The Father’s Seduction

Abstract

The first third of Luce Irigaray’s Speculum de l’autre femme is called ‘The Blind Spot of an Old Dream of Symmetry’. It is a close reading of ‘Femininity’, one of Freud’s New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis (1933). This encounter between Irigaray’s feminist critique and Freud’s final text on woman is an important training ground for a new kind of battle, a feminine seduction/disarming/unsettling of the positions of phallocratic ideology. Irigaray’s tactic is a kind of reading: close reading, which separates the text into fragments of varying size, quotes it and then comments with various questions and associations. She never sums up the meaning of Freud’s text, nor binds all her commentaries, questions, associations into a unified representation, a coherent interpretation. Her commentaries are full of loose ends and unanswered questions. As a result, the reader does not so easily lose sight of the incoherency and inconsistency of the text. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

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