 Quotes
Wednesday, December 13th, 2000 Medium "In life, an honest man with a confined understanding is frequently the slave of his habits and the dupe of his feelings, whilst the man with a clearer head and colder heart makes the passions of others bend to his interest; but truly sublime is the character that acts from principle, and governs the inferior springs of activity without slackening their vigor; whose feelings give vital heat to his resolves, but never hurry him into feverish eccentricities." Mary Wollstonecraft, The Vindications of the Rights of Men Big "Freud's epistemology is clearly phallocentric. The male is the bearer of knowledge; he alone has the power to penetrate woman and text; woman's role is to let herself be penetrated by such truth. Such epistemological phallocentrism is by no means specifically Freudian; on the contrary, it has so far enjoyed universal sway in our patriarchal civilization, and one could hardly expect Freud to emerge untouched by it. It is politically important, however, to point out that this pathological division of knowledge into masculine totality and feminine fragment is completely mystifying and mythological. There is absolutely no evidence for the actual existence of two such gender-determined sorts of knowledge, to be conceptualized as parallel to the shapes of human genitals. Dora can be perceived as the bearer of feminine epistemology in the study only because Freud selected her as his opponent in a war over cognition, creating her as his symbolic antagonist. To champion Dora's "feminine values" means meekly accepting Freud's own definitions of masculine and feminine. Power always creates its own definitions, and this is particularly true of the distinctions between masculine and feminine constructed by patriarchal society. Nowhere is patrarchal ideology to be seen more clearly than in the definition of the feminine as the negative of the masculine-and this is precisely how Freud defines Dora and the "feminine" epistemology she is supposed to represent." Toril Moi, Representation of Patriarchy: Sexuality and Epistemology in Freud's Dora Bonus Quote... "The pages I slowly cover with writing and which I add to those already written, produce a very particular rustling whisper that echoes round the empty room. Always assuming this is not just some post-prandial dream state as fragile as it is transient, it is against this present moment that everything I have lived through laps. Even if the periodically surfacing memories manage to make a crack in that thickness, once what has filtered through has been deposited there like parched dry lava, the heavy persistence of the present closes ranks and the paper becomes once more dumb and smooth, as if untouched by images from other worlds. It is those fleeting, ghostly worlds, no more palpable than the air I breathe, that must have been my life. And yet there are times when the images spring up inside me with such force that the thick wall crumbles and I move between two worlds. The flimsy partition of the body that keeps the two worlds separate becomes simultaneously porous and transparent and it feels as if it is now that I am standing on the great semicircular sweep of beach. Compact, naked bodies cross it, and its soft sand, ruffled by the tracks of blurred footsteps, reveals here and there the parched detritus left by the constant river, the tips of poles blackened by fire or weather, and even the invisible presence of something beyond our experience." Juan Jose Saer, The Witness
|
||