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> 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>
>
>