Thu Oct 26 15:15:51 1995
From: JRine\@aol.com
Could you distinguish (would you distinguish?) your use of the term "phantasmatic" from Vance Smith's use of "phantasm" in his portion of "Leaving the Fold?" I follow that both involve a ghostly sort of agency, or underwriting, and perhaps an underlying structure of fantasy?
Sat Oct 28 11:57:32 1995
From: biddick.1\@nd.edu
Dear Deborah, I am using the notion of disjunction of "home" discipline and my discplinary desires to perform my participation at this conference and my current work beyond this conference. As Caroline Dinshaw eloquently articulated in her plenary address--this is a queer positioning. I appreciate the opportunity to be here. kathy biddick
Sat Oct 28 12:04:18 1995
From: biddick.1\@nd.edu
JRINE: good question. I would not presume to answer for Vance and Michael. We would need to discuss this through together. I can tell you where I am working from with my use of phantasmatic. I am using a notion from Judith Butler which is linked with her notion of a politics of abjection in he Bodies That Matter. The question I would first ask Vance and Michael about phantasm is its (in my opinion) too easy collapse into the "pathological"--that is precisely the collapse that Butler works interrogates. My use of the phantastmatic is about sturcturating fantasies of materialization of corporeal visibility and invisibility, legibility and illegibility. My work is devoted to a historical understanding of technologies of materialization in an effort to pass through abjection, not to leave it behind (I eschew "CURE" talk) but to refigure it into a politics. I am here at the conference and could go into this in further detail, but I would like to work carefully with citation of Butler in order to do so and I do not have my copy of Butler with me--thank you for your question, kb
Sat Oct 28 13:50:37 1995
From: vsmith\@hermes.crc.wvu.edu
I only have a minute (the conference is about to resume), but what we've tried to do is to pursue that very collapse, suggesting that the pathological itself may be structured by the logic of abjection. That is, the phantasm is not itself the figure of the pathological, nor is the pathological the product of simple expulsion. Read, I think, perhaps, literally, the pathological does become another method of reinscribing dominant discourses. We've tied to suggest that working through the pathological is more complicated than that; it's closer to the marginal phenomenon of the abject.
Sat Oct 28 13:50:46 1995
From: Michael Uebel
Our use of the terms phantasm and fetish is meant to prompt a reading of
medieval culture free from the tyranny of the symbolic orders that
psychoanlaytic theory sets up inorder to pathologize the objects of its
own inquiry. The terms signify for us the conflicted investments
we, as medievalists, have in relation to the objects we study: in the
fetsih, the movement of attraction and repulsion that psychoanalytic
theory helps us understand, but which the theory tries to arrest in
the symbolic. The pathological thus becomes less an object than a
process that, as Kathleen agrees, must be passed through--or perhaps,
better,is always being passed through, as images are formed and
deformed in the imaginary.