BECOMING POST-HYSTERIC

Abstract

This article considers American writer and filmmaker Chris Kraus’s genre-bending, parodic book I Love Dick (1997) as a way to deconstruct divisions that persist between the female “hysteric” and the male “schizophrenic” in contemporary theory. Even after the feminist movements in France, the UK, and America in the 1970s, there remained a gender divide lying dormant within even the more experimental contemporary theory: the male schizophrenic is given more agency to occupy the roles of theorist, author, and philosopher of living while the female hysteric is rendered non-intellectual, unintelligible, and suppressed, seen in the popularization of metaphors of schizophrenia to describe the postmodern condition, for example. This is a dilemma Kraus confronts head-on, and which this article takes up at length, with the author making the case that Kraus’s work marks the beginning of a nuanced theory that encompasses both the hysteric and the schizo in tandem. The article argues that frameworks of becoming-hysteric and becoming-schizo are feminist ways through the post-structuralist terrains that Kraus deterritorializes, including but not limited to the theoretical realms of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari.

Keywords:

• hysteria
• schizophrenia
• feminist theory
• autofiction
• contemporary literature
• autotheory
• madness
• discourse
• schizoculture
• postmodernity
• post-structuralism
• history of psychiatry

disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

This work was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) through the Postdoctoral Fellowship program. Thank you to Dr Salah El Moncef and the anonymous peer reviewers at Angelaki for their editorial guidance and support.

1 For the purposes of this article, I draw on a male–female binary that is trans inclusive. This is the binary Kraus herself draws from in I Love Dick. As with many recent feminist scholars, I engage the “female” category here as one inclusive of other genders that exist beyond the category of the cisgender male, including gender-fluid, non-binary, and genderqueer people.

2 Mythology and folklore scholar Amy Hale’s recent conversation with artist and writer Tai Shani for the MIT Press podcast addresses the politics of “the counterculture” and the ways in which social issues persist within countercultural organizing on both “The Left” and “The Right.” Their conversation on the roots of countercultural thought is tied specifically to paganism and occult feminisms, with their discussing the coopting of leftist, hippie countercultural practices and visual vernacular by the right-wing counterculture (Shani and Hale). For the purposes of my discussion of Kraus’s I Love Dick in the context of Semiotext(e)’s publishing history and its intellectual and political origins in a post-May-1968 France (and a post-late-1960s civil rights era America).

3 In my book Autotheory as Feminist Practice in Art, Writing, and Criticism, I write:

Subcultures and postmodern theory are often seen as sites of resistance to a dominant culture, but they can also be sites of their own pernicious power imbalances and oppressions – a point Kraus engages directly in I Love Dick. If Hebdige theorizes subcultures, and Lotringer, Deleuze, and Guattari theorize “schizo-culture,” then Kraus theorizes the men who theorize subculture and schizo-culture. In I Love Dick, Kraus takes to task the lived actions of some of these notable men in relation to the politics of their work, writing autotheoretically and autofictionally to integrate her lived experience in relation to their lives and work […] [including] critiquing the sexism of Deleuze and Guattari’s dinner parties […] (222–23)

4 I propose the term “post-memoiristic” to describe the impulse that guides many autotheoretical writers at the end of the twentieth century through to the twenty-first century, with writers like Kraus distancing themselves from more traditional categories of genre like “memoir” in favor of cross-genre practices and performative ways of writing.

5 See Anna Watkins Fisher’s “Manic Impositions: The Parasitical Art of Chris Kraus and Sophie Calle,” where the author proposes the metaphor of parasitism as a way of understanding Kraus’s work as a strategic feminist performance engaged in relation to the men in her life (Fisher 223).

6 See the entry for “hysteria” in the Oxford English Dictionary.

7 See the entry for “schizophrenia” in the Oxford English Dictionary.

8 See the entry for “hysteria” in the Oxford English Dictionary.

9 In Chris Kraus’s Video Green: Los Angeles Art and the Triumph of Nothingness, she theorizes the dominant aesthetic in late 1990s Los Angeles as one in which personal, autobiographical approaches were rejected outright in favor of a vastly de-subjectifying, de-individuating, “neocorporate neoconceptual” approach:

Whereas modernism believed the artist’s life held all the magic keys to reading works of art, neoconceptualism has cooled this off and corporatized it. The artist’s own biography doesn’t matter much at all. What life? The blanker the better. The life experience of the artist, if channeled into the artwork, can only impede art’s neocorporate, neoconceptual purpose. It is the biography of the institution that we want to read. (21–22)

Kraus provides this as evidence for why her and the other “diary writers” – a symbol of those often women and “girls” who write and make artwork from the ostensibly “personal” materials of their lives – will fail in the contemporary art world of that time. Now, in the third decade of the twenty-first century, the context has changed, and the reception of writers working personally, while still contested in theory and scholarly circles (consider the charge of “narcissism,” for example, as a way of delegitimating work by women and people of color that engages their lives in direct ways), is arguably more welcomed.

10 See Lauren Fournier’s Autotheory as Feminist Practice in Art, Writing, and Criticism:

Written in the first person, the work moves between the present day and Wang’s past experiences as a woman living with what has been diagnosed as schizoaffective disorder, bipolar I. Wang’s book is at home in the oeuvre of its Minnesota-based indie press, which often publishes books that are genre-ambiguous and autofictionally or autotheoretically inclined (most famously Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts [2016]). (Fournier, Rev. 64)

11 See Fournier (Autotheory); Bal (“Documenting What”, “Imaging Madness”); Zwartjes; Brostoff and Fournier.

12 Kraus emphasizes the importance of Acker’s work in the development of autotheory as a feminist writing practice; in her 2017 book After Kathy Acker: A Literary Biography, Kraus writes that, until Acker, “There had not been a writer, a contemporary writer living in our midst, who united the world of pop culture and music and post-punk to the world of literature, let alone the world of critical theory” (Acker 218–19). Underscoring the point of Acker’s literary innovations, Kraus states that:

Incredibly, critics of all kinds have embraced discursive first-person fiction in the last years as if it were a new, post-internet genre. These contemporary texts owe a great debt to the candor and inventiveness of Acker’s work and the work of her peers and progenitors. (Acker 279)

It seems like Kraus is gesturing to autotheory here, though she does not mention this, or any other, specific term.

13 See Fournier, Autotheory as Feminist Practice in Art, Writing, and Criticism.

14 With this view, it is conceivable that Lotringer’s Semiotext(e) might be more receptive to feminist work in a post-Butlerian mode (like Kraus’s), which marks a distancing from Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis.

15 Media theorist Sarah Sharma argues that, when it comes to Italian and French ultra-Left theory, feminists did some of the work first and then the male autonomists appropriated it (Sharma).

16 Di Leo adds the caveat that:

Deleuze’s writings always seemed to have a less comfortable relationship with theory. While he was generally regarded along with Foucault and Derrida as one of the most important post-structuralist thinkers to come out of postwar France, his writing always received much less attention than theirs in literary theory circles as well as in the philosophical community. One might argue that the reason for this is linked to the fact that Deleuze’s writings are much more difficult to reduce to method than those of Foucault and Derrida. (177)

17 “Schizo-Culture” is the title of a 1975 Semiotext(e) publication and conference featuring work by Lotringer, Burroughs, Cage, Deleuze, Guattari, Foucault, Lyotard, as well as two radical feminist activists, Ti-Grace Atkinson and Judy Clark (Lotringer and Morris).

18 See Emmanuelle Guattari, I, Little Asylum.

19 See Sibylle Lacan, A Father.

20 Guattari’s daughter Emmanuelle Guattari wrote the book I, Little Asylum (Semiotext(e)) that details her time as a child growing up in this “castle disguised as a psychiatric clinic.”

21 See Fournier, “From Philosopher’s Wife to Feminist Autotheorist: Performing Phallic Mimesis as Parody in Chris Kraus’s I Love Dick” (2021), for an in-depth reading of the mechanism at work in I Love Dick; I take Fournier’s term “phallic mimesis,” here, as a way of understanding Kraus’s appropriation of schizophrenia.

22 This is the argument made by Lauren Fournier in the recently published monograph Autotheory as Feminist Practice in Art, Writing, and Criticism (MIT P, 2021), the first book-length work on the subject of “autotheory,” which provides a historicization and theorization of the term as well as an in-depth reading of Kraus’s I Love Dick.

23 See Fournier, Autotheory as Feminist Practice in Art, Writing, and Criticism. See page 256.

24 “In Félix’s book Chaosophy there’s a great discussion on schizophrenia between him, Deleuze, and eight of France’s leading intellectuals. All of them are men. If we want reality to change then why not change it?” (Kraus, Dick 227).

25 In a 1980 issue of Semiotext(e) and subsequent book edited by Lotringer and Christian Marazzi in 2007, Negri's work is included alongside those whom the editors deem the main leaders and theorists of the post-1968 Autonomist movement in Italy (Lotringer and Marazzi, Autonomia); out of forty-six entries, two are written by women and one makes direct mention of feminism. The argument has been made that the autonomists curated here appropriated the work of unacknowledged Italian women theorists and activists, including Silvia Federici, whose writings on labor, women's work, and witchcraft continue to shape conversations within contemporary theory and feminism today, and whose approach to biology and the body has been critiqued by trans scholars.

26 In their historicization of the New Narrative movement, Dodie Bellamy and Kevin Killian posit the end of the movement with 1997 and the publication of Kraus’s I Love Dick (Fournier, Autotheory 257; Bellamy and Killian 2).