Lise Weil
Reprinted from Trivia: A Journal of Ideas issue 20 (1992), this interview was originally intended for inclusion in an anthology to be edited by Lise Weil, which would explore the question, "What Is a Lesbian?"
Michèle Causse: The one thing you cannot do in a book, which is resolutory . . . is going to bed (for lack of a better expression) . . . Afterwards you can talk.
Lise Weil: Can we talk?
MC: I mean, really, a lesbian knows what to do with her desire. I could define lesbian as "Desire." In the plural: Desires. She is at the origin of a practice which she invents constantly, without any referent, any model.
LW: What is the practice: taking women to bed?
MC: No. The practice begins in the bed. "Il n'est de science que du corps" ["The science of the body is the only science"]. And sometimes it entails getting away from love, which is a paradox.
LW: But what is the practice?
MC: I told you. On my deathbed! Maryvonne and I had a definition of lesbianhood which was, contrarily to our practice: lesbianism is a constant elucidation of our being in the world. Through lesbianism, which is a face à face between two lesbians, you get to the core of what is interesting about being alive. Between two subjects who are constantly inventing themselves outside of any reference.
Lesbian is a relational word. This kind of relation requires the best of your energies, it requires a lot of reading, a lot of bedding, a lot of discovering, through talk, dialogue, and bodies, and the body is problematic, constantly.
LW: I'd like you to be more specific when you say relational. Does this relationship have to be sexual? Because . . . the fact of the matter is, so many lesbians don't, well, practice, all the time.
MC: Well, we are not nymphomaniacs, most of us, and the intensity varies according to our ages and the passion we put into the story. Yet, I insist, if the lesbian is not relational she's not a lesbian. Lesbian is a praxis.
LW: But then it's not necessarily sexual.
MC: No, not at all. I lived for eight years with a writer, Alicia, without ever making love with her. Of course it was painful. Because we were madly in love. But there was an absolute physical incompatibility. We had very different erotical expectations, and neither of us wanted to yield her desire. But since this love was not accomplished in bed, its energy was expressed everywhere in our lives.
LW: Well, that's it. You started by saying it's primarily sexual, it's not always about love, and now . . .
MC: But, yes, it was awfully sexual, we had terrible fights, she'd be saying "Thomas Mann . . . " and I'd say "Thomas Mann, forget it! John Cowper Powys . . . " (mind you, this was the early sixties), and we'd fight till I had a blue eye and she had a broken finger. She tore her manuscript into pieces out of rage . . . I collected the pages.
But the physical energy we didn't have in bed. I knew what I wanted, I didn't get it from her, she knew what she wanted, she didn't get it from me . . . So we decided we would rather be intensely alive . . .
LW: May I ask you, were you getting it from anyone else at that time?
MC: Not for three or four years, then I got a lover for a year. She happened to be someone I loved physically and really despised as a person. She was a fascist, extremely insensitive, uncaring, but a wonderful lover, what can I tell you? It is a very problematic topic. I was extremely humiliated by this relationship, which was purely physical, but you know the physical means a lot, and sometimes it is against our will. This was against my will, but I never renounce something I FEEL.
Anyway, a lesbian who is not relational does not exist. It takes two to make a lesbian. Without somebody to love, she is a person who cannot carry out her ontological definition.
LW: This raises a big question for me, because there are quite a few lesbians who live in the world of their imagination as far as a lover is concerned. It leads to great writing, for example, it leads to very passionate feeling, a lot of dreaming, but this person isn't there in the flesh.
MC: Well, at least she is a lesbian at heart. A "virtual" lesbian. Before I became a lesbian, I dreamed about it, I was obsessed.
LW: So would you date yourself as a lesbian from the time you began to dream?
MC: No, I already told you, I started touching girls when I was five years old. That was not love. It was intensely physical. I knew something at five that then I lost, until I was eighteen. At eighteen I was obsessed with the image of the female body. Abstract. Nobody in particular. But as long as you have not materialized it in fact, you are not a lesbian. It's like a killer who dreams of killing but doesn't kill. What is a lesbian who never "goes to bed" with women? I don't doubt that her intentions are lesbian, but really . . . it makes a lot of difference, Lise, don't you agree?
LW: Well of course it does. But what concerns me is . . . the pressure to have a woman in bed with you in the flesh just to qualify as a lesbian in your definition.
MC: But my dear, there is a semantic exactness in the word. It is not indefinitely extensible. And it is such a wonderful exactness. We love the "meaning" of the word lesbian. So much so that when we are alone, without anybody to love, we dream about "désir et plaisir." But this doesn't mean we are going to say yes to any woman who jumps on us . . . One has her own fantasy, her own "yes" inside her . . . A lesbian is one who will not say yes just like that. She is one who knows . . . what she wants, what she needs, what is good for her soul, her body, her intelligence . . .
LW: But for that reason, she's bound to go through long periods of solitude. For me, I feel no less a lesbian during those periods . . . In fact, quite often I feel like more of a lesbian because . . . my visions have room to grow and expand when I'm alone. Whereas very often in the relationship I'm focusing on the particularities of what's happening at the expense of a vision of what might be . . .
MC: That's sad, the sad word in your expression is "at the expense." When I am in love with the lesbian I share my life with, it is certainly not a person who forces me at the expense, on the contrary she is the person who feeds my vision, who gives wings to my visions.
LW: Well, ideally.
MC: Yes, but my relationships were ideal, are ideal.
LW: Really? Not the one you just described . . .
MC: It was ideal, I still love Alicia, I'd give my life for her, I love her intensely even now, she could ask me anything . . . I am glad I was not a slave to my own sexuality. I trusted her. I learned from her. Also I think that the body, and sex, is the obsessional signifiant of the male persuasion. A lesbian is not obsessed by sex. A lesbian is obsessed, if she has to be obsessed, by her ontological becoming, how is she going to give expression to what she is. A lesbian defines herself mostly by perception, by vision. She could be called a seer, a perceiver, that would be an absolute synonym as far as I'm concerned.
LW: Yes, yes, I agree.
MC: It's a philosophical vision, and then, inside this philosophical vision, obviously there is space and room only for other persons of one's kind, because you are not going to love your oppressor . . . By the way, I doubt that any woman has ever desired a man, but anyway . . .
LW: Michèle, do you know what? I go around asking women that very question . . . I find it so difficult to believe, but many women insist that they do.
MC: I know, I know, OK. Well why not, I mean, after all they've been trained for that. Let's not be surprised if a chicken can jump into a hole when the chicken has been taught to jump into a hole for hundreds or thousands of years. But some day one chicken will not jump into the hole and say no no no! and then all the other chickens . . . [Laughter] But yes, that's the way it will happen. I mean look, women are getting much more alienated from men, as they earn their own living, that they have a minimum of comfort, material and financial, they are much more difficult and fussy about them.
LW: I hope you're right.
MC: Oh I am sure. I am sure they are going to desert. Men are going to have only the Philippines left, only slaves, where there is no freedom.
LW: How long do we have to wait for this?
MC: A long time. But what I was saying: a lesbian is a seer who is concerned with the destiny of her class of sex, she has an extreme sense of responsibility towards her similars, she has an excruciating pain about the destiny of women at large, she is constantly wearing this pain on her shoulders, and this is something which never never abandons her. So she has not only her own grief, personal, private, her own relationship with another lesbian, which is so difficult inside this context of forced heterosexuality, capitalism, everything she hates, but on top of it she has this enormous pain of going constantly into a world where women are as they are, the projections of men, whether successful or failed, a fiction.
So she has to live in a fiction. What a lesbian goes through all her life is a fiction. The only reality is herself. Man is a fiction, woman is a fiction, she has to go through both of them who throw potatoes and tomatoes at her all the time, she is hated, she is . . . she is elated at the same time, she is so happy to be what she is [LW laughs], anyway . . .
LW: What you're saying is that she perceives the real . . .
MC: But the real is a fiction. And reality is only what is invented in the moment. And she invents, out of nothing, out of two fictions who have told her all her life what she has to be. This lesbian has never been what she has to be, she has become what she wanted to become. A being of extreme sensitivity of perception who wants to go against against against all her life. Which is extremely painful, tiring, exhausting, and does not make of her a pleasant person . . .
Of course I am talking about the ideal, but what is the point of not idealizing? I mean I can't, maybe that's my problem, I cannot talk but ideally . . .
LW: I don't think it's a problem.
MC: Is that all right with you? You know what, I think only if we take an extreme can we understand what is not extreme. An analysis of society has to be extreme . . . When I read Monique Wittig, when I read Marilyn Frye, when I read Jill Johnston, I find a whole world. In twenty years what we've done is incredible. This is lesbian community! It gives us a kind of strength, a kind of structuration. What we are is extremely articulated, even if we are just beginning to give a shape to our wants . . . It gives a sense of . . . invulnerability. I am invulnerable. Whatever happens.
The only vulnerability is my feelings towards another lesbian. The society at large has no power over me, except possibly that of starving me. Well, I've starved for twenty-five years, I will carry on with the help of my lesbian friends. But this is no power at all to starve me; they have no influence on my soul, my brains. My brains – when you think of what they do to brains in universities, and places like that! They want to wash your brains all the time [LW laughs] . . . and a lesbian is one who resists that. She is powerful. Really! Nothing can really attack and hurt her except her personal relationships, and I speak for myself here. It's obvious that each of us must speak for herself. If a lesbian does not speak from her own body, where does she speak from?
LW: I've been wanting to ask several different questions along the way. One of them is: when you talked about lesbian community just now, you were talking about it in terms of, for lack of a better word, intertextuality.
MC: That's interesting. I will be attacked for being a cultural feminist. I do have orgasmic relationships with thoughts and words. Certainly I cannot divide myself from the power of words. Words have an enormous impact on me: I am in Québec because of words. So, yes, I am indebted to the intellectual production of the lesbian community.
LW: Well I'd like to go back to the question . . . let's not call it community, let's call it culture. Do you see lesbians as a culture?
MC: Oh sure. Absolutely. An epistemological U-Turn. Capital.
LW: Because you know Betsy Warland was recently on a panel about speaking across cultures, and her presence on the panel as a lesbian was questioned, because as somebody said, lesbian unlike other cultures has no language of its own.
MC: I'm sorry, but for me, culture begins with us. We are the most powerful carriers of new visions, new definitions. We are originators.
LW: How do you define a culture?
MC: I would repeat myself, I would say a culture is a new perception of the same reality. It's a revolution. A lesbian creates a tabula rasa. She takes nothing for granted, then she begins to plant seeds.
LW: I love that you're talking about seeds, because of course culture has a biological meaning as well . . .
MC: Yes. I do not deny the fact that a culture grows and disappears. We are not there yet. Because what is important when I say we are a culture, is that we are the only possibility for the subject born female to have an ontology. When Luce Irigaray – in her own way, which I respect but do not share – discusses women's essence, when she talks about our "two lips," she is doing something for women that has never been done by the subject herself. And she is viciously attacked. Now just as women are about to be given this opportunity, it's discredited, it's said that essence is out.
We should always be suspicious – of materialism, deconstruction, etc. -- when they say this sort of thing. It means somebody is going to deprive us of something we never had. Men have an essence – God forbid, they have an essence, and just when we get to the point of getting one for ourselves: "Oh you're an essentialist!" goddamnit.
LW: I completely agree. Especially in academia.
MC: Essence is a fiction. Better, une fable, a fairy tale. Essence is a fairy tale. And men tell themselves beautiful fairy tales about how great they were, etc. We have no fairy tales about our own beauty. The only being who can give us such a fairy tale is a lesbian.
LW: Isn't that interesting. What you're saying is really analogous to the way that we're denied our knowledge of pre-history, a time when women were central. Every other cultural group has been allowed this kind of history. In German it's called "Rettungsgeschichte." The Jews have it, every culture and nation has it, it reinforces their own identity as a group, in fact it's what history is.
MC: Yes, absolutely.
LW: But when we try and do it, it's called just that: a legend, a fable, something we made up.
MC: Diana Fuss in her wonderful little book Essentially Speaking insists that nobody can do without essence, not even the materialist constructionists, not even Derrida when he says "Toujours, déjà là." So we must not feel guilty for claiming an essence. But we must use it strategically and very carefully, not falling into the pitfall of the fixed laws of nature . . .
LW: Let's get back to the question of woman then. You say that Irigaray attempts to deliver an essence to woman. Would you say that is true of lesbians in general?
MC: No. Because Irigaray works on women; I don't work on women, I'm not interested . . .
LW: But you do say that lesbians are the only women who have women at heart.
MC: At heart. But not to leave her as a woman. To take her out of gender. To take her out of her class. To make the word woman obsolete.
LW: But I am a little bit puzzled, when, in Les Oubliées de l'oubli, you repeat Wittig's statement that a lesbian is not a woman.
MC: Right.
LW: Yes but you also say you like Nathalie Barney's quote: "la lesbienne est la femme la plus femme."
MC: [laughs] Yes. I don't mind contradiction, as you've noticed.
LW: And last time we met you said you thought of lesbian as "the living energy in a woman's body."; And you talk about lesbians reclaiming women . . .
MC: Reclaiming them to get them out of gender. Gender being a construction of men. Because women are not at the origin of women. At the origin of women there are men. Flaubert said that:"God created men and men created the women." Which is absolutely right: women are a creation of men. As such I cannot revindicate them or like them. I want them to get out of gender. The only possible self for a woman is a lesbian. A woman who reappropriates herself becomes either a virgin or a lesbian.
LW: So this raises the following question for me: if a lesbian isn't a woman or is no longer a woman, does she no longer have the memory of those atrocities in her body?
MC: That's a very interesting question. You know what I think? Some lesbians will always have the memory of the atrocities, and some will never have it because they are linked immediately to the Amazonian cells. I always said that I had Amazonian cells, and that I passed through patriarchy as a pure science fiction and nightmare. For me, I am in constant communication with what was before. Patriarchy just doesn't exist, it's not pertinent. Personally I don't have the memories of the atrocities. What I have is an absolute impossibility for my body, my brain, my heart to be invaded . . . by man. Because it is not part of my unconscious history, my collective history, my Amazonian history. My Amazonian cells refuse them.
LW: Have you known women to live as women for a good portion of their lives, and then become Amazons?
MC: Yes, yes, Maryvonne, for example.
LW: So then the cells themselves can change?
MC: No, no. But I think there are Amazon cells, resisting cells, in every woman. They've been crushed.
LW: Then when we start to remember them, they revive.
MC: Oh yes. As soon as they are touched, they come alive. They spread. Wonderful benign cells . . .
LW: But when you say you have no memory of the atrocities . . .
MC: No, none! I told you, Lise, when men came to me, they turned their violence against themselves and they wanted to kill themselves. That's my personal experience.
LW: Because I've always thought that to the extent a woman remembers the Amazon in herself she must also remember the extent to which she's been persecuted for that . . . For instance, I imagine those women with some memory of the witch burnings would be precisely the most powerful women.
MC: You are right. Since I am talking personally I can only say that I have no memory of my awful anterior life, I have only a memory that tells me about how things should be. Because all this that surrounds us, rapes us, is only an avatar, this is only an accident and, by the way, a short accident, just a few thousand years, short compared to what is going to come and what has been.
LW: Before we run out of time, I want to go back to something we were talking about the other day. We started talking about lesbian as a perception that happens in a moment – and then we radiate that perception out into the world. But the problem is that it's very hard to sustain this perception over time. So last time we met we were talking about time and space. And it's both interesting and very sad what happens over time and in space because in fact there is no space for lesbians . . .
MC: I could answer on two levels. As far as time is concerned, for instance, I could explain that to keep this vision, I write. I write every day. Because of my writing I am constantly in touch with the lesbianism in me of what should be – the ontological existence of "women." I deal with time [by] keeping my perceptions alive artificially through the writing so that I'm constantly ahead of what is.
In space, that is a much more painful realization because I am extremely conscious of the fact that the only space I have is also the writing. That there is no space for us. And that once upon a time women had this space for ourselves. And without the territory of space – whatever Ti-Grace Atkinson thinks – as we have seen, by the way, in the last twenty years – as long as we don't have the space and we stay with men, as long as we don't claim our space, symbolical, territorial, physical, geographical, economical, political, we cannot generate thoughts, and I don't believe an agreement with men will come about. It's not possible. If it had been possible, it would have happened. So let's pack our bags . . .
The least we can ask for is territory. More and more women are the owners of a little house and garden. This is terribly important. Especially in patriarchy. Because inside this ridiculously small space, they can breathe. Of course, we should have a much larger territory, where we could make mistakes, we could err.
LW: We could build on the mistakes.
MC: As men have done all the time. We couldn't do worse, by the way. We would protect life, possibly, instead of killing it in the various ways it is killed at the moment. We would have to listen to lesbians who have a long tradition of respect toward nature, like the Natives, for instance.
But I cannot think as some feminist thinkers do about the value of the female. The female being a construction. What can you say about genuine authentic values? We would have to create them out of nothing. They have educated me not to be violent. I am violent! Give me a chance to be violent, I'll be violent! So . . . what are these wonderful domestic values? I'm supposed to be maternal. Maternal? I'd have killed myself if I'd been pregnant!
Yet . . . it's true that in women I've found a lot of qualities I cherish. Attention, attention is a very great quality, attention in the sense of presence. I don't think heterosexual women find it in their relationship with a man. Men are not relational.
Lesbians crave relationships. A lesbian is an attention devoted to another person, to the pleasure of another person. To the becoming, the expansion of another being. Also hers. But through others, because it's so wonderful when it comes from another. And another gives you so much. Just to look at her, be, look. There is a phrase by a Christian man, unfortunately, St. Augustine: "Take a human being and love him. Aimez-le." Take a female, possibly a lesbian, and love her. That's all. Take a human being, take a be-ing, let's use Mary Daly's word, take a be-ing and love her. Wonderful, wonderful. I can't do it easily, but I wish I could.
LW: OK. Now I have to bring you back from the ideal to the real. Sorry to do this.
MC: To the real?
LW: When you talked about – this is the question of over time again – lesbians becoming phallicized . . .
MC: Ah! Not only lesbians. Every woman at large. Because the problem is women are asked to become like men. And lesbians, too.
LW: I'm interested in your saying that about lesbians. I haven't observed it the way you have.
MC: I am worried that in the end the planet will be inhabited only by phallicized beings. The ones who have the phallus and who bore the whole world with their penis transformed into a phallus, and the women who imitate men because it is their only way of survival. Being with them, adopting their system, surviving in their world, and there is no way that they can stay as they are by the side of these persons who are pathologically engaged in a course towards power, technology, and all these values which are not our values – though I still insist I do not know what our values are.
LW: I think it's possible to know what they're not without knowing what they are.
MC: Voilà. I know for instance that one thing that is very alien to me is competition. This is very serious because in America every woman is competitive like a male. And I would say this is something we have absolutely to refuse. Every game, everything in the male world, is a competition. Can you imagine after that what kind of relationship one has with a woman, when your relationship is engaged in competition. This is the opposite of collaboration. If we are competitive, we are not going to collaborate. So I think we are phallicized in the sense that we are forced to live values that are extremely detrimental to our relations and to the word lesbian itself.
LW: Can you say anything more concrete than that?
MC: I would go back to Andrea Dworkin, when she says that we have not resolved "the bread and butter issue." As a matter of fact, we lesbians, writers or not, are all proletarized, intellectuals are proletarized. At best, some of us have a house, but it is not asked of us that we become an economic strength, that we become a collective strength. As long as we are individuals, there will be no salvation. Even if personally I am a rather individualistic being, I am not crazy enough to believe the salvation will come from individuals. I mean, each individual will save herself – but what will she save? Nothing, except a television set and three hours to look at television. That's nothing. That's anesthesia.
LW: I love the fact that what you're saying converges so much with something Paula Gunn Allen said in an interview for Trivia. She said the problem with white feminism is that it's always been couched in terms of rights. Native people have always known we need to be talking in terms of responsibilities. It's interesting that that's how you define lesbian – as those who take responsibility for the fate of women.
MC: Yes, this is a political conscience, this can be developed.
LW: And one of the things you're saying about the phallicization of lesbians is that we get more and more removed from this conscience.
MC: Exactly. From this collective conscience. We cannot progress if we're in a diaspora, what I call a diaspora. Each of us living in her own little place. It's an atomisation, which is as bad as a woman being in a house with a husband and children. We are as separated from each other . . .
LW: In some ways it's worse because we're calling ourselves lesbians, we're calling ourselves political beings, but we don't have the practice that would make of us a community of beings.
MC: In the beginning I think we would tear each other apart, with this practice. But it would be worth it. Tearing each other apart. I know it's very difficult, and very dangerous, yet it's the only salvation. You remember what your friend said, Barbara Macdonald.
LW: Yes. That until we put our lives on the line, we haven't shown that we're really serious.
MC: I totally agree. You know, when the Russian feminists were exiled from Russia, I saw Momonova in Paris and I said, "How lucky you are, you feminists, they took you seriously enough to put you in exile! In France, everybody laughs at you, they never mention your name! In Russia, they know it is a serious threat. A feminist is serious in Russia! That's a civilized country!"
about the author
As predestined by her name, Michèle Causse was born on the causses of Lot in France. She lived in France, Tunisia, Italy, Martinique and the US before emigrating to Canada where she published four of her main works. Her books include L'Encontre, ( ), Voyages de la Grande Naine en Androssie, a collection of essays Les oubliées de l'oubli and most recently Contre le sexage, a theoretical work on language and lesbian creativity. She has translated some thirty novels out of English and Italian, among them those of Djuna Barnes, Jane Bowles, and Herman Melville. She has also translated works by Mary Daly, Gertrude Stein, Alice Munro, Pavese, and Natalia Ginzburg. She now lives in the southwest of France.
back to top of this page
