Jane Gallop

Feminism and Psychoanalysis

The Daughter's Seduction

Post-structuralist attitudes to authorship as expressed by Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and Gayati Chakravorty Spivak with particular attention to time and death.

Reading and Writing in Time

The Deaths of the Author

Rosalind E. Krauss

Carol Mavor

Michael Fried

Shawn Michelle Smith

Gordon Hughes

Jay Prosser

Paola Cortés Rocca

Victor Burgin

Margaret Olin

Roland Barthes's 1980 book Camera Lucidais perhaps the most influential book ever published on photography. The terms studiumand punctum,coined by Barthes for two different ways of responding to photographs, are part of the standard lexicon for discussions of photography; Barthes's understanding of photographic time and the relationship he forges between photography and death have been invoked countless times in photographic discourse; and the current interest in vernacular photographs and the ubiquity of subjective, even novelistic, ways of writing about photography both owe something to Barthes. Photography Degree Zero,the first anthology of writings on Camera Lucida,goes beyond the usual critical orthodoxies to offer a range of perspectives on Barthes's important book. Photography Degree Zero(the title links Barthes's first book, Writing Degree Zero,to his last, Camera Lucida)includes essays written soon after Barthes's book appeared as well as more recent rereadings of it, some previously unpublished. The contributors' approaches range from psychoanalytical (in an essay drawing on the work of Lacan) to Buddhist (in an essay that compares the photographic flash to the mystic's light of revelation); they include a history of Barthes's writings on photography and an account of Camera Lucidaand its reception; two views of the book through the lens of race; and a provocative essay by Michael Fried and two responses to it. The variety of perspectives included in Photography Degree Zero,and the focus on Camera Lucidain the context of photography rather than literature or philosophy, serve to reopen a vital conversation on Barthes's influential work. Contributors: Geoffrey Batchen, Victor Burgin, Eduardo Cadava, Paolo Cortes-Rocca, James Elkins, Michael Fried, Jane Gallop, Gordon Hughes, Margaret Iverson, Rosalind E. Krauss, Carol Mavor, Margaret Olin, Jay Prosser, Shawn Michelle Smith

Reflections on Roland Barthes's Camera Lucida

Photography Degree Zero

The Daughter’s Seduction

The influence of the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan has extended into nearly every field of the humanities and social sciences—from literature and film studies to anthropology and social work. yet Lacan's major text, Ecrits, continues to perplex and even baffle its readers. In Reading Lacan, Jane Gallop offers a novel approach to Lacan's work based on his own theories of language. Lacan locates truth in the letter rather than in the spirit-in the ways statements are expressed rather than in their intended meaning. Gallop here grapples with six of Lacan's essays from Ecrits: "The Seminar on 'The Purloined Letter,' " "The Mirror Stage," "The Freudian Thing,'' "The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious,'' "The Signification of the Phallus," and "The Subversion of the Subject." While other commentators have chosen not to confront Lacan's notoriously problematic style in their discussions of his ideas, Gallop addresses herself directly to the problem and the practice of reading Lacan. She takes her direction from Lacan's view of subjectivity and offers a deeply personal, feminist reading of Ecrits. Concentrating on the relation of desire and interpretation, she opens up the rich implications of Lacan's thought, for psychoanalytic theory, for the act of reading, and for knowledge itself. Forceful and revealing, yet utterly candid about its own areas of uncertainty, Gallop's book will be indispensable to readers of Lacan and to scholars and students who have felt his impact.

Reading Lacan

Drawing on her own experiences with late-onset disability and its impact on her sex life, along with her expertise as a cultural critic, Jane Gallop explores how disability and aging work to undermine one's sense of self. She challenges common conceptions that equate the decline of bodily potential and ability with a permanent and irretrievable loss, arguing that such a loss can be both temporary and positively transformative. With Sexuality, Disability, and Aging, Gallop explores and celebrates how sexuality transforms and becomes more queer in the lives of the no longer young and the no longer able while at the same time demonstrating how disability can generate new forms of sexual fantasy and erotic possibility.

Queer Temporalities of the Phallus

Sexuality, Disability, and Aging

Four writers?the first, an eighteenth-century Frenchman whose works still retain their power to shock, scandalize, and instruct; the others, three twentieth-century Frenchmen, heirs and explicators of their earlier compatriot?form the central cast of characters of this literary-philosophical dialogue which seeks to transcend the barriers of time, space, and sexual identity imposed by traditional approaches to literature. Professor Gallop, acknowledging her debt to such writers as Friedrich Nietzsche and Roland Barthes, cites as the shaping principle of her work the central tenet of intertextuality?that a literary work is not a closed system which can be definitively characterized by reference either to its creator or to its beholder. Rather, reader, writer, and text meet, react, and interact in a performance of "polymorphous per-versity"?a performance which, Professor Gallop points out, finds a parodic analogue in the activities of Sade's distinguished libertines. Professor Gallop observes that Sade and the structuralists display a congruity of purpose, in that both take as their goal the destruction of the classical dichotomy, long enshrined at the heart of the humanist tradition, between the ideal and the material. Working from these peculiar conjunctions of theory, purpose, and enactment?and from a distinctly feminist point of view?Professor Gallop moves freely among the texts of her four subjects. She introduces Bataille's Sade to Blanchot?s Sade, relates Klossowski's Sade to Klossowski's Bataille, and, when necessary extricates Sade himself from the web of what has been written about him. She finds that each of the three later writers constructs his own "fiction," with Sade as chief character: Bataille, caught up in the idea of the "sovereign man," discovers the sovereign man in Sade; Blanchot, for whom the real action is the act of writing itself, describes a Sade confronting the horror of the loss of self in that act; while Klossowski creates several Sades, marking different moments in his intellectual itinerary: psychoanalytic, Catholic, Nietzschean. Professor Gallop demonstrates, however, that Sade is ultimately not appropriable?cannot, in effect, be consumed?and that, thus, an inversion occurs whereby Bataille, Blanchot, and Klossowski become extensions of Sade's characters, subsumed into the Sadian world. And she finds herself likewise a part of that world and her work "an ever reverberating extension of Sade's own writing."

Intersections, a Reading of Sade with Bataille, Blanchot, and Klossowski

Sexual harassment is an issue in which feminists are usually thought to be on the plaintiff's side. But in 1993—amid considerable attention from the national academic community—Jane Gallop, a prominent feminist professor of literature, was accused of sexual harassment by two of her women graduate students. In Feminist Accused of Sexual Harassment, Gallop tells the story of how and why she was charged with sexual harassment and what resulted from the accusations. Weaving together memoir and theoretical reflections, Gallop uses her dramatic personal experience to offer a vivid analysis of current trends in sexual harassment policy and to pose difficult questions regarding teaching and sex, feminism and knowledge. Comparing “still new” feminism—as she first encountered it in the early 1970s—with the more established academic discipline that women's studies has become, Gallop makes a case for the intertwining of learning and pleasure. Refusing to acquiesce to an imperative of silence that surrounds such issues, Gallop acknowledges—and describes—her experiences with the eroticism of learning and teaching. She argues that antiharassment activism has turned away from the feminism that created it and suggests that accusations of harassment are taking aim at the inherent sexuality of professional and pedagogic activity rather than indicting discrimination based on gender—that antiharassment has been transformed into a sensationalist campaign against sexuality itself. Feminist Accused of Sexual Harassment offers a direct and challenging perspective on the complex and charged issues surrounding the intersection of politics, sexuality, feminism, and power. Gallop's story and her characteristically bold way of telling it will be compelling reading for anyone interested in these issues and particularly to anyone interested in the ways they pertain to the university.

Jane Gallop

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