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55 beverly dahlen Forbidden Knowledge Since the late 1970s, Beverly Dahlen has been at work on A Reading, an ongoing long poem that she describes,in a 1980 essay,as“an interminable work”whose compositional method derives from the free-associative practices of psychoanalysis. Her experiments with this method of writing coincided with the rise of French feminism in the United States and were informed by its engagements with philosophy, structuralism, and psychoanalytic theory (particularly that of Jacques Lacan).“Forbidden Knowledge,”from which the sections below are excerpted, like A Reading, offers a meditation on and demonstration of écriture feminine —a term first used by Hélène Cixous in her 1975 essay “The Laugh of the Medusa,” where she writes, “Woman must write herself.”“Forbidden Knowledge” is one of the first American texts to employ psychoanalytic methods while also critiquing Freud and the postFreudian tradition for its gender politics. First presented as a talk at 80 Langton Street in San Francisco (26 October 1982), Dahlen’s essay addresses the radical negativity of lack as feminine, post-Oedipal, and social. For a woman, as Dahlen sees it, lack is the site of an indeterminacy that is also a possibility of freedom. Her writing unfolds around an absence that has no genre except that of reading, in a poetic practice of interminable coming-toconsciousness . Some of you may know that I have been writing, off and on, for a long time now, a work called A Reading, which is theoretically open-ended, which turns out to be something like a journal, at times like poetry, or prose narrative, and that it was not preconceived in terms of these or any other forms or genres originally. [This text mimics speech, a talk, imagining you, the second person, or persons , others to whom I speak in the future, the end of October, the darkness rising. Preliminary fall I called it originally. Originally there was sin. One was haunted.My history professor who thought Freud confirmed the myth of original sin. Not a fashionable idea. One had better not mention it. A few nights ago I dreamed I was giving this talk at the Polish Hall in Portland where, as a child, I was taken by my parents to the meetings of the Kaleva Club. A foreign language—Finn—was spoken there, but I don’t remember any language in the dream. The lights were very bright. 56 beverly dahlen In this text I would have liked to imitate a certain kind of writing: spare, elegant—the expository writing we learned in school. What I try to teach, proper table manners, the idea of the paragraph, a logical organization, “Eros is the gatherer and tends to form perpetually richer and more complex unities,”1 “civilization and its discontents,”Bob’s2 advice:make a couple of points, don’t try to say it all.] Its method of composition throughout much, but not all of the work, aspires to be free association, [“And where are the confines of relevance?”3] borrowing from Freud the technique he developed in psychoanalysis, [Freud thought free association was easily learned, but Lacan calls it a “forced labor . . . so much so that some have gone so far as to say that it requires an apprenticeship . . . ,” that “nothing could be less free.”4] which essentially obligates the patient to speak first and think later,a reversal of our normal procedure. [Is that our normal procedure? Is it not rather that speech and thought arise simultaneously? What is a thought? Can we see or know the end of a thought before we begin to speak it, or while we are speaking it? Do we ever know what we are talking about? And then there is free association, which specifically requires a nonjudgmental attitude towards thought. What is behind this? Freud’s conviction that there is an element of censorship in thinking—in all thought?— and that a way to evade the censor would be to say it all, to try to say everything.] The technique of freely associating ideas and images has been adopted by many writers as a method of composition since Freud first developed it in the context of psychoanalytic practice. There is by now a rather long history of its use, in one way or another, by modernist writers and artists. [“The antiauthoritarian ethics occurs on the level of structure. We call all this ‘new’; I reuse the word continually; sense of a ‘new form’ a ‘new book’ a ‘new...

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