ABSTRACT
What I am proposing is not a story of influence; rather it is a cultural study that relies on a historical approach to intertextual analysis. As we shall see, what binds these men and women together as feminist and profeminist painters and writers is an intertextual and interartistic aesthetic based on the memory dynamics of nachtriiglichkeitl or deferred action.1 Tracing the
intertextual development of their aesthetic through nachtriiglichkeit will bring us, finally, to the problem of the phallus as it operates within the psychoanalytical theory by which nachtriiglichkeit is formulated, first by Freud, then Lacan. Here, with the help of Kaja Silverman's recent breakl.ltrough analysis of liThe Lacanian Phallus," we will see how the aesthetic we are describing sets up a feminist intervention against dominant modernism at the same time it enacts, through the gaze, a neutralization of phallic discourse per see
We know from Degas that he deliberately made his nudes look as if seen with the eye of a voyeur, or as he put it, by someone peeping through a keyhole. Hence these are often referred to as the "keyhole nudes" (Armstrong 239; Lemoisne 107). And yet Degas's center of consciousness narrative point of view is plain to see in any case.2 While the fragmented image of the nude body is the only visible part of Degas's narrative, Degas has provided many signs of a second presence, and this presence is clearly that of the voyeur. It is in fact through his look-his center of consciousness-that we perceive the image of the nude body he is looking at. Though she doesn't name it as such, Carol Armstrong is well aware of the male center of consciousness when she notes that "we are made aware of the viewer (whom we ... assume to be male) as a thing outside [the scope of the picture] and unseen, a gaze without a body, a position in space characterized by its invisibility" (239). Thus, she adds, lithe female body-the object ... is declared unapprehensible; the viewer-the subject-remains separate, his myth of sublimated union through ... vision denied him" (241; italics mine).3
