L'Orient au féminin ou l'Autre qui revient au même

Abstract

In Western literature, the poetic Orient constitutes a signifying system which connotes the extraneity, the utopic elsewhere breaking from the norm. The feminist theoretcial fictions, whether from Quebec or from France, did not fail to create their own poetic Orient in which the Other, the Elsewhere and the Previous are similarly interwoven. The personal experience we have of Indian music gave us a pleasure analogous to the reading of these fictions. However, as we tried to further the analogy, we were gradually compelled to deconstruct it, finding that this Orient in the feminine, far from constituting the sign of the presence of the "semiotic" could be understood as the paroxysm of a knowledge, an arithmetic, an authority. Thus, was not the feminine just like the Oriental, a conceptual construct? How is it possible to reconcile on one hand, a textual practice which deconstructs the subject and inscribes the subconscious, with on the other hand an ideological pursuit aiming at the historical incarnation of the very same subject?