not-all Žižek
Here is JB commenting on the fact of recognition in Lordship and Bondage is really about self-loss.
Here is the JB quoting from Hegel’s Phenomenology:
Self-consciousness is faced by another self-consciousness; it has come out of itself. This has a two-fold significance: first, it has lost itself, for it finds itself as an other being; secondly, in doing so it has superseded the other, for it does not see the other as an essential being, but in the other sees its own self. (para 178)
The gradual yet insistent effort of Hegel’s journeying subject in the Phenomenology of Spirit never relinquishes this project to relate itself to externality in order to rediscover itself as more inclusive being. The insurpassability of externality implies the permancence of desire. In this sense, insofar as Hegel’s subject never achieves a static union with externality, it is hopelessly beyond its own grasp, although it retains as its highest aim the thorough comprehension of itself. This thoroughgoing self-determination is the ideal of integrity toward which self-consciousness strives, and this striving is denoted by desire (44).
After all, desire revealed an implicit intentional aim, namely, to disclose and enact a common ontological structure with the world. Hence, despite the alleged object of desire … “the consumption of this brute being which poses as other to me,” desire has at base a metaphysical project which, while requiring determinate objects, transcends them as well, i.e., to effect a unity with the realm of externality which both preserves that realm and renders it into a reflection of self-consciousness. (44)
Because desire is the principle of self-consciousness’ reflexivity or inner difference, and because it has as its highest aim the assimilation of all external relations into relations of inner difference, desire forms the experiential basis for the project of the Phenomenology at large … the gradual sophistication of desire —expanding inclusiveness of its intentional aims —is the principle of progress in the Phenomenology (45).
Judith Butler Interview with Udi Aloni February 2010
Online version 1 and another version
Philosopher, professor and author Judith Butler arrived in Israel this month, en route to the West Bank, where she was to give a seminar at Bir Zeit University, visit the theater in Jenin, and meet privately with friends and students. A leading light in her field, Butler chose not to visit any academic institutions in Israel itself. In the conversation below, conducted in New York several months ago, Butler talks about gender, the dehumanization of Gazans, and how Jewish values drove her to criticize the actions of the State of Israel.
In Israel, people know you well. Your name was even in the popular film Ha-Buah [The Bubble – the tragic tale of a gay relationship between an Israeli Jew and a Palestinian Muslim].
[laughs] Although I disagreed with the use of my name in that context. I mean, it was very funny to say, “don’t Judith Butler me,” but “to Judith Butler someone” meant to say something very negative about men and to identify with a form of feminism that was against men. And I’ve never been identified with that form of feminism. That?s not my mode. I’m not known for that. So it seems like it was confusing me with a radical feminist view that one would associate with Catharine MacKinnon or Andrea Dworkin, a completely different feminist modality. I’m not always calling into question who’s a man and who’s not, and am I a man? Maybe I’m a man. [laughs] Call me a man. I am much more open about categories of gender, and my feminism has been about women’s safety from violence, increased literacy, decreased poverty and more equality. I was never against the category of men.
A beautiful Israeli poem asks, “How does one become Avot Yeshurun?” Avot Yeshurun was a poet who caused turmoil in Israeli poetry. I want to ask, how does one become Judith Butler -especially with the issue of Gender Trouble, the book that so troubled the discourse on gender?
You know, I’m not sure that I know how to give an account of it, and I think it troubles gender differently depending on how it is received and translated. For instance, one of the first receptions [of the book] was in Germany, and there, it seemed very clear that young people wanted a politics that emphasized agency, or something affirmative that they could create or produce. The idea of performativity – which involved bringing categories into being or bringing new social realities about – was very exciting, especially for younger people who were tired with old models of oppression – indeed, the very model men oppress women, or straights oppress gays.
It seemed that if you were subjugated, there were also forms of agency that were available to you, and you were not just a victim, or you were not only oppressed, but oppression could become the condition of your agency. Certain kinds of unexpected results can emerge from the situation of oppression if you have the resources and if you have collective support. It’s not an automatic response; it’s not a necessary response. But it’s possible. I think I also probably spoke to something that was already happening in the movement. I put into theoretical language what was already being impressed upon me from elsewhere. So I didn’t bring it into being single-handedly. I received it from several cultural resources and put it into another language.
Once you became “Judith Butler,” we began to hear more about Jews and Jewish texts. People came to hear you speak about gender and suddenly they were faced with Gaza, divine violence. It almost felt like you had some closure on the previous matter. Is there a connection, a continuum, or is this a new phase?
Let’s go back further. I’m sure I’ve told you that I began to be interested in philosophy when I was 14, and I was in trouble in the synagogue. The rabbi said, “You are too talkative in class. You talk back, you are not well behaved. You have to come and have a tutorial with me.” I said “OK, great!” I was thrilled.
He said: “What do you want to study in the tutorial? This is your punishment. Now you have to study something seriously.” I think he thought of me as unserious. I explained that I wanted to read existential theology focusing on Martin Buber. (I’ve never left Martin Buber.) I wanted look at the question of whether German idealism could be linked with National Socialism. Was the tradition of Kant and Hegel responsible in some way for the origins of National Socialism? My third question was why Spinoza was excommunicated from the synagogue. I wanted to know what happened and whether the synagogue was justified.
Now I must go Jewish: what was your parents’ relation to Judaism?
My parents were practicing Jews. My mother grew up in an orthodox synagogue and after my grandfather died, she went to a conservative synagogue and a little later ended up in a reform synagogue. My father was in reform synagogues from the beginning.
My mother’s uncles and aunts were all killed in Hungary [during the Holocaust]. My grandmother lost all of her relatives, except for the two nephews who came with them in the car when my grandmother went back in 1938 to see who she could rescue. It was important for me. I went to Hebrew school. But I also went after school to special classes on Jewish ethics because I was interested in the debates. So I didn’t do just the minimum. Through high school, I suppose, I continued Jewish studies alongside my public school education.
And you showed me the photos of the bar mitzvah of your son as a good proud Jewish Mother…
So it’s been there from the start, it’s not as if I arrived at some place that I haven’t always been in. I grew very skeptical of certain kind of Jewish separatism in my youth. I mean, I saw the Jewish community was always with each other; they didn’t trust anybody outside. You’d bring someone home and the first question was “Are they Jewish, are they not Jewish?” Then I entered into a lesbian community in college, late college, graduate school, and the first thing they asked was, “Are you a feminist, are you not a feminist?” “Are you a lesbian, are you not a lesbian?” and I thought “Enough with the separatism!”
It felt like the same kind of policing of the community. You only trust those who are absolutely like yourself, those who have signed a pledge of allegiance to this particular identity. Is that person really Jewish, maybe they’re not so Jewish. I don’t know if they’re really Jewish. Maybe they’re self-hating. Is that person lesbian? I think maybe they had a relationship with a man. What does that say about how true their identity was? I thought I can’t live in a world in which identity is being policed in this way.
But if I go back to your other question… In Gender Trouble, there is a whole discussion of melancholy. What is the condition under which we fail to grieve others? I presumed, throughout my childhood, that this was a question the Jewish community was asking itself. It was also a question that I was interested in when I went to study in Germany. The famous Mitscherlich book on the incapacity to mourn, which was a criticism of German post-war culture, was very, very interesting to me.
In the 70s and 80s, in the gay and lesbian community, it became clear to me that very often, when a relationship would break up, a gay person wouldn’t be able to tell their parents, his or her parents. So here, people were going through all kinds of emotional losses that were publicly unacknowledged and that became very acute during the AIDS crisis. In the earliest years of the AIDS crisis, there were many gay men who were unable to come out about the fact that their lovers were ill, A, and then dead, B. They were unable to get access to the hospital to see their lover, unable to call their parents and say, “I have just lost the love of my life.”
This was extremely important to my thinking throughout the 80s and 90s. But it also became important to me as I started to think about war.
After 9/11, I was shocked by the fact that there was public mourning for many of the people who died in the attacks on the World Trade Center, less public mourning for those who died in the attack on the Pentagon, no public mourning for the illegal workers of the WTC, and, for a very long time, no public acknowledgment of the gay and lesbian families and relationships that had been destroyed by the loss of one of the partners in the bombings.
Then we went to war very quickly, Bush having decided that the time for grieving is over. I think he said that after ten days, that the time for grieving is over and now is time for action. At which point we started killing populations abroad with no clear rationale. And the populations we targeted for violence were ones that never appeared to us in pictures. We never got little obituaries for them. We never heard anything about what lives had been destroyed. And we still don’t.
I then moved towards a different kind of theory, asking under what conditions certain lives are grievable and certain lives not grievable or ungrievable.
It’s clear to me that in Israel-Palestine and in the violent conflicts that have taken place over the years, there is differential grieving. Certain lives become grievable within the Israeli press, for instance – highly grievable and highly valuable – and others are understood as ungrievable because they are understood as instruments of war, or they are understood as outside the nation, outside religion, or outside that sense of belonging which makes for a grievable life. The question of grievability has linked my work on queer politics, especially the AIDS crisis, with my more contemporary work on war and violence, including the work on Israel-Palestine.
It’s interesting because when the war on Gaza started, I couldn’t stay in Tel Aviv anymore. I visited the Galilee a lot. And suddenly I realized that many of the Palestinians who died in Gaza have families there, relatives who are citizens of Israel. What people didn’t know is that there was a massed grief in Israel. Grief for families who died in Gaza, a grief within Israel, of citizens of Israel. And nobody in the country spoke about it, about the grief within Israel. It was shocking.
The Israeli government and the media started to say that everyone who was killed or injured in Gaza was a member of Hamas; or that they were all being used as part of the war effort; that even the children were instruments of the war effort; that the Palestinians put them out there, in the targets, to show that Israelis would kill children, and this was actually part of a war effort. At this point, every single living being who is Palestinian becomes a war instrument. They are all, in their being, or by virtue of being Palestinian, declaring war on Israel or seeking the destruction of the Israel.
So any and all Palestinian lives that are killed or injured are understood no longer to be lives, no longer understood to be living, no longer understood even to be human in a recognizable sense, but they are artillery. The bodies themselves are artillery. And of course, the extreme instance of that is the suicide bomber, who has become unpopular in recent years. That is the instance in which a body becomes artillery, or becomes part of a violent act. If that figure gets extended to the entire Palestinian population, then there is no living human population anymore, and no one who is killed there can be grieved. Because everyone who is a living Palestinian is, in their being, a declaration of war, or a threat to the existence of Israel, or pure military artillery, materiel. They have been transformed, in the Israeli war imaginary, into pure war instruments.
So when a people who believes that another people is out to destroy them sees all the means of destruction killed, or some extraordinary number of the means of destruction destroyed, they are thrilled, because they think their safety and well-being and happiness are being purchased, are being achieved through this destruction.
And what happened with the perspective from the outside, the outside media, was extremely interesting to me. The European press, the U.S. press, the South American press, the East Asian press all raised questions about the excessive violence of the Gaza assault. It was very strange to see how the Israeli media made the claim that people on the outside do not understand; that people on the outside are anti-Semitic; that people on the outside are blaming Israel for defending themselves when they themselves, if attacked, would do the exact same thing.
Why Israel-Palestine? Is this directly connected to your Jewishness?
As a Jew, I was taught that it was ethically imperative to speak up and to speak out against arbitrary state violence. That was part of what I learned when I learned about the Second World War and the concentration camps. There were those who would and could speak out against state racism and state violence, and it was imperative that we be able to speak out. Not just for Jews, but for any number of people. There was an entire idea of social justice that emerged for me from the consideration of the Nazi genocide.
I would also say that what became really hard for me is that if one wanted to criticize Israeli state violence – precisely because that as a Jew one is under obligation to criticize excessive state violence and state racism – then one is in a bind, because one is told that one is either self-hating as a Jew or engaging anti-Semitism. And yet for me, it comes out of a certain Jewish value of social justice. So how can I fulfill my obligation as a Jew to speak out against an injustice when, in speaking out against Israeli state and military injustice, I am accused of not being a good enough Jew or of being a self-hating Jew? This is the bind of my current situation.
Let me say one other thing about Jewish values. There are two things I took from Jewish philosophy and my Jewish formation that were really important for me… well there are many. There are many.
Sitting shiva, for instance, explicit grieving. I thought it was the one of the most beautiful rituals of my youth. There were several people who died in my youth, and there were several moments when whole communities gathered in order to make sure that those who had suffered terrible losses were taken up and brought back into the community and given a way to affirm life again. The other idea was that life is transient, and because of that, because there is no after world, because we don’t have any hopes in a final redemption, we have to take especially good care of life in the here and now. Life has to be protected. It is precarious. I would even go so far as to say that precarious life is, in a way, a Jewish value for me.
I realized something, through your way of thinking. A classic mistake that people made with Gender Trouble was the notion that body and language are static. But everything is in dynamic and in constant movement; the original never exists. In a way I felt the same with the Diaspora and the emancipation. Neither are static. No one came before the other. The Diaspora, when it was static, became separatist, became the shtetl. And when the emancipation was realized, it became an ethnocratic state; it also became separatist, a re-construction of the ghetto. So maybe the tension between the two, emancipation and Diaspora, without choosing a one or the other, is the only way to keep us out of ethnocentrism. I suppose my idea is not yet fully formulated. It relates to the way I felt that my grandfather was open to the language of exile while being connected to the land at the same time. By being open to both, emancipation and Diaspora, we might avoid falling into ethnocentrism.
You have a tension between Diaspora and emancipation. But what I am thinking of is perhaps something a little different. I have to say, first of all, that I do not think that there can be emancipation with and through the establishment of state that restricts citizenship in the way that it does, on the basis of religion? So in my view, any effort to retain the idea of emancipation when you don’t have a state that extends equal rights of citizenship to Jews and non-Jews alike is, for me, bankrupt. It’s bankrupt.
That’s why I would say that there should be bi-nationalism from the beginning.
Or even multi-nationalism. Maybe even a kind of citizenship without regard to religion, race, ethnicity, etc. In any case, the more important point here is that there are those who clearly believe that Jews who are not in Israel, who are in the Galut, are actually either in need of return ? they have not yet returned, or they are not and cannot be representative of the Jewish people. So the question is: what does it mean to transform the idea of Galut into Diaspora? In other words, Diaspora is another tradition, one that involves the scattering without return. I am very critical of this idea of return, and I think “Galut” very often demeans the Diasporic traditions within Judaism.
I thought that if we make a film about bi-nationalism, the opening scene should be a meeting of “The First Jewish Congress for Bi-Nationalism.” It could be a secret meeting in which we all discuss who we would like to be our first president, and the others there send me to choose you? because we need to have a woman, and she has to be queer. But not only queer, and not only woman. She has to be the most important Jewish philosopher today.
But seriously, you know, it would be astonishing to think about what forms of political participation would still be possible on a model of federal government. Like a federated authority for Palestine-Israel that was actually governed by a strong constitution that guaranteed rights regardless of cultural background, religion, ethnicity, race, and the rest. In a way, bi-nationalism goes part of the way towards explaining what has to happen. And I completely agree with you that there has to be a cultural movement that overcomes hatred and paranoia and that actually draws on questions of cohabitation. Living in mixity and in diversity, accepting your neighbor, finding modes of living together. And no political solution, at a purely procedural level, is going to be successful if there is no bilingual education, if there are no ways of reorganizing neighborhoods, if there are no ways of reorganizing territory, bringing down the wall, accepting the neighbors you have, and accepting that there are profound obligations that emerge from being adjacent to another people in this way.
So I agree with you. But I think we have to get over the idea that a state has to express a nation. And if we have a bi-national state, it’s expressing two nations. Only when bi-nationalism deconstructs the idea of a nation can we hope to think about what a state, what a polity might look like that would actually extend equality. It is no longer the question of “two peoples,” as Martin Buber put it. There is extraordinary complexity and intermixing among both the Jewish and the Palestinian populations. There will be those who say, “Ok, a state that expresses two cultural identities.” No. State should not be in the business of expressing cultural identity.
Why do we use term “bi-nationalism?” For me it is the beginning of a process, not the end. We could say “multi-nationalism,” or “one-state solution.” Why do we prefer to use the term “bi-nationalism” rather than “one state” now?
I believe that people have reasonable fears that a one-state solution would ratify the existing marginalization and impoverishment of the Palestinian people. That Palestine would be forced to accept a kind of Bantustan existence.
Or vice versa, for the Jews.
Well, the Jews would be afraid of losing demographic majority if voting rights were extended to Palestinians. I do think that there is the fundamental question of “Who is this ‘we’?” Who are we? The question of bi-nationalism raises the question of who is the “we” who decides what kind of polity is best for this land. The “we” has to be heterogeneous; it has to be mixed. Everyone who is there and has a claim – and the claims are various. They come from traditional and legal grounds of belonging that are quite complicated. So one has to be open to that complication.
Now I want to move to the last part of the conversation. It was over three years ago, at the beginning of the Second Lebanon war, that Slavoj Žižek came to Israel to give a speech on my film Forgiveness. The Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel asked him not to come to the Jerusalem Film Festival. They said that I should show my film – as Israelis shouldn’t boycott Israel, but they asked international figures to boycott the festival.
Žižek, who was the subject of one of the films in the festival, said he would not speak about that film. But he asked: why not support the opposition in Israel by speaking about Forgiveness? They answered that he could support the opposition, but not in an official venue. He did not know what to do.
Žižek chose to ask for your advice. Your position then, if I recall correctly, was that it was most important to exercise, solidarity with colleagues who chose nonviolent means of resistance and that it was a mistake to take money from Israeli cultural institutions. Your suggestion to Žižek was that he speak about the film without being a guest of the festival. He gave back the money and announced that he was not a guest. There was no decision about endorsing or not endorsing a boycott. For me, at the time, the concept of cultural boycott was kind of shocking, a strange concept. The movement has since grown a lot, and I know that you’ve done a lot of thinking about it. I wonder what do you think about this movement now, the full Boycott, Diversion and Sanction movement (BDS), three years after that confusing event?
I think that the BDS movement has taken several forms, and it is probably important to distinguish among them. I would say that around six or seven years ago, there was a real confusion about what was being boycotted, what goes under the name of “boycott.” There were some initiatives that seemed to be directed against Israeli academics, or Israeli filmmakers, cultural producers, or artists that did not distinguish between their citizenship and their participation, active or passive, in occupation politics. We must keep in mind that the BDS movement has always been focused on the occupation. It is not a referendum on Zionism, and it does not take an explicit position on the one-state or two-state solution. And then there were those who sought to distinguish boycotting individual Israelis from boycotting the Israeli institutions. But it is not always easy to know how to make the distinction between who is an individual and who is an institution. And I think a lot of people within the U.S. and Europe just backed away, thinking that it was potentially discriminatory to boycott individuals or, indeed, institutions on the basis of citizenship, even though many of those who were reluctant very much wanted to find a way to support a non-violent resistance to the occupation.
But now I feel that it has become more possible, more urgent to reconsider the politics of the BDS. It is not that the principles of the BDS have changed: they have not. But there are now ways to think about implementing the BDS that keep in mind the central focus: any event, practice, or institution that seeks to normalize the occupation, or presupposes that “ordinary” cultural life can continue without an explicit opposition to the occupation is itself complicit with the occupation.
We can think of this as passive complicity, if you like. But the main point is to challenge those institutions that seek to separate the occupation from other cultural activities. The idea is that we cannot participate in cultural institutions that act as if there is no occupation or that refuse to take a clear and strong stand against the occupation and dedicate their activities to its undoing. So, with this in mind, we can ask, what does it mean to engage in boycott? It means that, for those of us on the outside, we can only go to an Israeli institution, or an Israeli cultural event, in order to use the occasion to call attention to the brutality and injustice of the occupation and to articulate an opposition to it.
I think that’s what Naomi Klein did, and I think it actually opened up another route for interpreting the BDS principles. It is no longer possible for me to come to Tel Aviv and talk about gender, Jewish philosophy, or Foucault, as interesting as that might be for me; it is certainly not possible to take money from an organization or university or a cultural organization that is not explicitly and actively anti-occupation, acting as if the cultural event within Israeli borders was not happening against the background of occupation? Against the background of the assault on, and continuing siege of, Gaza? It is this unspoken and violent background of “ordinary” cultural life that needs to become the explicit object of cultural and political production and criticism. Historically, I see no other choice, since affirming the status quo means affirming the occupation. One cannot “set aside” the radical impoverishment, the malnutrition, the limits on mobility, the intimidation and harassment at the borders, and the exercise of state violence in both Gaza and the West Bank and talk about other matters in public? If one were to talk about other matters, then one is actively engaged in producing a limited public sphere of discourse which has the repression and, hence, continuation of violence as its aim.
Let us remember that the politics of boycott are not just matters of “conscience” for left intellectuals within Israel or outside. The point of the boycott is to produce and enact an international consensus that calls for the state of Israel to comply with international law. The point is to insist on the rights of self-determination for Palestinians, to end the occupation and colonization of Arab lands, to dismantle the Wall that continues the illegal seizure of Palestinian land, and to honor several UN resolutions that have been consistently defied by the Israeli state, including UN resolution 194, which insists upon the rights of refugees from 1948.
So, an approach to the cultural boycott in particular would have to be one that opposes the normalization of the occupation in order to bring into public discourse the basic principles of injustice at stake. There are many ways to articulate those principles, and this is where intellectuals are doubtless under a political obligation to become innovative, to use the cultural means at our disposal to make whatever interventions we can.
The point is not simply to refuse contact and forms of cultural and monetary exchange – although sometimes these are most important – but rather, affirmatively, to lend one’s support to the strongest anti-violent movement against the occupation that not only affirms international law, but establishing exchanges with Palestinian cultural and academic workers, cultivating international consensus on the rights of the Palestinian people, but also altering that hegemonic presumption within the global media that any critique of Israel is implicitly anti-democratic or anti-Semitic.
Surely it has always been the best part of the Jewish intellectual tradition to insist upon the ethical relation to the non-Jew, the extension of equality and justice, and the refusal to keep silent in the face of egregrious wrongs.
I want to share with you what Riham Barghouti, from BDS New York, told me. She said that, for her, BDS is a movement for everyone who supports the end of the occupation, equal rights for the Palestinians of 1948, and the moral and legal demand of the Palestinians’ right of return. She suggested that each person who is interested, decide how much of the BDS spectrum he or she is ready to accept. In other words, endorsement of the boycott movement is a continuous decision, not a categorical one. Just don’t tell us what our guidelines are. You can agree with our principles, join the movement, and decide on the details on your own.
Yes, well, one can imagine a bumper sticker: “what part of ‘justice’ do you fail to understand?” It is surely important that many prominent Israelis have begun to accept part of the BDS principles, and this may well be an incremental way to make the boycott effort more understandable. But it may also be important to ask,
why is it that so many left [wing] Israelis have trouble entering into collaborative politics with Palestinians on the issue of the boycott, and why is it that the Palestinian formulations of the boycott do not form the basis for that joint effort? After all, the BDS call has been in place since 2005; it is an established and growing movement, and the basic principles have been worked out.
Any Israeli can join that movement, and they would doubtless fine that they would immediately be in greater contact with Palestinians than they otherwise would be. The BDS provides the most powerful rubric for Israeli-Palestinian cooperative actions. This is doubtless surprising and paradoxical for some, but it strikes me as historically true.
It’s interesting to me that very often Israelis I speak to say, “We cannot enter into collaboration with the Palestinians because they don’t want to collaborate with us, and we don’t blame them.” Or: “We would put them in a bad position if we were to invite them to our conferences.” Both of these positions presume the occupation as background, but they do not address it directly. Indeed, these kinds of positions are biding time when there is no time but now to make one’s opposition known. Very often, such utterances take on a position of self-paralyzing guilt which actually keeps them from taking active and productive responsibility for opposing the occupation even more remote.
Sometimes it seems to me that they make boycott politics into a question of moral conscience, which is different from a political commitment. If it is a moral issue, then “I” as an Israeli have a responsibility to speak out or against, to sink into self-beratement or become self-flagellating in public and become a moral icon. But these kinds of moral solutions are, I think, besides the point. They continue to make “Israeli” identity into the basis of the political position, which is a kind of tacit nationalism. Perhaps the point is to oppose the manifest injustice in the name of broader principles of international law and the opposition to state violence, the disenfranchisement politically and economically of the Palestinian people. If you happen to be Israeli, then unwittingly your position shows that Israelis can and do take positions in favor of justice, and that should not be surprising. But it does not make it an “Israeli” position.
But let me return to the question of whether boycott politics undermines collaborative ventures, or opens them up. My wager is that the minute you come out in favor of some boycott, divestment or sanctions strategy, Udi, you will have many collaborators among Palestinians. I think many people fear that the boycott is against collaboration, but in fact Israelis have the power to produce enormous collaborative networks if they agree that they will use their public power, their cultural power, to oppose the occupation through the most powerful non-violent means available. Things change the minute you say, “We cannot continue to act as normal.”
Of course, I myself really want to be able to talk about novels, film, and philosophy, sometimes quite apart from politics. Unfortunately, I cannot do that in Israel now. I cannot do it until the occupation has been successfully and actively challenged. The fact is that there is no possibility of going to Israel without being used either as an example of boycott or as an example of anti-boycott. So when I went, many years ago, and the rector of Tel Aviv University said, “Look how lucky we are. Judith Butler has come to Tel Aviv University, a sign that she does not accept the boycott,” I was instrumentalized against my will. And I realized I cannot function in that public space without already being defined in the boycott debate. So there is no escape from it. One can stay quiet and accept the status quo, or one can take a position that seeks to challenge the status quo.
I hope one day there will be a different political condition where I might go there and talk about Hegel, but that is not possible now. I am very much looking forward to teaching at Bir Zeit in February. It has a strong gender and women’s studies faculty, and I understand that the students are interested in discussing questions of war and cultural analysis. I also clearly stand to learn. The boycott is not just about saying “no” – it is also a way to give shape to one’s work, to make alliances, and to insist on international norms of justice. To work to the side of the problem of the occupation is to participate in its normalization. And the way that normalization works is to efface or distort that reality within public discourse. As a result, neutrality is not an option.
So we’re boycotting normalization.
That’s what we’re boycotting. We are against normalization. And you know what, there are going to be many tactics for disrupting the normalization of the occupation. Some of us will be well-equipped to intervene with images and words, and others will continue demonstrations and other forms of cultural and political statements. The question is not what your passport says (if you have a passport), but what you do. We are talking about what happens in the activity itself. Does it disrupt and contest the normalization of the occupation?
You remember that in Toronto declaration against the spotlight on Tel Aviv at the film festival, it was very clear that we do not boycott individuals, but the Israeli foreign minister tried to argue that we were boycotting individuals. Yet the question is about institutions. On that note, I want to clarify: You will not speak in Tel Aviv University… forever? Well, not forever…
When it’s a fabulous bi-national university [laughter]
Udi Aloni is an Israeli-American filmmaker and writer
Butler, Judith. “Stubborn Attachment, Bodily Subjection Rereading Hegel on the Unhappy Consciousness” Psychic Life of Power. 31-62
The ineluctability of the body in the “Unhappy Consciousness” parallels the ineluctability of “instinct” in Freud and that of the will in Nietzsche (56).
Lotsa people liked the liberation narrative of Lordship and Bondage but have neglected to look at the resolution of freedom into self-enslavement at the end of the chapter. The whole idea of the progressive history that is now in question, not to mention the status of the subject, so now “the dystopic resolution of ‘Lordship and Bondage’ has perhaps regained a timely significance (31).
The bondsman in Hegel throws off the apparently external “Lord” only to find himself in an ethical world, subjected to various norms and ideals. Or, to put it more precisely, the subject emerges as an unhappy consciousness through the reflexive application of these ethical laws (32).
A certain structuring attachment to subjection becomes the condition of moral subjectivation (33).
🙂 What JB is getting at here is the notion of the development of a subjective interiority. She like Foucault, but his limitation is a view of subject as purely a effect of power, yo bro, what about resistance?
Butler wants to underscore a Relationship Between Self-Enslavement as Bodily Subjection and Self-Imposed Ethical Norms
On the Geneology of Morals Nietzche draws relation between Self-Enslavement and the moralized “Man” of Conscience
This quote from Foucault is one of JB’s favourites:
The man described for us, whom we are invited to free, is already in himself the effect of a subjection [assujettissement] much more profound than himself. A ‘soul’ inhabits him and brings him to existence, which is itself a factor in the mastery that power exercises over the body. The soul is the effect and instrument of a political anatomy; the soul is the prison of the body” (Psychic Life 33, quoting Discipline and Punish 30-34).
How precisely are we to read this “inhabiting” of the body by the soul? Can a return to Hegel help us read it? What are the points of convergence and divergence in Hegel, Nietzsche, and Foucault on the structure of subjection?
Hegel’s account in “The Unhappy Consciousness” prefigures a critical discourse on ethical positions that not only seek to institute the denial or sacrifice of bodily life, but that fall into instructive paradoxes when they do.
Hegel shows that if the suppression of the body requires an instrumental movement of and by the body, then the body is inadvertently preserved in and by the instrument of its suppression (33). This formulation prefigures the possibility of a convergence with Nietzschean, Foucaultian, and, as we shall see, Freudian perspectives on self-abasement, which Hegel’s text in the transition to Spirit, forecloses. … Arresting the text prior to its resolution into Spirit, this inquiry seeks to know whether a suppressed link with a Nietzchean and Freudian account of conscience is embedded in Hegel’s chapter.
Hegel and the Production of Self-Enslavement
Hegel’s insights in the “Unhappy Consciousness” on the ineluctability of the attachment of and to the body in subjection are reiterated in Foucaultian frameworks, and that the Foucaultian account of subjection, despite its significant moves beyond dialectical logic, remains unwittingly tethered to the Hegelian formulation. Furthermore, Hegel tacitly presumes that subjection is understood as a self-negating attachment and, in this way, shares an operative assumption with the Freudian notion of libidinal investment.
bondsman is instrumental body, the lord’s body “but in such a way that the lord forgets or disavows his own activity in producing the bondsman, a production which we will call a projection (35).
This disavowal involves a clever trick. It is an action by which an activity is disavowed, yet, as an action, it rhetorically concedes the very activity that is seeks to negate.” [huh]
To disavow one’s body, to render it “Other” and then to establish the “Other” as an effect of autonomy, is to produce one’s body in such a way that the activity of its production —and its essential relation to the lord— is denied. … the “Other” become complicit with this disavowal.
YOU BE MY BODY FOR ME, BUT DO NOT LET ME KNOW THAT THE BODY YOU ARE IS MY BODY.
Not only does he labor for another, who takes the yield of his labor, but he gives up his signature for the signature of the other, no longer marking ownership of his own labor in any way. This expropriation of the object does not negate the bondsman’s sense of himself as a laboring being, but it does imply that whatever he makes, he also loses. The determinate thing that the bondsman makes reflects the bondsman himself as a determinate thing. But because the object is given away, he becomes that which can be forfeited. If the object is the congealing or forming of labor, and if the labor is that of the bondsman, then the determinate and transient character of the thing will imply the determinate and transient character of the bondsman. The laboring body which now knows itself to have formed the object also knows that it is transient. The bondsman not only negates things (in the sense of transforming them through labor) and is a negating activity, but he is subject to a full and final negation in death (40-41).
self-recognition is achieved through a certain fearful transience, absolute fear:
Unhappy Consciousness [Bondsman becomes Lord over himself, lord over his own body], this form of reflexivity requires a SPLITTING of the psyche into two parts
Unhappy consciousness seeks to overcome this duality (essential, unchangeable and inessential, changeable) (47)
1. Lordship
2. Bondage internal to a single consciousness: body is still split off from consciousness, reconstituted as an interior alien, the body is sustained through its disavowal as what consciousness must continue to disavow.
Consciousness clings or ATTACHES TO ITSELF, and this clinging to consciousness is at the same time a disavowal of the body, which appears to signify the terror of death, “the absolute fear”
The unhappy consciousness requires and engages this ATTACHMENT by invoking an IMPERATIVE, an ETHICAL NORM: CLING TO ONESELF (43)
Hence the imperative to cling to oneself is motivated by this absolute fear and by the need to refuse that fear.
The section on unhappy consciousness explains the genesis of the sphere of the ethical as a defense against the absolute fear by which it is motivated. The fabrication of norms out of (and against) fear, and the reflexive imposition of those norms, subjects the unhappy consciousness in a double sense: the subject is subordinated to norms, and the norms are subjectivating, that is, they give an ethical shape to the reflexivity of this emerging subject. The subjection that takes place under the sign of the ethical is a flight from fear, and so is constituted as a kind of flight and denial, a fearful flight from fear that covers its fear first with stubbornness and then with religious self-righteousness. (43).
[…] As a dual structure, the unhappy consciousness takes itself as its own object of scorn.
The philosophical elaboration of this scorn takes the following form: consciousness is now divided into two parts, the “essential” and “unchangeable,”on the one hand, and the “inessential” and “changeable,” on the other. … it renders this contradictory self into an INessential part of itself. It thus parts with itself in order to purify itself of contradiction.
As a result the unhappy consciousness BERATES itself constantly, setting up one part of itself as a pure judge aloof from contradiction and disparaging its changeable part as inessential, although ineluctably tied to it. … ethical self-judgment in the context of the unhappy consciousness: … the unchangeable consciousness “passes judgment” on the changeable.
[…] Before the introduction of the “mediator” and the “priest,” the chapter on the unhappy consciousness appears to proceed as if it contained a trenchant critique of ethical imperatives and religious ideals, a critique which prefigures the Nietzschean analysis that emerges some sixty years later.
Significantly, it is here, in the effort to differentiate itself from its excretory functions, indeed from its excretory identity, that consciousness relies on a “mediator,” what Hegel will call “the priest.” In order to reconnect with the pure and the unchangeable, this bodily consciousness offers up its every “doing” to a priest or minister. This mediating agency relieves the abject consciousness of its responsibility for its own actions. Through the institution of counsel and advice, the priest offers the reason for the abject consciousness’s actions. Everything that the abject consciousness offers that is, all of its externalizations, including desire, work, and excrement, are to construed as offerings, as paying penance. The priest institutes bodily self-abnegation as the price of holiness, elevating the renunciatory gesture of excrement to a religious practice whereby the entire body is ritualistically purged. The sanctification of abjection takes place through rituals of fasting and moritification. Because the body cannot be fully denied, as the stoic thought, it must be ritualistically renounced (51).
At this juncture Hegel departs from what has been the pattern of explanation, in which a self-negating posture is underscored as a posture, a phenomenalization that refutes the negation it seeks to institute.
In the place of such an explanation Hegel asserts the will of another operates through the self-sacrificial actions of the penitent. In effect self-sacrifice is not refuted through the claim that self-sacrifice is itself a willful activity; rather, Hegel asserts that in self-sacrifice one enacts another’s will. … [The penitent disclaims his act as his own, avowing that another’s will, the priest’s, operates through his own, avowing that another’s will, the priest’s operates through his self-sacrifice … (52)]
One might expect that the penitent would be shown to be reveling in himself, self-aggrandizing, narcissistic, that his self-punishments would culminate in a pleasurable assertion of self.
But Hegel eschews this explanation and thus breaks with the pattern of explanation in the chapter in favor of a religious solution to in Spirit (52).
Whereas in all of the earlier examples of self-negation pleasure was understood to INHERE in pain (the pleasurable aggrandizement of the stoic, the pleasurable sadism of the skeptic), pleasure is here temporally removed from pain, figured as its future compensation. For Hegel, this eschatological transformation of the pain of this world into the pleasure of the next establishes the transition from self-consciousness to reason.
Every effort to reduce itself to inaction or to nothing, to subordinate or mortify its own body, culminates inadvertently in the production of self-consciousness as a pleasure-seeking and self-aggrandizing agent. Every effort to overcome the body, pleasure, and agency proves to be nothing other than the assertion of precisely these features of the subject (53).
Post-Hegelian Subjections
Recall for Hegel ethical imperatives first emerge in a defensive response to absolute fear, and their emergence must be construed as a permutation and refusal of that fear. This absolute fear was the fear of death, hence a fear conditioned by the finite character of the body. The ethical refusal and subordination of the body might then be understood as a magical effort to preempt that existential negation. Moreover, the ideal of radical self-sufficiency is jeopardized by the body’s permeability and dependency. In this sense, excretion is not the only “animal function” that would signify “defilement” for this subject. The repeated efforts to sacrifice the body which become repeated assertions of the body are also efforts to defend it against everything that “jeopardizes ” it, where to be in “jeopardy” denotes a danger slightly less dire than death, a kind of penetrative paroxysm that implies being moved or shaken sexually “through and through.”
One could then see in the various forms of self-beratement and self-mortification typologized in “The Unhappy Consciousness” a prefiguration of neurosis and perhaps also a specific modality of homosexual panic. (54)
We might then reread the mobilizing fear that is both refused and rerouted by the ethical imperative in terms of the feared “expropriability” of the body. If the bondsman’s laboring activity could be expropriated by the lord and the essence of the bondsman’s body be held in ownership by that lord, then the body constitutes a site of contested ownership, one which through domination or the threat of death can always be owned by another. The body appears to be nothing other than a threat to the project of safety and self-sufficiency that governs the Phenomenology’s trajectory. The anal preoccupation that directly precedes the ascendance into a religious concept of an afterlife suggests that bodily permeability can only be resolved by escape into an afterlife in which no bodies exist at all.
This affirmation of the absolute negation of the body contradicts all the earlier efforts to subordinate or master the body WITHIN life, efforts which culminated in the assertion of the ineluctability of the body. Whereas other religious notions turned out to be surreptitious [stealth, clandestine] ways of reasserting the body, this one appears exempt from the dialectical reversal that it resolves (54-55).
Psychoanalysis
The repression of the libido is always understood as itself a libidinally invested repression. Hence, the libido is not absolutely negated through repression, but rather becomes the instrument of its own subjection. … In other words, prohibition becomes the displaced site of satisfaction for the “instinct” or desire that is prohibited, an occasion for reliving the instinct under the rubric of the condemning law. This is, of course, the source of the form of comedy in which the bearer of the moral law turns out to be the most serious transgressor of its precepts … In this sense, then, renunciation takes place through the very desire that is renounced, which is to say, the desire is never renounced, but becomes preserved and reasserted in the very structure of renunciation (55-56).
I do not mean to suggest that Freud’s highly problematic notion of instinct, Hegel’s inchoate body, and Nietzsche’s will are strictly equivalent. Yet I do want to suggest that these three thinkers circumscribe a kind of dialectical reversal which centers on the impossibility of a full or final reflexive suppression of what we might loosely call “the body” within the confines of life.
Within the Hegelian framework, the subject, which splits itself off from its body, requires that body in order to sustain its splitting activity; the body to be suppressed is thus marshalled in the service of that suppression. For Foucault, the body to be regulated is similarly marshalled in the service of suppression, but the body is not constituted prior to that regulation. On the contrary, the body is produced as an object of regulation, and for regulation to augment itself, the body is proliferated as an object of regulation. This proliferation both marks off Foucault’s theory from Hegel’s and constitutes the site of potential resistance to regulation. The possibility of this resistance is derived from what is unforeseeable in proliferation.. But to understaad how a regulatory regime could produce effects which are not only unforeseeable but constitute resistance, it seems that we must return to the question of stubborn attachments and, more precisely, to the place of that attachment in the subversion of the law (59-60).
… the logic of subjection in both Hegel and Freud implies that the instrument of suppression becomes the new structure and aim of desire, at least when subjection proves effective (60).
What Hegel implies in “The Unhappy Consciousness” is not merely that moral wretchedness cannot be coherently sustained, that it invariably concedes the bodily being that it seeks to deny, but that the pursuit of wretchedness, the attachment to wretchedness, is both the condition and the potential undoing of such subjection. If wretchedness, agony, and pain are sites or modes of stubbornness, ways of attaching to oneself, negatively articulated modes of reflexivity, then that is because they are given by regulatory regimes as the sites available for attachment, and a subject will attach to pain rather than not attach at all. … the desire to desire is a willingness to desire precisely that which would foreclose desire, if only for the possibility of continuing to desire. (61)
If desire has as its final aim the continuation of itself —and here one might link Hegel, Freud, and Foucault all back to Spinoza’s connatus— then the capacity of desire to be withdrawn and to reattach will constitute something like the vulnerability of every strategy (62).
Butler, Judith. “Longing for Recognition: Commentary on the Work of Jessica Benjamin” (2000) in Undoing Gender. New York: Routledge, 2004. Print.
When Hegel introduces the notion of recognition in the section on lordship and bondage in The Phenomenology of Spirit, he narrates the primary encounter with the Other in terms of self-loss. “Self-consciousness … has come out of itself. … it has lost itself, for it finds itself as an other being” (Phenomenology 111). One might understand Hegel to be describing merely a pathological state in which a fantasy of absorption by the Other constitutes an early or primitive experience. But he is saying something more. He is suggesting that whatever consciousness is, whatever the self is, will find itself only through a reflection of itself in another.
To be itself, it must pass through self-loss, and when it passes through, it will never be “returned” to what it was. To be reflected in or as another will have a double significance for consciousness, however, since consciousness will, through the reflection, regain itself in some way. But it will, by virtue of the external status of the reflection, regain itself as external to itself and, hence, continue to lose itself. (147)
Thus, the relationship to the Other will be, invariably, ambivalent. The price of self-knowledge will be self-loss, and the Other poses the possibility of both securing and undermining self-knowledge. What becomes clear, though, is that the self never returns to itself free of the Other, that its “relationality” become constitutive of who the self is.
Hegel has given us an ek-static notion of the self, one which is, of necessity, outside itself, not self-identical, differentiated from the start. It is the self over here who considers its reflection over there, but it is equally over there, reflected, and reflecting. Its ontology is precisely to be divided and spanned in irrecoverable ways. Indeed, whatever self emerges in the course of the Phenomenology of Spirit is always at a temporal remove from its former appearance;
it is transformed through its encounter with alterity, not in order to return to itself, but to become a self it never was. Difference casts it forth into an irreversible future.
To be a self is, on these terms, to be at a distance from who one is, not to enjoy the prerogative of self-identity (what Hegel calls self-certainty), but to be cast, always, outside oneself, Other to oneself. I believe that this conception of the self emphasizes a different Hegel from the one found in Benjamin’s work. It is surely one for which the metaphor of “inclusion,” as in “the inclusive self” would not quite work. 148
[…] I would suggest that the ek-static notion of the self in Hegel resonates in some ways with this notion of the self that invariably loses itself in the Other who secures that self’s existence. The “self” here is not the same as the subject, which is a conceit of autonomous self-determination. The self in Hegel is marked by a primary enthrallment with the Other, one in which that self is put at risk. The moment in “Lordship and Bondage” when the two self-consciousnesses come to recognize one another is, accordingly, in the “life and death struggle,” the moment in which they each see the shared power they have to annihilate the Other and, thereby, destroy the condition of their own self-reflection. Thus, it is at a moment of fundamental vulnerability that recognition becomes possible, and need becomes self-conscious. What recognition does at such a moment is, to be sure, to hold destruction in check. But what it also means is that the self is not its own, that it is given over to the Other in advance of any further relation, but in such a way that the Other does not own it either. And the ethical content of its relationship to the Other is to be found in this fundamental and reciprocal state of being “given over.” In Hegel, it would only be partially true to say that the self comes to “include” the Other. For the self is always other to itself, and so not a “container” or unity that might “include” Others within its scope.
On the contrary, the self is always finding itself as the Other, becoming Other to itself, and this is another way of marking the opposite of “incorporation.” It does not take the Other in; it finds itself transported outside of itself in an irreversible relation of alterity. In a sense, the self “is” this relation to alterity. 149-150
Although Benjamin sometimes refers to “postmodern” conceptions of the self that presume its “split” and “decentered” character, we do not come to know what precisely is meant by these terms. It will not do to say that there is first a self and then it engages in spllitting, since the self as I am outlining it here is beyond itself from the start, and defined by this ontological ek-stasis, this fundamental relation to the Other in which it finds itself ambiguously installed outside itself. This model is, I would suggest, one way of disputing any claim concerning the self-sufficiency of the subject or, indeed, the incorporative character of all identification. ….
If we assume that the self exists and then it splits, we assume that the ontological status of the self is self-sufficient before it undergoes its splitting (an Aristophanic myth, we might say, resurrected within the metapsychology of ego psychology). But this is not to understand the ontological primacy of relationality itself and its consequences for thinking the self in it necessary (and ethically consequential) disunity. 150
yes, it is necessary to say that the subject splits, but it does not follow from that formulation that the subject was a single whole or autonomous. For if the subject is both split and splitting, it will be necessary to know what kind of split was inaugurative, what kind is undergone as a contingent psychic event, and how those different levels of splitting relate to one another, if at all.
It is, then, one perspective on relationality derived from Hegel which claims that the self seeks and offers recognition to another, but it is another which claims that the very process of recognition reveals that the self is always already positioned outside itself. This is not a particularly “postmodern” insight, since it is derived from German idealism and earlier medieval ecstatic traditions. It simply avows that that “we” who are relational do not stand apart from those relations and cannot think of ourselves outside of the decentering effects that that relationality entails.
Moreover, when we consider that the relations by which we are defined are NOT DYADIC, but always refer to a historical legacy and futural horizon that is not contained by the Other, but which constitutes something like the Other of the Other, then it seems to follow that who we “are” fundamentally is a subject in a temporal chain of desire that only occasionally and provisionally assumes the form of the dyad.
I want to reiterate that displacing the binary model for thinking about relationality will also help us appreciate the triangulating echoes in heterosexual, homosexual, and bisexual desire, and complicate our understanding of the relation between sexuality and gender. 151
Butler, Judith. Undoing Gender. New York: Routledge, 2004. Print.
the triadic structure for thinking about desire has implications for thinking gender beyond complementarity and reducing the risk of heterosexist bias implied by the doctrine of complementarity.
I’m no great fan of the phallus … I do not propose a return to a notion of the phallus as the third term in any and all relations of desire. Nor do I accept the view that would posit the phallus as the primary or originary moment of desire, such that all desire either extends through identification or mimetic reflection of the paternal signifier. I understand that progressive Lacanians are quick to distinguish between the phallus and the penis and claim that the “paternal” is a metaphor only.
What they do not explain is the way the very distinction that is said to make “phallus” and “paternal” safe for use continues to rely upon and reinstitute the correspondences, penis/phallus and paternal/maternal that the distinctions are said to overcome.
I believe in the power of subversive resignification to an extent and applaud efforts to disseminate the phallus and to cultivate, for instance, dyke dads and the like. But it would be a mistake, I believe, to privilege either the penis or paternity as the terms to be most widely and radically resignified. Why those terms rather than some others? The “other” to these terms is, of course, the question interrogated here, and Benjamin has helped us to imagine, theoretically, a psychic landscape in which the phallus does not control the circuit of psychic effects. But are we equipped to rethink the problem of triangulation now that we understand the risks to phallic reduction (136).
The turn to the preoedipal has been, of course, to rethink desire in relation to the maternal, but such a turn engages us, unwittingly, in the resurrection of the dyad: not the phallus, but the maternal, for the two options available are “dad” and “mom.” But are there other kinds of descriptions that might complicate what happens at the level of desire and, indeed, at the level of gender and kinship? 136
[…] I do think however, that (a) triangulation might be profitably rethought beyond oedipalization or, indeed, as part of the very postoedipal displacement of the oedipal; (b) certain assumptions about the primacy of gender dimorphism limit the radicalism of Benjamin’s critique; and (c) that the model of overinclusiveness cannot quite become the condition for recognizing difference that Benjamin maintains because it resists the notion of a self that is ek-statically [standing outside of oneself] involved in the Other, decentered, through its identifications which neither exludes nor includes the Other in question.
Postoedipal Triangulation
Were we right to presume the binary of man and woman when so many gendered lives cannot assume that binary? Were we right to see the relation as a binary when the reference to the tertiary is what permitted us to see the homosexual aims that run through heterosexual relationality. … At what psychic price does normative gender become established? 144
How is it that presuming complementarity presumes a self-referential heterosexual that is not definitionally crossed by homosexual aims? If we could not ask these questions in the past, do they not now form part of the theoretical challenge for a psychoanalysis concerned with the politics of gender and sexuality, at once feminist and queer?
When the question of practical philosophy, that is, bringing philosophy in a practical relationship with living, then it has always delved into the question of desire. Why? Butler adds, to live a philosophical life, is to ask the question, is the human individual capable of living a philosophical, hence moral life? Does ‘ought’ imply ‘can’. And if desire were just seen to be an irrational component with no inherent competency, then the moral project would founder. But, on the contrary, moral philosophy has
On Spinoza
Hegel is sceptical of the notion of metaphysical closure, Butler adds that Hegel charges Spinoza with erecting a metaphysical system that “excludes the negativity of self-consciousness, that aspect of human life that precludes its final assimilation into Being …” (10) And it is in Hegel’s critique of Spinoza’s over-theistic mono-mania, that is Spinoza’s excluding of “consciousness’s own negativity” that we find hegel’s original contribution to the formulation of desire
A very nice summary of the Phenomenology
Spinoza’s metaphysics takes the point of view of the completed system as its starting point, but Hegel’s Phenomenology poses the question of how this system is known, and how the knower comes to know himeself as part of this system. In other words, Hegel wants to know how the movement of human knowledge, the negativity of self-consciousness, comes to be understood as necessary for the constitution of the system itself and further, how the necessity of human negativity confirms the impossiblity of that system’s completion and closure (12).
For Butler, no doubt heavily influenced by the French reading of Hegel, the negativity of self-consciousness is desire. Desire is the negative dialectic. Of which she poses the question to Hegel as to whether he is “guilty of silencing the power of the negative?” (14).
The deceptive pursuit of the Absolute is not a vain “running around in circles,” but a progressive cycle which reveals every deception as permitting some grander act of synthesis, an insight into yet more regions of interrelated reality (22).
Desire
Nothing just appears ex nihilo for Hegel, “‘Appearance’ is but one explicit or actual moment in the development of a phenomenon. In the Phenomenology, a given phenomenon appears in the context of a given configuration of the world. In the case of desire, we must ask, what kind of world makes desire possilbe? What must the world be like for desire to exist?” (24).
I am referring not only to humans not regarded as human, and thus to a restrictive conception of the human that is based upon their exclusion. It is not a matter of a simple entry of the excluded into an established ontology, but an insurrection at the level of ontology, a critical opening up of the questions, What is real? Whose lives are real? How might reality be remade? Those who are unreal have, in a sense, already suffered the violence of derealization. (Precarious Life, Verso 2004, 33.)
Norms govern recognizability: There’s a million quotes I can find to underscore this argument. What I need to outline with regards to this is
– The geneology of the emergence of Butler’s turn to normativity, which I’ll find as the Foucault Effect no doubt
– The more difficult part is the exegesis of this quote:
“Does recognition, as Hegel argues, consist in a reciprocal act whereby I recognize that the other is structured in the same way I am? And do I recognize that the other also makes, or can make, this recognition of sameness? Or is there perhaps another encounter with alterity here that is irreducible to sameness? If it is the latter, how are we to understand this alterity?” (27)
🙂 Is Butler saying in effect that introducing difference into Hegelian dialectic of recognition forces now not any reconciliation with sameness
– norms and language, decentre the subject, as Hegel mentions as the system of customs Sittlichkeit and in this way Žižek and JB are not that far apart. As both in their respective way resist pegging down Hegel as this authoritarian philosopher of logocentric identity.
There is a language that frames the encounter, and embedded in that language is a set of norms concerning what will and will not constitute recognizability. (30)
Adriana Cavarero
Cavarero is a post-Hegelian in her approach to ethics and the other.
– “there is an other not fully known or knowable to me”
– “exposure and vulnerability of the other makes a primary ethical claim upon me”
Butler agrees and disagrees. She definitely likes the part about exposure and vulnerability, but she offsets Cavarero’s emphasis on singularity, which can slide into an individualist ethics. Butler instead emphasizes ‘substitutability’ of the account. This is because …
“discourse is not life its time is not yours (36)
indifferent structures, a sociability that exceeds me, which gets to the fact that for Butler any emphasis on singularity effaces the extent to which this originality resembles too strictly a frame of referencing that doesn’t correspond to the deconstructionist framework. That is for Butler, the account is impossible because the exposure and vulnerability undoes the subject, the other’s opaqueness is my opaqueness and this is the substitutable condition of subjectivity, and to that extent it is substitutable.
The account I give of myself exceeds narration, it can not be narrated. It can’t be a story, there is no stable subject, it doesn’t unfold in a linear way.
If I try to give an account of myself, if I try to make myself recognizable and understandable, then I might begin with a narrative account of my life. But this narrative will be disoriented by what is not mine, or not mine alone. And I will, to some degree, have to make myself substitutable in order to make myself recognizable. The narrative authority of the “I” must give way to the perspective and temporality of a set of norms that contest the singularity of my story. (37)
After reading Molly Anne Rothenberg’s book and her critique of Foucault and Butler, I’m intrigued by this problematic of immanentism. It happens when relations take place entirely within, that is, without any causal agent developing from the outside, without being effected by an ‘outside.’
… a subject produced by morality must find his or her relation to morality. One cannot will away this paradoxical condition for moral deliberation and for the task of giving an account of oneself. Even if morality supplies a set of norms that produce a subject in his or her intelligibility, it also remains a set of norms and rules that a subject must negotiate in a living and reflective way (10).
Molly Anne Rothenberg says if the subject is produced by a morality, in what sense can it develop a relation to that morality, how can it distance itself such that it can be properly reflective of its relationship with a morality? This is the problem of immanence and why Rothenberg moves to a version of extimate causality, with its emphasis on the non-coincident subject, but unlike Foucaultian immanentism, there is a space, an opening, in the subject’s ‘non-coincidence’ that allows it recognize it’s own relationship and defensive posturing with relationship to his/her own excess and yet instead of playing a game of ‘hot potato’ instead, absorb the excess via a identification with the sinthome. Thus becoming in Rothenberg’s words (I think), a sinthomic subject. That is, a subject that takes on the place of where jouissance formerly was, now the subject [Here I am] emerges.
Nietzsche
On page 10, Butler begins w/ Nietzsche because he offers an account of how we become reflective in the first place: “we become conscious of ourselves only after certain injuries have been inflicted.” In the interests of meting out a just punishment that the lawyer for the claimant asks the defendant, give an account of yourself, what were your actions? “And so, in fearful response, I offer myself as an “I” and try to reconstruct my deeds … For Nietzsche accountability follows only upon an accusation or, minimally, an allegation, one made by someone in a position to deal out punishment if causality can be established. And we become reflective upon ourselves, accordingly as a consequence of fear and terror. Indeed we become morally accountable as a consequence of fear and terror (11).
N. did well to understand that I begin my story of myself only in the face of a “you” who asks me to give an account. Only in the face of such a query or attribution from an other —”Was it you?”— do any of us start to narrate ourselves, or find that, for urgent reasons, we must become self-narrating beings (11).
In The Psychic Life of Power, I perhaps too quickly accepted this punitive scene of inauguration for the subject. According to that view, the institution of punishment ties me to my deed, and when I am punished for having done this or that deed, I emerge as a subject of conscience and, hence, a subject who reflects upon herself in some way. This view of subject formation depends upon an account of a subject who internalizes the law or, minimally, the causal tethering of the subject to the deed for which the institution of punishment seeks compensation (15).
Foucault
For N. the elaboration of a morality… is the sublimated … effect of this primary aggression turned against oneself, the idealized consequence of a turn against one’s own destructiveness and, for Nietzsche, one’s own life impulses … Foucault turns …. to codes of morality, understood as codes of conduct —and not primarily to codes of punishment —to consider how subjects are constituted in relation to such codes, which do not always rely on the violence of prohibition and its internalizing effects. … For Foucault, reflexivity emerges in the act of taking up a relation to moral codes, but it does not rely on an account of internalization or of psychic life more generally, certainly not a reduction of morality to bad conscience (16).
In the early 1980s Foucault’s interest shifts to a consideration of how, “certain historically established prescriptive codes compelled a certain kind of subject formation. Whereas in his earlier work, he treats the subject as an “effect” of discourse, in his later writings he nuances and refines his position as follows: The subject forms itsellf in relation to a set of codes, prescriptions, or norms … This work on the self … takes place within the context of a set of norms that precede and exceed the subject. … setting the limits to what will be considered to be an intelligible formatio nof the subject within a given historical scheme of things.
There is no making of oneself (poiesis) outside of a mode of subjectivation (assujettisement) and, hence, no self-making outside of the norms that orchestrate the possible forms that a subject may take. The practice of critique then exposes the limits of the historical scheme of things, the epistemological and ontological horizon within which subjects come to be at all. To make oneself in such a way that one exposes those limits is precisely to engage in an aesthetics of the self that maintains a critical relation to existing norms. (Quoting Foucault) “Critique would insure the desubjugation of the subject in the course of what we could call, in a word, the politics of truth.” (17)
The Immanence Thing, Listen Up:
A practice of self-stylization in relation to norms … (means) neither conforming to the prescriptions entailed by a given code nor of internalizing a primary prohibition or interdiction (Hey Oedipal!)
However, the “I” engendered by morality is not conceived as a self-berating psychic agency. From the outset, what relation the self will take to itself, how it will craft itself in response to an injunction, how it will form itself, and what labor it will perform upon itself is a challenge, if not an open question (18).
the subject’s self-crafting … always takes place in relation to an imposed set of norms. the norm does not produce the subject as its necessary effect, nor is the subject fully free to disregard the norm that inaugurates its reflexivity; one invariably struggles with conditions of one’s own life that one could not have chosen. If there is an operation of agency or, indeed, freedom in this struggle, it takes place in the context of an enabling and limiting field of constraint. This ethical agency is neither fully determined nor radically free. It’s struggle or primary dilemma is to be produced by a world, even as one must produce oneself in some way. This struggle with the unchosen conditions of one’s life, a struggle —an agency— is also make possible, paradoxically, by the persistence of this primary condition of unfreedom (19).
Does the postulation of a subject who is not self-grounding, that is, whose conditions of emergence can never fully be accounted for, undermine the possibility of responsibility and, in particular, of giving an account of oneself? (19)
I will argue otherwise by showing how a theory of subject formation that acknowledges the limits of self-knowledge can serve a conception of ethics and, indeed, responsibility.
[…] primary relations are formative in ways that produce a necessary opacity in our understanding of ourselves. An account of oneself is always given to another, whether conjured or existing, and this other establishes the scene of address as a more primary ethical relation than a reflexive effort to give an account of oneself. Moreover, the very terms by which we give an account, by which we make ourselves intelligible to ourselves and to others, are not of our making. They are social in character, and they establish social norms, a domain of unfreedom and substitutability within which our “singular” stories are told (21).
With the help of Foucault’s self-criticism, it may be possible to show that the question of ethics emerges precisely at the limits of our schemes of intelligibility, the site where we ask ourselves what it might mean to continue in a dialogue where no common ground can be assumed. where one is, as it were, at the limits of what one knows yet still under the demand to offer and receive acknowledgment: to someone else who is there to be addressed and whose address is there to be received. (21-22).
Recognition
Thus if I question the regime of truth, I question, too, the regime through which being, and my own ontological status, is allocated. Critique is not merely of a given social practice or a certain horizon of intelligibility within which practices and institutions appear, it also implies that I come into question for myself. Self-questioning becomes an ethical consequence of critique for Foucault, as he makes clear in “What is Critique?” It also turns out that self-questioning of this sort involves putting oneself at risk, imperiling the very possibility of being recognized by others, since to question the norms of recognition that govern what I might be, to ask what they leave out, what they might be compelled to accommodate, is, in relation to the present regime, to risk unrecognizability as a subject or at least to become an occasion for posing the questions of who one is (or can be) and whether or not one is recognizable.
These questions imply at least two kinds of inquiry for an ethical philosophy.
If we conclude that Foucault’s failure to think the other is decisive, we have perhaps overlooked the fact that the very being of the self is dependent, not just on the existence of the other in its singularity (as Levinas would have it), but also on the social dimension of normativity that governs the scene of recognition. The social dimension of normativity precedes and conditions any dyadic exchange, even though it seems that we make contact with that sphere of normativity precisely in the context of such proximate exchanges. (23-4)
The norms by which I recognize another or, indeed myself are not mine alone. They function to the extent that they are social, exceeding every dyadic exchange that they condition. Their sociality, however, can be understood neither as a structuralist totality nor as a transcendental or quasi-transcendental invariability. Some would doubtless argue that norms must already be in place for recognition to become possible, and there is surely truth in such a claim. It is also true that certain practices of recognition or, indeed, certain breakdowns in the practice of recognition mark a site of rupture within the horizon of normativity and implicitly call for the institution of new norms, putting into question the giveness of the prevailing normative horizon. The normative horizon within which I see the other or, indeed, within which the other sees and listens and knows and recognizes is also subject to a a critical opening.
It will not do, then, to collapse the notion of the other into the sociality of norms and claim that the other is implicitly present in the norms by which recognition is conferred. Sometimes the very unrecognizability of the other brings about a crisis in the norms that govern recognition. If and when, in an effort to confer or to receive a recognition that fails again and again, I call into question the normative horizon within which recogntion takes place, this questioning is part of the desire for recognition, a desire that can find no satisfaction, and whose unsatisfiability establishes a critical point of departure for the interrogation of available norms (24).
In asking the ethical question “How ought I to treat another?” I am immediately caught up in a realm of social normativity, since the other only appears to me, only functions as an other for me, if there is a frame within which I can see and apprehend the other in her separateness and exteriority. So, though I might think of the ethical relation as dyadic or, indeed, as presocial, I am caught up not only in the sphere of normativity but in the problematic of power when I pose the ethical question in its directness and simplicity: “How ought I to treat you?” If the “I” and the “you” must first come into being, and if a normative frame is necessary for this emergence and encounter, then norms work not only to direct my conduct but to condition the possible emergence of an encounter between myself and the other (25).
We are not mere dyads on our own, since our exchange is conditioned and mediated by language, by conventions, by a sedimentation of norms that are social in character and that exceed the perspective of those involved in the exchange (28)
Post-Hegelians like Adriana Cavarero ask “who are you” and thus try to suggest that Hegel’s dialectic of recognition gets it wrong when it envelopes the other within the “I.” Although as Butler points out, Hegel reveals the shortcomings of the Master and Slave dyad of recognition, requiring a further incorporation under the sphere of ethics or sittlich.., Butler is drawing parallels between Hegel’s ethical sphere and structure of normativity that underscores the ability for one to recognize an other.
Whereas The Phenomenology of Spirit moves from the scenario of the dyad toward a social theory of recognition, for Caverero it is necessary to ground the social in the dyadic encounter. She writes: “The “you” comes before the we, before the plural you and before the they.
Susceptibility to others that is unwilled, unchosen, that is a condition of our responsiveness to others, even a condition of our responsibility for them. It means, among other things, that this susceptibility designates a nonfreedom and, paradoxically, it is on the basis of this susceptibility over which we have no choice that we become responsible for others (87-88).
Jean Laplanche contends that the limit to full articulation arrives, not because of a Lacanian “bar” that forecloses the return to a primary jouissance, but because of the overwhelming and enigmatic impressions made by the adult world in its specificity on the child. For Laplanche, there is no Other in some symbolic sense, just the various others who constiutute the caregiving adults in a child’s world. Indeed, for Laplanche there is no reason to assume that these caregivers must be oedipally organized as “father” and “mother.”
Note 19, page 142: Fletcher makes clear that Laplanche’s recourse to the “adult world” as the source of sexual messages is a significant departure from psychoanalytic accounts that assume that an Oedipal scene with Mother and Father structures desire at a primary level. … Fletcher notes that Laplanche’s theory of the “enigmatic signifier” emerges as a clear alternative to the Lacanian symbolic.
This counters the paternal law, linked to the structuralist account of the exchange of women and the universalist premises of “culture,” with a conception of the enigmatic signifier, which assumes not only that primary unconscious and sexual messages are impressed upon the child (constituting the meaning and efficacy of “primary seduction”) but that the primary others who make those impressions are themselves in teh grip of similar messages, which can never be fully decoded or recovered.
Fletcher asserts that Laplanche has clearly inaugurated a psychoanalytic possibility for explaining “those psychic trajectories that swerve from or attempt to rework the normalizing function of the paternal Law and its Oedipal polarities (e.g., various female and male homosexualities).” Although Fletcher does not show us precisely how this might work, he holds out this possibility as following from the displacement of the paternal law by the enigmatic signifier.
Second, he (Fletcher) points to a future project, namely, how to account for gender in the wake of the Oedipus’s displacement from primacy: “What Laplanche’s reworking of the drives in the context of primary seduction now leaves unclear or untheorised, is how the psychic constitution and inscription of a sexually and genitally differentiated body image (the repression and symbolization of what enigmatic signifiers?), the ground or at least terrain from the formation of gendered identities, is now to be rethought”