File spoon-archives/french-feminism.archive/french-feminism_1996/96-10-07.165, message 32


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. 
> 




   

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