On Fri, 7 Jan 2000, Doug Henwood quoted Jane Gallop paraphrasing Luce Irigary thinking:
> To have a theory of woman is already to reduce the plurality of woman
> to the coherent and thus phallocentric representations of theory.
> She [Irigaray], as professor of woman, is in the role of 'subject of
> theory', subject theorizing, a role appropriate to the masculine.
<snip>
> [Irigaray] 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.
I have never understood why this now-standard identification of clear thought with the masculine and fuzzy thought with the feminine is considered a feminist assertion. Wouldn't it be simpler, and truer, to say that clarity always comes at the sacrifice of detail and variety; that fidelity to infinite detail comes at the sacrifice of sum-up-ability; that you can't maximize both at the same time; and that robust thinking continually involves both moments, each with faults and virtues?
I somewhat sympathetic to arguments that a world of personal relations put a premium on concrete feeling where an immersion in a world of impersonal relations hones one's abilities and prejudices towards abstract thinking; and that the sexual division of labor has long put women on one side of that divide and men on the other; and that therefore there might be a tendency of each gender to be more talented in or sympathetic toward one approach or the other. But the idea of making these approaches into physically encoded gender essences seems to bm as progressive as asserting that blacks that speak standard English are talking white. And on top of that, it contradicts the expressed goal here of accounting for women in all their plurality, since, as we all know, some women excel at clarity of expression, and they are not less women for it. It's fine if Luce Irigaray herself does not. The other talent is a legitimate talent. But she seems here to be imitating one of Freud's least laudable traits, of seeing the world in the image of himself and making his quirks into the measure of man. She seems to be identifying her limits with the limits of women.
Michael
__________________________________________________________________________ Michael Pollak................New York City..............mpollak at panix.com