Speculum/of/the/Other/Woman

I felt something like the antagonist in an Ani DiFranco song tonight--it was a humbling but educative experience. I hope something similar can be said for each of you, whatever your experience in class tonight.

I want to end our reading of  Luce Irigaray with three interpretations of the book’s title:

1) Speculum of the Other Woman

2) Speculum of the Other, [Who is] Woman

3) Speculum of the Other, [That Which Escapes the Masculine Project, that We Name] Woman

1) The most troubling of the three meanings. In English, the “Other Woman” is the woman with whom a man cheats on his wife, with whom he is having an affair. 

On the one hand, this image is one that escapes the constrictions of domestic life as typically imagined. To return to Mad Men, Don’s mistresses are, in a certain sense, glorified within the show. They are secretaries, yes; but others are living out lives as professionals: psychologists, business owners, beatnik artists, and yes, teachers. 

On the other hand, the other woman, as the phrase suggests, can only signify within the masculine economy through her sexual relationship to the man who desires her. 

2) The most psychoanalytic of the three meanings. As I suggested in class tonight, Lacanian theory posits that “the object” is a product of (masculine) desire. The object--the other--is invested, it is brought into existence, by my (masculine) desire. In return, the object sustains my desire, which can never be fulfilled, fully played out, fully “conquered,” “possessed” or “known.” 

“Also at stake, therefore, the “object” and the modes of dividing the economy between them. In particular the economy of discourse. Whereby the silent allegiance of the one guarantees the auto-sufficiency, the auto-nomy of the other as long as not questioning of this mutism as a symptom--of historical repression--is required.”

Indeed, what do women want?

3) The most hopeful of three meanings (?). Is there a project that frees all people from the masculine economy? (Yes, I think all people need liberating in this sense--though I am of course willing to discuss priorities and tactics within this movement.)

Could Woman become a position, a movement, a location of true difference? 

“Now, let us imagine--for what else is there to do when rereading Freud but imagine a response, or else admit one’s inability to survey such an imagination--let us imagine that man (Freud, in the event) had discovered that the rarest thing--the most exciting as well as the most scientifically rigorous, the most faithful to factual materiality and the most historically curative--would be to articulate directly, without catacombs, what we are calling these two syntaxes. Irreducible in their strangeness and eccentricity to the other. Coming out of different times, places, logics, “representations,” and economies. In fact, of course, these terms cannot fittingly be designated by the number “two” and the adjective “different,” if only because they are not susceptible to com-parison. To use such terms serves only to reiterate a movement begun long since, that is, the movement to speak of the “other” in a language already systematized by/for the same.”