Questions.
1. Phelan mentions that for Lacan, “‘feelings are always reciprocal,’ if never
‘equal.’ Exchanging what one does not have for what one desires (and
therefore does not have) puts us in the realm of the negative and the
possibility of what Felman calls ‘radical negativity’ (The Literary Speech Act:
243) (165),” what are the problematics of the fallacy of performance and
gender ownerships if they extend outside of the body?
2. Phelan asserts that “The question of belief always enters critical writing and
perhaps never more urgently than when one’s subject resists vision and may
not be “really there” at all. Like the fantasy of erotic desire which frames love,
the distortions of forgetting which infect memories, and the blind spots
placed through the visual field, a believable image is the product of a
negotiation with an unverifiable real” (14). How could we consider
performatic acts more than belief if they are also part the ungrasp unreal
since they are the embodied ephemeral desire for a revolution of political
and social events?