Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology - uncopy

antagonistic relationship with the diagrams, algorithms, and footnotes which construct the
discourse of feminist analysis. In the context of an installation, this analysis is not meant to
definitively theorize the Post-Partum moment, but rather to describe a process of secondary
revision. In a sense, this text is also included in that process not as a topology of intention, but
as a rewriting of the discourse of the Document which is at once a repression and a reactivation
of its consequences.
NOTES
1. The Post-Partum Document is most closely associated with the debate that surfaced after the
publication in 1974 ofJuliet Mitchell’s book, Psychoanalysis and Feminism, and in particular
with a Lacanian reading ofFreud, which was in strong evidence as a theoretical tendency at the
Patriarchy Conference in London in May 1976. A seminar entitled Psychoanalysis and Feminism
was organized during the showing ofthe Post-Partum Document at the ICA New Gallery in October
1976. The relevance ofpsychoanalysis to ideology, feminine psychology, and art practice
was discussed by a panel on which I was a participant along with Parveen Adams, lecturer in
psychology, Brunel University; Susan Lipshitz, psychologist, The Tavistock; filmmaker Laura
Mulvey; and writer Rosalind Delmar.
2. Paul Q. Hirst, “Althusser’s Theory ofIdeology,” Economy and Society 5 (November 1976), p.
396; see also section on “Representation,” pp. 407–411.
3. Rosalind Coward, “Sexuality and Psychoanalysis,” unpublished paper, 1977.
4. For a useful outline of the debate see the Editorial Collective’s article on “Psychology, Ideology,
and the Human Subject” in Ideology and Consciousness 1 (May 1977), pp. 5–56. The
critique concerns Lacan’s acceptance ofthe “universality oflanguage,” c. f. Luce Irigary,
Speculum de l’Autre Femme (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1974). See also “Women’s Exile: An
Interview with Luce Irigary,” trans. Couze Penn, Ideology and Consciousness 1 (May 1977),
pp. 62–76.
5. See Jacques Lacan, “The Insistence ofthe Letter in the Unconscious,” in Structuralism (New
York: Anchor Books, 1970), pp. 287–323.
6. Julia Kristeva, “The System and the Speaking Subject,” Times Literary Supplement (October
12, 1973).
7. For an elaboration ofthe consequences in terms ofsexual difference, see Jacques Lacan, “La
Signification du phallus,” Ecrits (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1966), pp. 685–695.
8. Misrecognition here refers specifically to Lacan’s sense of the term as in “the function of
misrecognition which characterizes the ego in all its structures,” and not to ideological “misrec-
mary kelly notes on reading the post-partum document 373