epistemological performance

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I've been tracing inside of my head this blog post for several days now. I have been notwell the past few days, and have not felt like myself, or the self I need to be a writer, which is sharp & fairly lucid. I wonder how many others experience that space of time where they are dull and weak and unproductive, and yet have to do something, and wonder what they fill their time up with. I have been watching TV and reading Geoff Dyer's delicious book on DH Lawrence - a more cheerful Bernhardian ramble - and Mary Ruefle's lectures, and a book John got me from the library, a wonderfully bad pop-Freudian case study of Natascha Kampusch, one of the Austrian hidden girls, that reads like something out of a Jelinek novel (one of the reasons we are still so right for each other as partners/companions, the way we prescribe each other books the other needs with absolute precision.)  I wonder how much this sickness relates to me going off the grid in terms of capitalism - this is the first semester I haven't been offered classes in a while, although I wonder how I could possibly perform in a job right now, feeling how I do, or would I possibly not feel this way if I was working, or would I just not be allowed to feel this way.

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The past few weeks I have been trying to get my iron levels up after being reminded of my actually quite poor anemia, worse or as bad as anemic pregnant women who have something devouring residing inside them, which appears to be the cause of my whacked-out immune system the past couple of years, and general feelings of unwellness and weakness lately, although what is causing the severe anemia, which I've had on and off since a girl, including having two blood transfusions as a teenager after major surgery, is not quite known. I have constipated myself on iron tablets, which are not absorbing. I now have an intensely heavy period, so am in bed, not feeling well enough to sit up, so am drinking coffee, which I'm not supposed to have because it apparently counteracts dietary iron, and am sloshing the coffee all over the bed. Yesterday I went to a rather kitschy seafood place with John and ate 24 oysters, which apparently have very high B12 and heme (blood) iron content. Also I consoled myself on studies that farming oysters is apparently fairly ecologically sound (as opposed to, apparently, quinoa), and that they don't have central nervous systems. Even though I've been vegetarian for almost a decade and a vegan for five years, I am considering eating a steak tonight, if that will help, although I think I'd have to eat a lot of steaks.  I feel lately like a vampire who hasn't fed in some time. I need to get better before New York next week.

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These massive periods of blankness. Like an ellipsis. Nothing really done or accomplished. ...

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This is actually not what I wanted to write my blog post about. I feel criticized lately for my impulse towards the confessional. Perhaps I'm interested in that realm of experience viewed too banal or too petty to write about. I'm interested in the body, in sickness. I'm interested when other people write about it. Also one of the only reasons I've gone out in the world lately - the Irigaray seminar and my beginning modern and ballet dance classes, twice a week, all in Durham. My dance classes remind me of my awkward, grasping body. The dance classes take place entirely in front of a mirror.

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I promised I would blog more of the Grosz seminar, but this week I don't think I'll blog it, I would rather write about it, write through it. We have not actually gotten to the Irigaray directly, but last week we covered Freud's late-era essay on femininity and two of Lacan's Encore lectures dealing with Woman. I came away from reading the Lacan wanting to learn ancient Greek and read the major philosophers (Irigaray has said she studied philosophy because it was the "master's discourse" (says Toril Moi in Sexual/Textual Politics). E. Grosz calls it: "strategy."

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I was most struck by the performance of knowledge in both Freud and Lacan. What I always loved most about Freud is his sense of doubt, his self-consciousness, his ability to go back and reverse earlier theories (I want to go back and reread Leo Bersani's The Freudian Body, whose thesis in that book is that it's in Freud's circling, doubt-filled footnotes that he's the most radical on sexuality). And yet in "Femininity" Freud is performing the position of the one who knows—to the audience (this is a lecture) he is saying - Men have been worrying over this problem - THE WOMAN  - and then he says (paraphrasing) - Women, you are yourselves the problem. But his theories of femininity are completely fragmented, incomplete - as he suggests of the subjectivity of a woman, forever caught in the Oedipus Complex. He suggests that girls do not repress (like fetishists), so they do not have an unconscious (cuing, as Grosz states, Irigaray asking - "Does Woman HAVE an unconscious or is she the unconscious?") And yet, of course, his case studies of his girl-hysterics are all studies of repression.

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The ellipses of his thought on women. ...

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E. Grosz is explaining to the seminar Freud's basic tenets of the stages of infantile sexuality (most don't seem to have read Freud before), and I think because it's the level of explanation it seems to be almost dogmatically presented, in truth! Inside I am laughing, thinking - but Freud is mostly a fiction right? Perhaps that's Cixous' crime - the non-serious philosopher - she admits to reading Freud's case studies like the little dramas that they are. But EG explains that only men are fetishists (in the realm of Freud), explaining disavowal, how the object then cathexed onto is usually what is leading up to the mother's site of castration (feet, underwear, shoes). I want to ask - But don't women fetishize shoes? Carrie Bradshaw in SATC? But then realize that would be a ridiculous thing to say. Which also parallels my deep desire to find out what all the famous French feminists were wearing at Lacan's seminars - Irigaray, Mitchell, Cixous, Kristeva, Clement. What were they wearing. Dodie Bellamy makes a joke in Barf Manifesto, paraphrasing Kathy Acker, that the French feminists wore better shoes than the American feminists. But what shoes? Did they sit together? These are the questions I desire answers to.

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Freud at least admits at the end of his lecture on "Femininity" that he does not know. Lacan arrogantly, wittily, derisively performs his knowledge in his seminars. He begins his lecture entitled "God and the Jouissance of The Woman - A Love Letter" setting up the teacher/pupil relationship as one of transference, like in psychoanalysis. To love him is to admit that he is in the position of knowing. "When I say that they hate me, I mean that they de-suppose me of knowledge." I'm curious how this ties into Irigaray's project, her project of hatred, of mimicry, using the weapons of the hysteric, where she is analyzing a body of knowledge and who has been seen to possess it.

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Lacan flirts too - he is witty, condescending, using ancient Greek, gesturing to the massive body of knowledge he possesses that the audience doesn't. What must have that been like for the women in the audience? 

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The mystic does not know (connaissance)- she is coming, she does not know why, she is experiencing an excess of joy but does not know. "Does the Other know?"

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In comparison to this rather arrogant performance of knowledge, Lacan's mansplaining, it is a joy to read the Mary Ruefle. Her lectures that are about the space of not-knowing, or of searching, of attempting and failing. Her pieces on Emily Dickinson, Emily Bronte, and Anne Frank, trying to see how they meet (their lack of knowledge about the outside world), admitting that she originally called the lecture My Emily Dickinson with no prior knowledge of Susan Howe's book of the same name, or quoting the CliffNotes to Wuthering Heights. I realize the position of the essayist is not announcing one's knowledge, but searching. In the mode of Montaigne. Admitting fragmentation and incompleteness. 




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The most hilarious part of the Freud is the end where he muses that the only real intellectual invention of women has been in the field of weaving, which he theorizes has to do with his castration complex, women braiding their pubic hair over their lack. I mention this in class - EG thinks I am talking only of weaving - fabric -  - but I am mumbling - I am talking or trying to talk of writing - at the beginning of the Lacan he speaks of writing as Weaving. I think and probably do not say - is that what Irigaray is doing? Is that the projection of l'ecriture feminine? Weaving fragments. What about the spaces in between? What about the gaps, the incompleteness? What is not known?