She touches on psychoanalysis, feminism, semiotics, and film theory completing a cohesive investigative intellectual cycle.

This book just opened a new door for me regarding (the fantasy of) sexual difference (/femininity) and how we need to restructure feminist thought to start from the question of the visual image and its role in the enforcement of all cultural and political restrictions we know.
''What is the effect of the extension of the concept of analogy into the description of cinema as industrialised machine if not to reinforce the idea of cinema as simply the reproduction of imaginary identity?''

I have been looking for books that fill in this exact gap, this question that makes you wonder how women can *really* understand who they are when they keep 'seeing themselves seeing themselves'.

''how to engage at all from a feminist position founded on notions of immediate or personal experience, the knowledge of one's own history, with forms or concepts of representation which depend for their analysis on the idea of the unconscious; how to move against the very nature of every day language, which leads to the question of Riddles, 'what would a politics of the unconscious be?'.''

Amazing work!

[leren_lezen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very nice, one of the most clear (the first three chapters) introductions (and one of the first works, after Juliet Mitchel's Psychoanalysis & Feminism from 1974) on why psychoanalysis and feminism need each other. This is not the same as saying that psychoanalysis is inherently feminist, even though she makes a convincing claim that Lacan's primary work could be read as feminist (chapter two). The main thesis is that both psychoanalysis and feminism are theories of resistance, making strange what is seemingly familiar, natural or how it should be (consciousness and the patriarchy). Eventually she argues that psychoanalysis offers a theoretical framework that includes the unconscious (duh), specifically meaning that one never fully coincides with patriarchy, with oneself or with one's desire. This is what is being overlooked by some radical strands of feminism (that reduce women to mere puppets of patriarchy) as well as by utopian Marxism (which leaves out subjectivity as inherently problematic). It's all just not so simple and straightforward in the end (although we often wish that it would be!!)

[Keely Shinners · Rating 4 out of 5]

Anatomy is a sham and sexuality is the vanishing-point of meaning, the residue of the dialect to which I am constantly subjected. Feminism’s affinity with psychoanalysis rests above all on a recognition that there is a resistance to identity at the very heart of psychic life, as if desire lights upon its object, finds itself disarmed and then punishes the woman for the upset produced. The enigma of femininity is ascribed to the problem of interpretation itself. Three attributes. 1. The self barely holds itself together in speech. 2. Horror as a matter of power: the power of our fascination when we are confronted with the traces of our own psychic violence, the horror when that same violence calls on social institutions for legitimation, and receives it. 3. Mother as source and fading-point of all subjectivity and language. By the way, my cigarette pleases me because as I assimilate it I annihilate it, or so Freud would have me believe. “Only for mirrors infatuated with stable images do crises exist,” said Kristeva. Also: “I never abandoned the effort to take transcendence seriously and to track down its premises into the most hidden recesses of language.” Hidden recesses: the shadow self, that is, “an alienated and alienating image which presents itself as dangerous and hence potentially as a rival.” The writing table is where my ideal ego (who I wish to be) confronts my ego ideal (who I have been) and I fell suddenly most myself, which is a sort of narcissism. In the writing, I present their relation. It is a helix. I am incapable of seizing upon the object which supports my movement. I rotate round an ideal. I desire from a void. I can only verify you by decanting you. Lacan: “It is through the look that I enter into the light, and it is from the look that I receive its effect.” The image of the woman as the very difficulty of cinema: I represent what the man is not (difference) and what he has to give up (excess). The fixing of language and the fixing of sexual identity go hand in hand; they rely on each other and share the same forms of instability and risk. Lacan read Freud through language, but he also brought out, by implication, the sexuality at work in all practices of the sign. I'm talking about images of fragmentation of a cultural world they both echo and refuse.