Author: logocentric

Butler melancholia chapter 5

Melancholia describes a process

  1. an originally external object is lost (person, ideal)
  2. refusal to break the attachment to such an object or ideal
  3. leads to withdrawal of the object into the ego
  4. replacement of the object by the ego
  5. setting up of an inner world in which a critical agency is split off from the ego
  6. proceeds to take ego as its object

The accusations that the critical agency levels against the ego turn out to be very much like the accusations that the ego would have leveled against the object or the ideal.

Thus the ego absorbs both the love and rage against the object. Melancholia appears to be a process of internalization, and one might well read its effects as a psychic state that has effectively substituted itself for the world in which hit swells. The effect of melancholia, then, appears to be the loss of the social world, the substitution of psychic parts and antagonisms for external relations among social actors: “an object-loss was transformed into an ego-loss and the conflict between the ego and the loved person into a cleavage between the critical activity of the ego and the ego as altered by identification” (Freud). 179-180

The ego is “altered by identification,” that is, altered by virtue of absorbing the object or pulling back its own cathexis onto itself. The ‘price” of such an identification, however, is that the ego splits into the critical agency and the ego as object of criticism and judgment. 180

Thus the relation to the object reappears “in” the ego, not merely as a mental event or singular representation, but as a scene of self-beratement the reconfigures the topography of the ego, a fantasy of internal partititon and judgment that comes to structure the representation of psychic life tout court. The ego now stands for the object, and the critical agency comes to represent the ego’s disowned rage, reified as a psychic agency separate from the ego itself. That rage, and the attachment it implies are “turned back upon” the ego, but from where? 180

… melancholia is not an asocial psychic state … melancholia is produced to the extent that the social world is eclipsed by the psychic, that a certain transfer of attachment from objects to ego takes place, not without a contamination of the psychic sphere by the social sphere that is abandoned.

In melancholia, not only is the loss of an other or an ideal lost to consciousness, but the social world in which such a loss became possible is also lost. The melancholic does not merely withdraw the lost object from consciousness, but withdraws into the psyche a configuration of the social world as well. … psychic life withdraws a social world into itself in an effort to annul the losses that world demands.

Thus, if the relation between melancholia and social life is to be reestablished, it is not to be measured by regarding the self-beratements of conscience as mimetic internalizations of the beratements leveled by social agencies of judgement or prohibition.  Rather,

forms of social power emerge that regulate what losses will and will not be grieved; in the social foreclosure of grief we might find what fuels the internal violence of conscience. 183

Butler on kinship and symbolic

Butler, Judith. “Quandaries of the Incest Taboo” (2000) in Undoing Gender. 2004, 152-160.

To insist that kinship is inaugurated through linguistic and symbolic means which are emphatically not social is, I believe, to miss the point that kinship is a contingent social practice. In my view, there is no symbolic position of Mother and Father that is not precisely the idealization and ossification of contingent cultural norms. 158

Thus, the law that would secure the incest taboo as the foundation of symbolic family structure states the universality of the incest taboo as well as its necesary symbolic consequences. One of the symblic consequences of the law so formulated is precisely the derealization of lesbian and gay forms of parenting, singly-mother households, blended family arrangements in which there may be more than one mother or father, where the symblic position is itself dispersed and rearticulated in new social formations.

If one holds to the enduring symbolic efficacy of this law, then it seems to me that it becomes difficult, if not impossible, to conceive of incestuous practice as taking place. It also becomes difficult if not impossible, to conceive of the psychic place of the parent or parents in ways that challenge heterosexual normativity. Whether it is a challenge to the universality of exogamic heterosexuality from within (through incest) or from rival social organizations of sexuality (lesbian, gay, bisexual, as well as nonmonogamous), each of these departures from the norm becomes difficult to acknowledge within the scheme that claims that the efficacious incest taboo determines the field of sexual intelligibility. In a sense, incest is disavowed by the law on incest, and the forms of sexuality that emerge at a distance from the norm become unintelligible (sometimes, for instance, even psychosis-inducing, as when analysts argue in the structuralist vein that same-sex parenting risks psychosis in the children who are raised under such conditions). 158

It might then be necessary to rethink the prohibition on incest as that which sometimes protects against a violation, and sometimes becomes the very instrument of a violation. What counters the incest taboo offends not only because it often involves the exploitation of those whose capacity for consent is questionable, but because it exposes the aberration in normative kinship, an aberration that might also, importantly, be worked against the strictures of kinship to force a revision and expansion of those very terms. If psychoanalysis, in its theory and practice, retains heterosexual norms of kinship as the basis of its theorization, if it accepts these norms as coextensive with cultural intelligibility, then it, too, becomes the instrument by which this melancholia is produced at a cultural level. Or if it insists that incest is under taboo and, therefore, could not exist, what forfeiture of analytic responsibility toward psychic suffering is thereby performed? These are both surely discontents with which we do not need to live. 160

Butler 1997 definition of performativity

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

… gender is performative, by which I meant that no gender is “expressed” by actions, gestures, or speech, but that the performance of gender produces retroactively the illusion that there is an inner gender core. That is, the performance of gender retroactively produces the effect of some true or abiding feminine essence or disposition, so that one cannot use an expressive model for thinking about gender. Moreover, I argued that gender is produced as a ritualized repetition of conventions, and that this ritual is socially compelled in part by the force of a compulsory heterosexuality. 144

Butler Psychic Life of Power Chapter 5 part 2

The masculine and feminine are not dispositions but accomplishments

Accomplishments which emerge in tandem with the achievement of heterosexuality. Here Freud articulates a cultural logic whereby gender is achieved and stabilized through heterosexual positioning, and where threats to heterosexuality thus become threats to gender itself. 135

Hence the fear of homosexual desire in a woman may induce a panic that she is losing her femininity, that she is not a woman, that she is no longer a proper woman, that if she is not quite a man, she is like one, and hence monstrous in some way. Or in a man, the terror of homosexual desire may lead to a terror of being construed as feminine, feminized, of no longer being properly a man, of being a “failed” man, or being in some sense a figure of monstrosity or abjection. 136

Consider that gender is acquired at least in part through the repudiation of homosexual attachments; the girl becomes a girl through being subject to a prohibition which bars the mother as an object of desire and installs that barred object as a part of the ego, indeed, as a melancholic identification. Thus the identification contains within it both the prohibition and the desire, and so embodies the ungrieved loss of the homosexual cathexis. If one is a girl to the extent that one does not want a girl, then wanting a girl will bring being a girl into question; within this matrix, homosexual desire thus panics gender. 136

___

Jay, Meg. “”Individual Differences in Melancholy Gender Among Women: Does Ambivalence Matter?” Journal of the Am erican Psychoanal Assoc 2007; 55; 1279

Drawing most closely from Freud’s theory of melancholy, she argued that, because these losses are unrecognized in a heterosexual culture, they can never be mourned, leading to unresolved grief and a melancholic identification with the same-sex lost object. To Butler, gender is that melancholic identification. To put it simply, we are what we cannot have, in that we settle for being personally what we cannot have sexually. Femininity and masculinity are the funeral garb we wear in tribute to our lost homoerotic possibilities.

To Butler, gender is that melancholic identification. In a heterosexual culture, “we are what we cannot have” as we settle for being personally what we cannot have sexually: men cling to a masculine identification because they lose their chance for experiencing erotic love for other men and women take on femininity because they cannot experience erotic love for other women. 117 Jay 2007a

Indeed, classical and contemporary psychoanalytic theory have noted that the path toward sexual and gender identification is different for males and females because the pre-oedipal primary attachment is homosexual for girls and heterosexual for boys. (1285 2007)

Butler Psychic Life of Power Chapter 5

What Freud here call the “character of the ego” appears to be a sedimentation of objects loved and lost, the archaeological remainder, as it were, of unresolved grief.

If the object can no longer exist in the external world, it will then exist internally, and that internalization will be a way to disavow the loss, to keep it at bay, to stay or postpone the recognition and suffering of loss. 134

Are those identifications that are central to the formation of gender produced through melancholic identification? 135

If the assumption of femininity and the assumption of masculinity proceed through the accomplishment of an always tenuous heterosexuality, we might understand the force of this accomplishment as mandating the abandonment of homosexual attachments or, perhaps more trenchantly, preempting the possibility of homosexual attachment, a foreclosure of possibility which produces a domain of homosexuality understood as unlivable passion and ungrievable loss. This heterosexuality is produced not only through implementing the prohibition on incest but, prior to that, by enforcing the prohibition on homosexuality. the oedipal conflict presumes that heterosexual desire has already been accomplished, that the distinction between heterosexual and homosexual has been enforced (a distinction which, after all, has no necessity); in this sense, the prohibition on incest presupposes the prohibition on homosexuality, for it presumes the heterosexualization of desire. 135

reading Butler’s chapter 2 in GT

Lacanian discourse centers, Butler says, on “a divide”, a primary or fundamental split that renders the subject internally divided and that establishes the duality of the sexes.

But why this exclusive focus on the fall into twoness?  Within Lacanian terms, it appears that division is always the effect of the law, and not a prexisting condition on which the law acts. 54-55

It is clearly not enough to claim thta this drama holds for Western, late capitalist household dwellers and that perhaps in some yet to be defined epoch some other Symbolic regime will goven the laguage of sexual ontology. By instituting the Symbolic as invariably phantasmatic, the “invariably” wanders into an “inevitably,” generating a description of sexuality in terms that promote cultural stasis as its result.

Žižek in Albania

Early 1980s early Yugoslav commie regime undergo a crisis of legitimation.  Milosevic, providing legitimacy for the local Serb republic, devil’s pact with nationalist intelligentsia.  The Poetic Military Complex.  Warriors together with Poets, look out.

Pere Josef, the Catholic France made a pact with Protestant Sweden against Catholic Austrian Empire to prevent unification of Germany.  This led to Hitler around  hundred years later

Pere Josef was a brutal torturer.  But something real crazy, wrote the most beautiful mystical reflections.  How is it possible that the same person who was a monster was in his inner life a breathtakingly refined mysticist.   For some the solution for this is Eastern Spirituality.  But this doesn’t work for Žižek.  The true heroic greatness is to sacrifice his soul, his ethics for his country.  Any fool can give his life.  But it’s the real here that will do evil for his country, rape woman, kill children.  The ethical temptation is presented as a weakness. If you can’t kill, you are weak the true here does it.  Himmler’s solution: Bhagavad Gita, the Indian epic.  Bhagavad appeals to God, how can I do it, women and children will suffer, people will suffer, answer of Christna is: substantial reality doesn’t exist, what we perceive of reality is false appearance. If you arrive at spiritual enlightenment, then you see that that’s the only reality. You can kill as much as you want, kill do it, it doesn’t count, nothing is really killed, it’s all only appearance.  So Himmler always carried Bhagavad Gita in his pocket. Buddhists are the same.   Suzuki, how to kill without feeling guilty.  False illusion of substantial reality, the Buddhist enlightenment, you are no longer part of reality, your mind is a medium of only observation, you only see a dance of shadows and appearance.  Somehow your body gets stuck on the point of the knife my hand is holding.   Rorty says, we don’t have any substantial identity, we are stories we tell ourselves.  “We listen to each other’s stories” the way to bring peace is to listen to each other’s stories, your folkloric dances … An enemy is someone whose stories we were not ready to hear.  Would you say that Hitler was our enemy because we were not ready to hear his story?  Abandon this conclusion of trying to understand each other

🙁 Žižek Inner authenticity is a LIE.   when someone approaches you trying to understand your dances and songs in order to understand you, this tribe just wanted to be good hosts to their guests, and so as good hosts they invented the dance and masks because this is what they thought the other wanted.

You should not do to them what they are doing to you.  Underground the movie is specifically for the Western Gaze. An image of Balkans, outside history, where they each drink fuck all the time. This is what the West wants to see and he stages it for them, the spectacle, what they want to see.

: ( Žižek its Racist Jokes that play a great progressive role.   They were not racist jokes attacking each other but a sharing of obscenities.  I’ll tell you a joke about me, you tell me a joke about yours.  The correct heroic thing to do is not to say “ohhh that’s racist” but to ironically assume it.    A Fairy comes to a Slovene farmer and asks him, I will do anything you want me to do, but I’ll give it to your neighbour twice as much. So the Slovene farmer says, take one of my eyes. So Montenegro, how does a Montenegro masturbate, he digs a whole in ground sticks his penis in and waits for an earthquake etc.  So Žižek argues that its the exchange of these racist jokes etc.  “I fucked your mother” and the message was let’s be truly friends and Žižek replies, only after I do your sister.  So after that they conducted this, they didn’t have to replay it, their friendship developed, in the morning all they would exchange was “mother” and “sister.”  A good feminist would say “after I fuck your father” etc.  [huh?]

He’s not saying let’s start telling dirty jokes about each other.   This ironic populist low humour.  In each culture this works in a specific way. It’s a general feature of culture.  When you look at a culture, how a community is held together, large and small.  You have explicit rules, and then you have ‘meta rules’ higher level rules that tell you how to relate to these rules.   We should never underestimate, the subversion, undermining of community … order but underneath, obsenity total.   Croatia … we had only a med student.  He slept in a room with a wash basin, and a mirror, photos of half-naked girls. Once a weeks  doc came from military hospital.  One guy stood up and said, “he had pains in his penis” What did you say? the doc asked.  Undress. He undressed, his penis is painful.  It’s only when I have an erection.  Okay, the doctor says jerk off.  Do it.  He tries to get erection, it doesn’t work. The doc goes to mirror and gets the photo and takes them back. The doc was looking at us and laughing. This is the most oppressive, there was no underming of power.  You need this OBSCENE underside.

Cold distanct dignity, undermine it with obscenity.  But the problem with today’s liberal ideology: a decaffinated Other, they celebrate the Other but its a decaffeneited Other.   Drinking, depair disappears, and Other becomes holistic and spiritual.  The problem of “tolerance”, excessive harrasment, ‘toxic’ neighbour:  pedophile, abusive father etc.   It went from Albanians, Northern Africa, now Romanians.  Italy is now a democracy becoming more and more insubstantial After the last elections, the Centre if falling apart and Buslusconi is the boss.  But what is it about Berlusconi.  Did you notice that B. is systematically undermining the minimal dignity of what it is to be the head of state.  His mistresses, his wife.  An obscene soap opera.  Ronald Reagan was the first that played upon presenting himself as an idiot.  He would mock his own stupidity.  Richard Nixon was the last AUTHENTIC TRAGIC president.  Italy is still a formal democracy but its becoming insubstantial, now you have an obscene head of state who openly mocks his wife’s affairs.  This shouldn’t deceive you, its the like the army in the army, ha ha, masturbate, but the POWER remains there.  POSTMODERN power, permissivity, the right to choice, but underneath its all the more powerful.  Old type patriarch, I don’t care how you feel, behave but you’re going to grandma.  Postmodern permissive non-authoritarian Father, You know how much your grandmother loves you but only visit her if you want to.  Under the permissiveness of free choice, is the message not only must you go … you must enjoy.

Death of liberal Fukuyama utopia died after 9/11.  Western liberal utopia is not the recipe for the rest of world.  The true utopia was the 1990s, the happy era of Clinton … this moment is dangerous.  It is because SHOCK THERAPY, Capitalism needs a new boost, this financial crisis a SHOCK THERAPY for capitalism.  How to use this crisis to break the last of the union trade syndicate.  Let’s use this crisis to break the trade unions.  There was 1 good argument for Capitalism until now, capitalism did need a dictator to survive, Chile etc. but after 10-20 years it did bring democracy.  But now this game is OVER.  CHINA, can we imagine to which person from our time will they be raising statues 100 years in the future.  The long time president of SINGAPORE.  He invented Capitalism with ASIAN values.  that is, Authoritarian Capitalism.     China today is now an ideal capitalist country.   Something is emerging in China, capitalism with Asian values, a capitalism more dynamic and productive than western capitalism but without democracy.  ITS OVER the natural alliance with Capitalism and Democracy.  BERLUSCONI is a European version of it.  Berlusconi plays a clown but he’s got the POWER.  What should be politics, the economy, is de-politicized, the economy is starting to function in an authoritarian way.  What is happening in today’s capitalism, contrary to NEGRI, it NEEDS more than EVER A STRONG STATE. the STATE is getting stronger and stronger, but it won’t be able to do so in a formally DEMOCRATIC way.  When Bush confronted the crisis and addressed the American people. He used almost the same terms as when he reacted to 9/11. Our way of live is in danger.  Bush presented the first bail out money 700 billion dollars.  First vote it was against, then all politicians came together and said to Congress Fuck Off, this is not time for democracy.  They declared an economic state of emergency.  Capitalism is less and less able to function in a democratic state.   Italy since Sept 2008 is in a state of emergency.  This enables government to use army against immigrants, mafia … it will not be classical emergency state, where you wake up and there is curfew, no, its gradual, you’ll still be able to have all your pleasures.  The rise of IMMATERIAL LABOUR. when Marx spoke about it GENERAL INTELLECT, the collective practical knowlecge which is more imporatant than labour time. The source of capitalist wealth is no longer primarily worker exploitation, but COLLECTIVE KNOWLEDGE.  Labour measured by time becomes meaningless.  What Marx didn’t see is the possibility, that capitalism succeeded in REPRIVATISING the general intellect itself.  BILL GATES, how is he rich?  He didn’t exploit his workers, he didn’t get extra profit.  It isn’t from Rent to profit, but from profit to RENT.  It’s not PROFIT, this price is basically totally independent of production costs, he does take into consideration production costs, ITS RENT.  Bill Gates privatised part of the COMMON SPACE and we have to pay him rent.  the moment you deal with immaterial property, knowledge property.  It’s not like making a widget to sell on the market.  With immaterial goods, the state has to intervene.  Bill Gates, with intellectual property, it’s more complex.  Try to privatize some genetic structure. You need an exceptionally strong state to set the parameters. All the problem of copyright. The stronger and stronger state is needed and CANNOT do it in a democratic way.

COMMUNISM NOW!  Commies before were not strong enough in realizing what a terrifying experience communism was.  The German FIlm Lives of OTHERS.  Liberals don’t get the commie tragedy.  If you know anything of how socialism functions, if you have a corrupted secret police, where the film goes wrong, in a country East Germany, the writer would have been total observation even without somebody wanting to sleep with his wife.  Without religion good people do good things, and bad people do bad things. With religion good people do bad things.  The tragedy, is not bad people doing bad things, its good people starting to do good end up doing BAD things.  We have a whole series of antagonisms today:

– IMMIGRANTS  The walls are going up, West Bank EU, Mexico

– ECOLOGY: you can’t solve with market measure.

– Intellectual property

– Bio genetics; Fukuyama thinks now, biogenetics is strong argument enough all the coordinates are mixed.  There is now a wheel chair run totally by thought.  He can read if you think strongly about forward, backward, left right.  The wheelchair moves according to thought  Our being human is I have my FREE THOUGHT.  The problem is, what goes out, also goes in.  They already isolated the area of brain when you go into panic, then they bombard you and you are already in panic.  They have a machine, press a button all people are in panic.  Things are happening, the affects most ELEMENTARY what it is to be HUMAN.  This is getting underminded the inside/outside. what I think is inside, and reality is outside.

Clinton says this.  The result is hunger, many countries Indonesia, Haiti, the best land was privatized companies, who bought up best lands to export. This export industrial agriculatural plants.   HUNGER IS NEW PHENOMENON. Haiti is selling mud cakes. Cakes made of mud. They have minerals that fill your stomach.  FOOD IS TOO IMPORTANT TO BE LEFT TO THE MARKET says bill clinton. But Z. says what about education, arms industry, and health can’t simply be left to the market.

🙂 Butler argues about the conflation of desire with the real.  What does she mean by this?  That parts of the “literal” penis and the “literal” vagina, which cause pleasure and desire

dfw his legacy

DEATH IS NOT THE END:
David Foster Wallace: His Legacy and his Critics
By Jon Baskin

David Foster Wallace, who hanged himself in his home last September, wrote about authenticity, self-consciousness and the pursuit of happiness in America. It became a commonplace and then a cliché and then almost a taunt to call him the greatest writer of his generation, yet his project remained only vaguely understood when it was understood at all. With the benefit of time, it will be recognized that Wallace had less in common with Eggers and Franzen than he did with Dostoevsky and Joyce. Against what he believed to be the outmoded theoretical commitments of his predecessors and contemporaries, he labored to return literary fiction to the deep problems of subjective experience. Continue reading “dfw his legacy”

Chiesa

In what precise sense should Marx’s materialism be regarded as a doctrine that conceives of truth as a material cause?

And, most importantly, can Marx still be, in spite of marxism, the man of truth whose revolution of thought psychoanalysis should escort until a new political paradigm is formed?

The reason why class struggle should remain the privileged model, to insist on class struggle occupying a position of centrality is precisely not to invoke the ‘working class’ as the only agent of emancipation. In a sense, that is already to treat class insurgency as if it were yet another ‘multi-cultural’ demand for recognition.

It’s perfectly possible to imagine a capitalism in which, for instance, the demand for recognition of alternative sexualities has been entirely satisfied. But class struggle in the Marxist sense could not be satisfied by anything short of the ‘obliteration of bourgeoisie as a symbolic social space’ (which is by no means the same thing as the extermination of the members of the bourgeoisie).

In a very real sense, the proletariat is that very obliteration. This point is perhaps best made by a joke recently recounted by Lenin on the Tomb. An IRA man in a balaclava is at the gates of heaven when St Peter comes to him and says, ‘I’m afraid I can’t let you in’. ‘Who wants to get in?’ the IRA man retorts. ‘You’ve got twenty minutes to get the fuck out.’

For Zizek, Laclau makes the mistake of treating the critique of political economy as a ‘positive ontic science’ (just as his dismissal of class struggle makes the mistake of treating the proletariat as if it were a positive ontic entity, ‘the working class’, rather than a ‘substance-less subject’). What this ignores is what Zizek, after Derrida, called the ‘spectral’ dimension of Marx. In Marx’s ‘hauntology’ – where undead labour is the correlate of vitalized commodities – it is understood that fiction structures reality. To call capital a ‘self-engendering monster’ is not at all to speak metaphorically.

There is a lot to be done with this. Firstly, we can recognize the current political landscape as inherently populist. It is not only, as Zizek said, that populism (whether it be the ‘progressive’ populism of the anti-capitalist or anti-globalization movements or the reactionary populism of the fuel protesters or the Countryside Alliance) is the complement to administrative post-politics. It is that administrative post-politics is already itself populist. Badiou has argued that post-political malaise is not some accidental side-effect of parliamentary democracy but the terminal phase into which it inevitably declines.  Populism projects a restricted sense of possibilities, always offers us a choice from a fixed and pre-existent menu. It is the expression of the always-already, the anti-Event.

ziarek abstract value social death 4

To assert the absolute autonomy of social construction, to deny its dependence on the residue of the material and nonidentical, would, paradoxically, lead to another form of free-fl oating idealism. In the context of Adorno’s work we could say that feminist critiques of the essentialism/social construction binary have to “acknowledge the insolubility of an empirical, nonidentical moment” within social mediation, “a moment that doctrines of the absolute subject, idealist systems of identity, are not permitted to acknowledge as indissoluble” (17).

Ultimately, the reinterpretation of the essentialism/social construction binary in the context of use/exchange value relativizes and contests the fi xity of this opposition. First of all, both of these terms emerge from and to a large extent reproduce the historical process of the commodification of bodies. Furthermore, it is only through the mutual negation of their untruth that these opposites can demonstrate their partial insight. Thus, the falsity of antiessentialism lies in the “absolutization” of the autonomy of construction, in the denial of the persistence of the material and nonidentical even in the most abstract social form of mediation.

Nonetheless, it reveals the truth of the historical fact that in capitalism there is nothing, including bodies themselves, that is not mediated by social production and economic exchange. On the other hand, the obvious untruth of essentialism lies in its confusion of the limits of mediation with immediacy, as if it were possible to transcend production and exchange and find a positive value in bodies themselves. The essentialist argument forgets the fact that the limits of social construction can be indicated only by exposing its internal contradictions, and “not through recourse to something transcendent” (Adorno, Hegel 27). Yet, through this falsity, the recurrent suspicions of essentialism inadvertently bear witness to the remainder of damaged materiality, exteriority, and otherness, which, although reduced to social waste, nonetheless constitute nonsublatable limits of construction/social labor.

By misreading this remainder as essentialism and by disregarding the damaging abstraction of social form, the social construction argument remains in complicity with the metaphysics of production, which asserts the “absolute” autonomy of labor and “tolerates nothing outside itself”. 94-95

The reinterpretation of the essentialism/social construction binary in the context of commodification shows that the domination is perpetuated not only by the concealment of social mediation behind the appearances of immediacy but also by the abstraction of social value from all remnants of materiality, becoming, concrete labor, and the vulnerability of bodies.

Feminist criticism has addressed very well the problem of immediacy, by reconstructing again and again the obfuscated process of mediation and by demonstrating that what is posited as an intrinsic signification of the body is in fact produced by social domination. Yet, this reconstruction of the social mediation of embodiment neither diagnoses the full extent of bodily injuries nor poses a sufficient challenge to essentialism, which is why the problem of essentialism keeps reappearing in feminist theory.

What still has to be contested is the specific mode of social mediation characteristic of commodity fetishism, namely, the abstraction and the autonomy of social form, which, reproduced under the rubric of “social construction,” disavows the traumatic limits of signification and reduces every trace of nonsublatable alterity into social nonexistence.

ziarek abstract value social death 3

Ziarek, Ewa Plonowska. “The Abstract Soul of the Commodity and the Monstrous Body of the Sphinx: Commodification, Aesthetics, and the Impasses of Social Construction” differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 16:2 (2005)

We may wonder at this point whether feminist theories of social construction are not vulnerable to a similar critique of the ideology of labor, which sets up production as “absolute.”  Insofar as these theories consider any “outside” to the abstract mediation of bodies as the remnant of essentialism, they turn social construction into a “metaphysical principle pure and simple,” to use Adorno’s term—that is, into a metaphysics of autonomous production that knows no limits.

Let us notice here in particular a parallel between the speculative “soul” of the commodity produced through the reiteration of market exchanges and the speculative character of sex constituted by the reiteration of gender norms, as analyzed by Butler. According to Butler, “ ‘[S]ex’ is a regulatory ideal whose materialization is compelled, and this materialization takes place [. . .] through certain highly regulated practices” (1). By extending Butler’s influential argument, we could say that sex, like the soul of the commodity, is the most ideal effect of the economic formation of gender, though it nonetheless appears as the most material property of the body.

As Marx’s famous definition of commodity fetishism similarly suggests, the “phantom” immediacy of value is a speculative effect of the dialectic of capital, which reflects the social relations among men and their labor as the “fantastic” properties of things.

Yet to expose the illusory immediacy of sex as the most speculative result of social mediation is merely the first step of the critique of the commodification of bodies. The second necessary move is to contest the abstraction of social mediation/social construction as an equally illusory autonomy from every residue of materiality and nonidentity.