Butler, Judith. Antigone’s Claim
Category: incest
decline of paternal function
Campbell, Kirsten. Jacques Lacan and Feminist Epistemology. Florence, KY, USA: Routledge, 2004. 155
However, this identificatory process also fails to properly secure and maintain the paternal function. In Lacan’s account of the modern family, the paternal figure is subject to constant attack. For this reason, he perceives ‘the social decline of the paternal imago’ (1938a: 200, FC: 72).
Lacan’s argument in his later seminar Le sinthome (1975– 1976) (S23) (1975d) echoes this claim that the father is a position which must continually be upheld, as there is no support for the paternal function, no Other of the Other. Roudinesco argues that ‘[t]he story is that of modern man, man in our modern civilization, marked by the ineluctable decline of the ideals of the paternalistic family’ (1997: 215). Accordingly, the mark of modernity is not a normative, integrating Oedipus complex that succeeds; but rather one that fails.
The decline of the paternal function structures the modern subject in a failure to surmount its Oedipus complex. The failure of this complex should be understood as the failure of its resolution. A ‘successful’ resolution of this complex involves a repression of the desire for the mother, and the concomitant formation of the ego-ideal and super-ego in paternal identification.
When Lacan describes a ‘failure’ of the Oedipus complex, his argument is not that the complex itself fails, but rather that there is a failure of its paternal resolution. Lacan argues that in the failed modern Oedipus complex the structure of subjective identification shifts from that of traditional patriarchy to its modern form.
In making this argument, Lacan develops the otherwise blurred distinction in Freud’s work between the super-ego and the ego-ideal (Borch-Jacobsen 1991: 37). Lacan draws out two aspects of the paternal function, one that forms the imaginary ego-ideal – ‘be like me, the father’ – and the other which forms the repressive super-ego – ‘do not be like me, because you cannot have the mother’. 155
Lacan’s description of the ‘failed’ Oedipus complex posits a successful sublimation of the imaginary ego-ideal with its injunction ‘be like me’, but also a failure of the formation of the repressive super-ego with its categorical imperative of ‘do not be like me’. The subject does not repudiate maternal desire because the father says ‘no’, but rather because the subject gives up that desire in order to be like the father.154
identification with the socially privileged paternal figure rather than the repressive patriarchal father produces the modern subject.
… the subject sacrifices the mother for paternal identification, and receives in return the power and prestige that the father offers.
In the modern social world, the father represents (and has) social power and prestige in the parental relationship (Brennan 1993: 58). This symbolic and material economy privileges the bearer of the phallus, which the father claims or is given. For this reason, the child perceives the father as having power, prestige and privilege.
Teresa Brennan describes this operation of paternal identification as a process of the recognition of power, where the masculine subject recognizes the father ‘as a shaper and acknowledged recognizer, a namer, into whose dominating kingdom he will one day come’ (1993: 53). With paternal identification, the masculine subject accepts the Law of the Father – ‘I cannot have the mother’ – in return for the power of the father and access to other women.
… that ‘the modern form of the Oedipus, characterized by an ambivalent and “devouring” identification with the real father’, produces a subject that engages in aggressive rivalry with the father (1991: 40). This father is the symbolic father, the paternal legislator whose position the son usurps in his incorporating identification, as he cannot do in reality. With that identification, the son commits a symbolic murder of the father. The symbolic father comes to represent the real father of the subject, who can then incorporate the paternal figure as ego-ideal.
This process is an identification of the order of ‘wanting to be like’. That identification incorporates what Lacan describes as the single mark (trait unaire), the unifying trait of the phallus of the father, which functions as a representative of the Law of the Father and of a cultural order which privileges him.
sharpe jouissance mother
Sharpe, Matthew. Slavoj Žižek: a little piece of the real. Burlington Vt: Ashgate, 2004.
… the maternal body is held to be subjects’ first love object. … Her body is at least retroactively perceived by the subject ot have been the repository of a sovereign jouissance yet unhindered by the sacrifices demanded of us as speaking, socialised subjects.
So, by asserting that the imposition of the Law of culture actually liberates the child’s desire from its abjection before the mother, Žižek contends that unshackled jouissance is far from the untarnished Good … What Žižek suggest, indeed, is that the ‘primordial repression’ of this Thing operated by the absolute prohibition of incest is minimally necessary for subjectivity to emerge. This action ‘castrates‘ the subject — no matter of which sex — not in any literal sense, but in the sense of cutting it off irrevocably from its first object of desire [da Mada RT]. It frees subjects from an over-proximity to the lethal substance of jouissance that would render them incapable of anything resembling normalised social existence. (67)
gayle rubin’s essay, 35 years later
Rubin, Gayle. “The Traffic in Women” Toward Anthropology of Women. Ed. Rayna R. Reiter. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1975, pp. 157-210.
🙂 To what extent is Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble the natural heir to Gayle Rubin’s landmark 1975 essay? Butler wrote her book 15 years later and in it she gave explicit recognition to Rubin’s crucial and innovative theory of the sex/gender system. That is before Butler then proceeds to ‘jump off’ from where Rubin leaves off. But perhaps this metaphor is misplaced. Butler did not jump off from Rubin’s end point and proceed to enlarge upon her argument. Butler’s early theoretical intervention owes much to Rubin in that it allows Butler a clear platform to articulate a deconstructive strategy that enables her to expose the clear lines of an argument regarding ‘sex’ and ‘gender’ that she would go on then to dismantle and that would produce the concept of “performativity” which gave a generation of social and political theorists a way out of a post-Althusserian quandary of thinking the materiality of subjectivity and ideology in a innovative and theoretically productive ways.
But now Butler herself, 15 or so years on after her landmark intervention is facing a number of challenges of her own. Are Rubin’s roots in a Marxist problematic that Butler exorcised returning, as ziz would say, in the real, to haunt Butler? This is not to argue an argument maintaining that Butler’s straying from a Marxist paradigm is coming back to haunt her. Such calls for orthodoxy are not what is needed given what is required in political theory in the 21st C.
She starts with what is ‘the’ cause of women’s oppression, doesn’t dismiss a sole cause out of hand but states, ‘Instead, I want to sketch some elements of an alternate explanation of the problem.” 158 She begins with Claude Lévi-Strauss and Sigmund Freud. Because reading these works enables one to begin to understand within their social apparatus how it takes females as ‘raw materials and fashions domesticated women as products.” She mentions the necessity of women in the sphere of reproduction of labor, domestic duties in order to maintain the health of the workers. But makes the important point that “Capitalism has taken over, and rewired, notions of male and female which predate it by centuries. No analysis of the reproduction of labour power under capitalism can explain foot-binding, chastity belts … … the analysis of reproduction of labor power does not even explain why it is usually women who do domestic work in the home rather than men. 163 Rubin quotes Marx regarding the fact that along with human biology and physical conditions, what also factors into the equation with regards to a clear understanding of what is required to reproduce the working class is a historical and moral element. And finishes her part on Marx by stating, “Only be subjecting this “historical and moral element” to analysis can the structure of sex oppression be delineated (164).
“Sex is sex, but what counts as sex is equally culturally determined and obtained. Every society also has a sex/gender system – a set of arrangements by which the biological raw material of human sex and procreation is shaped by human, social intervention … ”
It is this sex/gender system that Rubin targets as ripe for analysis, like the mode of production was for Marx. In fact Rubin’s analysis so far draws many analogies and even a homology to Marxist analysis. Just as Marxists begin with the an understanding of how material life of society is reproduced, Rubin looks at the way in which all societies “will have some systematic ways to deal with sex, gender, and babies.” But she states, “it is important … to maintain a distinction between the human capacity and necessity to create a sexual world, and the empirically oppressive ways in which sexual worlds have been organized.” In order for Rubin to properly study sex/gender system she must turn to the study of kinship systems. To this end Rubin sees herself as taking up where Engels left off in his study “The Origins of Family, Private Property and the State.” And she starts with Claude Lévi-Strauss whose The Elementary Structures of Kinship in Rubin’s mind is a bold attempt to conceive of kinships as “an imposition of cultural organization upon the facts of biological procreation.” 170-171
[T]he incest taboo imposes the social aim of exogamy and alliance upon the biological events of sex and procreation. The incest taboo divides the universe of sexual choice into categories of permitted and prohibited sexual partners. Specifically, by forbidding unions within a group it enjoins marital exchange between groups. … [T]he taboo on incest results in a wide network of relations, a set of people whose connections with one another are a kinship structure 174.
But here Rubin drills down a bit further and asks, if it is women, along with yams, pigs, mats and shells etc. that are being exchanged, and these exchanges create and organization. Who is being organized. It is the men who exchange the women, who give and take the women who are linked, “the women being a conduit of a relationship rather than a partner to it.” 174
“Exchange of women” is a shorthand for expressing that the social relations of a kinship system specify that men have certain rights in their female kin, and that women do not have the same rights either to themselves or to their male kin. In this sense, the exchange of women is a profound perception of a system in which women do not have full rights to themselves. 177
“Gender is a socially imposed division of the sexes” 179 “Far from being an expression of natural differences, exclusive gender identity is the suppression of natural similarities” 180
“Moreover the incest taboo presupposes a prior, less articulate taboo on homosexuality. 180
In summary, some basic generalities about the organization of human sexuality can be derived from an exegesis of Lévi-Strauss’s theories of kinship. These are the incest taboo, obligatory heterosexuality, and an asymmetric division of the sexes. The asymmetry of gender -the difference between exchanger and exchanged-entails the constraint of female sexuality. 183
But there is an “economics” of sex and gender, and what we need is a political economy of sexual systems. We need to study each society to determine the exact mechanisms by which particular conventions of sexuality are produced and maintained. The “exchange of women” is an initial step toward building an arsenal of concepts with which sexual systems can be described. 177
Žižek on Butler
Žižek, Slavoj. “Passionate (Dis)Attachments, or, Judith Butler as a Reader of Freud” The Ticklish Subject. London: Verso, 1999, 247-312.
247 – 248 opposition between hysteria and perversion
🙂 Žižek argues the pervert sidesteps the unconscious in his direct acting out of his fantasies directly. Whereas the hysteric is always questioning, the pervert knows exactly what the other wants.
This opposition of perversion and hysteria is especially pertinent today, in our era of the ‘decline of Oedipus’, when the paradigmatic mode of subjectivity is no longer the subject integrated into the paternal Law through the symbolic castration, but the ‘polymorphously perverse’ subject following the superego injunction to enjoy. The question of how we are to hystericize the subject caught in the closed loop of perversion (how we are to inculcate the dimension of lack and questioning in him) becomes more urgent in view of today’s political scene: the subject of late capitalist market relations is perverse, while the ‘democratic subject’ (the mode of subjectivity implied by the modern democracy) is inherently hysterical (the abstract citizen correlative to the empty place of Power). In other words, the relationship between the bourgeois caught up in the market mechanisms and the citoyen engaged in the universal political sphere is, in its subjective economy, the relationship between perversion and hysteria. So when Rancière calls our age ‘post-political’, he is aiming precisely at this shift in political discourse (the social link) from hysteria to perversion: ‘post-politics’ is the perverse mode of administering social affairs, the mode deprived of the ‘hystericized’ universal/out-of-joint dimension (248).
🙂 I think Žižek is pulling Butler’s chain. 249 he cites coprophagy (eating shit) and breaks it down into its hysterical (if I eat shit will the other still love me? Will he leave me? What am I to the Other’s desire?) Žižek is implying that her form of theory is ‘perverse’ to the core. Calling Foucault (and Deleuze and Guttari’s Anti-Oedipus) a perverse philosopher. Why?
… the pervert bravely goes to the limit in undermining the very foundations of symbolic authority and fully endorsing the multiple productivity of pre-symbolic libidinal flux … the model of false subversive radicalization that fits the existing power constellation perfectly … the model of the false transgressive radicality (250-251).
It is not enough to say as Foucault does, that power in invoking its law engenders a flourishing of objects it itself was set up to legislate and control, they “set in motion a wild proliferation of what they endeavour to suppress and regulate: the very ‘repression’ of sexuality gives rise to new forms of sexual pleasure. But what Foucault misses according to Žižek, is the erotic, libidinal element that comes about in the subject as they are getting the whip. In other words subjection is kind of sexy for the subjected, in that, for example, the confessional activity “itself becomes sexualized” (253). Žižek cites political correct attitude of not calling stupid people ‘retarded’ but instead ‘mentally challenged.’ For Žižek the guy that self-flagellates himself in an attempt to prevent himself falling prey to sexual thoughts, is itself getting off, getting a sexual charge from the act of flagellation.
255 Žižek makes the interesting point that resisting colonial domination was inherent to colonial domination itself. “anti-colonialist national liberation movements are strict sensu generated by colonialist oppression” (255). The native moves from his passive identity in traditions and culture, to an identity spurred on by the event of colonial domination. “it is this oppression which brings about the shift from passive ethnic self-awareness grounded in mythical tradition tot he eminently modern will to assert one’s ethnic identity in the form of a national-state” (255).
Although Chechens evoke their hundred-year-old struggle against Russian domination, today’s form of this struggle is clearly the outcome of the modernizing effect of the Russian colonization of traditional Chechen society (255).
🙂 For Žižek active resistance is inherent to the forces of domination itself, by producing an excess the forces of domination thereby produce a resistance that goes beyond, an excess of resistance. So just because resistance is generated by the very power that it opposes, doesn’t mean its co-opted in advance.
… the key point is that through the effect of proliferation, of producing an excess of resistance, the very inherent antagonism of a system may well set in motion a process which leads to its own ultimate downfall (256).
The Effect Can ‘Outdo’ Its Cause
[Foucault] precludes the possibility that the system itself, on account of its inherent inconsistency, may give birth to a force whose excess it is no longer able to master and which thus detonates its unity, its capacity to reproduce itself. In short, Foucault does not consider the possibility of an effect escaping, outgrowing its cause, so that although it emerges as a form of resistance to power and is as such absolutely inherent to it, it can outgrow and explode it. … (the effect can ‘outdo’ its cause) (256).
And this is why Foucault lacks the appropriate notion of the subject: the subject is by definition in excess over its cause, and as such it emerges with the reversal of the repression of sexuality into the sexualisation of the repressive measures themselves (257).
From Resistance to the Act
For Lacan, radical rearticulation of the predominant symbolic Order is altogether possible – this is what his notion of point de capiton (the ‘quilting point’ or the Master-Signifier) is about: when a new point de capiton emerges, the socio-symbolic field is not only displaced, its very structuring principle changes. One is thus tempted to reverse the opposition between and Lacan and Foucault as elaborated by Butler (Lacan constrains resistance to imaginary thwarting, while Foucault, who has a more pluralistic notion of discourse as a heterogeneous field of multiple practices, allows for a more thorough symbolic subversion and rearticulation): it is Foucault who insists on the immanence of resistance to Power, while Lacan leaves open the possibility of a radical rearticulation of the entire symbolic field by means of an act proper, a passage through ‘symbolic death’. In short, it is Lacan who allows us to conceptualize the distinction between imaginary resistance (false transgression that reasserts the symbolic status quo and even serves as a positive condition of its functioning) and actual symbolic rearticulation via the intervention of the Real of an act (262).
ONLY ON THIS LEVEL – IF WE TAKE INTO ACCOUNT THE LACANIAN NOTIONS OF POINT DE CAPITON AND THE ACT AS REAL – DOES A MEANINGFUL DIALOGUE WITH BUTLER BECOME POSSIBLE.
🙂 Have to hand it to him, Žižek finds the crucial Butler quote, here it is:
What would it mean for the subject to desire something other than its continued ‘social existence’? If such an existence cannot be undone without falling into some kind of death, can existence nevertheless be risked, death courted or pursued, in order to expose and open to transformation the hold of social power on the conditions of life’s persistence? The subject is compelled to repeat the norms by which it is produced, but the repetition establishes a domain of risk, for if one fails to reinstate the norm ‘in the right way,’ one becomes subject to further sanction, one feels the prevailing conditions of existence threatened. And yet, without a repetition that risks life – in its current organization – how might we begin to imagine the contingency of that organization, and performatively reconfigure the contours of the conditions of life?
One should criticize Butler for conflating this act in its radical dimension with the performative reconfiguration of one’s symbolic condition via its repetitive displacements: the two are not the same – that is to say, one should maintain the crucial distinction between a mere ‘performative reconfiguration’, a subversive displacement which remains within the hegemonic field and, as it were, conducts an internal guerrilla war of turning the terms of the hegemonic field against itself, and the much more radical act of a thorough reconfiguration of the entire field which redefines the very conditions of socially sustained performativity. It is thus Butler herself who ends up in a position of allowing precisely for marginal ‘reconfigurations’ of the predominant discourse – who remains constrained to a position of ‘inherent transgression’, which needs as a point of reference the Other in the guise of a predominant discourse that can only be marginally displaced or transgressed (264).
From the Lacanian standpoint, Butler is thus simultaneously too optimistic and too pessimistic. On the one hand she overestimates the subversive potential of disturbing the functioning of the big Other through the practices of performative reconfiguration/displacement: such practices ultimately support what they intend to subvert, since the very field of such ‘transgressions’ is already taken into account, even engendered, by the hegemonic form of the big Other – what Lacan calls ‘the big Other’ are symbolic norms and their codified transgression. The Oedipal order, this gargantuan symbolic matrix embodied in a vast set of ideological institutions, rituals and practices, is a much too deeply rooted and ‘substantial’ entity to be effectively undermined by the marginal gestures of performative displacement. On the other hand, Butler does not allow for the radical gesture of the thorough restructuring of the hegemonic symbolic order in its totality (264).
🙂 And Slavoj, what, pray tell, is that ‘radical gesture’?
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 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
lloyd melancholia
Lloyd, Moya. Judith Butler: From Norms to Politics. Cambridge MA: Polity Press, 2007.
Mourning: takes place when an object (such as a loved one, an ideal or a country) is lost. In such cases, the libido (mental energy) that was once invested in that object gradually detaches from it and is cathected onto (invested in) another object. The subject thus comes to terms with its loss and is able to form a new emotional attachment —to fall in love for instance. At this point, ‘the ego becomes free and uninhibited again’ and the work of mourning is completed.
Melancholia: The individual in this case is unable to get over its loss in the usual way. Instead it incorporates the lost object into its ego. It identifies with it, taking on certain of its characteristics. As a consequence, ‘a new structure of identity’ is created in which certain qualities of the lost other are permanently internalized in the ego. Diana Fuss captures this process nicely when she notes that ‘by incorporating, the spectral remains of the dearly departed love-object, the subject vampiristically comes to life’. Where mourning is the ‘normal’ reaction to loss, melancholia is a pathological response (since the melancholic subject is unable to accept its loss).
“the character of the ego is a precipitate of abandoned object-cathexes and … it contains the history of those object-choices.” To rephrase, the ego is formed melancholically. It is an effect of its identifications. It is this idea that Butler takes over and applies to the question of gender identity.
When Butler talks about the gender identity being structured melancholically she writes that ‘the process of internalizing and sustaining lost loves is crucial to the formation of the ego “and its object-choice”‘ (Gender T. 74 cited in Lloyd 84). It is not only the ego that is formed melancholically, it is also the subject’s sexual orientation — their object choice. That is, whether they choose an object (person) of the opposite sex to or of the same sex as themselves.
According to Butler, when the child reaches the Oedipal phase, they have already been ‘subjected to prohibitions which “dispose” them in distinct sexual directions’ (GT 82, Lloyd 84). They have already acquired heterosexual desires, albeit incestuous ones.
The fact that at the resolution of the Oedipal phase the boy identifies with his father, following the logic of melancholia, must mean that he has lost his father as an object of desire and has not been able to let go of —or grieve— that loss. Ego formation, after all, requires the internalization of —or identification with— the lost object. Similarly the fact that the girl identifies ultimately with her mother must again mean that she has lost her as a love object and has been unable to grieve that loss.
In both cases the lost desire for the parent of the same sex is installed melancholically in the ego. Heterosexual desire is bought at the price of denying —or, in psychoanalytic language, disavowing or foreclosing (what we might think of as negating or repressing)— prior homosexual desire. Heterosexuality thus has a melancholic structure. (85)
When Freud tells the story of the Oedipus complex he narrates it in terms of the taboo against incest, a taboo which he, like Lévi-Strauss … saw as foundational to culture and society. When Butler re-tells the story, she does so in order to uncover what is hidden in Freud’s narrative: that the Oedipus complex relies upon a prior taboo against homosexuality.
The psychoanalytic story of desire, as told by Freud, is thus incomplete: it does not, perhaps cannot, tell of the loss of same-sex desire that exists prior to the Oedipal scene where the incestuous heterosexual love object is renounced and where the subject is initiated into both their sexual identity and the moral order (85).
lloyd oedipal
Lloyd, Moya. Judith Butler: From Norms to Politics. Cambridge MA: Polity Press, 2007.
According to Lévi-Strauss there is a universal law that regulates the exchange of women in all kinship systems: this is the incest taboo, which ensures that women are exchanged between clans of men not related by blood. The incest taboo is crucial in two ways
1. it generates a non-incestuous heterosexuality
2. the taboo represents the crucial step in the transition from nature to culture. It inaugurates society. … the taboo leads to compulsory heterosexuality. How?
It divides the universe of sexual choice into categories of permitted and prohibited sexual partners and it presupposes a prior less articulate taboo on homosexuality. Incest taboo = invariant transcultural symbolic law
Because Rubin believes all humans are sexually polymorphous, she adheres to an idea of ‘sexuality “before the law”‘ rather than as Butler would have it, sexuality as an effect of the law (81).
… it is clear that much of the conceptual apparatus Butler deploys in her own analysis of Lévi-Strauss, Freud and Lacan is borrowed from Rubin’s earlier text: her assumption of a prior prohibition on homosexuality, an understanding of heterosexuality as compulsory and a concern with the intractability of symbolic law (81).
In Freud’s estimation, all infants experience incestuous desires for their parents. How these desires are resolved determines not only the subject’s future sexual orientation but also how its ego and superego (conscience) develop.
Key to Freud’s account, according to Butler, is the idea of primary bisexuality. Freud assumes, that is, that all babies are born with both feminine and masculine dispositions… A masculine disposition, he suggests, is expressed in the child’s desire for its mother, while a feminine disposition is expressed in the child’s desire for its father. The sex of the child in question is irrelevant.
For Butler this can mean only one thing. Freud understands primary bisexuality heteronormatively: as ‘the coincidence of two heterosexual desires within a single psyche’ (Butler Gender Trouble 77 cited in Lloyd 83).
Why is Freud unable to imagine the possibility of pre-oedipal homosexuality? Butler’s supposition (echoing Rubin) is that the reason for this is that the Oedipus complex, and thus Freud’s theory of psycho-sexual development, presumes a prior prohibition on homosexuality.
In order to expose this prior prohibition, Butler set about demonstrating that far from masculinity and femininity being dispositions that naturally inhere in persons, they are, in fact, effects of identification.
Identification refers to the process whereby the individual acquires its identity, or aspects thereof, from someone (or something) else. One of the ways in which this occurs is through … introjection.
Introjection: is when the subject takes into its ego —into him or herself— objects from the outside world in order to preserve them. Introjection is a response to loss.
jb on braidotti butch desire sexual d
Braidotti argues that sexual difference is often rejected by theoriests because femininity is itself associated with a pejorative understanding of tis meaning. She dislikes this pejorative use of the term, but thinks that the term itself can be releaased into a different future. … But is it fair to say that those who oppose this framework therefore demean or debase femininty …. If is fair to say that those who do not subscribe to this framework are therefore against the feminine, or even misogynist? It seems to me that the future symbolic will be one in which femininity has multiple possibilities, where it is, as Braidotti herself claims, released from the demand to be one thing, or to comply with a singular norm, the norm devised for it by phallogocentric means.
But must the framework for thinking about sexual difference be binary for this feminine multiplicity to emerge? Why can’t the framework for sexual difference itself move beyond binarity into multiplicity? (196-197)
Butch Desire
There may be women who love women, who even love what we might call “femininity,” but who cannot find a way to understand their own love through the category of women or as a permutation of femininity. Butch desire may, … be experienced as part of “women’s desire,” but it can also be experienced, that is, named and interpreted, as a kind of masculinity, one that is not to be found in men. There are many ways of approaching this issue of desire and gender. We could immediately blame the butch community, and say that they/we are simply antifeminine or that we have disavowed a primary femininity, but then we would be left with the quandary that for the most part (but not exclusively) butches are deeply, if not fatally, attracted to the feminine and, in this sense, love the feminine.
We could say, extending Braidotti’s frame of reference, that this negative judgement of butch desire is an example of what happens when the feminine is defined too narrowly as an instrument of phallogocentrism, namely, that the full range of possible femininity is not encompassed within its terms, and that butch desire ought properly to be described as another permutation of feminine desire. This last view seeks a more open account of femininity, one that goes against the grain of the phallogocentric version. … But if there is masculinity at work in butch desire, that is, if that is the name through which that desire comes to make sense, then why shy away from the fact that there may be ways that masculinity emerges in women, and that feminine and masculine do not belong to differently sexed bodies? Why shouldn’t it be that we are at an edge of sexual difference for which the language of sexual difference might not suffice, and that this follows, in a way, from an understanding of the body as constituted by, and constituting, multiple forces? If this particular construction of desire exceeds the binary frame, or confounds its terms, why could it not be an instance of the multiple play of forces that Braidotti accepts on other occasions? (197-198).
I just think that heterosexuality doesn’t belong exclusively to heterosexuals. Moreover, heterosexual practices are not the same as heterosexual norms; heterosexual normativity worries me and becomes the occasion of my critique. No doubt, practicing heterosexuals have all kinds of critical and comedic perspectives on heterosexual normativity. On the occasions where I have sought to elucidate a heterosexual melancholia, that is, a refulsal of homosexual attachment that emerges within heterosexuality as the consolidation of gender norms (“I am a woman, therefore I do not want one”), I am trying to show how a prohibition on certain forms of love becomes installed as an ontological truth about the subject: The “am” of “I am a man” encodes the prohibition “I may not love a man,” so that the ontological claim carries the force of prohibition itself. This only happens, however, under conditions of melancholia, and it does not mean that all heterosexuality is structured in this way or that there cannot be plain “indifference” to the question of homosexuality on the part of some heterosexuals rather than unconscious repudiation … Neither do I mean to suggest that I support a developmental model in which first and foremost there is homosexual love, and then that love becomes repressed, and then heterosexuality emerges as a consequence. I do find it interesting, though, that this account would seem to follow from Freud’s own postulates.
I firmly support Braidotti’s view, for instance, that a child is always in love with a mother whose desire is directed elsewhere, and that this triangulation makes sense as the condition of the desiring subject. If this is her formulation of oedipalization, then neither of us rejects oedipalization, although she will not read oedipalization through the lack, and I will incorporate prohibition in my account of compulsory heterosexuality. It is only according to the model that posits heterosexual disposition in the child as a given, that it makes sense to ask, as Freud asked in The Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, how heterosexuality is accomplished. In other words, only within the thesis of a primary heterosexuaity does the question of a prior homosexuality emerge, since there will have to be some account given of how heterosexuality becomes established. My critical engagement with these developmental schemes has been to show how the theory of heterosexual dispositions presupposes what would defeat it, namely a preheterosexual erotic history from which it emerges. If there is a triangularity that we call oedipalization, it emerges only on the basis of a set of prohibitions or constraints. Although I accept that triangularity is no doubt a condition of desire, I also have trouble accepting it. The trouble is no doubt a sign of its working, since it is what introduces difficulty into desire, psychoanalytically considered (199-200).
What interests me most however, is disarticulating oedipalization from the thesis of a primary or universalized heterosexuality (200).
butler gender regulation
Butler, Judith. Undoing Gender. New York: Routledge, 2004.
But for gender to be regulated is not simply for gender to come under the exterior force of a regulation. If gender were to exist prior to its regulation, we could then take gender as our theme and proceed to enumerate the various kinds of regulations to which it is subjected and the ways in which that subjection takes place. The problem, however, for us is more acute. After all, is there a gender that preexists its regulation, or is it the case that, in being subject to regulation, the gendered subject emerges, produced in and through that particular form of subjection? (41)
It is important to remember at least two caveats on subjection and regulation derived from Foucaultian scholarship:
1. regulatory power not only acts upon a preexisting subject but also shapes and forms that subject; moreover, every juridical form of power has its productive effect;
2. to become subject to a regulation is also to become subjectivated by it, that is, to be brought into being as a subject precisely through being regulated
The second point follows from the first in that the regulatory discourses which form the subject of gender are precisely those that require and induce the subject in question.
To assume that gender always and exclusively means the matrix of the “masculine” and “feminine” is precisely to miss the critical point that the production of that coherent binary is contingent, that it comes at a cost, and that those permutations of gender which do not fit the binary are as much a part of gender as its most normative instance. To conflate the definition of gender with its normative expression is inadvertently to reconsolidate the power of the norm to constrain the definition of gender … Whether one refers to “gender trouble” or “gender blending,” “transgender” or “cross-gender,” one is already suggesting that gender has a way of moving beyond that naturalized binary.
The conflation of gender with masculine/feminine, man/woman, male/female, thus performs the very naturalization that the notion of gender is meant to forestall (42-43). Thus, a restrictive discourse on gender that insists on the binary of man and woman as the exclusive way to understand the gender field performs a regulatory operation of power that naturalizes the hegemonic instance and forecloses the thinkability of its disruption.
… the distinction between symbolic and social law cannot finally hold, that the symbolic itself is the sedimentation of social practices, and that radical alterations in kinship demand a rearticulation of the structuralist suppositions of psychoanalysis, moving us, as it were, toward a queer poststructuralism of the psyche (44).
How does a shift from thinking of gender as regulated by symbolic laws to a conception of gender as regulated by social norms contest this indifference of the law to what it regulates? And how does such a shift open up the possiblity of a more radical contestation of the law itself (48).