ABSTRACT
Shoshana Felman is thereby part of the rejection by modern French feminism of Freud's definition of female sexuality in terms of an absence. Translated into French, Felman's essay on Adieu was incorporated in her work La Folie et la chose litteraire, as one of a series of studies in the relationship between madness and the literary text. The crucial word in her vocabulary is difference, a difference that has difficulty in, is prevented from, expressing itself. 'Women', writes Phyllis Chesler, in her book Women and Madness, 'Women more than men, and in greater numbers than their existence in the general population would predict, are involved in "careers" as psychiatric patients'. Depressed and terrified women are not about to seize the means of production and reproduction: quite the opposite of rebellion, madness is the impasse confronting those whom cultural conditioning has deprived of the very means of protest or self-affirmation.
