Bearing the Beyond: Women and the Limits of Language in Stanley Cavell — Page 9:
41 Reading the fate of women in the Hollywood movies analyzed by Cavell therefore gives us insights in the violent consequences of the skeptical epistemic and erotic ideals of total access and total disjunction. Importantly these consequences are not metaphysical but instantly recognizable as part of the violence perpetrated against women's bodies in a world shaped by these ideals. Yet, Cavell's close attention to the luminosity of the body of the female stars on film also presents these women as a visualization of the sublime, understood as that which resists the confinements of the given order of things and yet is encoded in this very order. These women's powerful bodies bear the beyond, which is able to change or judge the world created in a state male skeptical imagination.[8]For this notion of the sublime see also: Mehigan, Timothy J. <em>The Critical Response to Musil's</em> The Man without Qualities. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2003. 103.
Judging the World
42 In his reflections on opera Cavell expands on the idea that women have the power to judge a male-centered world from a space beyond it. He does this by linking their power to judge with the act of singing. He writes that a central feature of "singing [is] expressing the inexpressible — in loss or in discovery" (Pitch 154; emphasis added). The women in opera express in their song the
sense of being pressed or stretched between two worlds — one in which to be seen, the roughly familiar world of the philosophers, and one from which to be heard, one to which one releases or abandons one's spirit [. . .] and which recedes when the breath of the song ends. This expression of the inexpressible (for there is no standing language of that other world; it requires understanding without meaning) I described as a mad state, as if opera is naturally pitched at this brink. (Pitch 144)
43 Like the women stars in the melodrama, the singing women in opera expose themselves to the male world, because they carry within them the power to embody an Emersonian aversion from a place beyond the male space of seeing. In what he calls the experience of loss Cavell expresses the connection of singing to orality. Orality implies a pre-verbal place of feeling or pain. It is from this space that the woman expresses herself without a concept and consequently without assurance that she is understood or can make sense. The point is "to propose that we think of the voice in opera as a judgment of the world on the basis of, called forth by, pain beyond a concept." The therapeutic seduction of opera involves that we are called to listen to this pain and "to understand beyond explanation" (Pitch 149). This pain expresses the forced separation of the women's self from herself in a world where there are no words for her, "a separation that may be figured as being forced into a false marriage" (Pitch 151). In its inexpressiveness, this experience of loss — like music — points to a place of "understanding before what we might call meaning, as if it exists in permanent anticipation of — hence in perpetual dissatisfaction with, even disdain for — what can be said" (Pitch 160).
44 In what he names the experience of discovery, Cavell links singing to orgasm. In singing, the woman is beside herself. She experiences herself in connection to a "nextness to a grander world," i.e., a transcendent or sublime realm intervening into our world in the form of an "irrupting of a new perspective of the self to itself" (Pitch 145). Cavell conceives of this irruption of self-knowledge as empowering jouissance available only to the woman herself. The diva abandons herself to this knowledge and in her abandonment she is willing to "depart from all settled habitation, all conformity of meaning" (Pitch 144). In her — according to Cavell — word-shattering singing she becomes the emblem of the "human as immigrant" (Pitch 144).
Conclusion
45 It is impossible not to hear heteronormative Freudian undertones in Cavell's equation of "woman" and her "inexpressible jouissance" with "absence" and "transcendence."[9]The similarities between Cavell and, for example, Julia Kristeva are suggestive and deserve fuller exploration. I explore these in more detail in my <em>Beyond the Philosopher's Fear</em>, where I give a fuller and more critical account of Cavell's symbolism of gender. In his work on the movies or on opera, the "feminine side" of our character symbolizes "the other" side, i.e., the sublime other side of the male and his fearful and violent desire to control. However likewise important is that Cavell's reading of these movies allows us to consider how these structures of desires (named as feminine or masculine) are malleable and part of the world that we speak into being. Masculinity and femininity are not the result of innate rules of desire given in biology or in the structure of any symbolic system; rather as forms of desire masculinity or feminity are formed in us through the social intercourses that carries our world. Consequently, they are local and performative. In Cavell's analysis modern philosophy's desire for the impossible, as the opening gambit of modern skepticism, is intertwined with these local performances of desire, epistemic and erotic. Not metaphysics but new attention to politics of desire will help us overcome them.