Ineluctable Modality of the Vaginal
Arguing about Lacan’s late seminars, about the petit objet a, or about the theory of the two lips, about the expulsion of Irigary, I think that’s what it was, though I’m willing to bet most couples don’t argue about such things, at least not after two or three margaritas, probably not under any circumstances at all, but then again we weren’t really arguing about that, not about French psychoanalysis, not about the petit objet a, not about Irigary and that sex which is not one, but about some other subject altogether, it’s always something else, that’s what was making me so sad, how it was always some other subject, a subject that was bumped aside, some isolate, hermeneutical matter that I couldn’t pin down in an Upper West Side bar while he was assuming his particularly vehement boy expression, a kind of a phallocratic face, or a carnophallogocentric face, a politics of face simulation, a phallic politics of facial deformation, it should have been about finances, this argument, or about the economic politics of sexuality, or about his inability to allow into debate the discussion of matrimony, which he always said was a social construction of commitment, rather than a commitment itself, and if I could agree with the liberating theory of contingency, the contingency of committed relationships, then I would see that this social construction of commitment was irrelevant, just something that magazines and television programming tried to hard-sell me, and its not that I disagreed, at all, I understood that marriage had feudal origins and was thus about bourgeois power and patrimony, but I took issue with the fact that we could never even discuss the nuptial commitment, because if we did he said that I was assuming a fascist totalizing language, a feminine language in the becoming of male totalitarian language, and then he would start to drink to excess and his face would flush and we couldn’t touch each other for a week or more, well, maybe it was on this occasion that I did say it out loud as I too had drunk or was just plain fed up, maybe I raised my voice a little, admitted that he was a phallocrat, that despite his seminars in Marxist aesthetics, or whatever, Walter Benjamin, women disgusted him, that the way he required the first and last word, the alpha and omega, was an oppressive thing, always the last word, always a dead stop, which was when he got going on some nonsense, on algorithms of the unconscious, on Borromean knots, those psychosexual and linguistic constructs that are essential to the conjunction of language and consciousness, the gossamer moment of ontology, the knot that binds, the erotic, the feminine, couldn’t be untangled, couldn’t be separated and formulated outside of feminine consciousness, these knots, a girl thing, Borromean knots, I don’t know, up until then we might have found the spot where we agreed that we didn’t disagree, and we might have listed the things we agreed on, a history that swept backward behind us, we agreed on being in that certain bar on the Upper West Side and, prior to that, we agreed on certain jukebox selections, Tom Waits or Leonard Cohen or Joni Mitchell if available, and, prior to that, we agreed on a sequence of semesters and vacations, ebbing and flowing, and prior to that, we agreed on moving in together, cohabiting, and, prior to that, we agreed on a certain narrative of our meeting, a narrative which spun out its thread in this way: both of us trapped on the subway one night when it rumbled to a stop between 96th St. and 72nd St., both of us reading, coincidentally, The Lover by Marguerite Duras, straphanging, talking and giggling during the quarter hour that the Number Two was hobbled in the express tunnel, the injustice of collapsed trains, it was sweet, and I asked for his number, because he was too shy to do the asking, or so we agreed later, and, in my black tights with the provocative stylized tear, he said, which was actually an accidental tear on the thigh, and in my gray miniskirt, which was only slightly racier than office garb, I was the one who was ready to move, ready to yield to some subliminal discourse of romantic love, we agreed on this narrative and recounted it periodically, refining and improving, concretizing or reifying its artifice, and he occasionally included actual passages from the Duras, blunt short sentences, claimed to have read these to me, to have read them aloud in the subway tunnel, as we hung on those straps, though there were no actual straps (it was a train that had only poles and transverses), and though I was actually reading Djuna Barnes, and later anyhow he always said that the romanticwas a destructive force, responsible for all the worst poetry of the nineteenth century, responsible even for the theory of Total War, because by extrapolation, there would be no war without the romance of the Empire, the romance of nationalism, the romance of purity doctrines, he even said that he no longer liked Duras, whose idea of upheaval was decadent, alcoholic, still we wrote this story together, shared the quill, about a time when we had been irresistible, when we used to burst into one another’s apartments eager to fling off layers of fashion, when we used to cry out, making use of that philosophers stone of romantic mythology, jouissance, I admit it, that time was lost, and when in the singular precincts of our separate offices we tried to locate that time, that fabulous unity, it was as part of our intimate folklore of abundance, rather than a part of actual experience, and that was maybe the real argument, the one we didn’t have in the Upper West Side bar, that was the stiff breeze, and our relationship was a Mylar balloon slipping out of a toddler’s fist, helixing around and around up into the elsewhere of the musky New York City skies, landing distantly back in time, during the Sandinistas, during El Salvador, during Iran-Contra, fogbound in the dim past, we had loosed our balloon, even if all this simply made him furious because he always said that Iwould not stay on a particular subject, that was the problem, the culture of femininity asserted as its moral right a fuzziness with respect to meaning, You’re a sloppy thinker! I arrived at a point, he said, through a kind of labial circulation, a vicus recirculation, as Joyce said, meaning probably both vicious and having to do with Vico, but maybe viscous, too, as in labial, viscous, heavy with a heavy menstrual fluidity, You wont stay on the point, youexceed and overflow, he said, in the bar on the Upper West Side, in the seventh year of our entanglement, our Borromean knot, but I insisted that staying on the point was his way of dictating the terms of the discussion like arguing about whether