Response 8: "The Blind Spot of an Old Dream"

While I found Freud’s excerpt in the section “Woman, science’s unknown” to be interesting, I basically disagreed with what he said. The quote talks about how “Throughout history people have knocked their heads against the riddle of the nature of femininity” and how men have never stopped worrying about trying to understand this “problem” and how this worry doesn't apply to women because they are the said “problem” (644). He seems to contradict himself when he talks about how the debate of understanding femininity doesn't involve women. Even from just the quote itself, the woman doesn't seem to be the “problem”; the problem seems to lie more in the fact that men debate amongst themselves on what they think defines femininity without including the perspective of the subject of discussion.

There is a quote on page 650 that I agree with, where Irigaray states that Freud's analysis "is an organized system whose meaning is regulated by paradigms and units of value that are in turn determined by male subjects" and it is particularly because of that that women are seen as less than/lacking throughout the text.

In a way, it also reminds me how the New Critics emphasized meaning could only be derived from the text and avoided looking at how external factors such as societal events could have also influenced the said piece of literature (for example, how the New Critics disregarded societal changes in the South). In both these situations, Freud and the New Critics are looking at things from the perspective of the "norm" (white, male) and because of this, they may not always read/assess the situation from the most accurate viewpoint.

Another one of Irigary's statements that I agreed with was: “…it is precisely the downplaying of the female side of this series of binary oppositions that marks the importance of the masculine” (644). It’s quite true and interesting how even the dominant term in the binary relies on the ‘inferior term’ to reassert its advantage; it also reminded me of a previous discussion about how even the status of the master relies on showing how many servants he has. I wonder what Freud would have to say about the fact that this seeming perfection and elevated status of males relies so heavily on his perception of women as passive and inferior/imperfect. Another question is: which is the lesser of two evils? To be completely dismissed (as the New Critics did) or to thought of as subservient (as Freud did).