‘Circe’: Joyce’s Argumentum ad Feminam

Abstract

The rapidly growing body of feminist scholarship in Joyce studies¹ can be seen as part of a larger project to rethink the complex intersections between gender and the logic of modernity.² As Alice Jardine argues, the often uneasy valorisation of the feminine in modern literary and theoretical texts is not an accidental but rather an intrinsic feature of modernity. The invention or recovery of new rhetorical and ‘conceptual spaces’ in modern texts all too often depends on coding as feminine what has been excluded or marginalised in the dominant discourse.³ Similarly, the work of Julia Kristeva has located the source of the aesthetic ‘revolution’ in a desire to reach the maternal jouissance by violating the constraints of the symbolic exchange. The suppressed level of signification — the semiotic chora — is ‘gendered’ as maternal as if the structuralist linguistics could not be deconstructed without dismantling gender ideology.⁴ From yet another perspective, Luce Irigaray responds that the articulation of female sexuality in its own specificity necessarily involves ‘retraversal’ and ‘mimicry’ of the discursive operations of the patriarchal culture, whose specular system of representation is intolerant of differences, multiplicity, and indeterminancy.⁵

Argumentum ad feminam, as we said in old Rome and ancient Greece. … For the rest Eve’s sovereign remedy.

(James Joyce, Ulysses, p. 483)