the many breasted goddesses

thinking more along the lines of Irigaray's response to Freud ... the origin of the world spins not on the murder of the father by his sons (civilization and its discontents) but by the primordial murder of the mother (Catherine Keller writes on this also).  what this means for my thesis I'm not sure.

i need to read irigaray's "sexes and genealogies" and more of cixous' white ink writing.

i am drawing across fields - psychoanalysis, the psychoanalytic, poststructuralist french feminists, the pool of post-structuralism and the creative existentialists... , and the psychoanalytic existentialists like Yalom... 

different views of the same?????????????

Isaac Bashevis Singer "The Slave"

A beautiful book by this Nobel Prize laureate.  It narrates the life of Jacob - a Yiddish man sold as a slave to a mountain top polish village - set in the 1600's which was a tumultuous time for the Jews in eastern europe.  Singer describes some of the atrocities committed by the cossacks during his narrative.  Jacob falls in love with a mountain girl.  She is a regal character and she is developed as a true heroine and truth speaker, but also framed by Jacob's spiritual turmoil and the turmoil of the jewish community over his 'unclean' love for her - he is a religious jew.  The novel concludes with Jacob returning to Pilitz from the holy land to recover the bones of his beloved Wanda from the ground.  In many ways this novel explores the courageous struggle for authenticity and truth and life in his two characters against a backdrop of depravity.

Jane Austen "Mansfield Park"

Austen provides a damning satire of the upper classes in Regency England.  The story portrays the struggle and eventual overcoming of the much maligned 'poor cousin' who must accept charity from the family due to her family's hopeless circumstances.  Was Jane Austen writing to liberate through her novels?  Certainly, the content of her novels is critical of society, and the place and treatment of women.  It lays bare their vulnerability due to the social dominance of men and the masculine-defined fabric of that society.  She is able to speak truths more freely using 'the novel' than the placard.

Camus "The Myth of Sisyphus"

Camus is a philosopher born in French Algiers.   He wrote often on Freedom - the provenance of his thought was in his experiences of world wars.  He wrote prominently on Freedom.  His books "The Myth of Sisyphus" and "The Rebel" both describe his views on freedom, reason, religion, politics.  While his thoughts are oriented round the experiences of men in his day, there is potential for cross over.  He was very interested in justice and the idea of struggle.  His comparisons of the condemned man and the suicidal man are lucid.

Cixous

Helene Cixous writes using the poetic. Her book "Third Body" explores the love relationship.

Celebrating the male voice?

I am wondering how to engage with the male voice. The Song is primarily a woman's story, written by a woman, encountered by a woman, speaking of issues experienced by women... A woman's particular experience of death/life, making meaning, encountering the male other, and struggling to be free.

I want to recognise the voices of Kierkegaard, Camus, Sartre, Heidegger, Buber, Levinas ... but they write from the place of 'other', they write as men, write to a male academia, of male concerns ... as such their writings are androcentric. Camus writes about freedom eloquently, but he writes of war, and soldiering and male politics. Sartre has dubious views about women - he is caught up in his own experience. Buber and Levinas reach out to the other Entre Nous and Ich und Du. There might be some hope there.

But perhaps in building the feminine verticality of Irigaray ... I need to look further to Kristeva, Cixous, Beauvoir ... I'm wondering about bell hooks as well.

Irigaray, Kelso and friends

Irigaray, Kelso and other writers like Elizabeth Grosz and Michelle Boulous Walker seem to talk about the recreation of the mother-daughter sociality or geneaology (also listed are Elizabeth Hirsch, Margaret Whitford). This 'verticality' which gives strength.... an intellectual, ethical world of speaking women. We are told we are trapped in a 'symbolic' system which operates via language with a silencing effect on the feminine.

Poetic style (women's ways of writing, reading and speaking) is a way to speak what has been formerly 'unspeakable' due to this oppression (by the Symbolic, by language). Western culture is underwritten by the necessity of feminine silence. The silent feminine serves to reflect man to himself and in doing so she disappears.

The mother appears in the Song in highlighted ways... The subversive subtext (against the feminine) still operates in the song. Though I sense feminine authorship it is as if the oppressor is housed within the author - we are (as women) unconsciously complicit in our own suppression/repression/oppression. But there is also another subversive subtext in the Song that struggles against the symbolic language/culture/patriarchy of its time/space of writing. Its that subtext I want to engage. I don't think this is 'forgotten future' in the song. I think this is the production of or the desire for a future of difference from the author.

Irigarayan view of poetic writing

Kelso (2009, p 105):

"she considers poetry to be a productive even carthartic linguistic practice because it foregrounds, rather than disavows, the pleasure of language production, especially when it comes to the indeterminacy of meaning. Unlike languages and discourse of truth, poetry enjoys the free play of words and their meanings, refusing to tie down one to the other. For irigaray, poetic discourse has the potential to explore alternative meanings and pleasures that may begin to speak the unspeakble desires of "woman" and her body. This potential arises because in analytic and poetic discourses the emphasis is not upon the production of a unitary, uncontestable, reflection of some pre-existing "truth".

Kelso sourced these thoughts from Irigaray's "The forgetting of air in Martin Heidegger" (1999). I haven't read this but found a sense of kinship with Irigaray's mode of writing (love discourse) in "The marine lover of Friedrich Neitzsche". Her polysemantic poetic writing did indeed capture the unspeakable ... and allowed for an "I/You" kind of valuing of text and read.

recreating the mother in the present...

"This forgotten mother cannot be 'found' or located in the past, that is, 'she' cannot be recuperated or even reconstructed from the past. Rather she is created in the present through an engagement with the past enabled by the psychoanalytic setting or practicable. And crucial to this "return" are analytic and poetic modes of language production." Kelso (2009, p70)

'the murder of the mother'

What is the 'murder of the mother' to Irigary? (Kelso, p69) Is it a metaphor, a type of metaphysical murder that is ongoing and perpetuated in our culture?? Does the murder of the mother figure in the song???

How, then ... Irigaray (Speculum of the other woman, 1985, 345)

How, then can one return into the cave [of Socrates], the den, the earth? Rediscover the darkness of all that has been left behind? Remember the forgotten mother?

Shulamith and the existentialists

A journey into the universe of the Shulamith using Irigaray's love discourse and the existential themes of death, freedom, isolation and meaninglessness.