From: CPeebles-AT-aol.com
Date: Sun, 23 Jun 1996 21:59:39 -0400
Subject: Re: French Feminism and Lacan


Another interesting source is Joan Copjec's article "Sex and the Euthanasia
of Reason" in her *Supposing the Subject* (a collection of essays by various
Lacanians). Her essay is two things, mostly: first, a rebuttal of historicism
a la Judith Butler -- explaining how a certain feminist critique 'gets Lacan
wrong' as it were, and second, an engagement with Lacan's formulae of sexual
difference (see Seminaire, Livre XX: Encore) in terms of two of Kant's
antinomies of reason, the mathematical ('feminine') and dynamical
('masculine'). It's a quite provoking and useful essay, I think, and
concludes with a gesture towards the need to think a new ethics, one not
based on the economy of exclusion or limit, an ethics proper to the woman
(Copjec's words). So that while she specifically sets out to correct a
feminist misreading, she ends up by calling for a feminist engagement with
Lacan.
--Catherine Peebles