Date: Fri, 22 Sep 95 12:28 CDT
From: Jeffrey A steele <JASTEELE-AT-macc.wisc.edu>
Subject: Re: Text Discussion


The way to start a good discussion is for someone to pick an essay, read it, and
then post some observations.  Others can join in with comments about their
favorite texts, etc.  Over the past year, on different lists, I have witnessed
over a dozen atempts to generate a text-based discussion.  In the majority of
cases, numerous messages were posted concerning the selection of texts;
relatively few messages ever addressed the text that was eventually chosen.
 
So let's start. . . .
 
In "The Blind Spot of an Old Dream of Symmetry," the first essay in _Speculum_,
I have been particularly struck by Irigaray's comment (in relation to Freud's
concept of "penis-envy"):
 
	In point of fact, if all the implicationjs of Freud's discourse were
	followed through, after the little girl discovers her own castration
	and that of her mother--her "object," the narcissistic representative
	of all her instincts--she would have no recourse other than melancholia.
 
This melancholia, Irigaray  goes onto suggest, cannot be resolved because it
involves the experience of a "'loss' that escapes any representation."
 
In my research on Margaret Fuller and other 19th-century American women writers,
I have been particularly intereseted in the ways unlocalized melancholia
(reflecting a state of being disempowered by dominant ideologies) can be
localized and addressed through specific acts of mourning.  Along these lines, I
think it no accident that Kristeva wrote a book on melancholia and
depression--_Black Sun_.
 
Have other members of this list picked up on this dynamic?  Does anyone else
connsider what I call "the politics of mourning" an important issue in the works
of Irigaray and her contemporaries?
 
Jeffrey Steele, UW-Madison
jasteele-AT-macc.wisc.edu

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