160 MONIQUE WITTIG I feel that we are at a very important time, with new are literally the signs which f commitme terpenetrate one another, support one another, reinforce and priority. As a feminist, and as a lesbian, I can express myself in an it will come from a consciousness of myself as a lesbian and ery lism which engenders the Structural Unconscious. The ensemble artist. It is a question of where you get your support and whom you give your encrgy to and nd of ahistoric va a political decisi well as artists No one is going to give us space or visi /e must take it. Since we have no history, we for This psyche, can begin to paint, draw, weave, and write our own. In sisterhood history and unworked by class confli nctions with very few ele agh therapy and theorization, upon the collective an Chapter 20 unconscious, We ght that the uncor MONIQUE WITTIG control, it is not just I ymbols in the psyche demands multiple interpretations. Only sp THE STRAIGHT MIND Monique Wittig, "The Stralght Mind, Feminist Issues 1, n. l summer1980),103-1 why logie the psycho ra yats her knowledge? For example, for Lacan, what he业t ARS IN PARIS, language as a phenomenon h aches him what the other one taught him. But who will deny that has entered the political discussions of the lesbian and women's liberation movements. This is because it relates the structures of the Unconscious? w irresponsible enough to disregard the disco) field where what is at play is power, or more than that, a network of of the psychoanalyzed people lying on their couches? In my opinion, there is no doubt that act upon the social reality. The i said he found there them there. People who did not fall into the power of the psychoanalytical institution r linguistics, the multiplication of schools of linguistics that advent of the sciences of pninulationo that the psychoanalyzed discourses show. In the the symptoms of the importance of that political stake. The science of language has invaded other sciences, such as anthropology through Levi-Strauss, psychoanalysis through Lacan, and way as the witches could, under torture ce(if early semiology of Roland Barthes nearly escaped from linguistic domination to become allows her/him to communicate and which s/he needs), than to attempt to say what a political analysis of the different systems of signs, to establish a relationship en this who is directly respons ho exploits her/him economically, politically, ideologically and whose interpretation reduces not last. Rather than introducing into semiology concepts which are foreign to it-in this case But can the need to contract implies only be satisfied in the Marxist concepts- Barthes quickly stated that semiology was only a branch of linguistics and his is not the case. All the Thus, the entire world is only a great register where the most diverse languages come to have themselves hasize the political significance of ty that lesbians, feminists, and gay men face in the attempt to com society, other than with a psychoanaly
62 MONIQUE WITTI THE STRAIGHT MIND 163 When the general state of things is understood ot sick or to be cured, one nemy)the result is for the oppressed person to break the psychoanalytical contract nist, and gay lib eories, and current ideas that I will call the straight mind. (See The Savage Mind by Claude ield, as if anything of that which signifies could escape the political in this moment ch bear this mark, includi nd as if, in what concerns signs could exist. Thes a core of nature which nature, that everything although it has been accepted in recent years that there is no such thi ything which puts them Our refusal of the totalizing interpretation of psychoanalysis make theoreticians say the we neglect the symbolic dimension. These discourses deny us every possibility of creating our own categories. But their most ferocious action is the unrelenting tyranny that they exert upon Atkinson and her analysis of sexual int science,the straight mind develops laminating group, we nate all the discourses of the material(physical)violence that they directly do to the oppressed people, a violence p. get the phenomena at the same time. I can only underline the oppressive character that the straight of the laws which claim to hold true for all societies. all all individuals. Thus to underline its immediate effects through the pression of individuals by discourses, and I would like caks of the exchange of women, the difference between the sexes, the symbolic order, noonscious,desire, Jouissance, culture, history, giving an absolute meaning to these concepts posters on the walls of or thought which produc ing: it signifies that women are dominated.Semiot of this discourse, describe its disposition. What they read in that discourse are sig can interpret the function is not o sgi y and which have no raison dare except to be elements o/ ns whose is f pression(economically and politically), but also it is in itself real The rhetoric which expresses them (and whose seduction I do not un oppression, since it itself in myths, re poeticize the obligatory character b it kee t In this thought, to reject the oblig orget who the cessary for the ssibility of the constitu the other and to reject the rence. Thus lesbianism, homosexuality, and the societies that we for cannot be thought of or spoken of, even though they have always existed. Thus, the straight and the d是山 one of the forms ofodies and our miner that sh discours iences and theorie work ally without this cot very expression, as Marx said I call the straight mind, F to deal wi For heterosexual society is the society which not only oppresses lesbians and gay men, it presses many different/others, it oppresses all women and many categories of men, all those and reality, your discourse is naive, you misunderstand this or that science are in the po If the discourse of modern theoretical systems and social science exert a power upon act of power, since it is essentially a normative act, Everybody tries to show the other as it is because it works with concepts which closely touch us. In spite of the historic advent: of different, But not everybody succeeds in doing so. One has to be socially dominant to succeed
164 MONIQUE WITTIG THE STRAIGHT MIND 165 between the in a concert of interdisciplinarity, never more harmonious than since the heterosexual myths ther. like sure values that can be es affects all the concepts which are part of the same conglomerate. Bu invested, in anthropology as well as in psychoanalysis and in all the social sciences no such thing man or being-man, "Man"an ula which have-becen-slavery"is the dynamic which introduces the diachronism of history into the n F politically studied from within the science of our oppre same time. the and abolish men and with this sorrow that we have manifesto, of language/action, that which transforms, that which makes history other words, for us and universal th any longer omen and men, and tracted from them, laws that could be stuffed into computers, and in any case for the moment If politic angsre strumental are that an economic and political transformation will violent and brutal a way that the whole system, which was believed to be formal, topl into another dimension of knowledge. This dimension belongs to ce somehow we designated, and since, as Levi-Strauss said, we talk, will not su So, this is what lesbians say everywhere in this country and in some others, if that of language, and language is we ain by these strategic concepts. It is ety are still unenvisionable. An anthro de perspective, and it would be incorrect to say that lesbians associate, make love, live with ocial groups can no longer appear as a logical necessity to the dominated, because they revolt, women, for"woman"has meaning only in heterosexual systems of thought and heterosexual ecause they question the differences, Levi-Strauss, Lacan and their epigones call upon coessities which escape the control of consciousness and therefore th responsibility of Notes e, which require the excha nge of wome This text was first read in New York at the Modern Language Association Convention in 1978 and no society, depends on it. But what does women being exchanged mean if not that they ar political power without mastery of the art of dominated? No wonder then that there is only 3 Throughout this paper when Lacan's use of the term"the conscious"i referred to it is capitalized, 4 For example see Karla Jay, Allen Young, eds, Out of che Clouets(New York: Links Books, 1972) there is no slavery of women, there is difference. To which I will answer with this a ade eeting in 1848: Why do the gentlemen say it have been slavery, this sorrow that we have sorrowed. "Yes, be taken away fro definition of"social sex"Nicole-Claude Mathieu, "Notes pour une definition sociologique own the"what goes-without-saying"heterosexual pm山甲mk efal Sex Category in Soclology (pamphlet), Explorations 如Dnb 9 In pe Materialist Simmc dr et la lutte des femmes, suddenl nerged through the dominated individu II Are the millons of dollars a year made by the psychoanalysts symbolic? women, who started their struggle almost two centuries ago. And it has bee, particularly through ork: Hill and Wang, 1972),p. 13 No more is any woman who is not in a relation of personal dependency with a
