>questions
I thought of you last night, Carrol, as I read this bit from Jane Gallop's The Daughter's Seduction: Feminism and Psychoanalysis (pp. 62-65):
<quote> In Heine's 'Questions' a youth asks the sea to answer 'life's hidden riddle, the riddle primeval and painful'. He asks specifically: 'Tell me, what signifies man? From whence doth he come? And where doth he go?' There is no answer, only the murmuring of the sea. The poem then ends with the line: 'And a fool is awaiting the answer.'
At the beginning of the section called 'Questions' in Ce Sexe, Irigaray writes: 'Since the writing and publication of Speculum, many questions have been asked. And this book is, in a way, a collection of questions. It does not "really" answer them. It pursues their questioning. It continues to interrogate' (p. 119). The fool waits for an answer. Irigaray is not interested in the answer. She pursues a ceaseless questioning which has not time and is not foolish enough to wait for an answer.
The first part of Irigaray's 'Questions' takes place in a philosophy seminar, where, in response to Speculum, she has been invited as 'authority on women , for the students to ask her questions. The situation is somewhat analogous to that of "Femininity', in which Freud is lecturing on women, professing about women, allowing the audience to learn from his expertise. Tied up in this dialectic of questions and answers is the problematic of 'authority on women'. To have a theory of woman is already to reduce the plurality of woman to the coherent and thus phallocentric representations of theory. Irigaray, as professor of woman, is in the role of 'subject of theory', subject theorizing, a role appropriate to the masculine. She is in Freud's role, dreaming his dream. How can she avoid it without simply giving up speaking, leaving authority to men and phallocentrism?
She begins the transcribed seminar with this introduction: 'There are questions that I don't really see how I could answer. In any case "simply"' (Ce Sexe, p. 120). She can respond to a question, give associations, keep talking, hopefully continue to interrogate. But she 'doesn't see', has a blind spot which she exposes: her inability to give a 'simple' answer, a unified, definitive answer, the kind valorized by an ideology of well-framed representation. She is inadequate to a phallomorphic answer. The phallus is singular ('simple'), represents a unified self, as opposed to the indefinite plurality of female genitalia (clitoris, vagina, lips-how many?, cervix, breasts- Irigaray is fond of making the list, which never has quite the same elements, never is ,simply' finished).
'In other words', she continues, 'I don't know how to conduct here some renversement [overthrow/ reversal] of the pedagogic relation in which, holding a truth about woman, a theory of woman, I could answer your questions: answer for woman in front of you.' The pedagogic relation expects her as 'authority' to have a 'truth', a 'theory' which would allow her to 'simply' answer. She would then 'answer for woman', speak for her not as her. Woman would be the subject-matter, the material of her discourse. She would trade woman, just as women have always been I merchandise' in a commerce between men. Woman is passed from the hands of the father to the husband, from the pimp to the john, from the professor to the student who asks questions about the riddle of femininity.
There is a certain pederasty implicit in pedagogy. A greater man penetrates a lesser man with his knowledge. The homosexuality means that both are measurable by the same standards, by which measure one is greater than the other. Irigaray uncovers a sublimated male homosexuality structuring all our institutions: pedagogy, marriage, commerce, even Freud's theory of so-called heterosexuality. Those structures necessarily exclude women, but are unquestioned because sublimated-raised from suspect homosexuality to secure homology, to the sexually indifferent logos, science, logic.
But what of Irigaray's phrase: 'I don't know how to conduct here some renversement of the pedagogic relaton' [sic]? Again she is admitting, from the position of supposed knowledge, her inadequacy - 'I don't know.' That already is a reversal of the pedagogic relation. The teacher 'knows', the student does not. But what Irigaray does not know is how to reverse the relation, how to get out of the position of authority. Her lack of knowledge is specifically her inability to speak her lack of knowledge, her inability to make a non-phallic representation. Of course there is also the sense that a woman in the role of authority is already a reversal. But she cannot carry off that reversal, cannot profess about women, cannot 'simply' theorize 'Renversement' means both ,reversal' and 'overthrow'. The pedagogic relation ought to be overthrown, but this subversion tends to be a reversal, which would bring us back to the same. If men and women, teachers and students switched places, there would still be an economy of symmetry, in which the knowledge of the one, the theory of the one, was the gauge for measuring the worth of the other, still no dialogue between two different sexes, knowledges, only a homologue with one side lacking what the other has.
'I will thus not bring definitions into a questioned discourse.' She does not know what to do to bring about an upset of the pedagogic, pederastic relation, but she can decide what not to do. She refuses definitions, definiteness which fixes plurality into unified representations. She will not bring definitions from outside into a 'questioned discourse'. The process of questioning is a specific dialectic shattering stable assumptions and producing contextual associations. To bring in ready-made definitions as answer to questions is not really to allow one's discourse or authority to be called into question. Such prepared answers are not part of a specific dialogue, but simply immutable truth that is unaffected by dialogue. That sort of relation - the mocked-up, artificial, Socratic dialogue of pedagogy with the 'answer' prior to and independent of the question and the questioning - denies any possibility of an unsettling contact with the questioner's otherness, one that might affect definition. Good pedagogic definition remains aloof from the situation, free from the desires of student and teacher, free from desire, sexually indifferent. Irigaray's uncertain, indeterminate attempt to respond to questions without giving definitive answers thus attempts really to engage the questions, to dialogue with something hetero (other) rather than being trapped in the homo (same).
Compare Irigaray's seminar to Freud's situation in the 'lecture' on femininity. First, there is the difference between lecture and seminar, the seminar supposedly implying a plurality of contribution, whereas the lecture divides into speaker presumed to have knowledge and listeners presumed to learn-to be lacking in knowledge.' But as Irigaray reminds us in the first footnote of Speculum, 'Femininity' is a fictive lecture. In the preface to the New Introductory Lectures, Freud writes: 'These new lectures ... have never been delivered. . . . If, therefore, I once more take my place in the lecture room, it is only by an artifice of the imagination; it may help me not to forget to bear the reader in mind as I enter more deeply into my subject.'
As he 'enters more deeply into his subject', in this case as he enters more deeply' into woman, he needs an 'artifice of the imagination', a fantasy that he is really communicating not just trapped in his own sameness. Freud fantasizes the lecture hall so as to conjure up the comforting pederastic relation as he penetrates into femininity. Whereas Irigaray will not give answers, and publishes the questions posed by others, Freud, with the exception of the Heine fragment and its hidden questions, writes from an imaginary dialogue in which otherness is simply a fantasy, an artificial projection. Such is, according to Irigaray, the so-called heterosexual encounter: man's relation is only to his imaginary other; femininity is no more encountered as otherness and difference than in Freud's audience. </quote>