Response to Smith's Response

Abstract

purely an epiphenomenon of discourse but that unconscious desire is productive in the construction of the subject's experience and that this understanding is critical for political and social criticism. For me, a feminist psychoanalytics promises deep and profound change for the individual and of relations of power/knowledge because it offers a way to understand the complexities of unconscious desire, the way it shapes the female subject and therefore can mystify her experience in the first place. Understanding the itineraries of desire is possible, offering a woman a way to see how her imagining constructs her 'own' experience as such, how to see her imagining already to be inflicted with or subjected in oppressive relations, how to see her possible complicity with oppressive relations, and finally how to see the difference between oppressive relations and the constrictions of desire. Although I understand desire always to be related to political economies, I think of desire as discontinuous from these, not reducible to these. This allows for an analysis of both the inner curve of desire and the engagement of desire in social technologies of reproduction. Smith is right to argue that her standpoint epistemology is also meant to bring knowledge to women that would extend their understanding beyond the immediately known. I always understood her to be taking this position; I simply disagree that this is accomplished by making women's experiences the point d'appui for political criticism, although doing so would limit feminist criticism to a sociological Indeed, my reading of Smith's writing is meant to suggest that even she does not just begin with women's experiences because what makes women's experiences visible to Smith or to any woman also requires being able to make visible what has been excluded from or disavowed in what Smith describes as dominated discourse. What feminists have learned from deconstruction is how to see or read the traces of exclusion, of disavowal, and even to be able to argue that the discourse of hegemonic masculinity is constructed through disavowal. But deconstruction has also taught feminists to read their desire to deconstruct male dominated Reading the disavowed is not like representing the working of a fish tank or quite like reading a subway map. Reading the disavowed is not only about uncovering excluded experiences. It is also about a self-reflective tracing of the desire to exclude. Indeed, it is a deconstructive gesture that allows Smith to name sociological discourse a male dominated one. Thus, when Smith criticizes me as 'the analyst' for not