Just another day of knowledge gleaning over at Daring Fireball.

Precept Practice Card: The first Pure Precept

I thought I might write something up, if time allowed, about Joan Rivière (1883 – 1962), a British psychoanalyst who was among the first to translate Freud’s writings into English. Rivière’s own writing later inspired Jacques Lacan’s infamous dictum, “There is no such thing as woman.”

A fine thing to say on Ada Lovelace Day!!

In her remarkable essay “Femininity as Masquerade,” what Rivière argues is not that femininity is “put on to hide masculinity,” as Wikipedia has it, but rather something more complex than that. Or convoluted perhaps (Lacanian pun). It’s about the difficulty of speaking from the position of being “not,” as in “not male” — even, or especially, in Riviere’s own clinical findings, for intellectual women.

Through Lacan, Riviere’s writing had a powerful influence on the French feminists of the 1980′s, and on me in grad school, grappling as we were with issues related to women occupying the position of speaking subjects, as opposed to that of listening posts objects.

I’d say more but I still have to change the DNS and put a redirect on the finish up a few technical details to get this up and running before midnight strikes. For now, this fragment of a citation will have to do.

Thank you, Ada, Joan — and Molly the owl.* And, thank you, Ada Lovelace Day!

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* Working on the redesign, I’ve been kept company by the rustling, hooting, chucking, screeching, other worldly sights and sounds of the Live Barn Owl Nest Box Cam, where two owlets have hatched in the 30 hours I’ve been watching. I’m not sure exactly what this has to do with Ada Lovelace Day, or with Joan Riviere, but I’m saying it anyway.

“Pay attention, that’s all,” Eliza said. “Notice things. Connect what you’ve noticed. Connect it into a picture. Think of how the picture might be changed; and act to change it. Some of your acts may turn out to have been foolish, but others will reward you in surprising ways; in the meantime, simply by being active instead of passive, you have a kind of immunity that’s hard to explain —”

“Uncle Gottfried says, ‘Whatever acts cannot be destroyed.’”

“The Doctor means that in a fairly narrow and technical metaphysical sense,” Eliza said, “but it’s not the worst motto you could adopt.”

— Eliza with the 13-year-old Princess Caroline of Brandenburg-Ansbach, Leipzg, 1694, in Neal Stephenson’s The Confusion, Vol. II of The Baroque Cycle