butler – Page 23 – objet (a)

Butler melancholia chapter 5

Melancholia describes a process

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Butler on kinship and symbolic

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

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

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

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

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

Butler 1997 definition of performativity

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

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

Butler Psychic Life of Power Chapter 5 part 2

The masculine and feminine are not dispositions but accomplishments

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

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

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

___

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

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

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

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

Butler Psychic Life of Power Chapter 5

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

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

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

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

reading Butler’s chapter 2 in GT

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

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

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

ziarek abstract value social death 4

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ziarek abstract value social death 3

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

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

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

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

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

ziarek abstract value social death 2

The mystery of the commodity, like the enigma of femininity, resides in its social form expressing the value of social labor, which in turn is intertwined with the value of “social construction.” This contradiction in the double value of the commodifi ed bodies points to the total dissociation of social form from the sensuous body, which, as a result of this separation, is reduced to passive, coarse matter. What Marx’s concept of the commodity diagnoses, therefore, is the indifference and the separation of social form from the “coarsely sensuous objectivity” of matter and concrete labor under the capitalist conditions of exchange (90).

These three kinds of abstraction performed by the commodity form

the abstraction from the heterogeneity of concrete labor,
temporalization,
and the particularity of the object

are mutually interdependent. As Adorno argues, what is at stake in separation of the abstract labor from physical work is the denial of the necessary dependence of concrete labor on its other: on the material, on “nature,” on the remainder of the nonidentical, which cannot be appropriated by the laboring social spirit.

By eliminating this “tie” to the material and nonidentical, the abstraction of social form denies that there is any “outside” to the principle of capitalist exchange based on equivalence. In so doing, abstraction turns labor into an ideology, which is coextensive with the appropriation of the labor of others and the domination of their bodies. Working in the service of equivalence and domination, this ideology of abstract, sovereign labor dissolves not only every qualitative difference but also every trace of the nonidentical and the incommensurate.

Ziarek abstract value social death 1

My main claim in this respect is that the protracted essentialism/antiessentialism debate is itself a symptom of the historical commodification of racialized, sexed bodies. By situating this binary in the context of commodification, we can diagnose more precisely the main difficulty that the opposition between essentialism/antiessentialism obscures and to a certain degree reproduces: namely, the schism between the abstraction of the commodity form, which determines the value of the object in total separation from its materiality, and the concomitant reduction of the nonsublated remnants of materiality to mere waste or markers of social death. This schism between the abstraction of social values and the nonsymbolizable material refuse is itself a source of social injustice, which is inscribed in the modern conceptions of racial and sexual differences.

Thus, in order to challenge both essentialism and social construction, feminist theory has not only to expose and contest the obscured social mechanisms of power but also to criticize the economic abstraction as the often invisible source of bodily injury.

This schism between the abstraction of social values and the nonsymbolizable material refuse is itself a source of social injustice, which is inscribed in the modern conceptions of racial and sexual differences. Thus, in order to challenge both essentialism and social construction, feminist theory has not only to expose and contest the obscured social mechanisms of power but also to criticize the economic abstraction as the often invisible source of bodily injury (89).

butler interview feb 2008 sexual difference

Italian interview Feb 2008 in Monthy Review Magazine (wow, times are a changin)
I am always surprised that, in Europe, these great divisions are made between Irigaray and the philosophers of sexual difference, on one side, and Butler, on the other, because in the USA we work in both lines. For me, this supposed contrast does not exist; in my classes I teach Irigaray. In my opinion, when we study the signiﬁcances that have been conferred on sexual reproduction and how it has been organised, we ﬁnd important convergences between Irigaray’s work and mine, because the question is:

how does the scene of reproduction come to be the deﬁning moment of sexual difference?
And what do we do with this?

And, in this respect, we ﬁnd various points of view: that of psychoanalysis, which underlines masculine dependence on the mother and at the same time its rejection; that which emphasises the importance of the maternal as a feminine value, as the basis for the feminist critique; and we can also ﬁnd another perspective that raises questions like:

why has sexuality been thought of in a restrictive form within the framework of sexual reproduction?
What does it mean that sexual difference is determined around the idea of reproduction?
What does it mean to think of non-reproductive sexuality in relation to this burdensome symbolic scene of reproduction?

Every nation-state, every national religious unit, wants to control reproduction, everybody is very uneasy about reproduction: the Spanish conservatives want to control reproduction, they say “no” to abortion. Why? Because it is through the control of women’s bodies that reproduction of the population is achieved and it becomes possible to reproduce the nation, the race, masculinity. We are all trying to change these values and work on them, trying to ﬁnd other spaces and possibilities for femininity, for masculinity, for that which is neither feminine nor masculine.

We have distinct conceptions about how to think this difference, but, for sure, we are all interested in exploring this difference. Given that we cannot assume a hard and fast division between these positions, I think there could be a dialogue between them: none of us want to accept the conception of sexual reproduction that transforms woman into a non-being that makes possible the being of man. We all start here, though we all have different strategies about how to move on.

butler interview feb 2008

Italian interview Feb 2008 in Monthy Review Magazine (wow, times are a changin)
I would like to go back and ask about the conditions of survival: what do we need to survive? We depend on our surroundings and on food; the food should be well distributed and eating habits healthy. We depend on justice and the distribution of economic resources. I believe there could be a politics of this sphere that looked on life as simply that, life, bare life; a politics that allowed us to see that life is never just naked life, that it is always politically saturated. Hence my disagreement with Agamben’s characterisation of ‘naked life’, for example when he refers to the Palestinians in Gaza, stripped of their rights, exposed to brutality without any defence, reduced to mere life; it is not a question of ‘mere life’, these lives are politically saturated: there is a battle taking place to cross the border, to ﬁnd food, to rebuild the house destroyed by bombs, or to get medicine. All these actions are struggles, even, I would say, practices of freedom. The practices of survival are extremely important; if we say they are simple mere organic life, we cannot recognise them as political struggles.

When the USA was attacked in September 2001, the government set out to quickly construct an idea of the country as sovereign, impermeable, invulnerable, because it was unacceptable that its frontiers had been breached. The system involved creating very powerful images, normally of men: men of the government, men ﬁghting to save people inside the World Trade Center. There was a kind of resurgence of the idea of a strong, efﬁcacious, militarised man, a man whose body will never be destroyed nor affected by anyone, who will be pure action and pure aggression. A certain idea of the subject was produced: who is the American subject? Who is America? A very aggressive afﬁrmation was made about masculine sovereignty, a certain idea of what the body is — of the masculine body, a certain idea of masculine subjectivity, which also amounts to a national self-comprehension — and then naturally they annihilated the sovereignty of Iraq, of Afghanistan, they resorted to Guantanamo because it is not under Cuban sovereignty and is also outside the borders of US sovereignty, in such a way that they could do what they wanted. They play with sovereignty; they take a certain kind of sovereignty as a prerogative, but do not respect sovereignty as a principle.

Another possibility would have been to say: we have been attacked, we accept the fact that we live in a global community, our frontiers are porous, people can cross them, we have to decide how we want to live this. Instead of defending ourselves, what we need are new international agreements and also to show the USA as being committed to international law, because we should remember that since 2001, and even before, Bush has refused to sign almost any international treaties: the anti-missile treaty, that establishing the International Court; anything to do with international cooperation, including the UN. He exercised his sovereignty over them and against them.

Perhaps because international cooperation is an ethos: we are dependent on a global world, we are all vulnerable, there can be accusations and agreements. How do we live together? What kind of agreements do we accept? But it is the nation-states that establish agreements between themselves and the real question is that of the stateless peoples: insurgent populations, people who live within political organisations that are not permitted to participate in international agreements. What kind of connection can be established here? This implies another kind of politics, a global politics, one that does not restrict itself to the nation-states. I am referring to other ways of thinking our vulnerability as nations, our limits as nations, and that include the conception of the subject as being fundamentally dependent or fundamentally social, as well as the forms of political organisation that seek to structure global politics in such a way as to gain recognition of our interdependence.