Jane Gallop

This is the kind of book one can read in a morning. Indeed, some sexual coupling take longer. It was pleasurable to read (to continue the analogy.) And yet, I want to argue with her thesis.

I appreciate how sexuality was an important part of her education. I would not want to take it away from her. And yet, should those not free enough or not hot enough be discriminated against in school? Perhaps we are already discriminating against those who are not smart enough, and studies show that being show more better looking gives you an advantage in employment so this issue will not go away.

Jane explains that she won't sleep with students now because she is in a committed relationship. Presumably it would be disruptive to her relationship if she did. (Is this hurting her effectiveness as a teacher? ) That's because sexuality is potentially disruptive (as is education). But people need protection from disruption as well. That's why there are rules.

Rules are for everyone. If I argue that I went through a red light because I was the only car for miles around, my ticket would not be dismissed. Rules are meant to handle the general case and not the specific. I think the rules against student/faculty sex do more good than harm. I didn't do a study. I'm just guessing. Yes, the thinking and ways of talking about this subject are muddled--or at least were until this book clarified them.

Jane invokes Freud to argue that sexuality is in all relationships. I will invoke Freud to say that conscious consent can hide unconscious lack of consent. The presence of a power differential makes it all the more complicated. In practice, I'm sure that sex between students and teachers continues despite the rules and when it works for the best, no one files any complaints about it.

Jane argues that there should be no limits to knowledge at a university, but there will always be the limits of time and space. That's why choosing to research a particular topic means passing on other topics. Perhaps considering who is hurt by particular intellectual pursuits is a valid consideration in making such a decision.

I think Jane's complainants reframed their relationships after the fact. What seemed like connection now looked like undue influence or worse seen in this new light. Many relationships get reframed afterwards. Love is blind. Hindsight is 20 20.

The situation has gotten even more complicated in the succeeding years. It's time Jane wrote a new book! show less

Because it was published in 1982, Jane Gallop's Feminism and Psychoanalysis can seem a little outdated. I found this to be particularly true of the early parts of the book which, for all the importance of Juliet Mitchell and Ernest Jones to the history of psychoanalysis, provide detailed analyses of debates that no longer seem so pressing or relevant to today's theory.

Once she gets to the third and fourth chapters, however, which both deal with Lacan's famous Seminar XX: Encore, in which he show more outlines his theory of feminine sexuality, Gallop really hits her stride. Those two chapters alone make this book a classic, a sensitive reading of Lacan's theory (supplemented, in Ch.4, by a reading of Stephen Heath) that shows why Lacan is both an object of attraction and repulsion to feminist critics - and indeed, why this ambivalence is so central to the insights he provides.

Chapters 5 and 6 successfully repeat this pattern by putting Luce Irigaray into dialogue with Freud and Lacan, focusing in particular how she challenges notions of paternal authority, attempting to find a different way of writing and thinking that does not fall back into the same old patriarchal patterns. I found it fascinating how Gallop shows Irigaray asking "impertinent questions" to her "fatherly" precursors, while at the same time showing how Irigaray, as their "daughter," is unconsciously partially "seduced" by them.

The final three chapters show feminist critics in dialogue with each other: Irigaray and Eugénie Lemoine-Luccioni (Ch.7), Irigaray and Julia Kristeva (Ch.8), and finally, Catherine Clément and Hélène Cixous (Ch.9). Gallop shows how these thinkers struggle to implement a feminist discourse that goes beyond the traditions of phallic authority.

What I really loved about Gallop's book is its radical honesty: as a critic, Gallop is not afraid to be brutally candid about the shortcomings of her intellectual heroes nor, even more endearingly, to turn the spotlight of criticism on her own possible shortcomings and prejudices. "In all this talk of correct narrative position, staging one's own transference, risking one's identity, I begin to feel less and less sure of what might be the 'correct position' for me, of whether I, like Irigaray, am trying to regain self-mastery by the best ruse of all. [...] my avowed project [...] is to avoid getting locked into a specular opposition," she writes in Ch.7 (p.103). This openness, this vulnerability, this unvarnished willingness to question authority makes Gallop's book a true revelation: here, in its self-reflexive uncertainty, is a genuinely new mode of discourse, the realization of a promise that psychoanalysis has, until now, largely failed to keep. show less

Jane Gallop's debut Feminism and Psychoanalysis turned out to be an unexpected pleasure, a book that triumphs because it takes seriously the task not only of criticism, but of self-criticism. Gallop, in short, writes with a searching sense of honesty and self-scrutiny that is both winning and critically incisive.

Gallop's earlier book did focus on Lacan, but it was mainly in order to place his ideas about female sexuality and the phallus from Seminar XX in dialogue with feminist thinkers. show more Reading Lacan, by contrast, consists of Gallop's interpretations of selections from Écrits, with a specific focus on those that were available in English translation at the time (the full text of Écrits was not translated until 2006).

Gallop sprinkles her text with little notes, some theoretical, some personal - this "experimental" move is indicative of the 1980s context in which she is writing. Some are insightful, some come across as a little pretentious.

The Prefatory Material opens with a meditation on the meaning and purpose of "women's studies." She then makes the argument that Lacan's notion of universal castration and his subversion of the "subject who is supposed to know" constitute a challenge to authority that aligns with the feminist project. I am not so sure that this is necessarily true, but I am inclined to agree with this premise. Finally, she looks at how the intersection between literature and psychoanalysis in Lacan's work allows us to be both analyst and analysand at the same time. Self-reflexive Gallop is in the house.

Chapter 1 deals with a number of meditations on how to read Écrits. The first is a contemplation of Écrits itself is a "lure," drawing readers in because of its similarity to literature, but eluding us nonetheless because, in the end, it escapes that label. The second is a look at the way Lacan simultaneously utilizes and subverts the notion of "mastery." The third is a comparison of Lacan's text to Roland Barthes's opposition between readerly and writerly texts, arguing that Lacan belongs to the latter. The fourth examines the difficulties of translation and the ambiguities of Lacan's French. Overall, the thesis of the chapter seems to be that students of literature might *think* they recognize a familiar series of textual strategies in Écrits, but the reality is that they are encountering something radically new and subversive.

Chapter 2 (focus: "Seminar on 'The Purloined Letter'") is a brilliant analysis of the back-and-forth interplay between Lacan and American culture. The negative side of this equation comes from Lacan's hatred of American ego-psychology, while its positive side is provided by his admiration of Poe. A further layer to this discussion is the fact that Poe, who was an admirer of French culture, was first lionized by French readers: in other words, did they mirror each other? Gallop closes with an amazing consideration of the fact that both Dupin and Lacan may be decoys to draw our attention away from where the "real" analysis is happening.

Chapter 3 (focus: "The Mirror Stage...") is another remarkable chapter, in which Gallop uses the unusual publication history of Lacan's paper to point to the uncertainty of the origin. Indeed, she undoubtedly embarrassed Jean-Michel Palmier, who makes a gesture toward Lacan's early text - which, as it turns out, exists only as a footnote. Which "mirror stage" comes first: the missing original or its re-written double? Gallop also skewers Catherine Clément's claim that the mirror stage "is the germ containing everything" - a violation of Lacan's caution to his audience not to project onto his work the false notion that things are "already there" when they are in reality a product of new insights. The rest of the chapter sees Gallop exploring in depth this temporal paradox: if the mirror stage is the moment that brings into being the very notion of order, then how can we possibly think about what came "before" order, since doing so can only be achieved through the window that was opened up by the mirror stage.

Chapter 4 (focus: "The Freudian Thing") is a difficult but wonderful chapter that focuses on the "correct" location of the unconscious. Using Freud's hometown of Vienna as the shifting center of her discussion - think of the castle in Kafka's novel - Gallop runs the reader through a dizzying series of wordplays and conceptual slips that show how, whenever we think we have grasped the unconscious, it eludes us. Vienna is never quite where we think it is.

Chapter 5 (focus: "The Agency of the Letter...") reflects more deeply on the question of Lacan's style. Gallop then heads into the Lacanian territory that I like least, with an extended discussion of metaphor and metonymy, followed by an attempt to read his mathemes/formulae as something between a poem and a rebus.

Chapter 6 (focus: "The Signification of the Phallus") returns to territory covered in Feminism and Psychoanalysis, with an extended discussion of the difference between the "phallus" and the "penis." Since it goes over old ground, I found this chapter to be by far the least rewarding in the book.

Chapter 7 (focus: "The Subversion of the Subject...") examines the difficult nuances of Lacan's claim that "God is unconscious," as opposed to "God is dead." Comparing this notion to Barthes's concept of the dead author, Gallop notes the subtleties and advantages of the Lacanian formula for both literature and atheism.

With the exception of Chapter 6, I found Reading Lacan to be an even stronger work than Gallop's first book. Her insights into Lacan are often dazzling, especially for the way she is able to take complex ideas and turn them over and over so that the reader can see all their various nuances. While it's not quite a perfect book, its audacity, insight, and intellectual fearlessness nonetheless merit its five star rating. show less

Freud is very easy to read while Lacan nearly impossible. When I turned to Ms. Gallop for help, I found that this impossibility is, if not outright intentional, at least widely acknowledged. In fact, one of the best things in this book is that the author refuses to adopt the position of one presumed to know. Early on she says "My various mentions of insufficient command of the material are a very central part of my project." and how that releases her from "constantly cover[ing] one's show more inevitable inadequacy in order to have the right to speak" the alternative being the fake certainty too many texts suffer from today. She further argues that her stance is thus both feminist and Lacanian.

Ms. Gallop's own writing can be hard to understand too but she has succeeded in freeing me up from having to understand it as well as I feared I would have to before writing this review. That itself is an accomplishment of the kind one might think could only be achieved via psychotherapy.

Indeed everyone writing about Lacan turns out to be difficult to read (though some more than others) and Ms. Gallop reads other writers as well and explains the issues, or at least tries. Luckily I have enough familiarity with Freud and Lacan to try along with her. If you do not, this book should not be where you begin.

Often Ms Gallop approaches Lacan's writing as if its difficulty is the secondary elaboration of a dream disguising latent content. She associates to the parts as Freud instructs us to do with dreams. Though she has interesting associations it is easy to get lost in the details when one would prefer a more global understanding.

One can argue that such a clear understanding is impossible, not only for Lacan's work but for anything at all if you take a Lacanian perspective. The symbolic cannot "capture" the real. However this reader needs more of an overview, even a necessarily unsatisfying one. show less