Author: logocentric

constitutive outside abjection

Butler, Judith. Bodies That Matter New York: Routledge, 1993.

And whereas this can appear as the necessary and founding violence of any truth regime (construction of a constitutive outside) … it is important to resist that theoretical gesture of pathos in which exclusions are simply affirmed as sad necessities of signification. The task is to reconfigure this necessary “outside” as a future horizon, one in which the violence of exclusion is perpetually in the process of being overcome. But of equal importance is the preservation of the outside, the site where discourse meets its limits, where the opacity of what is not included in a given regime of truth acts as a disruptive site of linguistic impropriety and unrepresentability, illuminating the violent and contingent boundaries of the normative regime precisely through the inability of that regime to represent that which might pose a fundamental threat to its continuity. In this sense, radical and inclusive representability is not precisely the goal: to include, to speak as, to bring in every marginal and excluded position within a given discourse is to claim that a singular discourse meets its limits nowhere, that it can and will domesticate all signs of difference. If there is a violence necessary to the language of politics, then the risk of that violation might well be followed by another in which we begin, without ending, without mastering, to own—and yet never fully to own—the exclusions by which we proceed (53).

Antigone chapter 1

Butler, Judith. Antigone’s Claim. New York: Columbia UP, 2000.

Indeed … as a figure for politics, she points somewhere else, not to politics as a question of representation, but to that political possibility that emerges when the limits to representation and representability are exposed (2).

… Antigone has already departed from kinship, herself the daughter of an incestuous bond, herself devoted to an impossible and death-bent incestuous love of her brother, how her actions compel others to regard her as “manly” and thus cast doubt on the way that kinship might underwrite gender, how her language, paradoxically, most closely approximates Creon’s, the language of sovereign authority and action, and how Creon himself assumes his sovereignty only by virtue of the kinship line that enables that succession, how he becomes, as it were, unmanned by Antigone’s defiance, and finally by his own actions, at once abrogating the norms that secure his place in kinship and in sovereignty (6).

… she exposes the socially contingent character of kinship

🙂 Here is JB’s first mention of how the symbolic and incest taboo relate

A social order is based, rather, on a structure of communicability and intelligibility understood as symbolic. And though for both of these latter theorists, the symbolic is not nature, it nevertheless institutes the structure of kinship in ways that are not precisely malleable (12).

Lacanians tend to sever the symbolic account of kinship from the social, thus freezing the social arrangements of kinship as something intact and intractable, as that which social theory might do in a different register and at a different time. Such views sever the social and the symbolic only to retain an invariant sense of kinship in the latter.

The symbolic, which gives us kinship as a function of language, is separated from the social arrangements of kinship, presupposing that

(a) kinship is instituted at the moment that the child accedes to language,

(b) kinship is a function of language rather than any socially alterable institution, and

(c) language and kinship are not socially alterable institutions —at least not easily altered (15).

The symbolic place of the father does not cede to the demands for a social reorganization of paternity. The symbolic is precisely what sets limits to any and all utopian efforts to reconfigure and relive kinship relations at some distance from the oedipal scene (20).

🙂 Here is how JB explains the transition from Levi Strauss structuralist incest taboo to Lacan’s symbolic

When the study of kinship was combined with the study of structural linguistics, kinship positions were elevated to the status of a certain order of linguistic positions without which no signification could proceed, no intelligibility could be possible. What were the consequences of making certain conceptions of kinship timeless and then elevating them to the status of the elementary structures of intelligibility? Is this any better or worse than postulating kinship as a natural form? 20

jodi dean politics without politics

Dean, Jodi. “Politics without Politics” Parallax, 2009, vol. 15, no. 3, 20–36.

In this concrete sense, Žižek is right to claim that attachment to democracy is the form our attachment to capital takes. In the consumption and entertainment-driven setting of the contemporary United States, one’s commitments to capitalism are expressed as commitments to democracy. They are the same way of life, the same daily practices of ‘aware-ing’ oneself and expressing one’s opinion, of choosing and voting and considering one’s choice a vote and one’s vote a choice.

… democracy names left castration (‘I know, but nevertheless’). Because the left presents itself as appealing to and supporting democracy, it fails to take a stand, to name an enemy. Instead of drawing a line and saying what it is against, what it excludes, left political theory in the contemporary United States advocates inclusion, universality, multiplicity, the plurality of modes of becoming, and ethical responsiveness (Dean 21).

Insofar as left political theory adopts democracy as its primary aspiration, it disavows the fundamental antagonism conditioning politics as such. For the left (in the United States and in parts of the European Union), democracy thus takes the form of a fantasy of politics without politics (like fascism is a form of capitalism without capitalism): everyone and everything is included, respected, valued, and entitled. No one is made to feel uncomfortable. Everyone is heard and seen and recognized and has a place at the table (George Lakoff identifies Barak Obama as a key figure in the new politics, which is precisely this ‘politics’ of unity, empathy, and understanding) (Dean 21).

There are at least three sites a theory of democracy might
designate:

a. democracy might designate a site of resistance, struggle or opposition;

b. democracy might designate a system of governance, order, or rule;

c. democracy might designate a society, culture, or spirit (ambient milieu).

Which of these three is correct? Derrideans would say the fourth one: democracy is always to come and hence necessarily exceeds the three aforementioned sites. But this answer is just another version of ‘I know but nevertheless’. Democracy remains an ideological fantasy covering the failures, excesses, and obscenities of real existing democracy. The Derridean response thus returns me back to where I started: democracy as the solution to the problems of democracy or the democratic capture of left aspirations to equitable and sustainable distributions of resources, labor, and its products.

Derridean democracy to come and the post-politics, post-democracy thesis are two sides of the same coin. They are two aspects of democratic time, past and future, but not now (Žižek might say that their relation is that of a parallax; we can see democracy from each perspective but not from the two perspectives simultaneously). Consider a chant repeated at hundreds and thousands of protests over the last decade: What do we want? Democracy! When do we want it? Now! This chant works as a protest because it is clearly impossible. What would happen if the response were ‘Okay, protestors, you’ve got your democracy. Now what are you going to do?’ Imagine the executive branch of the US government walking off the job, handing their codes and files and top-secret stamps to the throngs outside their gates, the protestors wondering what to do with their puppets, signs, and bongos as they fragment into affinity groups and try to decide what their goals and priorities are. The protestors are not really demanding democracy now. Their demand is not meant to be met. Democracy has already arrived – as language of right and left, governance and electoral politics, ambient milieu. This is what democracy looks like, real existing democracy. To avoid the trauma of the real, of getting what we wished for, leftists move from actuality to possibility (from what we have to what could be) … (Dean 25).

But this move from actual to possible democracy doesn’t quite work. It misses its own movement or moving, the torsion that the shift from actual to possible entails. Žižek’s description of the temporal anamorphosis (distortion) of objet petit a is appropriate here:

Spatially, a is an object whose proper contours are discernible only if we glimpse it askance; it is forever indiscernible to the straightforward look. Temporally, it is an object which exists only qua anticipated or lost, only in the modality of not-yet or not-anymore, never in the
‘now’ of a pure, undivided present.18

This description applies to democracy. Democracy is anticipated or lost, but never present. When one looks at the present, all one sees is a gap, perhaps manifested by multiple attempts to fill it, as in the various definitions of democracy as resistance, governance, or ambient milieu.

There can be past democratic ideals – nostalgic fantasies of Athens, town meetings, our days in the resistance – or there can be hope for the future, justification of present acts in terms of this future, but there isn’t responsibility now. So disavowing democracy’s arrival, democracy now, contemporary left fantasies of democracy animate its diagnoses of post-politics and inspire its rejections of law, regulation, and the state.

In the account I’ve offered thus far, democracy appears as an obscure object-cause of desire, something that can never be fully attained or reached without ending the desire for it. But this is only one aspect of objet a. The other is its status in drive, not as something lost but as a hole or gap, not as an impossible lost object but as loss itself.

DRIVE

Drawing from Lacan, Žižek construes drive as fixation, not as the thing onto which one is fixated. In drive, enjoyment comes from missing one’s goal, from the repeated yet ever failing efforts to reach it that start to become satisfying on their own. Drive circulates around an object, generating satisfaction through this very circulation. Perhaps paradoxically, then, drive is at the same time disruptive. Fixation cuts into and derails the regular course of things, what is taken for the conventional patterns of everyday life, assessments of benefit and risk, pragmatic realism, and the organic attempts to secure the conditions of life. It’s a traumatic kernel in the reality of the symbolic order itself.

This drive dimension better describes democracy for the left; it is our circling around, our missing of a goal, and the satisfaction we attain through this missing. It accounts for the attachments and repetitions to which we are stuck, even as this very stuckness undermines our possibilities for political efficacy. Democratic drive, then, is another way of conceiving democracy as ambient milieu, a way that highlights the circulation we can’t avoid, but which at the same time can’t be understood as giving us what we want even as it gives us something else instead, some kick of enjoyment. We protest. We talk.We complain.We undercut our every assertion, criticizing its exclusivity, partiality, and fallibility in advance as if some kind of purity were possible, as if we could avoid getting our hands dirty. We sign petitions and forward them to everyone in our mailbox, fetishizing communication technologies as the solution to our problems. We worry about conservatives even as we revel in our superiority – how can anyone be so stupid? We enjoy (Dean 26).

I’ve presented post-politics and democracy-to-come as two sides of the same coin. I’ve suggested that the gap separating and connecting them be thought in terms of the closed circuit of drive rather than the openness of desire. So understood, democracy is not what we seek but never reach, not a name for political desire as such, but instead a term for the capture of political aspiration in the circuit of drive. Democracy is a remnant from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries we have yet to escape. Differently put, if democracy names a political desire that is never fulfilled,
then it is accompanied by a political drive wherein democracy is what we fail to escape. In this dimension of drive, democracy designates our political stuckness (Dean 28).

My argument is that gaps emerge; they are political, and contemporary democracy organizes enjoyment as an effect of circling around these gaps. Rancie` re’s narrativization, then, is better understood an image of the capture of politics in the circuits of democratic drive. The contemporary setting is not one of simple opposition between post-political consensus and the eruption of irrational violence (and eruption Rancie`re views as a return of the archaic). Rather, it involves the satisfaction of the democratic drive as its aims remain inhibited (Dean 35).

Rather than achieving the goal of equality, then, disagreement produces satisfaction; I’ll call it a political satisfaction, by staging the lack of equality. Although it might seem paradoxical that one’s aim is not agreement to one’s demand – the demand for equality – the paradox occurs only in the register of desire. Understood in terms of drive, the bending or distortion or change in the aim such that the failure to reach it provides enjoyment makes sense. The aim of equality is sublimated in the drive to make one’s disagreement with inequality appear. One gets satisfaction by appearing in one’s disagreement. This provides its own partial enjoyment and in fact can only continue to provide it so long as there is inequality, so long as the ostensible aim in staging the disagreement isn’t reached (Dean 35).

Rancière’s account of the staging of disagreement, rather than figuring the political as such (the political confrontation between politics and the police) exemplifies the sublimation of politics in democratic drive. As drive, democracy organizes enjoyment via a multiplicity of stagings, of making oneself visible in one’s lack. Contemporary protests in the United States, whether as marches, vigils, Facebook pages, or internet petitions aim at visibility, awareness, being seen. They don’t aim at taking power. Our politics is one of endless attempts to make ourselves seen. It’s as if instead of looking at our opponents and working out ways to defeat them, we get off on imagining them looking at us. And since, as Lacan reminds us in Seminar XI, the object of the drive is of total indifference,46 the disagreement one imagines oneself being seen as staging is irrelevant. Egalitarian or elite, anarchist or communist, any political gap will provide a charge sublimated as it is within the democratic drive. We want to make ourselves seen as political without actually taking the risk of politics (Dean 35).

Até

Até. In Greek, ate means either “destructive, delusional madness” or the “ruin” that follows from delusion. The concept has a close association with tragic action, where characters are often deluded by the gods or by their own arrogance into bringing about their own downfall.

Lacan takes ate and develops within it the idea of destruction as a boundary between life and death. Thus Lacan connects Antigone with the limit of the symbolic order (see below), a limit beyond which lie divine laws (the dictates of the gods) propelling Antigone’s defiance of Creon and her destruction as well. Ate is, therefore, “the limit of human existence that can be crossed only briefly within life” (Butler, Antigone 47).

foreclosure

Grigg, Russell. Lacan, Language and Philosophy. New York: SUNY Press, 2008.

Thus “foreclosure” refers not to the fact that a speaker makes a statement that declares something impossible — a process closer to disavowal — but to the fact that the speaker lacks the very linguistic means for making the statement at all.

This is where the difference between repression and foreclosure lies. On Lacan’s analysis of Freud’s classic studies on the unconscious —The Interpretation of Dreams, The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious— The mechanisms of repression and the return of the repressed are linguistic in nature. His thesis that the unconscious is structured like a language implies the claim that for something to be repressed it has first of all to be registered in the symbolic. Thus repression implies the prior recognition of the repressed in the symbolic system or register. In psychosis, on the other hand, the necessary signifiers are lacking altogether, and so the recognition required for repression is impossible. However, what is foreclosed does not simply disappear altogether but may return albeit in a different form, from outside the subject (4).

butler injurious interpellations

Butler, Judith. Psychic Life of Power. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1997.

We cannot simply throw off the identities we have become … can we reformulate psychic resistance in terms of the social without that reformulation becoming a domestication or normalization? (Must the social always be equated with the given and the normalizable?) 103

If Foucault could argue that a sign could be taken up, used for purposes counter to those for which it was designed, then he understood that even the most noxious terms could be owned, that the most injurious interpellations could also be the site of radical reoccupation and resignification.

But what lets us occupy the discursive site of injury? How are we animated and mobilized by that discursive site and its injury, such that our very attachment to it becomes the condition for our resignification of it?

Called by an injurious name, I come into social being, and because I have a certain inevitable attachment to my existence, because a certain narcissism takes hold of any term that confers existence, I am led to embrace the terms that injure me because they constitute me socially. 104

🙂 I think Butler veers off into taking up the argument of Wendy Brown’s book States of Injury.

Interpellation is “barred” from success not by a structurally permanent form of prohibition (or foreclosre), but by its inability to determine the constitutive field of the human. 129

butler breakdown of subjectivation

This temporal gap between usages produces the possibility of a reversal of signification, but also opens the way for an inauguration of signifying possibilities that exceed those to which the term has been previously bound. (Psychic 94)

The Foucaultian subject is never fully constituted in subjection, then; it is repeatedly constituted in subjection, and it is in the possibility of a repetition that repeats against its origin that subjection might be understood to draw its inadvertently enabling power. 94

How does the process of subjectivation, the disciplinary production of the subject, break down, if it does, in both Foucaultian and psychoanalytic theory? Whence does that failure emerge, and where are its consequences? (Psychic 1997, 95)

🙂 Butler then looks at Althusser

Policeman in street: “Hey you there!” The scene is clearly a disciplinary one; the policeman’s call is an effort to bring someone back in line … As Althusser himself insists, the peformative effort of naming can only attempt to bring its addressee into being; there is always the risk of a certain misrecognition … The one who is hailed may fail to hear, misread the call, turn the other way, answer to another name, insist on not being addressed in that way. … The name is called, and I am sure it is my name, but it isn’t. The name is called, and I am sure that a name is being called, my name, but it is in someone’s incomprehensible speech, or worse, it is someone coughing, or worse a radiator which for a moment approximates a human voice.

Consider the force of this dynamic of interpellation and misrecognition when the name is not a proper name but a social category, and hence a signifier capable of being interpreted in a number of divergent and conflictual ways. To be hailed as a “woman” or “Jew” or “queer” or “Black” or “Chicana” may be heard or interpreted as an affirmation or an insult, depending on the context in which the hailing occurs … If that name is called, there is more often than not some hesitation about whether or how to respond, for what is at stake is whether the temporary totalization performed by the name is politically enabling or paralyzing, whether the foreclosure, indeed the violence, of the totalizing reduction of identity performed by that particular hailing is politically strategic or regressive or, if paralyzing and regresive, also enabling in some way. (96)

… In this sense disciplinary discourse does not unilaterally constitute a subject in Foucault, or rather, if it does, it simultaneously constitutes the condition for the subject’s de-constitution . What is brought into being through the performative effect of the interpellating demand is much more than a “subject,” for the “subject” created is not for that reason fixed in place: it becomes the occasion for a further making.

Indeed, I would add, a subject only remains a subject through a reiteration or rearticulation of itself as a subject, and this dependency of the subject on repetition for coherence may constitute that subject’s incoherence, its incomplete character. This repetition or, better, iterability thus becomes the non-place of subversion, the possibility of a re-embodying of the subjectivating norm that can redirect its normativity. (99)

butler subjectivation assujetissement

Butler, Judith. The Psychic Life of Power. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1997.

The term “subjectivation” carries the paradox in itself: assujetissement denotes both the becoming of the subject and process of subjection —one inhabits the figure of autonomy only by becoming subjected to power, a subjection which implies a radical dependency. (83)

butler desubjectivation

Butler, Judith. The Psychic Life of Power. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1997.

According to the logic of conscience, which fully constrains Althusser, the subject’s existence cannot be linguistically guaranteed without passionate attachment to the law. This complicity at once conditions and limits the viability of a critical interrogation of the law. One cannot criticize too far the terms by which one’s existence is secured.

But if the discursive possibilities for existence exceed the reprimand voiced by the law, would that not lessen the need to confirm one’s guilt and embark on a path of conscientiousness as a way to gain a purchase on identity? What are the conditions under which our very sense of linguistic survival depends upon our willingness to turn back upon ourselves, that is, in which attaining recognizable being requires self-negation, requires existing as a self-negating being in order to attain and preserve a status as “being” at all?

In a Nietzschean vein, such a slave morality may be predicted upon the sober calculation that it is better to “be” enslaved in such a way than not to “be” at all. But the terms that constrain the option to being versus not being “call for” another kind of response. Under what condition does a law monopolize the terms of existence in so thorough a way? Or is this a theological fantasy of the law?

Is there a possibility of being elsewhere or otherwise, without denying our complicity in the law that we oppose? Such a possibility would require a different kind of turn, one that, enabled by the law, turns away from the law, resisting its lure of identity, an agency that outruns and counters the conditions of its emergence. Such a turn demands a willingness not to be — a critical desubjectivation —in order to expose the law as less powerful than it seems. What forms might linguistic survival take in this desubjectivized domain. How would one know one’s existence? Through what terms would it be recognized and recognizable?

How are we to understand the desire to be as a constitutive desire? How is such a desire exploited not only by a law in the singular, but by laws of various kinds such that we yield to subordination in order to maintain some sense of social “being”? (129-130)

butler chapter 5

redirecting rage against the lost other, defiling the sanctity of the dead for the purposes of life, raging against the dead in order not to join them.

Survival is a matter of avowing the trace of loss that inaugurates one’s own emergence.

To make of melancholia a simple “refusal” to grieve its losses conjures a subject who might already be something without its losses, that is, one who voluntarily extends and retracts his or her will.

Yet the subject who might grieve is implicated in a loss of autonomy that is mandated by linguistic and social life; it can never produce itself autonomously.

From the start, this ego is other than itself; what melancholia shows is that only by absorbing the other as oneself does one become something at all.

The social terms which make survival possible, which interpellate social existence, never reflect the autonomy of the one who comes to recognize him- or herself in them and, thus, stands a chance “to be” within language.

Indeed, by forfeiting that notion of autonomy survival becomes possible; the”ego” is released from its melancholic foreclosure of the social.  🙂 How is this?

The ego comes into being on the condition of the “trace” of the other, who is, at that moment of emergence, already at a distance. To accept the autonomy of the ego is to forget that trace; and to accept that trace is to embark upon a process of mourning that can never be complete, for no final severance could take place without dissolving the ego. 196

Regulatory power becomes “internal” only through the melancholic production of the figure of internal space, one that follows from the withdrawing of resources — a withdrawal and turning of language, as well. By withdrawing its own presence, power becomes an object lost — “a loss of a more ideal kind.” Eligible for melancholic incorporation, power no longer acts unilaterally on its subject.

Rather the subject is produced, paradoxically, through this withdrawal of power, its dissimulation and fabulation of the psyche as a speaking topos. Social power vanishes, becoming the object lost, or social power makes vanish, effecting a mandatory set of losses. Thus, it effects a melancholia that reproduces power as the psychic voice of judgment addressed to (turned upon) oneself, thus modeling reflexivity on subjection. 198