952021, issue 2
The Wound and the Flower
Surti Singh
“Is femininity secreted by the ovaries? Is it enshrined in a Platonic heaven? Is a frilly
petticoat enough to bring it down to earth? Although some women zealously strive
to embody it, the model has never been patented. It is typically described in vague
and shimmering terms borrowed from a clairvoyant’s vocabulary” (de Beauvoir 2011,
3). Only a few years before the publication of Minima Moralia, Simone de Beauvoir
had published the Second Sex, a work in which she raised this paradox of femininity:
it was something so enmeshed in the understanding of womanhood, and yet, could
not be properly located. Femininity was to be found neither in the biological body,
“secreted by the ovaries,” an eect of being in possession of a womb or uterus, nor
in the appeal to some eternal feminine soul, which by the mid-twentieth century
had already become anachronistic. Yet, on de Beauvoir’s account, femininity was also
not simply a gender performance—the donning of a frilly petticoat—as Judith Butler
would later famously argue. For de Beauvoir, femininity was a negative term, some-
thing that embodied everything that in a heterosexual, patriarchal society, man is not. If
masculinity and femininity shared an abstract legal parity, in concrete reality, there was a
deep asymmetry. The “feminine character” is Other—it is inessential, inferior, irrational,
a situation of bodily imprisonment marked by menstruation, childbirth, menopause and
hormones—a condition, therefore, of great repulsion.
Adorno’s Minima Moralia is not a feminist text, but it is comprised of a set of
aphorisms that, like de Beauvoir, ask after the condition of femininity in a patriarchal
society. In the aphorism, “Since I set my eyes on him,” (§ 59) Adorno discusses the fem-
inine character, and the ideal upon which it is based, as products of patriarchy and, in a
fashion similar to de Beauvoir’s, views this masculine production of the female character
as a “negative imprint of domination”. This aphorism culminates in Adorno’s provoc-
ative formulation “femininity itself is already the eect of the whip”. Adorno refers to
the infamous passage from Thus Spoke Zarathustra, where the little old woman says to
Zarathustra, “You are going to women? Then don’t forget the whip.” For Adorno, this
injunction reects Nietzsche’s adherence to the idea of an eternal feminine soul, and
the equation of “the feminine” with women, “hence the perdious advice not to forget
the whip”. Adorno thus reverses Nietzsche’s formulation: rather than woman requiring
submission through violence because of the unruliness of her feminine nature, feminin-
ity itself is always already an eect of male violence.
Adorno’s provocative formulation has formed the basis for thinking about how
a feminist critical theory might be recovered from the canon of the Frankfurt School,
in which it appears to be all but absent. Recent feminist accounts of this aphorism have
positioned Adorno as holding both radical and conservative views of sex, as both a
queer theorist avant la lettre (Duford, 2017) and as reproducing the dichotomy between
male sadism and female masochism as the only horizon of female sexuality within a
heterosexual patriarchal society (Marasco, 2006). I cannot enter into these debates here;
instead, I propose to return to this aphorism once more, but through the door opened
by de Beauvoir. There is an unexpected experiential dimension—the lived experience
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of the body—that Adorno attends to in this aphorism, which complicates his notion of
the feminine character.
Adorno recalls the founding psychoanalytic myth of femininity, according to
which a woman experiences her body as an eect of castration. Because of castration,
a woman’s genitals are perceived as a wound, and this wound is reactivated when she
begins to menstruate. This experience of the body gives rise to neuroses but also to a
certain epistemic privilege: “The woman who feels herself a wound when she bleeds
knows more about herself than the one who imagines herself a ower because that suits
her husband” (§ 59). The crucial distinction Adorno makes in considering this myth
of femininity is that between feeling and imagining, between the experience of one’s
corporeity and the fantasy that one adopts about it. Adorno suggests that women come
closer to knowing their feminine character through their embodiment, through their
lived experience, rather than through the assumption of an ideal.
Yet the distinction between feeling and imagining is not so clear in Adorno’s
analogy, for to imagine oneself as a ower is also at the same time to feel oneself as a
site of injury, which in the patriarchal script of womanhood is an injury either on the
horizon or one that has already transpired. That is to say, the wound or injury of castra-
tion, which is reactivated during menstruation, is reactivated yet again when a woman
loses her virginity, when she is de-owered. The image of femininity as a ower is thus
not so innocent for it in fact contains a history of bodily injury, the ow of blood as a
rite of passage that conrms a woman’s purity to her husband.
In Adorno’s formulation, to imagine oneself as a ower, as a being-for-others,
happens through the male gaze of the husband, and later he gives another example in
relation to the gaze of the jealous male:
The femininity which appeals to instinct, is always exactly what every woman
has to force herself by violence—masculine violence—to be: a she-man. One
need only have perceived, as a jealous male, how such feminine women have
their femininity at their nger-tips—deploying it just where needed, ashing
their eyes, using their impulsiveness… (§ 59).
This performative aspect of femininity requires an active form of mutilation, one that
requires woman to violently bend herself to the prevailing ideal, an ideal produced by
the (male) ego and thus fully adapted to the rationalized order. Adorno presents the
she-man as a female form that wields the violence of masculinity, a paradoxical gure of
allure and frustration, desire and horror; but does this gure, when ashing her eyes and
using her impulsiveness as the jealous male watches, enjoy her masculine femininity? For
de Beauvoir, enjoyment borne of submission was an obstacle to women’s emancipation
from the patriarchal order. And surely for Adorno, if the she-man bears enjoyment, it
only serves to further will her own submission. In the dialectic between the wound
and the ower, between embodiment and the assumption of an ideal, enjoyment is not
discussed, but it arrives on the scene.
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Surti Singh is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at
Villanova University. Her research interests include
Frankfurt School Critical Theory, Global Critical
Theory, Psychoanalysis, Feminist Philosophy, and
Aesthetics. She is Co-Principal Investigator of the
research project,Extimaces: Critical Theory from the
Global South,and currently serves as President
of the Association for Adorno Studies. Recent
publications include “Dark play: Aesthetic resistance
in Lukács, Benjamin and Adorno,”Philosophy and
Social Criticism(2020),“Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory:
The Artwork as Monad” inThe ‘Aging’ of Adorno’s
Aesthetic Theory: 50 Years Later(2021) and “Mahdi
Amel and the Non-Identical,”Critical Times:
Interventions in Global Critical Theory(Forthcoming).
de Beauvoir, Simone. 2011. The Second Sex.
Translated by Constance Borde and Sheila
Malovany-Chevallier. New York: Vintage Books.
Duford, Rochelle. 2017. “Daughters of the
Enlightenment: Reconstructing Adorno on
Gender and Feminist Praxis.” Hypatia 32 (4):
784-800.
Marasco, Robyn. 2006. “‘Already the Effect of the
Whip’: Critical Theory and the Feminine
Ideal.” Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural
Studies 17 (1): 88-115.
Works Cited Biography
