Shoshana Felman--"Women and Madness: The Critical Phallacy" (1975)

Felman identifies the "phallacy" of reading women's madness in texts as the undefinable "Other"-- outside of the order she is meant to identify with (as the "reflection" the the male as not-male), the space where reason and language break down--as both women as madness and the paradoxical but concurrent reading of madness as being unwomanly, and therefore being outside of the order provided by the role of woman.

Felman notes Phyllis Chesler's work, which identifies the preponderance of hysteria or madness of women as "either the acting out of the devalues female role or the total or partial rejection of one's sex-role stereotype" (quoting Chesler). Felman also nods to Irigaray's "Speculum of the Other Woman"--that woman is the dichotomous opposite of man in logocentric logic (the predominance of logos over writing). This economy produces as "unique valorization of the 'positive' pole (that is, of a single term) and, consequently, the repressive subordination of all 'negativity,' the master of difference as such." Irigaray points out that woman is viewed as his opposite, his other, not in her own right, different. "Female sexuality is thus described as an absence (of the masculine presence), as lack, incompleteness, deficiency....This symmetrical conception of otherness is a theoretical blindness to the woman's actual "Difference, which is currently asserting itself, and asserting precisely its claim to a new kind of logic and a new type of theoretical reasoning."

in response to Irigaray, Felman poses the question: What is is for a woman to speak? Who is speaking--can a woman speak or is she "spoken for", "in the name of", etc. Perhaps, then, to "speak for" a woman to "appropriate and to silence." Felman points to what she sees as Irigaray's "Blind spot": what are the answers and the repercussions of speaking as a woman, since language is inherently structured through patriarchy? Felman says Irigaray has not fully thought this out.

Felman proposes a central problem: "how can one speak from the place of the Other? How can the woman be thought about outside of the Masculine/Feminine framework, other, than as opposed to man, without being subordinated to a primordial masculine model? How can madness, in a similar way. be conceived outside of its dichotomous opposition to sanity, without being subjugated to reason? How can difference as such be thought out as non-subordinate to identity? In other words, how can thought break away from the logic of polar opposition?"

Felman undertakes a critical re-reading of the text and criticism of Balzac's "Adieu." In short, Felman argues that critical readings of the text have shrugged off, even excised, Stephanie's madness because it falls outside the realm of logic, the describable, the definable. Critics cannot read it, and it is "silenced" just as Stephanie is tamed by sugar cubes. Felman says the text points to the "problematic within a systematic search for the nature of feminine identity." "Women as such are associated both with madness and with silence, whereas men are idefetified with prerogatives of discourse of and reason." She shows a new reading of the text, which identifies Balzac's text as disorienting and identified with speaking as Other...

Then she calls us forth to speak both as mad and not mad.