"Part of the process of embracing this new
hermaphroditic consciousness involves understanding what is meant
by ‘the feminine’... An interesting formulation can be found in
the French psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva’s notion of forms of jouissance,
which she discusses in Black Sun:
Two forms of jouissance... seem possible
for a woman: on the one hand, there is phallic jouissance - competing
or identifying with the partner’s symbolic power. On the other
hand, there is an other jouissance that fantasy imagines
and carries out by aiming more deeply at psychic space, and the
space of the body as well. That other jouissance requires that
the melancholy object blocking the psychic and bodily interior
literally be liquefied. (Kristeva, 1989: 78-9)
... ‘The feminine’, or luna, refers
to psychic space and the space of the body, and the workings of
the imagination within it. Kristeva’s description is also alchemical,
for it describes the transformation of the nigredo, the
‘melancholy object’ that must be ‘liquefied’. We often read in
alchemy that everything must be reduced to water... In alchemical
terms, Kristeva describes the emergence of Luna out of the captivity
of the despair and depression of the nigredo." Nathan Schwartz-Salant
