Date: Tue, 9 Jul 1996 20:46:06 -0500 (CDT) From: rebecca elizabeth zorach <rezorach-AT-midway.uchicago.edu> Subject: Re: psychoanalysis Grosz's argument (in "Labors of Love," contained in _Space, Time and Perversion_), it seems to me, relates more to the particular use to which de Lauretis (in _The Practice of Love_) puts psychoanalysis than to psychoanalysis writ large. That is, she critiques de Lauretis for accepting oedipalization, the paternal phallus, and castration, in attempting to account for lesbian desire. (d.L. also seems to be essentializing lesbian desire in a way that seems troubling to me). Grosz sees psychoanalysis as a discourse that has been useful for feminism, but which is fundamentally blind to lesbianism. "My concerns are not about the quality of de Lauretis's work but about the capacity of the framework of psychoanalysis to explain precisely that which it must exclude in order to constitute itself as a system or a discourse." (167) But in more provocative moments she says such things as: "Does de Lauretis function to provide a political rationale and credibility for psychoanalysis as it lies dying? Does she, and other lesbian theorists who have tried to appropriate psychoanalysis for lesbian projects [Butler? Fuss?], serve to prolong the agonies of this dying discourse, giving it hope for remission when in fact it should be buried?" (159) In a later essay in the same collection ("Animal Sex"), Grosz moves to models taken from the animal world (interestingly, she looks to Roger Caillois, also a major player in Lacan's _Four Fundamental Concepts_) to say not what female desire is, but what it is not (sound familiar?); she also interestingly talks about bodily zones in terms of intensities and jealousies in their relations to each other and to other bodies -- in ungendered ways. (Can feminism and gay/lesbian studies do without a notion of gender? Or make gender tacit? Or find a model of gender other than the psychoanalytic?) -Rebecca On Tue, 9 Jul 1996 dralfonso-AT-msuvx2.memphis.edu wrote: > Why would Grosz critique de Lauretis in this way, given her own > in-vestement in psychoanalytic discourses, I wonder? Can you give us > more of the argument? > > rita. > BTW, I'm a Leo everyone. >
Display software: ArchTracker © Malgosia Askanas, 2000-2005