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The Daughter's Seduction: Feminism and Psychoanalysis
The Daughter's Seduction examines the relation between contemporary feminism and the psychoanalytical theories of Jacques Lacan. Through readings of the major texts that stand at the intersection of French psychoanalysis and feminism, it confronts, boldly and directly, such topics as sexual difference, desire, reading. writing. power. family. phallocentrism, and language. In doing so, Jane Gallup not only illuminates current French psychoanalytic and feminist thinking, but also explores contemporary American and British thought.... Gallop begins by questioning a number of feminist assumptions, through the agency of Lacanian psychoanalysis, and ends by using feminist writing to question certain psychoanalytic positions. In the course of the book, the reader watches and participates in a complex seduction as feminism (the daughter) gives up her resistance to psychoanalysis (the father). The father in turn surrenders his impassive self-mastery and betrays his desires. Renouncing their familial roles of daughter and father, they may be able to escape the vicious circle in which they have been imprisoned. --- excerpts from book's dustjacket
164 pages, Hardcover
First published May 1, 1982
5 people are currently reading
303 people want to read
About the author
Jane Gallop
22 books21 followersJane Gallop is Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Wisconsin -- Milwaukee, where she has taught since 1990. Before that, she was Herbert S. Autrey Professor of Humanities at Rice University, where she founded the Women's Studies program. At the beginning of her career, she taught in the French Department at Miami University in Ohio (she earned a PhD in French Literature in 1976). She is the author of nine books, and nearly a hundred articles. She has written on a wide range of topics: psychoanalysis, especially the work of Jacques Lacan; French feminism; psychoanalysis and feminism; the Marquis de Sade; feminist literary criticism; pedagogy; sexual harassment; photography; queer theory; close reading. While the topics vary, her writing can be understood as the consistent application of a close reading method to theoretical texts. She has been teaching this close reading of theory to her students for the past 40 years.
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
November 28, 2018
Because it was published in 1982, Jane Gallop's Feminism and Psychoanalysis can seem a little outdated. I found this to be particularly true of the early parts of the book which, for all the importance of Juliet Mitchell and Ernest Jones to the history of psychoanalysis, provide detailed analyses of debates that no longer seem so pressing or relevant to today's theory.
Once she gets to the third and fourth chapters, however, which both deal with Lacan's famous Seminar XX: Encore, in which he outlines his theory of feminine sexuality, Gallop really hits her stride. Those two chapters alone make this book a classic, a sensitive reading of Lacan's theory (supplemented, in Ch.4, by a reading of Stephen Heath) that shows why Lacan is both an object of attraction and repulsion to feminist critics - and indeed, why this ambivalence is so central to the insights he provides.
Chapters 5 and 6 successfully repeat this pattern by putting Luce Irigaray into dialogue with Freud and Lacan, focusing in particular how she challenges notions of paternal authority, attempting to find a different way of writing and thinking that does not fall back into the same old patriarchal patterns. I found it fascinating how Gallop shows Irigaray asking "impertinent questions" to her "fatherly" precursors, while at the same time showing how Irigaray, as their "daughter," is unconsciously partially "seduced" by them.
The final three chapters show feminist critics in dialogue with each other: Irigaray and Eugénie Lemoine-Luccioni (Ch.7), Irigaray and Julia Kristeva (Ch.8), and finally, Catherine Clément and Hélène Cixous (Ch.9). Gallop shows how these thinkers struggle to implement a feminist discourse that goes beyond the traditions of phallic authority.
What I really loved about Gallop's book is its radical honesty: as a critic, Gallop is not afraid to be brutally candid about the shortcomings of her intellectual heroes nor, even more endearingly, to turn the spotlight of criticism on her own possible shortcomings and prejudices. "In all this talk of correct narrative position, staging one's own transference, risking one's identity, I begin to feel less and less sure of what might be the 'correct position' for me, of whether I, like Irigaray, am trying to regain self-mastery by the best ruse of all. [...] my avowed project [...] is to avoid getting locked into a specular opposition," she writes in Ch.7 (p.103). This openness, this vulnerability, this unvarnished willingness to question authority makes Gallop's book a true revelation: here, in its self-reflexive uncertainty, is a genuinely new mode of discourse, the realization of a promise that psychoanalysis has, until now, largely failed to keep.
Once she gets to the third and fourth chapters, however, which both deal with Lacan's famous Seminar XX: Encore, in which he outlines his theory of feminine sexuality, Gallop really hits her stride. Those two chapters alone make this book a classic, a sensitive reading of Lacan's theory (supplemented, in Ch.4, by a reading of Stephen Heath) that shows why Lacan is both an object of attraction and repulsion to feminist critics - and indeed, why this ambivalence is so central to the insights he provides.
Chapters 5 and 6 successfully repeat this pattern by putting Luce Irigaray into dialogue with Freud and Lacan, focusing in particular how she challenges notions of paternal authority, attempting to find a different way of writing and thinking that does not fall back into the same old patriarchal patterns. I found it fascinating how Gallop shows Irigaray asking "impertinent questions" to her "fatherly" precursors, while at the same time showing how Irigaray, as their "daughter," is unconsciously partially "seduced" by them.
The final three chapters show feminist critics in dialogue with each other: Irigaray and Eugénie Lemoine-Luccioni (Ch.7), Irigaray and Julia Kristeva (Ch.8), and finally, Catherine Clément and Hélène Cixous (Ch.9). Gallop shows how these thinkers struggle to implement a feminist discourse that goes beyond the traditions of phallic authority.
What I really loved about Gallop's book is its radical honesty: as a critic, Gallop is not afraid to be brutally candid about the shortcomings of her intellectual heroes nor, even more endearingly, to turn the spotlight of criticism on her own possible shortcomings and prejudices. "In all this talk of correct narrative position, staging one's own transference, risking one's identity, I begin to feel less and less sure of what might be the 'correct position' for me, of whether I, like Irigaray, am trying to regain self-mastery by the best ruse of all. [...] my avowed project [...] is to avoid getting locked into a specular opposition," she writes in Ch.7 (p.103). This openness, this vulnerability, this unvarnished willingness to question authority makes Gallop's book a true revelation: here, in its self-reflexive uncertainty, is a genuinely new mode of discourse, the realization of a promise that psychoanalysis has, until now, largely failed to keep.
August 12, 2015
I picked this book up at a local book sale (due to the fact that it didn't have barcode SKU which means that the re-sellers didn't pick it up) and all I can say is wow. What an incredibly valuable book.
This is one of the most succinct readings of Lacan that I've ever read and perhaps one of the few to 1) listen to him without idealizing him and 2) go beyond his thought. Well, maybe beyond is the wrong word, but it certainly extends the reach of psychoanalysis and feminism horizontally in the way that a spider spins a web. I'd go so far as to place her above Fink in actually understanding and portraying lacanian ideas.
The basic form of the book is to juxtapose two or more authors (namely feminist-psychoanalysts such as Irigary, Montreley, Mitchell, Cixous, Lacan, Sade, etc.) and read them with each other. It is rare that this is actually done. Typically, one author is read directly through the other. In The Daughter's Seduction, there is an inmixing of ideas and words such that a new, intertextual idea is produced. One can read a repetitious trauma afflicting multiple authors across fields and temporalities, connected by their verbage. Gallop listens to both sides and performs a sort of "marriage counseling" session, coming to incredible conclusions through following verbal cues in and around texts (many times citing footnotes or slips of the pen).
The book itself is a deft, slow, meticulous reading that also is (sometimes too much) self-aware. The only moments where I felt 'annoyed' were in moments of self-analysis (i.e. "maybe I say this just because I'm in transference to lacan"). I don't think this is a negative sentiment to have, but in context this sort of comment interrupts the highly dialectical movement in support of the author's jouissance.
One last extraneous thought. The book took me a long time to read. Maybe two months, I think I took a month off of it because it was so convincing (or maybe, unconsciously, I didn't want it to be finished?). Either way, it reads like fiction and introduces concepts in a way that make it accessible to lay-readers with very little knowledge of lacan or feminism. I was highly impressed and reminded of Annie Rogers' (see The Unsayable) writing.
I'm very interested in her other books specifically Reading Lacan and The Deaths of the Author: Writing and Reading in Time.
This is one of the most succinct readings of Lacan that I've ever read and perhaps one of the few to 1) listen to him without idealizing him and 2) go beyond his thought. Well, maybe beyond is the wrong word, but it certainly extends the reach of psychoanalysis and feminism horizontally in the way that a spider spins a web. I'd go so far as to place her above Fink in actually understanding and portraying lacanian ideas.
The basic form of the book is to juxtapose two or more authors (namely feminist-psychoanalysts such as Irigary, Montreley, Mitchell, Cixous, Lacan, Sade, etc.) and read them with each other. It is rare that this is actually done. Typically, one author is read directly through the other. In The Daughter's Seduction, there is an inmixing of ideas and words such that a new, intertextual idea is produced. One can read a repetitious trauma afflicting multiple authors across fields and temporalities, connected by their verbage. Gallop listens to both sides and performs a sort of "marriage counseling" session, coming to incredible conclusions through following verbal cues in and around texts (many times citing footnotes or slips of the pen).
The book itself is a deft, slow, meticulous reading that also is (sometimes too much) self-aware. The only moments where I felt 'annoyed' were in moments of self-analysis (i.e. "maybe I say this just because I'm in transference to lacan"). I don't think this is a negative sentiment to have, but in context this sort of comment interrupts the highly dialectical movement in support of the author's jouissance.
One last extraneous thought. The book took me a long time to read. Maybe two months, I think I took a month off of it because it was so convincing (or maybe, unconsciously, I didn't want it to be finished?). Either way, it reads like fiction and introduces concepts in a way that make it accessible to lay-readers with very little knowledge of lacan or feminism. I was highly impressed and reminded of Annie Rogers' (see The Unsayable) writing.
I'm very interested in her other books specifically Reading Lacan and The Deaths of the Author: Writing and Reading in Time.
March 15, 2017
It must have been hard being a Lacanian in 1982. For that fact alone, The Daughter's Seduction is a wonder. It is clear throughout that Gallop is not a perfect reader of French, but she is a wonderful reader of Lacan in translation. Her awkward translations of Seminar XX: Encore lack every bit of the quality, clarity, and even poetry of Bruce Fink's translation in 1998. And yet through suturing the writing of Lacanian analysts, a heavy dose of Freud, and a little bit of Lacan (truthfully there is not much of Lacan's text here) Gallop produces something that manages to be brilliant despite its datedness. Gallop makes claims and expresses ideas that anyone thinking at the intersection of feminism and psychoanalysis should keep in mind. At the same time, her text has in many ways been left in the dust.
While the "theory" in this text of Gallop's has not aged gracefully, the writing stands several cuts above contemporaries and others who have taken up her mantle. Gallop's prose is engaging and refined. Her thinking is adventurous and her style reflects her willingness to follow intellectual flights of fancy to productive ends. I would say that this text, in its time of release, probably came as a revelation despite feeling dated today. Gallop close reads, dissects, etymologizes, and lets nothing go unquestioned. Her intellectual practice has clearly influenced a generation of queer theoretical imitators. Gallop, here, is an early adopted of queer irony and wordplay.
The most important moments in her text come in the sequence of chapters, "Encore Encore," "The Father's Seduction," "Impertinent Questions," "Writing Erratic Desire," and "The Phallic Mother: Fraudian Analysis." In "Encore Encore," Gallop poses crucial questions about authority and authorization in relation to textual analysis and thought. She relates the kind of authority many seek to claim in relation to Lacanian analysis is the authority of the Name-of-the-Father. Gallop argues, though, that Lacan and feminism both share a repudiation of that authority and a desire to see it supplanted. Gallop writes, "Infidelity then is a feminist practice of undermining the Name-of-the-Father. The unfaithful reading strays from the author, the authorized, produces that which does not hold out as reproduction, as a representation." Gallop goes on to pick up this thread in "Writing Erratic Desire," where she writes of Irigaray in opposition to orthodox Lacanian analysts, "ironically it is Irigaray who is carrying on Lacan's most radical battle, the battle against the institutionalize stagnation of psychoanalysis."
Gallop goes on, in the page immediately following, to draw out a crucial facet of Lacanian theory in relation to the phallus. Gallop writes, "A commonplace of Lacanian doctrine is the separation of the concepts of 'phallus' and 'penis' ... The phallus, unlike the penis, is lacking to any subject, male or female. The phallus symbolizing unmediated, full jouissance must be lacking for any subject to enter the symbolic order, that is to enter language, effective intersubjectivity." For Gallop to distill such an important notion of Lacan that is so easily missed by many criticism is astounding, particularly considering the period in which she was writing. She goes on to effectively put the lie to Lacan's formulation, "Certainly the signifier 'phallus' functions in distinction from 'penis', but it must also always refer to 'penis' ... Such attempts to remake language to one's own theoretical needs, as if language were merely a tool one could wield, is a very naive, un-Lacanian view of language." And yet, Gallop delivers to Lacan an escape hatch from this criticism earlier in "Encore Encore." At that chapter's close she writes (in a haphazard but technically correct translation of Lacan), ", 'One must make use, but really use them up, really wear out these old words, wear them threadbare, use them until they're thoroughly hackneyed'. What a way of ruining exchange value by use! Perhaps this explains the annoying and embarrassing insistence of 'phallus' and 'castration' in Lacan. Maybe he's using them up, running the risk of essence, running dangerously close to patriarchal positions so as to wear 'phallus' and 'castration' out, until they're thoroughly hackneyed."
Gallop, at least, cannot be accused of offering anything hackneyed.
While the "theory" in this text of Gallop's has not aged gracefully, the writing stands several cuts above contemporaries and others who have taken up her mantle. Gallop's prose is engaging and refined. Her thinking is adventurous and her style reflects her willingness to follow intellectual flights of fancy to productive ends. I would say that this text, in its time of release, probably came as a revelation despite feeling dated today. Gallop close reads, dissects, etymologizes, and lets nothing go unquestioned. Her intellectual practice has clearly influenced a generation of queer theoretical imitators. Gallop, here, is an early adopted of queer irony and wordplay.
The most important moments in her text come in the sequence of chapters, "Encore Encore," "The Father's Seduction," "Impertinent Questions," "Writing Erratic Desire," and "The Phallic Mother: Fraudian Analysis." In "Encore Encore," Gallop poses crucial questions about authority and authorization in relation to textual analysis and thought. She relates the kind of authority many seek to claim in relation to Lacanian analysis is the authority of the Name-of-the-Father. Gallop argues, though, that Lacan and feminism both share a repudiation of that authority and a desire to see it supplanted. Gallop writes, "Infidelity then is a feminist practice of undermining the Name-of-the-Father. The unfaithful reading strays from the author, the authorized, produces that which does not hold out as reproduction, as a representation." Gallop goes on to pick up this thread in "Writing Erratic Desire," where she writes of Irigaray in opposition to orthodox Lacanian analysts, "ironically it is Irigaray who is carrying on Lacan's most radical battle, the battle against the institutionalize stagnation of psychoanalysis."
Gallop goes on, in the page immediately following, to draw out a crucial facet of Lacanian theory in relation to the phallus. Gallop writes, "A commonplace of Lacanian doctrine is the separation of the concepts of 'phallus' and 'penis' ... The phallus, unlike the penis, is lacking to any subject, male or female. The phallus symbolizing unmediated, full jouissance must be lacking for any subject to enter the symbolic order, that is to enter language, effective intersubjectivity." For Gallop to distill such an important notion of Lacan that is so easily missed by many criticism is astounding, particularly considering the period in which she was writing. She goes on to effectively put the lie to Lacan's formulation, "Certainly the signifier 'phallus' functions in distinction from 'penis', but it must also always refer to 'penis' ... Such attempts to remake language to one's own theoretical needs, as if language were merely a tool one could wield, is a very naive, un-Lacanian view of language." And yet, Gallop delivers to Lacan an escape hatch from this criticism earlier in "Encore Encore." At that chapter's close she writes (in a haphazard but technically correct translation of Lacan), ", 'One must make use, but really use them up, really wear out these old words, wear them threadbare, use them until they're thoroughly hackneyed'. What a way of ruining exchange value by use! Perhaps this explains the annoying and embarrassing insistence of 'phallus' and 'castration' in Lacan. Maybe he's using them up, running the risk of essence, running dangerously close to patriarchal positions so as to wear 'phallus' and 'castration' out, until they're thoroughly hackneyed."
Gallop, at least, cannot be accused of offering anything hackneyed.
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February 11, 2025This was a drag
June 23, 2015
Can't help but think that Zizek has cribbed a lot of Gallop's irreverent, mercury polemical voice for his own style. I bet it was cool to be alive in the 80s and read stuff like this and eventually write Gender Trouble. Gallop writes how Derrida wished he could have written. It's crazy how close some theory comes to the level of literature. Gallop is better than pretty much anyone I've read at actually analyzing Lacan.
July 11, 2020
This is my favorite on the subject. Gallop has a sense of humor and a brilliant perspective on academic thought and writing.
May 9, 2022
Somewhat outdated but quite ripe with meaning. Definitely worth reading for those looking to learn more about psychoanalysis.
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews