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Slavoj Zizek's dialogue with French feminism is rather limited. Aside from his occasional disparaging comments about Julia Kristeva's anti-revolutionary sentiments,2 Zizek has for the most part avoided serious discussion with Kristeva, Hélène Cixous or Luce Irigaray.3 Though actively, but not uncritically, working within a Lacanian framework, as Zizek does, these "French feminists" (as they are typically grouped) must have seemed too compromised by their association with Derrida and deconstruction. Rather than engaging with what French feminism's Lacanianism might have to offer the Left, Zizek perceives these thinkers as unhelpfully belaboring Freud/Lacan's phallogocentric predilections, and appealing to a deceptive version of the "eternal feminine."
Zizek's indifference is all the more regrettable since he and the French feminists alike share a deep commitment to sexual difference. Each also seeks to make a place for the question of sexual difference-and more specifically, for the question of (female) jouissance-within a philosophy that, from Descartes's cogito to Heidegger's Dasein, has remained largely blind to it. Like Lacan, who questioned the primacy of cognition in Western philosophy-philosophy's axiomatic insistence on self-knowledge as an expression of self-mastery-Kristeva professes her own kind of "antiphilosophy,"4 affirming the deep interconnection between thought and desire, if not the identification of thought with desire (jouissance): "The knowing subject is also a desiring subject, and the paths of desire ensnarl the paths of knowledge" (307). In other words, the desiring subject for Kristeva (as well as for Irigaray and Cixous) is decidedly a psychoanalytical one: "Desidero is the Freudian cogito" (Lacan, Écrits 154).5 Zizek echoes his French feminist counterparts when he points out philosophy's willful neglect of sexual difference and argues for psychoanalysis's implicit role as a necessary supplement:
[T]he crucial difference between psychoanalysis and philosophy concern[s] the status of sexual difference: for philosophy, the subject is not inherently sexualized, sexualization only occurs at the contingent, empirical level, whereas psychoanalysis raises sexuation into a kind of formal a priori condition for the very emergence of the subject. We should thus defend the claim that what philosophy cannot think is sexual difference in its philosophical (ontological) dimension. (Zizek, Less Than Nothing 747).
What Zizek shares with his feminist counterparts is a certain appeal to, or concern with feminine jouissance (enjoyment), as a site of contestation, as an alternative economy...