post-colonial_translation

Cixous, Lispector and fidelity 143
we examine them from the perspective of Jacques Lacan’s notion of
‘the subject presumed to know’. If ‘transference is the acting-out of the
reality of the unconscious,’ the bond that brings together the subaltern
and the dominant is not merely the outcome of a violent experience,
but also an emotional, and even an erotic affair. ‘I deemed it necessary’,
writes Lacan, ‘to support the idea of transference, as indistinguishable
from love, with the formula of the subject presumed to know. [ . . . ] The
person in whom I presume knowledge to exist thereby acquires my love’
(quoted in Felman 1987, pp. 87, 86). In what I have described here as a
paradigmatic scene of colonization, as well as in the general plot that
opposes the subaltern’s openness towards the dominant to the latter’s
impenetrability towards the former, we may say that the dominant
culture plays the role of ‘the subject presumed to know’, the
unquestioned and unquestionable ‘self-sufficient, self-possessed
proprietor of knowledge’ (ibid., pp. 87, 84). At the same time that the
subaltern culture desires the knowledge which supposedly belongs to
the dominant, the latter never doubts the legitimacy of its status as the
owner and guardian of such knowledge. Consequently, from such a
perspective, the tragedy of the subaltern is precisely the blindness with
which it devotes itself to this transferential love that only serves the
interests of the dominant and feeds the illusion of ‘the subject presumed
to know’, as it also legitimates the latter’s power to decide what is proper
and what is not, what is desirable and what is not.
And since this is a story of love but, first of all, also of asymmetries,
the fascination which the subaltern feels towards the dominant is never
truly reciprocated, at least within the colonial context. In a predictable
counteractive move, it has been the explicit overall goal of post-colonial
theorists to subvert and even to transform the basic asymmetrical
narratives constructed by colonialism by means of the recognition and
the celebration of heterogeneity. Among such theories, some trends in
contemporary feminism have been particularly forceful in defending a
non-violent approach to difference which allegedly offers a pacifistic
alternative to the age-old models imposed by patriarchy and
colonialism. The prominent French feminist Hélène Cixous’s highly
influential thinking largely derived from her notion of the ‘feminine’ as
transcending the traditional biological opposition between men and
women (1975) is certainly one of the best-known examples of such
efforts.
The main object of this chapter is precisely one of Cixous’s most
ambitious projects which is a remarkable illustration of the
contradictions implied by her notion of the feminine: her textual ‘affair’