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Class 15 Notes

Page history last edited by Alan Liu 2 years, 5 months ago

Preliminary Class Business

 

 

 

Deconstruction: A Review

 

  • Roland Barthes -- S/Z:
    • “[The ideal] text is a galaxy of signifiers, not a structure of signifieds; it has no beginning; it is reversible; we gain access to it by several entrances, none of which can be authoritatively declared to be the main one; the codes it mobilizes extend as far as the eye can read, they are indeterminable…the systems of meaning can take over this absolutely plural text, but their number is never closed, based as it is on the infinity of language.…” (p. 5)

 

  • Jacques Derrida -- "Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences"
    • "If totalization no longer has any meaning, it is not because the infiniteness of a field cannot be covered by a finite glance or a finite discourse, but because the nature of the field—that is, language and a finite language—excludes totalization. This field is in effect that of play, that is to say, a field of infinite substitutions only because it is finite, that is to say, because instead of being an inexhaustible field, as in the classical hypothesis, instead of being too large, there is something missing from it: a center which arrests and grounds the play of substitutions." (p. 365)

 

  • Paul de Man -- "Shelley Disfigured"  
    • "And to read is to understand, to question, to know, to forget, to erase, to deface, to repeat.... The Triumph of Life warns us that nothing, whether deed, word, thought, or text, ever happens in relation, positive or negative, to anything that precedes, follows, or exists elsewhere, but only as a random event whose power, like the power of death, is due to the randomness of its occurrence." (p. 122)

 

 

 


 

1. French Feminism & Poststructuralism

 

    • Derrida, last paragraph of "Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences" (1966):
      • "For my part, although these two interpretations must acknowledge and accentuate their difference and define their irreducibility, I do not believe that today there is any question of choosing—in the first place because here we are in a region (let us say, provisionally, a region of historicity) where the category of choice seems particularly trivial; and in the second, because we must first try to conceive of the common ground, and the différance of this irreducible difference. Here there is a kind of question, let us still call it historical, whose conception, formation, gestation, and labor we are only catching a glimpse of today. I employ these words, I admit, with a glance toward the operations of childbearing—but also with a glance toward those who, in a society from which I do not exclude myself, turn their eyes away when faced by the as yet unnamable which is proclaiming itself and which can do so, as is necessary whenever a birth is in the offing, only under the species of the nonspecies, in the formless, mute, infant, and terrifying form of monstrosity."

 

 

 

 

                                 UC Berkeley Free Speech Movement (2964-65) -- Images | Wikipedia article
                                "May 1968" --   Images | Wikipedia article

                                 May 1970 student strikes in U.S.

                                       UCSB May 1970 Student Riots

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


         Hélène Cixous

Luce Irigaray
  
Julia Kristeva

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Jacques Lacan , "The Significance of the Phallus," in Ecrits:

 

"The phallus reveals its function here. In Freudian doctrine, the phallus is not a phantasy, if by that we mean an imaginary effect. Nor is it as such an object (part-, internal, good, bad, etc.) in the sense that this term tends to accentuate the reality pertaining in a relation. It is even less the organ, penis or clitoris, that it symbolizes. And it is not without reason that Freud used the reference to the simulacrum that it represented for the Ancients.

        For the phallus is a signifier, a signifier whose function, in the intrasubjective economy of the analysis, lifts the veil perhaps from the function it performed in the mysteries. For it is the signifier intended to designate as a whole the effects of the signified, in that the signifier conditions them by Its presence as a signifier.

         .... The phallus is the privileged signifier of that mark in which the role of the logos is joined with the advent of desire."

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Chart comparing Freud & Lacan Chart comparing Freud, Lacan, Cixous, & Irigaray

 

 

 

 

  • Other works to facilitate discussion:
    • Jane Gallop, Thinking Through the Body (1988) [book cover]
    • Jacques Lacan, Ecrits, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1977)

 


 

 

 

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