Part II - OUR PRODUCTION OF A PAST, IN THE PRESENT OF ANALAYSIS: ENGAGING WITH THE BOOK OF CHRONICLES

Summary

In the last section, I outlined the feminist mode of reading that I wish to bring to the book of Chronicles, a mode heavily in debt to the early work of Luce Irigaray. Based on Irigaray's reinterpretation of the psychoanalytic setting (praticable), my own engagement with Chronicles practises a form of psychoanalytic reading that, with Irigaray, I have argued is both ethical and therapeutic. In light of this reinterpretation of the praticable, I have argued that Irigaray's own reading practice enables a twofold approach to analysis. On the one hand, the negative, critical analysis of the Imaginary and the unconscious of masculine discourses, by women analysts, must take place so that the silences of those discourses (the limits of masculine language and thinking) can not only be heard, but heard differently. With respect to this negative, critical aspect of Irigarayan reading practice, and aided by Michelle Boulous Walker's recent work on silence and the maternal body, I shall utilize certain analytic concepts to enable a critical analysis of the means by which the feminine has been silenced in Chronicles. Briefly, in Chapters 3 and 4 I pay close attention to the language of “birthing” and its effects on meaning production, and to the effects that the mother's speech has on the genealogy and the narrative. I am also listening out for what fascinates the analysand, what he chooses to focus on, the things about which he gives us intricate, and sometimes seemingly unnecessary, details.