Alexander Huster, New York University

Desiring Subjects

My paper focuses on questions surrounding the possibility of the construction of a female subject in texts by two postwar Austrian women writers: Ingeborg Bachmann and Elfriede Jelinek. I analyze Ingeborg Bachmann’s novel Malina and Elfriede Jelinek “filmbook” [Filmbuch] Malina as well as Werner Schröter’s film version of the text in terms of the different textual genres and their de- and reconstructions of identity concepts. In this context, I analyze the conceptualizations of desiring subjects by mobilizing feminist theories on gendered identity and psychoanalytical approaches. I attempt to reveal the gendered power dynamics and mechanisms that have fixed the subject – object oppositions within the (textual) symbolic order. I furthermore attempt to establish relations between writing and subjectivity. I identify passages in the texts where the speaking subject (the female I) is capable of revealing the power and the desire to resist and oppose the “law of the father.” I argue that the female subject of the texts attempts to establish her own subjectivity in writing and speaking as “the authoress” of her own language. Thereby she continuously de- and reconstructs her identity. The female subject uses a language that rejects binary or hierarchical models but still strives for the recognition of the symbolic father figure. Thus the subject wants to break free of the boundaries set by the symbolic order. In my view, all three texts frame a mosaic from sub-and surface text, which illustrates the female figure as a desiring subject struggling for identity. I believe that the idealized father figure in all three texts does not recognize the female “I” as a speaking subject. Nevertheless, in the subtext, the “I” searches for ways to constitute a language of her own by ‘traveling through an inner dreamscape.’ Within her dreams she attempts to establish her own utopian space, even if this desired space cannot escape the given binaries. Thus, one central question, which Luce Irigaray has been addressing: “how to create a language in which women can speak?” is answered by the female subject of the texts through her disappearing in the wall. She survives neither in the symbolic sphere, nor in her own de -and reconstructions. She cannot position herself in a space from which she can speak, from which she can be heard, and in which she can survive. Bachmann’s nameless writer fails to establish her status as an artist in her own right, and is thus a figure of an overlooked outsider.

By examining three key scenes of Werner Schröter’s film version of Malina, I show that the male filmmaker’s perspective crucially changes Bachmann’s text, as he retrieves it into the symbolic order.