Author: logocentric

butler on bracha ettinger matrixial

Butler, Judith. “Bracha’s Eurydice” (2002) Theory, Culture & Society, 21: 1, (2004) 95-100.

So we do not know what we have lost in her, or whom we have lost. But there is more. We are not speaking only of the loss of childhood, or the loss of a maternal connection that the child must undergo, but also of

an enigmatic loss that is communicated from the mother to the child, from the parents to the child, from the adult world to the child who is given this loss to handle when the child cannot handle it, when it is too large for the child, when it is too large for the adult, when the loss is trauma, and cannot be handled by anyone, anywhere, where the loss signifies what we cannot master.

When we turned, looking for Eurydice, we thought perhaps we could know she was there by seeing, and so we thought that looking would be a way of knowing and capturing.

But it turned out that she was uncapturable in this way, and that, in general, she is uncapturable, that capture will not be the way in which we might experience her. Bracha writes, ‘failure is the measure of what has been recognized’.

This means that we cannot hope to establish a sure way of knowing what loss it is that we negotiate here. So we have to ask about historical losses, the ones that are transmitted to us without our knowing, at a level where we cannot hope to piece it together, where we are, at a psychic level, left in pieces, pieces that might be linked together in some way, but will not fully ‘bind’ the affect.

This is part of the work of borderlinking that Bracha writes about, and it is, in her view, prior to identity, prior to any question of construction, a psychic landscape that gives itself as partial object, as grains and crumbs, as she puts it, as remnants that are, on the one hand, the result, the scattered effects of an unknowable history of trauma, the trauma that others who precede us have lived through and, on the other hand, the very sites in which a new possibility for visual experience emerges, one which establishes a temporality in which the past is not past, but is not present, in which the present emerges, but from the scattered and animated remains of a continuing, though not continuous, trauma. 3-4

But who are we? Are we really intact before these images? Or do they also look back at us and banish us to a realm that is prior to the speakability of the ‘I’? Do these images not imperil a certain self-recognition precisely through linking us to a psychic and cultural prehistory that we cannot think, cannot know?

Does Bracha mock the philosopher? Or does she expose the philosopher to a scene of emergence at once traumatic, scattered, partial, multiple, non-unified and non-unifiable, the scene which is closed over again and again by our talk of identity and our presumption that what we most need is recognition for what we distinctly are?

If failure is the measure of recognition, then we will be recognized for what fails the terms of recognition, for what goes beneath, before or beyond the terms of self-definition or, indeed, cultural identification. Identification itself will be understood to emerge from a space in which we unknowingly inherit the trauma and desires of others, and find that they are indistinguishable from our own, that we are transitively instated by the other, and that the speaking of the ‘we’ or of the ‘I’ is not really possible in this domain.

And it may be that language cedes to vision here, to the particular kind of frozen motion that the pre-narrative understanding of identity requires.

Bracha calls this non-unifiable and linked space of a primary psychic relation the feminine, the matrixial. She uses words here to designate the space from which her theory and her painting and her analytic experience emerge.

But we would be incautious if we were to understand that she is simply giving new definition to ‘the feminine’, or producing a new version of feminine identity. We would be equally precipitous if we were to assume that ‘the feminine’ has a monopoly on non-identity.

But we have to hear this word if we are to understand the way in which she is displacing the ‘phallus’ from its position as the original signifier for Lacan.  For she is opening up the landscape in another direction through this word, ‘the feminine’ or this word, ‘the matrixial’.

She is, I think, asking us to reformulate the very relation between the subject and its other, and to ask what precedes this encounter in which the phallus seeks to confirm its status, where the feminine acts only as a faulty mirror in the circuitry of that narcissism? What form of relationality troubles the distinctness of these terms?

I would even claim that, in her view, it is not possible to say ‘I am feminine’, or that ‘you are feminine’. Since the very ontological designations, ‘I am’ and ‘you are’, post-date the space of the matrixial.

The matrixial is what we guard against when we shore up the claims of identity, when we presume that to recognize each other is to know, to name, to distinguish according to the logic of identity. 5

What is the agency of the one who registers the imprints from the other? This is not the agency of the ego, and neither is it the agency of one who is presumed to know. It is a registering and a transmutation that takes place in a largely, though not fully, preverbal sphere, an autistic relay of loss and desire received from elsewhere, and only and always ambiguously made one’s own. Indeed, they are never fully made one’s own, for the claim of autonomy would involve the losing of the trace. And the trace, the sign of loss, the remnant of loss, is understood as the link, the occasional and nearly impossible connection, between trauma and beauty itself.

So much works against this encounter, the possibility of this transmutation, since to lose the trace is to lose the connection with the matrixial space itself, and to articulate the trace through a history or a conceptual representation that is too masterful is to lose the trace again, this time through seeking to know it too fully and too well.

We lost Eurydice because we sought too quickly to know that she was behind us, and the look which seeks to know, to verify, banished her yet more fully into the past. And yet, in Bracha’s tableaux, the image is still there, coming toward us, fading away, a moment that is frozen in its doubleness, layered, fractured, filtered. The suspension of time conditions the emergence of a space that suspends the sequential ordering of time.

We cannot tell our story here, nor offer a recognition in which a gaze seeks to become commensurate with what it sees. We are invited into the space in which we are not one, cannot be, and yet we are not without the capacity to see. We see here, as a child or, perhaps, an infant, whose body is given as the remnants of another’s trauma and desires. What is it we seek to recognize here? That she is gone, that she is staying? Eurydice cannot be captured, cannot be had. She appears only in the moment in which we are dispossessed of her.

There is something of our dispossession in her, the one by which we come into being, through another, as another, that links us not only with this or that maternal origin, but perhaps more emphatically, with her history, the one she cannot tell.

That history emerges not only as a tableau, as a frozen landscape, but as one whose motion and beauty is precisely derived from its traumatic character. This is not to make the ‘I’ any less absolute than it is, but it is to suggest that trauma stages its encounters, has its own illuminations, and that the work of art registers this radical and originary dispossession of the ‘I’, the subject, and its gaze that constitutes the condition for a certain work and even a kind of agency prior to the subject itself.

We see Eurydice, but she does not belong to us at the moment that we see her. And because she does not belong to us, she comes forth, delineating a field of appearance and of art, beyond foreclosure and redemption. But it is only on the condition that she is not fully banished, and that she still does not belong to us that she appears, and that trauma finds its rare encounter with appearance itself.(6-7)

Note: This article originally appeared as the catalogue essay for The Eurydice Series:
Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger, Drawing Papers 24 (New York: The Drawing Center
Publications, 2002).

transgender

Carlson, Shanna T. “Transgender Subjectivity and the Logic of Sexual Difference” Volume 21, Number 2, 2010 d i f f e r e n c e s: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies

What do gender studies and Lacanian psychoanalysis have to offer one another? Is it possible to integrate the two domains, or do they, as Copjec charges and as Butler herself seems to worry in Antigone’s Claim, represent fundamentally incompatible approaches?

🙂 this article iprovides a missing link to my disertation.+

Footnote 3: quoting Butler from AC:
It is why, for instance, it would be difficult to find a fruitful engagement at the present time between the new Lacanian formalisms and the radical queer politics of, for example, Michael Warner and friends. The former insists on fundamental notions of sexual difference, which are based on rules that prohibit and regulate sexual exchange, rules we can break only to find ourselves ordered by them anew. The latter calls into question forms of sexual foundationalism that cast viable forms of queer sexual alliance as illegitimate or, indeed, impossible and unlivable. At its extreme, the radical sexual politics turns against psychoanalysis or, rather, its implicit normativity, and the neoformalists turn against queer studies as a “tragically” utopian enterprise. (Antigone’s 75)

Objet a

Lacan tells us that object a is introduced from the fact that nothing, no thing—no food, no breast, no person—will ever satisfy the drive. Object a as “cause of desire” (Encore 92) is not the object that the subject seizes, nor is it the aim of desire, but rather, “It is either pre-subjective, or the foundation of an identification of the subject, or the foundation of an identification disavowed by the subject” (Four 186). It is, indeed, the foundation of a subject, but a contingent foundation: as Dean explains, “[T]his object counterintuitively (ungrammatically?) appears to precede the subject, to found the subject [. . .]. Yet the apparent foundationalism of object a betokens a radically contingent foundation, since as Ellie Ragland points out, ‘[w]e humans are grounded in objects that are not themselves grounded’” (Beyond 194). In insisting that “any object” can stand in as a representative for object a and that object a is only a further representative of “the eternally lacking object,” Lacan distances himself from a reading of Freud that would see a sexual developmental progression or “maturation” from the oral to the anal to the genital drives. Instead, Lacan emphasizes the essential groundlessness of object a and its voidlike role in the circuitous motion of the drive (Four 181).

There are two sexual positions available to human subjects because, as Lacan asserts in Encore using the language of logic and mathematical formalization, subjects are positioned differently with respect to one term: the phallic function. There are two sexual positions insofar as every subject is either “all” or “not-all” under the phallic function. Before falling too quickly into the abyss that can follow from the explication of the phallic function, a few preliminary words are in order on sexual difference as it relates to signification itself: Copjec notes that “[s]ex is the stumbling block of sense” (204), citing Lacan’s own comment that

“[e]verything implied by the analytic engagement with human behavior indicates not that meaning reflects the sexual, but that it makes up for it” (qtd. on 204).

Lacan’s account of object a seems to pose no threat to any range of queer theories of sexuality insofar as it does not presuppose, for
example, that a particular type of object should or in fact ever could satisfy the drive. Indeed, Lacan repeatedly mocks the institution of so-called genital primacy (Ethics 88).

And yet none of this talk of objects, lamellas, and libido speaks directly to Lacan’s assertion that there are two possible subject positions, masculine or feminine. Left only with a story of a-sexual asexuality, we might be halfway to a Lacanian narration of transgender ontology—not such a radical thought when we recall that Freud was the one who pointed out the constitutive bisexual perversion of the human unconscious. From whence, then, the feminine and masculine subject positions?

Sexuation

Similarly, Renata Salecl writes in her introduction to Sexuation that sexual difference “is first and above all the name for a certain fundamental deadlock inherent in the symbolic order” (2).

In fact, it is impossible to signify sex, and the phallus serves as “an empty signifier that stands for” that impossibility (Barnard, Introduction 10).

Feminine and masculine subjects, then, relate to that failure, or are that failure, differently,

As Lacan recounts, the formulas consist of the following: the right side of the formula, is the Feminine side which reads

There is not one x that is not subject to the phallic function
*
*

Not every x is subject to the phallic function

figures the “feminine” side and can be translated to state that there is not one x that is not subject to the phallic function and that not every x is subject to the phallic function.

The feminine subject finds “herself” “not-all” by way of negation insofar as “she” forms part of an open set, open and thereby infinite because it is not constituted by an exceptional figure. No shared trait—aside from the absence of any such shared trait—serves to define the set; no constitutive outside functions close her set. Exceptionally lacking exception, though, and being only loosely linked by virtue of an absence offers/burdens the feminine subject (with) a particular perspective on the phallic function and thus on what grounds the masculine subject, which Barnard describes as “a view to the contingency of the signifier of the Other in its anchoring function [. . .] [S]he ‘knows’ that the signifier of phallic power merely lends a certain mysterious presence to the Law that veils its real impotence” (“Tongues” 178). One of the logical consequences of such a position, of “being in the symbolic ‘without exception’” (178), is that she has a different relation than the masculine subject, not only to the symbolic but also to the lack in the Other.

The “anchoring function” lacking to the feminine subject is located on the “masculine” side of Lacan’s formula:

It is through the phallic function that man as whole acquires his inscription

*  All x’s are (every x is) submitted to the phallic function

*

*  There is at least one x which is not submitted to the phallic function.

*

This exception also immediately takes on a truly exceptional status, from the standpoint of the masculine subject who is established by it, for the exception proffers the outside that closes “his” set and the limit that grounds “his” being; it thereby proffers a sort of support not afforded the feminine subject.

One figure of this exception would be at of the mythical primal father, he who evades castration and thereby enjoys unlimited jouissance. In other words, the masculine subject is only “whole” or “all” as a result of the fact that he is permitted (permits himself?) the fantasy of one who escapes the very same set that grounds his being

… castration/sexual difference is something that fundamentally, if incompletely, makes up for the absence of the sexual relationship.

By this logic, the sexual positions borne of sexual difference figure as solutions, no doubt principally unsatisfying ones, for the loss of a sort of relation that was in fact never possible, a relation of One-ness or complementarity, or for the loss of that missing half that Plato tells us, somewhat cruelly, we once had.

Importantly, though, nothing in this account specifies that the lost/nonexistent sexual relation was a heterosexual one. As Tracy McNulty has noted, “If the ‘relation’ that is lost is really the relation to the One, to unity or wholeness, then this would be true regardless of sex or sexual ‘orientation’”

carlson pt 2 on tim dean

Carlson, Shanna T. “Transgender Subjectivity and the Logic of Sexual Difference” Volume 21, Number 2, 2010 d i f f e r e n c e s: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies

Footnote 7:  Dean goes on to explain, however, that “[a]ll desire entails the presence of the symbolic Other, but since this Other has no gender— there is no ‘Other sex’—desire involves a relation to otherness independent of sexual difference”(137).

In this shift, from questions of Lacan’s theory of desire to questions of sexual difference,
Dean attempts to clarify desire’s independence from the regime of “gender” but obscures the insight of the formulas of sexuation that “gender” and “sexual difference” are not one and the same thing.

Too closely linking gender and sexual difference, Dean runs the risk of mandating “gendered” readings of Lacan, which could in turn result in a theory at times illogically heterosexist. At various moments in his narrations of the formulas, Lacan, too, can be read as too closely linking gender and sexual difference, which is why I have based my meditation primarily on the formulas.

[Quotoing Tim Dean in Beyond Sexuality] takes exception to Butler’s account of sexuality as outlined in Bodies That Matter, for, as he argues, Butler’s is a rhetoricalist approach. According to Dean, “rhetoricalist theories of sexuality effectively evacuate the category of desire from their accounts” by failing to take account of “what in rhetoric or discourse exceeds language” (178). Desire will prove essential to Dean’s own account of sexuality; in his project to deheterosexualize desire, Dean develops the notion of object a in order to theorize sexuality “outside the terms of gender and identity” (222).

According to Dean, the limitation of situating the phallus at the center of a theoretical account of desire is not only that the phallus has such a problematic history but that it is a single term; object a, on the other hand, “implies multiple, heterogeneous possibilities for desire” (250).  Dean wishes to figure desire within “terms of multiplicity” (249) rather than principally according to an “ideology of lack” (247).

He cites Lacan’s assertion that “[d]esire is a relation of being to lack” (qtd. in Beyond 247) but emphasizes, too, that “the question of conceptualizing desire in terms of lack remains a stubborn problem” for a variety of queer- and feminist-minded projects (248). Dean identifies the latter resistance as having precisely to do with the way that the ideology of lack intersects with castration in psychoanalytic theory (248). In favor of such a scene, Dean turns instead to polymorphous perversion as a site of multiplicity, contending that theorizing desire from the point of excess instead of from the point of lack “makes desire essentially pluralistic, with all the inclusive implications of pluralism” (249).

For Dean, one of the advantages of theorizing desire from the starting point of polymorphous perversion arises from Freud’s understanding of polymorphous perversion as preceding normative—that is, genital—sexuality; in this way, perversion comes to represent a sort of “paradise lost” that “normal sexuality” will try, but never completely manage, to supplant (235).

In rehearsing Freud’s decision to classify perversion in terms not of content but rather of “exclusiveness and fixation” (236),

Dean will go so far as to suggest that “the process of normalization itself is what’s pathological, since normalization ‘fixes’ desire and generates the exclusiveness of sexual orientation [heterosexual or homosexual] as its symptom” (237).

However, what is not of interest to Dean, at least in this text, is Lacan’s assertion that masculine and feminine subjects relate differently to object a. According to Lacan, it is the masculine subject that is principally occupied with object a. Queer as it is, could Dean’s account of desire be lacking the feminine?

Lacan writes that “the object—from at least one pole of sexual identification, the male pole—the object [. . .] puts itself in the place of what cannot be glimpsed of the Other” (Encore 63). By contrast, for the feminine subject, “something other than object a is at stake in what comes to make up for the sexual relationship that does not exist” (63). Here again, we see Lacan specifying that via sexual difference, something tries to make up for the absence of the sexual relation. However, there is a fundamental asymmetry at play in the making up for lost/fantasized complementarity, for feminine and masculine subjects make up for the loss, in part, with recourse to different types of others.

In both Bodies That Matter and Antigone’s Claim, Butler performs readings of the subject’s entry into the symbolic via sexual differentiation, and two of her principal charges are that Lacan’s symbolic is normative and that the assumption of a sexed position enjoins compulsory heterosexuality. In Antigone’s Claim, Butler turns from matters of discourse and materiality to the scene of kinship in order to explore how psychoanalysis might both/either compel and/or inhibit the forging of new kinds of community ties, ties that Butler subsumes under the promising header “radical kinship.”

Butler’s investment in the possibility of imagining new forms of kinship ties has a strong affective and political attraction, which she wields to good end, for example, in her listing of the ways that “kinship
has become fragile, porous, and expansive” (Antigone’s 22). Butler cites the mobility of children who, because of migration, exile, refugee status, or situations of divorce or remarriage, “move from one family to another, move from a family to no family, move from no family to a family, or live, psychically, at the crossroads of the family, or in multiply layered family situations” (22). She points to the blending of straight and gay families, to gay nuclear families, and to straight or gay families where a child may have no mother or no father, or two mothers or two fathers, or half-brothers as friends (22–23), asking: “What has Oedipus engendered? [. . .] What will the legacy of Oedipus be for those who are formed in these situations, where positions are hardly clear, where the place of the father is dispersed, where the place of the mother is multiply occupied or displaced, where the symbolic in its stasis no longer holds?” (22–23). No doubt this is a time of potentially unprecedented familial mobility. Some would evaluate these realities as the sign of a crisis in “family values”; others would celebrate the more positive effects of the new types of ties and encounters. In this text, though, Butler is also taking aim at a particular strain of psychoanalysis that would seem unexpectedly to ally itself on some levels with defenders of the heterosexual nuclear family. Butler  references such positions as she has encountered them, including psychoanalysts opposed to or at least worried about gay adoption as a possible source of psychosis for the adopted children, Jacques-Alain Miller’s alleged opposition to male homosexual marriage on account of its likely infidelity, and others’ suggestion that autism can be traceable to lesbian parenting (70). Butler concludes,“These views commonly maintain that alternative kinship arrangements attempt to revise psychic structures in ways that lead to tragedy again, figured incessantly as the tragedy of and for the child.”

I would like to join Butler in imagining sexuation otherwise than as a scene of compulsory heterosexuality. However, I do not think that doing so requires locating a loophole in the Oedipal narrative, as Butler does in her interpretation of the Antigone story.

For while Butler is quite right to lament and fear the compulsory heterosexuality that provides a potent backdrop to many societal norms and ideals, no one knew better than Lacan that, as he put it, “[i]deals are
society’s slaves” (qtd. in Dean, Beyond 229).

In her argument, Butler seems to cast the Oedipal scene as the only available solution within psychoanalysis to the failure of the sexual relation, as in her observation that, for Lacan, the symbolic is “the realm of the Law that regulates desire in the Oedipus complex” (Antigone’s 18).

… the Oedipal drama is a principally “masculine” (and indeed a principally “obsessional,” if not a principally heterosexual) solution to the failure of the sexual relation, one that hallucinates an object as prohibited. But as we have seen, there is not only one solution to the failure of the sexual relation: there are two! In this way, Butler is quite right to turn to Antigone as an alternative to the Oedipal solution. 60

carlson butler Antigone pt. 3

Carlson, Shanna T. “Transgender Subjectivity and the Logic of Sexual Difference” Volume 21, Number 2, 2010 d i f f e r e n c e s: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies

Butler is quite right to turn to Antigone as an alternative to the Oedipal solution. In Butler’s reading, Antigone helps us envisage new forms of kinship and, correspondingly, the “possibility of social transformation” (24).

Butler indicates that Antigone’s own position in her family represents one of kinship incoherence (22), insofar as Antigone could be read to love her brother incestuously (6), and insofar as her father is also her brother. Butler notes that she is not advocating incest per se as a new, radical form of kinship (24); rather, in reflecting on the end of Sophocles’ play, she writes, “In this light, then, it is perhaps interesting to note that Antigone, who concludes the oedipal drama, fails to produce heterosexual closure for that drama, and that this may intimate the direction for a psychoanalytic theory that takes Antigone as its point of departure” (76).Perhaps Butler is exactly right on this count as well.

Perhaps psychoanalysis should take Antigone as its point of departure. Through the figure of Antigone, Butler explores a non-Oedipal solution to the failure of the sexual relation, one that in Lacan’s reading entails a specifically feminine encounter with the signifier. However, she does so without avowing that this solution was available to subjects from the start, that it was not the Oedipal drama that engendered it. (61)

Lacan is more explicit: the form the nonworking of the incest prohibition takes is femininity. Feminine figures testify precisely to the failure of the prohibition, for, as Copjec eloquently plots out, “Lacan answers that the woman is not-all because she lacks a limit, by which he means she is not susceptible to the threat of castration; the ‘no’ embodied by this threat does not function for her” (226).

While the “universal” incest prohibition does not “work” for the feminine subject, this does not necessarily mean that she has incestuous relations with or desires toward someone in her family (which may be
composed as radically or as porously as permitted by the limits of our imaginations)—though she very well may, and I see no reason to shy away from Butler’s suggestion that Antigone’s desire for her brother Polynices is incestuous: “Is it perhaps the unlivable desire with which she lives, incest itself, that makes of her life a living death, that has no place within the terms that confer intelligibility on life?” (Antigone’s 23).

Nonetheless, I would emphasize that incest as one possible disruptive form of radical kinship is not the only stake here. Rather, according to Lacan, no object— mother, father, brother, sister—is marked as prohibited for the feminine subject. Not only is incest not prohibited; no one thing is prohibited.

Thus, for the masculine subject, the point is not that he need necessarily be a heterosexual, ostensibly “biological” boy barred access to his heterosexual, “biologically” female mother, but that he be a subject who has fallen under the blow of some prohibition and by consequence takes up a position as unconsciously masculine.

And as McNulty has noted, “To believe that [the prohibited object is] the mother is a specific symptom, a particular way of resolving castration [. . .] by attributing it to the father and thereby making it ‘avoidable’ through obedience or submission to norms. [In other words,] it also reveals the ideology of norms as a way of avoiding castration”.

On the other hand, for the feminine subject, the point is perhaps even more radical: regardless of her “gender,” the feminine subject is she to whom no prohibition is addressed. No universal can be made of or for her. The relief given the masculine subject, composing prohibitions as limits, does not transpire for the feminine subject. Instead, the nonworking of the prohibition is what ushers the feminine subject toward . . . maybe (who knows?) her brother/half-sister/stepmother/adoptive cousin/grandfather, and definitely toward a contingent encounter with the symbolic.

With this in mind, I would suggest that Antigone’s claim on a future for kinship, or a future for relationality, as well as a future for psychoanalysis, has just as much, if not more, to offer by way of what she does as a feminine figure confronting a symbolic that she is “totally, that is, limitlessly inscribed within” (Copjec 227) as with what she does as a would-be incestuous figure that “represents not kinship in its ideal form but its deformation and displacement” (Butler, Antigone’s 24).

Curiously, then, if we attempt a still more fragile point of contact between Lacanian psychoanalysis and gender studies, a contact on the question of femininity, we open onto the sort of radical clearing wished
for and envisaged by gender theorists’ calls for a safer, more just world for queer and transgender subjectivities and relations.

What has been overlooked in Dean’s narration of desire and disavowed in Butler’s reading of kinship is the possibility and exploration of a feminine perspective. The feminine perspective brings with it a relation both to the radically contingent and to intractability, or the real, precisely by virtue of the fact that the feminine subject is not afforded the same sort of support and limits by the phallic function spared the masculine subject. (63)

Where psychoanalysis may appear limited resides in part in what I interpret as the too easy capitulation of the terms feminine and masculine to “gendered” readings.

As we saw earlier, some Lacanians participate in a logic of sexual difference whereby it magically turns out again and again that subjects with apparently female genitalia “are” “women,” and so on. Butler damningly maps out the consequences of such readings with respect to family relations:

And when there are two men or two women who parent, are we to assume that some primary division of gendered roles organizes their psychic places within the scene, so that the empirical contingency of two same-gendered parents is nevertheless straightened out by the presocial psychic place of the Mother and
the Father into which they enter? Does it make sense on these occasions to insist that there are symbolic positions of Mother and Father that every psyche must accept regardless of the social form that kinship takes? (Antigone’s 69)

It seems important to imagine a queerer future for Lacanian psychoanalysis wherein terms like “the desire of the mother” and “the law of the father,” still very much in currency, might be replaced (not, of course, without haunting remainders) by some new terminology that would better reference the psychical functions these terms index. But terminology shifts alone will not a queer theory make of contemporary deployments of psychoanalysis; we must also bear in mind Dean’s rigorous reminder that

objects a emerge outside of and in excess to the frame of gender. And with respect to sexual difference, we must insist on the ways in which, for Lacan, the terms masculine and feminine signal two different logics, two different modes of ex-sistence in the symbolic, two different approaches to the Other, two different stances with respect to desire, and (at least) two different types of jouissance. Nothing here indicates “gender” as we might more conventionally conceive of it. 64

carlson pt 4

Carlson, Shanna T. “Transgender Subjectivity and the Logic of Sexual Difference” Volume 21, Number 2, 2010 d i f f e r e n c e s: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies

What would it look like to consider transgender identity as an expression of the logic of sexual difference?

I would like to define the transsexual subject as a person who identifies with a gender that is not consonant with the gender assigned at birth. In some cases, but certainly not all, the transsexual subject will go to whatever efforts possible (hormone therapy, sex or genital reassignment surgery, etc.) to “pass” as that gender. Inasmuch as the transsexual subject strives to pass and/or (for not all transsexuals strive to pass) identifies with one gender or another with an apparent degree of certainty, he or she is psychically no different than any other subject who lines up under one banner or the other.

Ostensibly “nontranssexual” subjects also strive to pass; they also identify with an apparent degree of certainty with one gender or another. In other words, “transsexuality” is not in and of itself any more extreme a type of symptom than is “man” or “woman.” Where transsexual subjects’ experiences may be different from those of ostensibly nontranssexual subjects, of course, arises in part from the fact that the latter have not, so far, proven particularly welcoming: from under the meager protection of their banners, they have not yet realized that they have no monopoly on the psychic experience of the semblance of “gender certainty.” Oftentimes, the upshot of this false monopoly on a piecemeal “certainty” is that transsexual subjects—particularly those who do not rigorously fit the demands of the public’s “incessant need to gender every person they see as female or male” (Serano 117)—are excluded, objectified, exploited, scapegoated, and silenced. 65

Transgenderism presents a slightly different situation, and this is the one with which this article has been occupied. For it could be argued that the
transgender subject—as someone who is not necessarily or only very strategically invested in “passing” as one gender or another (e.g., someone who could be described as “bigendered” or “gender-fluid” [Serano 27]), as someone who may be invested in embodying a gender that would attest to what he or she may define as the constructedness of gender (e.g., “genderqueer” [Serano 27])—would be the human subject as such, the unconsciously bisexual subject for whom sexual difference is only ever an incomplete, unsatisfactory solution to the failure of the sexual relation. In this way, transgenderism would figure as a solutionless solution to the impasses of sexual difference, a sort of unconscious scene of undecideability, but an undecideability fundamentally shared by all human subjects, no matter their seeming “gender.” 65

But there is another way of reading transgenderism, or another transgenderism available to subjects, wherein transgenderism figures not as a solutionless solution to the impasses of sexual difference, but rather as an expression of the logic of sexual difference: a feminine solution. Hysteria as it is defined by Lacan is a profoundly feminine phenomenon and is characterized by the question, “Am I a man, or am I woman, and what does that mean?” The hysteric tends to interrogate societal norms at large, oftentimes embodying a subversive attitude that arises in part from a profound suspicion that her own sexed and sexual body is incommensurate to cultural injunctions regarding gender identities.

As Ellie Ragland- Sullivan writes, “Lacan saw the hysteric as embodying the quintessence of the human subject because she speaks, as agent, from the lack and gaps in knowledge, language and being” (164).

The hysteric is, in some senses, interested in nothing but the lack that, for example, Dean may be read to circumvent by focusing on the apparent multiplicity of object a.

The failure, deadlock, and trauma of sexual difference returns for the hysterical/feminine transgender subject, irreducibly, in her insistent interrogation of the phallic function and in her very queer relation to the lacking Other. 66

Our question, then, might read as follows: what will the feminine/transgender subject do confronting a symbolic that she is “totally, that is, limitlessly inscribed within” (Copjec 227)?

For this, we do not have to look far—we might consider Antigone, or, if we wish to be more timely, we might pay attention to art, writings, memoirs, and scholarship by various present-day transgender or, sometimes, transsexual-identified subjects.

If part of the point this essay is trying to make, though, is that there is something transgendered about the human subject, and that this transgenderism transcends notions of gender, it follows that we need not be restricted by rigid definitions of gender identities to encounter the question, “Am I a man, or am I woman, and what does that mean?” Feminine subjects identify in multiple directions. More importantly, they demonstrate another sort of agility as well: “[Lacan] implied that for all the difficulties woman had with speech and the signifier, mistrusting its promises because they de facto fail her, a certain freedom to play was available to woman [. . .]

[A]ccording to Lacan, ‘Women are less enclosed by discourse than their partners in the cycle of discourse’” (MacCannell 198–99). When we recall that discourses are “forms of the social tie” (Lacan qtd. in MacCannell
235) and that discourses as social ties move to cover over the lack of the sexual relation, we could argue by extension that

the hysteric feminine subject in particular is structurally well situated to cycle through and fall between the cracks of discourses. Preoccupied as the hysteric is with the very question that discourse wishes to mask, she may be particularly well situated to “do something” to the social tie itself.

And yet, despite (but also because of) her “freedom to play,” the feminine/transgender subject’s speech does not stop insisting that discursive flexibility, lest it be mistaken for a merry-go-round of liberating multiplicity, is a flexibility borne of and about at least two overlapping lacks: castration and a certain exclusion.

Feminine/transgender speech materializes (sometimes, painfully silently) hollowed out by the deafening significance of what it “is” to “be” a (divided) (feminine) subject, a truth that echoes across gender divides and blurs.

Ragland cautions as well: “Given that the hysteric’s fundamental question in the signifier is ‘Am I a woman or a man?’ she is at risk of being overtaken by the real in both the symbolic and the imaginary” (69). She later adds more pointedly:

How, then, does the hysteric reveal a truth worth noting? Subversion for its own sake or acting out is not admirable […]. It is rather, this, that the subject, any subject except a psychotic, is divided. In varying ways, all individuals who are divided suffer from this. The master represses it in the place of truth. The academic puts it inthe place of repressed knowledge. The analyst interrogates it. Bu tthe hysteric lives it; it is her bade of honor that she lives castration at the surface of her life and discourse […]. The hysteric does not say, as poststructuralists would claim, I am man and woman, the difference makes no difference [. . .]. For her it is an either/or question. This is the heart of Lacanianism: either/or. Either one is masculine or one is feminine. One is not both, except in the suffering of hysteria. Both is the position of suffering, not liberation. It is this truth of the hysteric to which Lacan pays heed. (85)

If we are to dream of some liberatory remainder to this suffering subversion, it may — as Butler suggests from from a different perspective — be locatable precisely there where Antigone speaks her “aberrant” words (Psychic 58) — yes, where, sometimes, “gender is displaced” (82), but sexual difference is not. As Slavoj Žižek writes in response to Butler’s Psychic Life of Power:

“The Lacanian answer to this is clear — “to desire something other than its continued ‘social existence'” and thus to fall “into some kind of death,” that is, to risk a gesture by means of which death is “courted and pursued,” points precisely towards the way Lacan reconceptualized the Freudian death-drive as the elementary form of the ethical act. Note that the act, insofar as it is irreducible to a “speech act,” relies for its performative power on the preestablished set of symbolic rules and/or norms. Is this not the whole point of Lacan’s reading of Antigone?”

At the beginning of this essay, I asked what gender studies and Lacanian psychoanalysis have to offer one another and whether it might be possible to integrate the two domains. To answer quite simply,

Lacanian psychoanalysis offers gender studies what I read as a richly malleable framework for thinking through matters of sex, subjectivity, desire, and sexuality. Likewise, gender studies offers Lacanian psychoanalysis readers who are deeply, productively mistrustful and whose compelling perspectives on diverse social issues are driven by passionate commitment.

Integration of the two domains can only ever be a scene of fruitful contestation, but it could also go further if contemporary psychoanalytic thinkers were willing to listen to their compatriots’ desires and to redefine some of their more exclusionary “shibboleths” (Dean, Beyond 226), and if gender theorists were willing to reread psychoanalysis, again.

exclude or exploit

Jodi Dean, The Communist Horizon part 2

I also want to emphasize that for communists the binary inclusion/exclusion does not indicate the primary axis of justice (although it functions quite nicely for liberal democrats who insist that the true political issue is making sure that no one is excluded from opportunities to participate in the democratic process or from the possibility of striking it rich in the capitalist market). The remedy for those without papers, for example, is to have papers—and thus membership in the state. This isn’t a bad goal, but it is a goal that extends rather than takes or changes state power. The remedy for those without property (slum dwellers, say), is a right to property, a remedy that incorporates the owner into the official market economy, in effect eliminating the threat to the market that uncounted use and exchange pose.

But is capitalism best understood as a system that constitutively excludes persons or one that constitutively exploits them?

Building from Alain Badiou and Jacques Ranciere, Zizek claims that the antagonism between the included and the excluded is the fundamental antagonism rupturing capitalism today (and hence crucial to the idea of communism). Zizek recognizes that the focus on exclusion easily elides with “the liberal-tolerant-multicultural topic of ‘openness’ . . . at the expense of a properly Marxist notion of social antagonism.” Yet he argues that the inclusion of the proletariat is an inclusion of a different sort, an inclusion of the capitalism’s point of symptomal exclusion (“part of no part”) that effectively dismantles it.

A lot rides on the notion of “proletariat” here, especially insofar as contemporary capitalism relies on communication as a productive force, rather than industrial labor. On the one hand, Zizek detaches “proletarian” from the factory, treating “proletarianization” as a process that deprives humans of their “substance” and reduces them to pure subjects. On the other, he identifies exclusion as a particular kind of proletarianization, one by which some are made directly to embody “substanceless subjectivity.” They are the material remainders of the system, its unavoidable and necessary byproducts. Because the entire system relies on their exclusion (or their inclusion as remainders), because they embody the truth that capitalism produces human refuse, surplus populations with no role or function, to include them would destroy the system itself.

Capitalist productivity derives from its expropriation and exploitation of communicative processes. Cesare Casarino’s distinction between the common and the commons is helpful here.

The expropriation of language in the spectacle opens up a new experience of language and linguistic being: ‘not this or that content of language, but language itself, not this or that true proposition, but the very fact that one speaks.’ Failure to communicate provides its own satisfaction, the enjoyment of language itself.

The movement from commons to common repeats, in a way, this shift from active to passive or, the movement from desire to drive.

Blogs, Facebook, YouTube—they each and together take our ensemble of actions and return them to us as an endless communicative common.  Rather than “I make,” there is production, a production of thoughts and affects, opinions and contributions that circulate, accumulate, and distract. Words were spoken.

Agamben’s answer to the expropriation of the common is drive. The communist answer is desire, a desire already manifest in our active linking and adding and making, our creating and contributing without pay, just for ourselves and for each other

on communism

Jodi Dean, The Communist Horizon

Those who suspect that the inclusion of liberal democrats in a set with capitalists and conservatives is illegitimate probably are democrats. To determine whether they belong in the set of those who fear communism, they should ask themselves whether they think any evocation of communism should come with qualifications, apologies, condemnations of past excesses. If the answer is yes, then we have a clear indication that liberal democrats, and probably radical democrats as well, still consider communism a threat and so belong in a set with capitalists and concerns. They all are anxious about the forces the desire for communism risks unleashin

Bicycles are a “gate-way drug” to communism.

But in parliamentary democracies, for leftists to refer to their goals as a struggle for democracy is strange—it’s not like they are fighting for rights to vote and organize. Democracy is our ambient milieu, the hegemonic form of contemporary politics (which is yet another reason that the right can use communism as a name for what opposes it). For the left to use the language of democracy now is thus even stranger, a way of avoiding the fundamental antagonism between the top one percent and the rest of us by acting as if the only thing really missing was participation.

Rather than recognizing that for the left democracy is the form that the loss of communism takes, the form of communism’s displacement, radical democrats treat democracy as itself replacing communism (and on this point share the neoliberal position regarding the victory of capitalism). Political repercussions of the loss of communism as a name for left aspirations include a corresponding turn away from militant opposition and toward generalized inclusion as well as an abandonment of tight organizational forms like the party, the council, and the cell in favor of broad, thin, and momentary calls to become aware of an issue and change one’s lifestyle.

More fundamentally, the repercussion of the sublimation of communism in democratic preoccupations with process and participation is acquiescence to capitalism as the best system for the production and distribution of resources, labor, and goods.

The mistake leftists make when they turn into liberals and democrats is thinking that we are beyond the communist horizon, that democracy replaced communism rather than serving as the contemporary form of communism’s displacement.

They don’t see, can’t acknowledge, their own complicity in despotic financialism: if political struggle is always an irreducible dimension of capitalism and capitalism always interlinked with conflict, resistance, accommodation, and demands, then refusals to engage in these struggles, rejections of the terms of these struggles, will affect the form that capitalism takes.

The point I want to emphasize is that a primary factor in the changes in capitalism over the past thirty to forty years has been a change in the understanding of work, a change from an emphasis on its class, group, and collective dimension to a view of work as a personal choice, endeavor, and locus of meaning. Individual work displaced work as a common condition, freeing capital from the constraints in encountered when it had to deal with workers as a collective force.

Left appeals to democracy thus look a lot like the Lacanian notion of drive. For Lacan, drive, like desire, describes the way the subject arranges its enjoyment, jouissance.

– In the economy of desire, enjoyment is what the subject can never reach, what the subject wants but never gets—oh, that’s not it.

In the economy of drive, enjoyment comes from missing one’s goal; it’s what the subject gets, even if it doesn’t want it. It’s that little extra charge which keeps the subject keeping on. The subject’s repeated yet ever failing efforts to reach its goal become satisfying on their own.

Democracy for the left is drive: our circling around, our missing of a goal, and the satisfaction we attain through this missing. We talk, complain, and protest. We make groups on Facebook. We sign petitions and forward them to everyone in our mailbox. Activity becomes passivity, our stuckness in a circuit, which is then lamented and mourned as the absence of ideas or even the loss of the political itself and then, yet again, routed through a plea for democracy although it doesn’t take a genius to know that the real problem is neoliberal capitalism and its extreme inequality. What leftists call the loss of the political is the fog they muddle around in because they’ve lost sight of the communist horizon.

In the contemporary networks of communicative capitalism, drive is a feedback circuit that captures our best energies. Invigorating communism as a political alternative requires amplifying the collective desire that can cut through these affective networks. Fortunately, that desire is already there.

As Foucault makes clear, the limiting of the people as a common force turns them from active agents of power into a passive population. Here they are active only as individuals, little entrepreneurs or enterprises. What appears as the freedom of the market, then, is a certain foreclosure of the collective power of the people in and as a common. The power that matters, to affect the basic conditions in which they live, is displaced onto an economy that they are told they cannot govern because they cannot know. What do the people get instead? Representative democracy—the form of their passivity.

From politics of the extimate to axiomatic politics

Ceren Özselҫuk and Yahya M. Madra. “Economy, Surplus, Politics: Some Questions on Slavoj Žižek’s Political Economy Critique of Capitalism.” 78-107

[Žižek] searches for exceptional social agents that would replace the proletariat in transforming capitalism. Slums, in Žižek’s recent work, seem to be the privileged site for such social agents. Marginalized and dispossessed of “all but their chains,” “excluded from citizenship,” slum dwellers, for Žižek, hold the position of the extimate, the “part of no part,” the torque that could unravel the capitalist system (2007, 56-58). We wonder, however, whether this political vision is not rendering Žižek susceptible to the same critique that he has previously extended to Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri.

We are referring here to Žižek’s critique of Hardt and Negri’s politics of immanence and its reliance on a messianic awakening in which the dormant potential of the multitude realizes itself (2007). Is the politics of the extimate, at least in the manner occasionally articulated by Žižek, not premised on a similar understanding of political agency that is simply asserted, rather than constructed—although this time, the political agent refers to some exceptional social group (i.e., slum dwellers) rather than the multitude? 101

Initially, Žižek’s notion of the extimate appears to differ from the Hardt and Negri’s use of immanence. By rendering capitalism and its potential opposition as perfectly overlapping,

a politics of immanence eliminates the theoretical space needed to actually construct a position of real difference from which economic transformation can proceed.

For Žižek, the concept of the extimate refers precisely to such a political position that incarnates real difference. At a closer look, however, both Hardt and Negri and Žižek are unable to situate difference. If all difference collapses into a (capitalist) sameness in Hardt and Negri, difference is introduced in a manner that remains arbitrary and
unwarranted in Žižek. This common shortcoming does not come as a surprise
to us. Žižek shares with Hardt and Negri a similar ontology of the economy,
permeated by the logic of self-driven and self-regulating capitalist accumulation.

Limiting the constitution of the economy to the masculine logic of the capitalist-all, Žižek is hard pressed to carve up a position within capitalism that is heterogeneous to it.

The latter, then, is arbitrarily assigned to a selected set of marginalized positions, such as slum collectives, with an alleged disposition to revolt. Slums could certainly be a potential site for social transformation, or they might not be. What we wish to question, however, is the political cogency of trying to locate the “real” social agents of change.

After all, Marxian history is replete with stories of resentment when class-in-itself fails to transpire into class-for-itself (that is, when certain dominated and marginalized groups, anticipated to resist and mobilize due their marginalized position, fail to do so).

Axiomatic politics enables us to extricate ourselves from limiting the potential of transformation to a privileged set of social groups, economic sectors or geographical scales. It displaces the agent of class transformation from a social group to an abstract principle that could insert itself into every occasion in which decisions over the use of surplus are being instituted, rendering each concrete class organization an inconsistent and failed attempt.

Yet, it is also important not to confuse the communist gesture of refusal of an exception with the hysterical questioning of the Master. If the communist axiom fails to constitute an all, this is not because it has doubts about the authenticity, the legitimacy, the validity of that which occupies the position of the exception. By leaving the exception in place, such an understanding would remain blind to the radical commitment of the axiom. Rather, it is because the axiom, to repeat Joan Copjec’s perceptive claim, is only “half-said” (2002, 171, 175). That is, the potential of the axiom is only actualized as it encounters and engages with the function of exception in various concrete contexts, as its universalizing aspiration propels it to move beyond the cooperative workplaceto the local economy, beyond the local economy to the nation-state, and beyond the nation-state to a community of states, and so on. 101-102

Masculine economies of surplus labor

Ceren Özselҫuk and Yahya M. Madra. “Economy, Surplus, Politics: Some Questions on Slavoj Žižek’s Political Economy Critique of Capitalism.” 78-107

In this vein, it is only appropriate to consider the different organizations of surplus as various institutional attempts to furnish us with a knowledge of how to come to terms with the impossibility of the class relation. Under feudalism, for instance, the feudal manor constitutes a set, an all gathered together under the feudal lord qua the exception to the set. While all feudal agencies (from the knights that protected the manor from the attacks of the other lords and the vassals that managed the lord’s demesne to the church that provided the rules of conduct under the feudal order), receive a cut from the surplus for the services and functions that they render, it is only the lord who occupies an exceptional status that designates him as the sole recipient of the (products of the) surplus labor performed by the serfs. This highly stylized description of the feudal system can be formalized through

the masculine logic of exception, where the exception to the set (the feudal lord) that appropriates the surplus labor, delineates the boundaries of the affective and political economy of the feudal order. 93

Provided that theexceptional status of the lord is upheld, the social agencies that fall under the feudal form can engage in endless struggles with each other. Moreover, the
endless variations that the feudal form has passed throughout the long transition from feudalism to capitalism (Dobb 1946; Hilton 1976; Ashton and Philpin 1985) as well as its continuing (albeit highly fragile and unstable) presence in the contemporary household (Fraad, Resnick, and Wolff 1994; Gibson-Graham 2006; Safri 2006) attest to the fact that it is both fairly resilient yet at the same time highly unstable.

[W]e discern the masculine logic of exception that Marx identified in the feudal system (the universal set of the feudal manor constituted around the lord as its constitutive exception) in the other “canonical” modes of production, including slavery and capitalism. For instance, under the modern capitalist enterprise (i.e., the joint-stock company whose existence can be traced back all the way to the inception of Dutch East India Company in 1602), all the factors of production, “all individuals really active in production from the manager down to the lowest day labourer” as Marx puts it (1991, 568, emphasis added), must give something to get something (a portion of the living labor): the workers have to perform labor, the managers have to manage, the accountants have to keep the accounts, the financiers have to loan capital and so on. In this sense, under the joint stock company, “the capitalist” qua entrepreneur dissolves into its functional components and, thereby, evaporates.

Nevertheless, this universal set of all subsumed under the capitalist enterprise is still constituted by an exceptional entity, or better yet a function, that enjoys “other people’s surplus” without giving anything in return: the Board of Directors.

As long as the reproduction of the exceptional status of the Board of Directors as the sole appropriator of surplus, as the entity that gets “something for nothing,” is not jeopardized, the affective and political economy of capitalism can accommodate an infinite range of distributions of surplus, a wide array of consumption practices, and a variety of modes of exchange. According to our reading, therefore, (portions of) surplus value becomes the object cause of desire (as the currency that enables these subjects to participate in the commodity economy) for the subjects of this capitalist-all only within the delimited frame constituted by the exception to the exchange-function universalized by the market system: from the worker who demands a union premium (efficiency wage) to the executive manager who tries to secure funds for new investment in R&D, they all struggle with each other to justify (to the symbolic Big Other) why they should get a larger cut from the surplus appropriated by the Board of Directors.

The drive-effect

Early on in the paper, we welcomed the recent psychoanalytical literature on “the administration of enjoyment under late capitalism” and its analysis of the logic of desire in consumption. And then, in concretizing our “There is no class relation” thesis, we argued that surplus labor/value is the object cause of desire for the subjects of  capitalist-all (or any other exploitative form structured around a constitutive exception). In both cases, we were able to identify concrete desiring subjects.  Nevertheless, if we are speaking of the case of a joint stock company and if there is no actual capitalist but only a series of functionaries subsumed under the capitalist-all, then how are we going to impute a desire or a drive to the capitalist corporation?

In his The Parallax View, Žižek recognizes this problem and distinguishes the drive of capitalism from desire within capitalism. In contrast to desire, which is located on the side of the interpellated subjects of consumption who jump from one commodity to another in search of satisfaction, drive “…inheres to capitalism at a more fundamental, systematic, level: drive is that which propels the whole capitalist machinery, it is the impersonal compulsion to engage in the endless circular movement of expanded self-reproduction (emphasis added). 95

We enter the mode of drive the moment the circulation of money as capital becomes “an end in itself, for the expansion of value takes place only within this constantly renewed movement. The circulation of capital has therefore no limits.” […] (2006, 61)

As noted earlier, Žižek borrows this economic determinist narrative from a particular tradition within Marxism that has long defined “expansion through contradiction” as the “law of motion” of capital, and saw in it the telos of capitalism’s end (Norton 2001).
Žižek’s innovation is to turn this narrative upside down and associate drive with capitalism’s resilience rather than its destruction. Even though a pantheon of Marxist political economists, including Paul Sweezy, David Gordon, and David Harvey, posit that “accumulation for accumulation’s sake” is “the rule that governs the behaviour of all capitalists” (Harvey 1982, 29), the argument that the endless circular movement of the circuit of capital is propelled by an accumulation drive is not necessarily one that Marx himself would subscribe to.

Indeed, if we were to expand our concept of capitalism to include Marx’s explorations in Volumes 2 and 3, and his analysis of the numerous claims on surplus value, then it becomes very difficult to reduce the movement of capital into a self-regulating “expanded self-reproduction.”15 We have already noted that, within the masculine universe of the capitalist corporation, in the shape of endless struggles over the surplus, we find “an infinite movement of the desire within a finite, delimited frame” (Zupančič 2000, 289). An endless number of social agencies located within and outside of the actual corporation (but, to the extent they do not question the status of the constitutive exception, within the “capitalist-all”) strive to receive a cut of the surplus and to this end, they need to struggle with one another and, on occasion, justify their “necessity” for the continued existence of the capitalist form of extraction and distribution of surplus value.

This capitalist-all (with its constitutive exception embodied in the Board of Directors) frames the field within which a whole range of “competitive battles” takes place (Ruccio and Amariglio 2003, 239-244). The agencies of these competitive battles could be different recipients of surplus distributions within a corporation, different corporations (within and across industries), different forms of capital (industrial, financial, and merchant), and even nation-states and trans- and inter-national institutions (Resnick 2006). In this sense, the capitalist-all is a topological whole and its consistency is sustained by the taboo status of the exception: as long as (the institutional form that embodies) the exception is sustained and remains unquestioned, the particular location of a particular claimant/recipient of surplus value is only incidental.

We have already argued that, what sets in motion the circuit of capital is a host of social technologies of reproduction. Therefore, from our perspective, the question is not so much what propels the circuit of capital and the process of the self-expansion of value, but rather what throws it out of balance.

In fact, the aggregate outcome of the internal dynamic fueled by the logic of desire at the level of the subjects of capitalist-all is the mad dance of capitalism caught in a circular movement, sometimes resulting in expanded reproduction, sometimes in simple reproduction, and sometimes in non-reproduction. What are economic recessions and depressions, if not the unexpected aggregate outcomes of the uncoordinated activities as well as the competitive battles among the subjects of the capitalist-all? 97

Therefore, the cause of this directionless circular movement is not a drive to accumulate or “an impersonal compulsion to engage in […] expanded selfreproduction” (Žižek 2006, 61). Rather,

the blind movement of the circuit of capital is the overdetermined outcome of, on the one hand, the social technologies of reproduction that uphold/maintain the exception, and on the other hand, the competitive battles and intractable contradictions that crisscross the capitalist-all.

And if there is a drive, it is either at the level of the particular subjects of the capitalist-all, or, if it is at the aggregate level, then it is only as a drive-effect—not really as a drive, but rather a semblance of drive, giving an impression of inevitability and necessity in what seems like a “repetition compulsion.” 97

The question of difference

On the one hand, we have touched upon and highlighted economic difference as it is inflected within capitalism, in the figure of the different claims on the distributions of surplus value. On the other hand, we have demonstrated the different forms of configuring the relation to surplus labor within the delimited economies of capitalism, feudalism, and slavery. Nonetheless, in order to explicate what we mean by the ethico-political in the realm of the economy, we need to produce a particular notion of difference that embodies not only a break from the libidinal economy of capitalism but from all delimited structures of class. To be able to think this difference, we turn to psychoanalysis.

the possibility of formulating a meaningful economic difference that would unsettle the capitalist field of differences. We proffer that, when grafted onto the Marxian field of economic difference,

sexual difference (qua Lacan’s formalization of Kant’s dynamical and mathematical antinomies) helps to articulate difference as such. It allows distinguishing between the kind of difference within the delimited frame of the masculine logic of exception—including the differences among the various class structures that fall under the masculine logic of exception—and the difference between this masculine logic and the feminine logic of non-all.

The masculine logic defines a whole, an all, by positing a constitutive exception. Within the bounds of this set, all kinds of differences are permitted—with the proviso that the constitutive exception remains untouched.

The feminine logic of non-all, on the other hand, refuses to posit an exception at the expense of failing to constitute a coherent whole.

Contra capitalism, or any other exploitative form of appropriation of surplus (e.g., slavery, feudalism), the logic of non-all refuses to assign exclusive appropriative rights to any particular set of social agents.

This also includes those who were exploited under the ancien régime, namely the workers. Communism is generally understood to be the reparation of collective justice or the completeness of social being, which would be achieved once what is stolen from the workers is given back to them. Rejecting the substitution of one exception (i.e., board of directors) by another (i.e., the worker), the logic of non-all disrupts this fantasy. It is important to note that the exception that constitutes the capitalist-all is a function, even though it is embodied in the institution of the Board of Directors in our contemporary social formations. That is, various economic ideologies can sustain the function assumed by the Board of Directors. The ideology of economic growth, for instance, as the unchanging answer of classical political economy, neoclassical economics, and late neoclassical economics to their constitutive and shared problematic of how to reconcile rational choice and social harmony, seems to be a prominent example. In a passage, uncharacteristic in its declaration of the inevitability of capitalism as a “fetish,” Žižek skillfully argues for the need to counter this discourse:

“Whenever a political project takes a radical turn, up pops the inevitable blackmail: ‘Of course these goals are desirable in themselves; if we do all this, however, international capital will boycott us, the growth rate will fall, and so on.’ […] Many fetishes will have to be broken here: who cares if growth stalls, or even becomes negative? Have we not had enough of the high growth rate whose effects on the social organism were felt mostly in the guise of new forms of poverty and dispossession? What about a negative growth that would translate into a qualitatively better, not higher, standard of living for the wider popular strata? That would be a political act today…” (2004, 74) 99

Žižek aptly exposes the efficiency with which the superegoic imperative of growth holds back the contemporary subjects as its captives. The discourse of “negative growth” is a sobering gesture to undo the grip of the growth fantasy. However, our emphasis is on interrupting the logic of exception in all of its manifestations,  irrespective of the particular economic discourses that sustain it. After all, this logic can be perpetuated not only in the ideology of growth, but also in the economic fantasies of “local development,” “alleviation of poverty,” “enhancing human capital,” “creation of jobs,” “economic efficiency,” “freedom of choice,” and so on. That is why we approach economic difference instigated and materialized by the “non-all” as a moment, a perspective, a principle, which refuses the exception as such, and not just the particular social group that occupies the position of the exception, or the particular social discourse that articulates this function. We call this difference the communist moment.

Utopianism or dystopianism? No, thanks!

Ceren Özselҫuk and Yahya M. Madra. “Economy, Surplus, Politics: Some Questions on Slavoj Žižek’s Political Economy Critique of Capitalism.” 78-107

If we were to distinguish surplus labor from surplus value and reconstruct the proper homology as one between surplus labor and surplus jouissance, then an entirely different picture emerges.

In this alternative construction of the homology, not just capitalism but all forms of production, appropriation, and distribution are disrupted by the paradoxical topology of surplus jouissance.

By universalizing the psychoanalytical insight, in this manner, to all class formations, we intend to steer away from the dual dangers of utopianism as well as dystopianism. On the one hand, we reject utopianism by acknowledging the impossibility of a social link purged from surplus jouissance and the impossibility of the class relation, echoing the Lacanian insight pertaining to the impossibility of the sexual relation. On the other hand, we would be rejecting dystopianism by not restricting the homology to capitalism and retaining the Marxian insight pertaining to the possibility of another way of relating to surplus. Moreover, through our reconstruction of the homology, we will be able to produce a more robust and distinctively Marxian explanation as to why surplus labor/value, and not an inexorable accumulation drive, is indeed the absent “cause” that sets the circuit of capital in motion. 91

“There is no class relation”

We also believe that the numerous refutations and reinstatements of the labor theory of value, by reducing it to a theory of price determination, obscure Marx’s radical insight pertaining to the impossibility of the class relation (92).

For Marxian economics, neither the respective quanta of necessary- and surplus-labor nor the potential destinations of the appropriated surplus-labor could be determined a priori.  Indeed, there is no stable and universally accepted logic for conducting and institutionalizing the process of the performance, appropriation, and distribution of surplus-labor. To the extent that

there is no true, correct, or just way of dividing the total labor-time performed by direct laborers into its necessary and surplus components and distributing the surplus labor to their destinations, all social organizations of surplus labor will be structured around a foundational, constitutive lack.

This is the sense in which we construct the homology between surplus labor and surplus jouissance. Since there exists no pre-constituted/pre-given guideline or knowledge as to how to organize the surplus labor, there exists a surplus of knowledge. Indeed, historically concrete forms of the social organization of class (that designate who is the lord and who is the serf, who is the master and who is the slave, who is the capitalist and who is the worker) are already so many different, and ultimately failed, attempts to overcome this constitutive impossibility of the class relation and make up for the absence of a ready-made knowledge of what to do with the living labor. Yet each formation, each form of organizing surplus labor is inevitably thrown out of balance,
insofar as all social links are smeared with surplus jouissance. At the end of the day, to the extent that we are speaking of surplus labor, whether it is directly materialized in products/services or in currency with which one can buy products/services, the dialectics of desire as well as the obdurate logic of partial drives will be present.

All social links, therefore, including class formations, are structured around a constitutive lack that simultaneously invites and frustrates the communities.

We consider this foundational, constitutive lack as the absent cause, the foundational antagonism, the constitutive impossibility, around which sociality is constructed.

As Žižek once put it, the antagonism between the “bosses” and “workers” is “already a ‘reactive’ or ‘defence’ formation, an attempt to ‘cope with’ (to come to terms with, to pacify…) the trauma of class antagonism” 92

The homology, therefore, is not so much between the surplus labor and surplus jouissance as it is between the way a particular organization of surplus labor is a response formation to a foundational impossibility and the way the desire of the subject is sustained by a fantasy formation that wraps itself around the constitutive lack embodied in the objet petit a. 93

Diverging from Žižek, we do not restrict the conceptual content of surplus labor
to the paradoxical logic of capitalism, although we concur that there is a capitalist way of organizing the surplus labor, just as there could be a feudal or a communist way of organizing it. This seems more in tune with the original spirit of Marx. While he discussed surplus value as the form of surplus labor under capitalism, Marx neither derived the concept of surplus labor from, nor reduced it to, capitalism. Rather, the concept emerged as a consequence of Marx’s repeated attempts to make sense of the changing forms of economic organizations that existed side by side in the long process of the so-called transition from feudalism to capitalism. To argue otherwise and assert that
Marx constructed surplus labor exclusively through his focus on capitalism would be to neglect how Marx persistently studied, theorized and compared the different economic forms, such as feudalism, primitive communism, simple commodity production, capitalism, and so on, before he arrived at the concept of surplus labor.

In this precise sense, we consider surplus labor to be the “concrete universal” of the Marxian tradition. While surplus labor as a concept emerges out of Marx’s analysis of its various concrete manifestations, it always fails to be given a final shape by any one of these forms. 93

surplus labour surplus value surplus jouissance

Ceren Özselҫuk and Yahya M. Madra. “Economy, Surplus, Politics: Some Questions on Slavoj Žižek’s Political Economy Critique of Capitalism.” 78-107

In our attempt to develop a psychoanalytically informed class difference, however, we encounter another resistance, namely, a particular psychoanalytical approach to Marxian discourse, in which the scope of some key Marxian concepts is limited to the form they take within the specific discourse of capitalism. We find the virtual absence of surplus labor in the psychoanalytical literature symptomatic in this respect.

Rather, surplus labor appears in only one conceivable form, the capitalist form of surplus value. Such a reduction of Marxian concepts to their particular form within the discourse of capitalism eliminates the possibility of conceiving different relations to surplus labor (and hence to class) as integral to conceptualizing economic difference from capitalism.

Lacan’s seminars XVI and XVII, delivered in the aftermath of May 1968, include many favorable references to Marx’s discourse and the significance of the concept of surplus value. It is in seminar XVI that Lacan, in order to underscore the intimate relationship between surplus jouissance and surplus value, emphasizes the term “homology,” thereby evoking the idea of a fundamental similarity in the structure and function of these two concepts, a sameness that needs to be strictly distinguished from a cursory resemblance
between two discrete entities 87

Our interpretation of the encounter between Marx and Lacan begins from conceiving the homology as one between two nodal points (surplus labor and surplus jouissance) that set a new “discourse” in motion that revolves around them. Žižek, on the other hand, understands the homology as one between surplus jouissance as the object cause of desire and the surplus value as the “cause” which sets in motion the circuit of capital. His analysis differs from ours primarily in its oversight of the Marxian distinction between surplus labor and the particular form it takes under capitalism, surplus value. This, in turn, as we shall demonstrate, leads to a representation of capitalism as the only game in town. We believe that with the absence of the epistemological dimension of the homology that insists on retaining the independent existence and the distinct objects of each theoretical discourse, the attempts at articulating psychoanalysis with Marxism fail to do justice to either discourse. 87

What then, for Žižek, is the precise nature of the homology between the two concepts and what was it that Marx failed to recognize? What additional insight does the psychoanalytical concept of surplus jouissance bring into the Marxian concept of surplus value?

For Žižek, surplus jouissance is essentially “a residue, a remnant, a leftover of every signifying operation” (1989, 180) that gets “embodied” in the Lacanian objet petit a.

The Lacanian objet petit a “is just an objectification of a void, of a discontinuity opened in reality by the emergence of the signifier” (95).

Zupančič adds that surplus jouissance is a pure waste, an excess, a senseless and entropy-inducing refuse of signification that results from “the inadequacy of the signifier to itself, its inability to function ‘purely,’ without producing a useless surplus” (2006, 159).

However, surplus jouissance is not a simple, ordinary waste or excess that could be disposed of without consequence. Quite the contrary, in its status as the limit of signification, surplus jouissance (or objet petit a) is where the cause, the kernel of enjoyment is. The objet petit a is the “‘surplus’ in the object which stays the same in all possible worlds” (Žižek 1989, 95): because it lacks consistency, because it is “just an objectification of [the] void” of signification, it simultaneously frustrates and incites our desire to pin its meaning down to a concrete attribute.

Nevertheless, the subtraction of this excess, this surplus, this “something in it more than itself” will not deliver a balanced desire:

[Surplus jouissance] is not a surplus which simply attaches itself to some ‘normal’, fundamental enjoyment, because enjoyment as such emerges only in this surplus, because it is constitutively an ‘excess.’ If we subtract the surplus we lose enjoyment itself, just as capitalism, which can survive only by incessantly revolutionizing its own material conditions, ceases to exist if it ‘stays the same’, if it achieves an internal balance. This, then, is the homology between surplus value — the ‘cause’ which sets in motion the capitalist process of production — and surplus-enjoyment, the object-cause of desire. (Žižek SOO 1989, 52-53)

Žižek … argue[s] that because capitalism is marked by a constitutive imbalance, it is impossible to reform it or eliminate its foundational discord between the forces and relations of production.

Just as one cannot obtain domesticated, balanced desire without surplus jouissance, one cannot maintain a regulated capitalism without an incessant push towards capital accumulation that continually revolutionizes its conditions of production and reproduction. 89