Jacqueline Rose - PDF document

Jacqueline Rose It has been the strength of feminism to produce a recognition of the political importance sexuality and subjectivity in the face of more traditional political or Marxist analyses which have consistently left them out of account. The dialogue between psychoanalysis and feminism belongs in that political space. But the very success of that intervention may in turn be in danger of producing an unintended consequence: that the domain of what is more easily and conventionally defined as the political can continue to be analysed as if it were free of psychic and sexual processes, as if it operated outside the range of their effects. The re-election of Margaret Thatcher to a term and the resurgence of right-wing ideologies seems the appropriate moment to up this issue - a moment when those very processes reveal themselves more and to be crucial determinants or at least components of the political scene, a moment we find ourselves witnessing the pressure of fantasy on our collective political life. If Margaret Thatcher throws up this question, she also does so in a way which is especially difficult for feminism because she is a woman, one furthermore who some of the worst properties of what feminism has identified as a patriarchal and state. This very difficulty can, however, perhaps serve as a caution to what become, in many discussions of psychoanalysis and feminism, an idealization of unconscious, whether as writing or pre-Oedipality, or both. This article attempts to Thatcher in the domain of what psychoanalysis calls the realm of symbolic that is, the general forms of psychic cohesion which societies engender and which they also come to rely. For feminism the symbolic order is always gendered. article is therefore an attempt to run two propositions together: that the symbolic is gendered; that right-wing ideologies thrive on and strain against the furthest of psychic fantasy. It then adds to these two a further question: how to analyse both these factors when it is a woman at the summit of political power who comes to embody them at their most extreme? I . . . a a victim/executioner new formations NUMBER 6 WINTER I 988 - - a will a a a a a a a a A a - a a I a a a a a 4 a Marxism Today a a a a a - - a - - a aa a a a a a o - a a - - a a a Dance with a Stranger, - - a a a a a - a a ? 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