butler – Page 25 – objet (a)

Copjec can’t get back to mom

Secularized notion of infinity

Death Drive: this drive is inhibited as to its aim, part of this drive is to prevent itself from attaining its ultimate aim: death

The satisfaction of the drive through the very inhibition of its aim is the very definition of sublimation.

33: the psychoanalytic theory of Freud replaces [Kant’s] transcendental forms with empty, nonobjectifiable objects, the objects of the drive.

39: “But that’s what I like about them, that they come that way” Jasper Johns

There could not be a better description of drive/sublimation: it so wills what occurs that the object it finds is indistinguishable from the one it chooses.

copjec obdurate desire to endure

41: the singular truth of Antigone’s love for her brother must have a universal destiny, must be openly declared. The proclamation of love occurs in a passage that has struck several critics as so strange as to provoke the wish that it would one day be found to be an interpolation

If my husband had died, I could have had another, and a child by another man, if I had lost the first, but with my mother and father in Hades below, I could never have another brother.

This is the sentiment we express when we say of someone, “they broke the mold after they made him.” Antigone lets us know that her brother is unique, irreplaceable. There will never be another like him. His value to her depends on nothing he has done nor on any of his qualities. She refuses to justify her love for him by giving reasons for it, she calls on no authority, no diety, none of the laws of the polis to sanction the deed she undertakes on his behalf.

42: That Antigone does not give reasons for her love does not imply that her brother is unfathomable to her but that she is, as even the Chorus perceives, autonomous. She gives herself her own law and does not seek validation from any other authority. In other words, it is not the otherness but the nonexistence of the Other on which Lacan’s interpretation turns.

42: Antigone’s affirmation of love is, I am arguing, similar to Jasper Johns’s affirmative declaration, “But that’s what I like about them, that they come that way.” Johns declines to offer reasons for his fascination with targets or American flags or a particular set of commercial stencils; he, too, attests, in Lacan’s phrase, to the “ineffaceable character of what is.” We are invited once more to taste the tautologism of love, and perhaps now we can say in what it consists, namely the coincidence, or near coincidence, of the drive with its object. This is what Lacan sometimes called the “illusion of love”: one believes the beloved is everything one could hope for without recognizing the role one’s love for him or her plays in one’s satisfaction. … For, love is that which renders what the other is loveable. This is not to say that Antigone overlooks part of what he is, that she fails to see that is a traitor to Thebes or that he has any personal flaws. It means she loves him as he is, the way he comes.

“I love in you something more than you,”

…. Lacan means to say that this “something more” is accessed through love. If one were to receive identical gifts or identical reports of an event one has unfortunately missed both from an acquaintance and from a beloved friend, one would get more, a surplus satisfaction, from the latter. A gift given by a beloved friend ceases to coincide with itself, it becomes itself plus the fact that it was given by the friend. The same is true of everything I get from the beloved, all the qualities, everything he or she is. That is, the “is” of the beloved is split, fractured. The beloved is always slightly different from or more than herself. It is this more, this extra, that makes the beloved more than just an ordinary object of my attention.

copjec singularity immortality sublimation

23: Someone dies and leaves behind his place, which outlives him and is unfillable by anyone else. This idea constructs a specific notion of the social, wherein it is conceived to consist not only OF particular individuals and their relations to each other, but also AS a relation to these unoccupiable places. The social is composed, then not just of those things that will pass, but also of relations to empty places that will not. This gives society an existence, a durability, despite the rapid and relentless alterations modernity institutes. If, with the collapse of eternity, the modern world is not decimated by historical time, it is because this unoccupiable place, this sense of singularity, somehow knots it together in time. Singularity itself, that which appears most to disperse society, is here posited as essential rather than antagonistic to a certain modern social bond.

Singularity

This notion of singularity which is tied to the act of a subject is defined as modern because it depends on the denigration of any notion of a prior or superior instance that might prescribe or guarantee the act. ”Soul”, ”eternity”, ”absolute”, patriarchal power, all these notions ”have to be destroyed” before an act can be viewed as unique and as capable of stamping itself with its own necessity.
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One calls singular that which “once it has come into being, bears the strange hallmark of something that must be,” and therefore cannot die (Lacan cited in Copjec Antigone)
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24: For it is through the psychoanalytic concept of sublimation that we will be able to clarify exactly how singularity is able to figure and not be effaced by the social bond. … However incomplete the notion of sublimation remains at this point, it is nevertheless clear that it is meant to bridge the gap between singularity and sociality.

Immortality and Sublimation

25: dogma: bare life is sacred [code for Butler’s essential vulnerability, wow I get it now, Copject is arguing that Butler’s emphasis on abject, bare life is well … ]

26: Agamben faults Foucault for failing to demonstrate how political techniques and technologies of the self (by which processes of subjectivization bring the individual to bind himself to his own identity and consciousness and, at the same time, to an external power) converge to produce that form of involuntary servitude” which characterizes the modern subject, we recognize a need to know more about the biological definition of life if we are ever going to be able to explain how modern power is able to sink its roots so thoroughly —so inexhaustibly— into bare life. What is it about this definition of life that allows power to assume such an extensive, even capillary hold over it?

29: [on the pessimism and bleakness of Agamben] For, by focusing, however productively, on historical continuities, Agamben is led to downplay the rupture the nineteenth century "life sciences" represented, and it is precisely the notion of rupture, of a thought or act that would be able to break from its immanent condition, that is needed to restore power to life. The most insidious difficulty confronting us, however, is the fact that we ourselves remain dupes of the dogma that death is imbedded in life; that is, we remain victims of the theme of bodily finitude, or of bare life

The real romantic heritage —which is still with us today— is the theme of finitude. The idea that an apprehension of the human condition occurs primordially in the understanding of its finitude maintains infinity at a distance that’s both evanescent and sacred … the only really contemporary requirement for philosophy since Nietzsche is the secularization of infinity. (Badiou)

This statement strikes one as a long overdue correction of certain contemporary commonplaces. Yet its judgment will remain incomprehensible to cultural theorists [Copjec attacks here the cultural theorists and Butler no doubt] who continue to misrecognize bodily finitude as the sobering fact that confounds our Romantic pretentions. For these theorists —for whom limits are almost always celebrated, insofar as they are supposed to restrict the expansionism of political modernism and its notions of universalism and will— the body is the limit, par excellence, that which puts an end to any claim to transcendence.

What Badiou is here proposing is that our idea of bodily finitude assumes a point of transcendence. Like Agamben, Badiou argues that death becomes immanentized in the body only on condition that we presuppose a beyond. [As opposed to those postmodernists who reject any notion of transcendence as well… plain wierd. (RT)]

how thought escapes being a mere symptom of its historical conditions

What is needed, in this case, is a rethinking of the body. where the body is conceived not as the seat of death but, rather as the seat of sex. Contrary to what Foucault has claimed, the sexualization of the body by psychoanalysis does not participate in the regime of biopolitics; it opposes it. 29

What is needed is not an abandonment of current interest in the body, but a rethinking of it… for in truth another notion of the body has already been proposed, precisely as a challenge to the one offered by the (bare) life sciences… the one suggested by psychoanalysis, where the body is conceived not as the seat of death but, rather, as the seat of sex...

Borrowing Badiou’s phrase … through its definition of the sexualized body, psychoanalysis provided the world with a secularized notion of infinity. Or the concept of an immortal individual body, which Kant could not quite bring himself to articulate, is finally thinkable in Freud.

copjec antigone gives herself own law

31: Hegel – Polynices is forever entombed in his own “imperishable individuality,” his own imperishable finitude. In this way bare, bestial life has been dignified, rendered sacred.

32: Lacan’s interpretation turns on his recognition that the body is the site of a different obscenity, a jouissance that opens a new dimension of infinity, immortality. Thus will Lacan be led to describe Antigone’s deed not as a bestowal of “imperishable individuality” on her brother, but as an “immortalization of the family Até.”

But what does this difference signify in regard to Antigone’s relation to the dead, to her familial past, or to the city?
And what does it signify … in regard to the relation between the “individual organism,” which may be looked at, as Freud put it, “as a transitory and perishable appendage to the quasi-immortal germ plasm bequeathed to him by his race,” and the species?
How can our argument —that Lacan reconnects body and act, the very terms Hegel’s analysis sunders— be reconciled with Freud’s contention that sublimation pries the act, whether it be a physical act or the act of thinking, from the body’s grip?

Death and only death is the aim of every drive

32: There is no drive impelling the subject toward any sort of fusion with others … we must then definitively reject the “benevolent illusion” that there is among men a drive toward perfection or progress. Drive pushes away from or against the stabilization of unities or the dumb progress of developments.

… death drives are described by Freud as … working instead toward winning for the subject what we can only regard as potential immortality. How so?

33: Directed not outward toward the constituted world, but away from it, the death drive aims at the past, at a time before the subject found itself where it is now, embedded in time and moving toward death. What if anything does this backward trajectory, this flight from the constituted world and biological death discover? … drive discovers along its path something positive, certain “necessary forms of thought’ … that time does not change … in any way and [to which] the idea of time cannot be applied” Freud does conceive his notion of drive as an intervention in Kant’s philosophy, but the drive does not lend credence to the “Kantian theorem that time and space are … ‘necessary forms of thought'” … rather it significantly revises that theorem. … Freud replaces the transcendental forms with empty, nonobjectifiable objects, the objects of drive.

The aim of the drive is death, “the restoration to an earlier state of things” a stat of inanimation or inertia. Now this state exists only as an illusion … Psychoanalysis rewrites this mythical state as the primordial mother-child dyad, which supposedly contained all things and every happiness and to which the subject strives throughout his life to return.

34: the drive inhibits as part of its very activity, the achievement of its aim, some inherent obstacle —the OBJECT of the drive— simultaneously BRAKES the drive and BREAKS IT UP, curbs it, thus preventing it from reaching its aim, and divides it into partial drives … the now partial drives content themselves with these small nothings, these objects that satisfy them. Lacan gives to them the name objects a: they are, as it were, simulacra of the lost (maternal) object, or as Freud and Lacan both refer to it, of das Ding. Object a is, however, the general term, Lacan designates several specific objects: gaze, voice, breast, phallus. In other words he gives them the names of bodily organs. Why are the objects given these names? How do they displace Kant’s “necessary forms of thought”.

35-36: The various aspects of the mother, what she was like, will be captured by Vorstellungen, the system of representations or signifiers that form the relatively stable and familiar wold we share in common with our “fellow human-beings” or neighbors. But some aspects of the primoridial mother cannot be translated into these representations, since they are, Freud says, “new and non-comparable” to any experience the child has of himself.” A hole thus opens in the system of signifiers since those that would enable us to recall these new and noncomparable or singular aspects of the mother are simply unavailable, they simply do not exist.

… At the core of this matter of the unforgettable but forever lost Thing, we find not just an impossibility of thought, but of a void of Being.

The problems is not simply that I cannot think the primordial mother, but that her loss opens up a hole in being. Or, it is not that the mother escapes representation or thought, but that the jouissance that attached me to her has been lost and this loss depletes the whole of my being.

segal butler changes

Segal, Lynne. “After Judith Butler: Identities, Who Needs Them?” Subjectivity (2008) 25, 381-394.

5 ways JB has changed (384)

She has moved from primarily semiotic analysis to stressing the significance of the socio-cultural moment
from political abstractions to ethical reasoning
from pivotal concern with gender and sexuality to a general interest in alterity and the face/place of the other
from a Foucauldian engagement with exteriority and performativity to a more psychodynamic interest in interiority and stress upon the formative early years of life
from a rejection of identities into the specific embrace of several very distinct ones, articulated – with a suitable plethora of caveats – in the form of an identity politics

Reflecting upon 9/11, for instance, Butler asks how we can prevent the endless recurrence of acts of violence producing, relentlessly, only further cycles of violence. This is indeed, of course, just what that event has served to trigger in US foreign policy, at least under George W. Bush. In the five essays in Precarious Life (Butler, 2004a), Butler wonders how violence, loss, grief and mourning might be used to suggest instead possiblilities for non-violent reactions, asking us to consider ‘‘what makes for a grievable life.’’ In her view, could we but recognize and accept our own complexity and shared ‘‘primary vulnerability;’’ more generous encounters with others on the international stage might become possible. We cannot will away our own vulnerability without ceasing to be human, she observes, but what we need to ask ourselves is why some lives are grievable while others are not. Here, of course, she notes the endless roll calls for the American dead, in 9/11, or in subsequent military maneuvres; the non-existence, even of body counts, let alone obituaries, for the war casualties inflicted by those same military encounters, waged by the US government (ibid., p. xix).

In pointing this out, Butler hopes that she can provide the basis of an ethics for rethinking our conceptions of what is normatively human, for imaging the conditions that would enable all to have access to what ‘‘counts as a liveable life and a grievable death’’ (ibid., p. xv). It is easy to admire the strategic optimism here, even if the philosophical idealism underpinning it is somewhat less than fully convincing.

The Hegelian/Levinasian ethical route Butler navigates in articulating her current global egalitarian, pacifist stance is one which, on its own, seems to need the addition of considerable political analysis if it is to produce convincing goals for engaging with, let alone attempting to confront, the alarming political conjuncture of the 21st century.

However, Butler is absolutely right to emphasize the need for historical and cultural translations if we are to try to understand those we create as the face of the other, as our most threatening outsiders. There is undoubtedly a need for new forms of genuine multiculturalism, critically engaged with the unpacking/the deconstructing of the multiple meanings often attaching to just those emblematic markers of ‘‘otherness’’ that ‘‘we’’ find most disturbing – the ‘‘we’’ here referring to the putatively white westerners, secular, Christian, and today, very determinedly at official levels, also Jewish.

I am not so sure that many will want to follow Butler along her own preferred Hegelian/Levinasian route, asserting the place of the Other in the formation of subjectivity, though I can see that this is what she is encompassing when she writes: ‘‘I am nowhere without you. I cannot muster the ‘we’ except by finding the way in which I am tied to ‘you’, trying to translate, but finding my own language must break up and yield in order to know you’’ (Butler, 2003b, p. 19). Few will master Butler’s own demanding art of translation in the formation of subject positions, or see the radical potential bursting out of her philosophical reasoning that ‘‘the human comes into being, again and again, as that which we have yet to know’’ (ibid.). She is right, I am sure, but this in itself will not draw quite as many people as she might hope into political activism.

why would she, of all people, do this, as a Jew, rather than, as she seemed to suggest one should in her early writings, as a unique individual, politically analyzing the brutalities ensuing from Israel’s 40 long years of Occupation of East Jerusalem, the West Bank and its continued enclosure of Gaza? I asked her this question recently, at a Jewish Book week, which she and I were both addressing, primarily to raise questions about Israel and Palestine, and express our opposition to its occupation and our solidarity with those working for peace and justice over there. She answered, quite simply, that this is her heritage. She was brought up in a very Jewish tradition, so it is, literally, a ‘‘familiar’’ move for her to make.

In one of her most recent books, Giving an Account of Oneself (Butler, 2005), Butler writes more clearly than ever about the specific cultural grounding of any subject position in the precise historical conditions and the particular ‘‘crucible of social relations’’ available for self-narration. Aporias, opacity, gaps and fissures are an inevitable part of any self-narration, given the untidy jumble of experience and the unspeakable dimensions of the unconscious. But Butler today is far more appreciative of narratives of self-making, hoping that studying them may help us find ‘‘some forgiveness to offer to others and perhaps also to oneself when and if it becomes clear that giving a full account of oneself is impossible’’ (Kirby, 2006). ‘‘I may risk intelligibility and defy convention but then I am acting within or on a sociohistorical horizon, attempting to rupture or transform it’’ (Butler, 2005). Put more simply, we might say, we can only give an account of ourselves to an audience that is prepared, and already at least partly knows how, to listen to us through some form of shared vernacular. In a recent article on the limits of translation, Heike Bauer spoke of the significance of ‘‘shared discursive history’’ (an expression borrowed from the linguist Sally McConnell-Ginet) referring to the ways in which our particular conceptual framings affect how we translate

But merely to demonstrate the artifice and fragility of dominant linguistic framings is hardly, thereby, to weaken them. On the contrary, perhaps, the phantasmatic hold of gender and sexuality, rather like the now ubiquitous grip of market capitalism, has always thrived and renewed itself through surviving its own inevitable instabilities and contradictions. Alan Sinfield was neither the first, nor the last, gay theorist to point out that Queers’ celebration of the fluidity and fragmentation of the subject suited market forces very well, glamorizing risk, titillation and the endless embrace of the novel:

‘‘The task,’’ as he says, ‘‘is less to applaud and hasten the disintegration of residual identities – the market will take care of that – than to assess and exert some influence over the emergence of new ones’’ (Sinfield, 1998, p. 198).

her reference points remain, as she says, particular, social and political, there has emerged another rather distinct way of making trouble (in the context of a now long-standing refusal to recognize the humanity of another people) by using Jewish philosophy itself to critique the use of violence by the state of Israel, supposedly in defence of Jewish people everywhere.

butler foreclosure

I also don’t think that the foreclosures that produce the subject are fixed in time in the way that most Lacanians do. They really understand foreclosure as a kind of founding moment. My sense is that it is always the case that the subject is produced through certain kinds of foreclosure-certain things become impossible for it; certain things become irrecoverable-and that this makes for the possibility of a temporarily coherent subject who can act. But I also want to say that its action can very often take up the foreclosure itself; it can renew the meaning and the effect of foreclosure.

For instance, many people are inaugurated as subjects through the foreclosure of homosexuality; when homosexuality returns as a possibility, it returns precisely as the possibility of the unraveling of the subject itself: “I would not be I if I were a homosexual. I don’t know who I would be. I would be undone by that possibility. Therefore, I cannot come in close proximity to that which threatens to undo me fundamentally.” Miscegenation is another moment-it’s when you suddenly realize that a white subject assumes that its whiteness is absolutely essential to its capacity to be a subject at all: “If I must be in this kind of proximity to a person of color, I will become undone in some radical way.” We see forms of segregation and phobic forms of organizing social reality that keep the fiction of those subjects intact. Now, I think it’s possible sometimes to undergo an undoing, to submit to an undoing by virtue of what spectrally threatens the subject, in order to reinstate the subject on a new and different ground. (Butler interview with Salih, 2000)

lloyd criticism of desire for existence

For while the terms by which persistence —or survival— is made possible are social terms, that is, norms that are the contingent effects of specific power relations, the desire for existence itself, as she deploys it, appears not to be.

This is clear from her characterisation of it. The desire for existence, she notes, is a desire that is ‘exploited by regulatory power’ (Psychic 19), a desire with the ‘capacity’ to ‘be withdrawn and to reattach’ under different modes of subjection (psychic 62), a ‘desire to survive, “to be”‘, which is a ‘pervasively exploitable desire’ (psychic 7).

For desire to be exploited —or exploitable— by power implies, of course, that it pre-exists power and is thus not one of its effects. Likewise, the notion that desire can withdraw and reattach suggests also that it is a substance with capacities independent of power… desire for existence appears to operate as an a priori universal that transcends and/or precedes culture and society(99-100).

… attributing to the desire to exist certain qualities prior to its imbrication in power relations … For here what interests Butler is the way that social norms of recognition are configured such that the desire ‘to persist in one’s own being’ is denied to certain individuals (undoing 31). In other words it is the norms of recognition that she subjects to critical scrutiny, NOT the desire for existence as such (100).

When Butler deploys the term ‘social’, whether in relation to norms, culture, or language, it signals a contingent effect circumscribed by power. What she does not do, however, is pay sufficient attention to the historical conditions of emergence of these particular effects. She does not, that is, examine the historical practices that themselves generate the social.

lloyd interpellation subjection assujettisement

Psychic subjectivity is formed in dependence

subjection (assujetissement) in order to continue as a subject, individuals have to submit to the very power that subordinates them. Their evident willingness to do so suggests … a ‘passionate attachment’ to their subjection.

The policeman in the street calls out, “Hey you there!” and the individual recognizing that it is being spoken to, turns towards the policeman’s voice. At that moment the individual is transformed into a subject, or in Althusserian terms, a subject of ideology.

The turn to the voice of the law is the action that constitutes the individual’s subjection by power. Subjection, as Butler summarizes it, is best thought of, through the rhetorical idea of the trope, or turn (Psychic 3, Lloyd 98).

This turn is figurative since it cannot be made by an actual subject —the subject only comes into existence through the turn. In Althusser’s case, prior to the turn there is only the individual; after the turn there is a subject. What intrigues Butler however, is why the individual turns in the first place; why, that is, does it respond to the voice of the law? Althusser, according to Butler, offers no explanation for this. So she provides one.

The individual responds to the voice of the law because it assumes that it is guilty of some infraction —otherwise why would the policeman be calling out to it? It responds, that is, because its conscience tell it to. But if the individual has a conscience prior to its subjection by the law, then … The individual has already been subjected to a prior psychic operation of power, in which it has become both self-conscious and self subjugating (Psychic 106-131 Lloyd 98-99)

On its own, therefore, the theory of interpellation cannot explain subjection. What is needed here is a theory of the formation of the psyche.

lloyd melancholia

Lloyd, Moya. Judith Butler: From Norms to Politics. Cambridge MA: Polity Press, 2007.

Mourning: takes place when an object (such as a loved one, an ideal or a country) is lost. In such cases, the libido (mental energy) that was once invested in that object gradually detaches from it and is cathected onto (invested in) another object. The subject thus comes to terms with its loss and is able to form a new emotional attachment —to fall in love for instance. At this point, ‘the ego becomes free and uninhibited again’ and the work of mourning is completed.

Melancholia: The individual in this case is unable to get over its loss in the usual way. Instead it incorporates the lost object into its ego. It identifies with it, taking on certain of its characteristics. As a consequence, ‘a new structure of identity’ is created in which certain qualities of the lost other are permanently internalized in the ego. Diana Fuss captures this process nicely when she notes that ‘by incorporating, the spectral remains of the dearly departed love-object, the subject vampiristically comes to life’. Where mourning is the ‘normal’ reaction to loss, melancholia is a pathological response (since the melancholic subject is unable to accept its loss).

“the character of the ego is a precipitate of abandoned object-cathexes and … it contains the history of those object-choices.” To rephrase, the ego is formed melancholically. It is an effect of its identifications. It is this idea that Butler takes over and applies to the question of gender identity.

When Butler talks about the gender identity being structured melancholically she writes that ‘the process of internalizing and sustaining lost loves is crucial to the formation of the ego “and its object-choice”‘ (Gender T. 74 cited in Lloyd 84). It is not only the ego that is formed melancholically, it is also the subject’s sexual orientation — their object choice. That is, whether they choose an object (person) of the opposite sex to or of the same sex as themselves.

According to Butler, when the child reaches the Oedipal phase, they have already been ‘subjected to prohibitions which “dispose” them in distinct sexual directions’ (GT 82, Lloyd 84). They have already acquired heterosexual desires, albeit incestuous ones.

The fact that at the resolution of the Oedipal phase the boy identifies with his father, following the logic of melancholia, must mean that he has lost his father as an object of desire and has not been able to let go of —or grieve— that loss. Ego formation, after all, requires the internalization of —or identification with— the lost object. Similarly the fact that the girl identifies ultimately with her mother must again mean that she has lost her as a love object and has been unable to grieve that loss.

In both cases the lost desire for the parent of the same sex is installed melancholically in the ego. Heterosexual desire is bought at the price of denying —or, in psychoanalytic language, disavowing or foreclosing (what we might think of as negating or repressing)— prior homosexual desire. Heterosexuality thus has a melancholic structure. (85)

When Freud tells the story of the Oedipus complex he narrates it in terms of the taboo against incest, a taboo which he, like Lévi-Strauss … saw as foundational to culture and society. When Butler re-tells the story, she does so in order to uncover what is hidden in Freud’s narrative: that the Oedipus complex relies upon a prior taboo against homosexuality.

The psychoanalytic story of desire, as told by Freud, is thus incomplete: it does not, perhaps cannot, tell of the loss of same-sex desire that exists prior to the Oedipal scene where the incestuous heterosexual love object is renounced and where the subject is initiated into both their sexual identity and the moral order (85).

lloyd oedipal

Lloyd, Moya. Judith Butler: From Norms to Politics. Cambridge MA: Polity Press, 2007.

According to Lévi-Strauss there is a universal law that regulates the exchange of women in all kinship systems: this is the incest taboo, which ensures that women are exchanged between clans of men not related by blood. The incest taboo is crucial in two ways

1. it generates a non-incestuous heterosexuality

2. the taboo represents the crucial step in the transition from nature to culture. It inaugurates society. … the taboo leads to compulsory heterosexuality. How?

It divides the universe of sexual choice into categories of permitted and prohibited sexual partners and it presupposes a prior less articulate taboo on homosexuality. Incest taboo = invariant transcultural symbolic law

Because Rubin believes all humans are sexually polymorphous, she adheres to an idea of ‘sexuality “before the law”‘ rather than as Butler would have it, sexuality as an effect of the law (81).

… it is clear that much of the conceptual apparatus Butler deploys in her own analysis of Lévi-Strauss, Freud and Lacan is borrowed from Rubin’s earlier text: her assumption of a prior prohibition on homosexuality, an understanding of heterosexuality as compulsory and a concern with the intractability of symbolic law (81).

In Freud’s estimation, all infants experience incestuous desires for their parents. How these desires are resolved determines not only the subject’s future sexual orientation but also how its ego and superego (conscience) develop.

Key to Freud’s account, according to Butler, is the idea of primary bisexuality. Freud assumes, that is, that all babies are born with both feminine and masculine dispositions… A masculine disposition, he suggests, is expressed in the child’s desire for its mother, while a feminine disposition is expressed in the child’s desire for its father. The sex of the child in question is irrelevant.

For Butler this can mean only one thing. Freud understands primary bisexuality heteronormatively: as ‘the coincidence of two heterosexual desires within a single psyche’ (Butler Gender Trouble 77 cited in Lloyd 83).

Why is Freud unable to imagine the possibility of pre-oedipal homosexuality? Butler’s supposition (echoing Rubin) is that the reason for this is that the Oedipus complex, and thus Freud’s theory of psycho-sexual development, presumes a prior prohibition on homosexuality.

In order to expose this prior prohibition, Butler set about demonstrating that far from masculinity and femininity being dispositions that naturally inhere in persons, they are, in fact, effects of identification.

Identification refers to the process whereby the individual acquires its identity, or aspects thereof, from someone (or something) else. One of the ways in which this occurs is through … introjection.

Introjection: is when the subject takes into its ego —into him or herself— objects from the outside world in order to preserve them. Introjection is a response to loss.

stephen white being as potentiality

White, Stephen K. Sustaining Affirmation: The Strengths of Weak Ontology in Political Theory. New Jersey: Princeton UP, 2000.

Butler speaks of “fundamentally more capacious, generous, and ‘unthreatened’ bearings of the self.”

There is nothing in Butler’s ontology with which the ethical idea of generosity toward becoming resonates, draws sustenance. … It is world of pressures, demands, insistences, a world in which one is hard pressed to see any ontological prefiguration of that virtue of generosity upon which her ethical-political hopes so crucially turn.

stephen white illocutionary perlocutionary

White, Stephen K. Sustaining Affirmation: The Strengths of Weak Ontology in Political Theory. New Jersey: Princeton UP, 2000.

Butler does not deny that there are illocutionary speech acts, but she questions whether the isolated picure of a necessarily effective speech act is any better as a general model of injurious speech than Althusser’s isloated picture of interpellation is as a general model of the reproduction of discursive power. In both cases, too much occurs with necessity; too much sovereignty is accorded to the intentions of the speaker; and too little resistant agency is accorded to the addressee.

… speakers wield injurious with necessarily crushing effect; and addressees are thus automatically constutted as victims. Not only does this occlude the space of possible non-state-centered political agency, but it also perpetuates a “sovereign conceit” about actors. Those in poistions of power are imagined as in full control of speech —a control limitable only by that greater sovereign, the state. And addressees are imagined as being, at least ideally, in a condition where the terms of discourse are “their own” a delusion that forges that we are all always already interpellated in a multitude of ways (92).

We do better to think injurious speech on a ‘perlocutionary’ model, where saying something initiates a set of consequences or effects; this saying and its consequences are temporally distinguishable. The word and th wound do not fuse into one. The gap between them may in some cases be quite small; but its existence is crucial to emphasize, because it constitutes the space of possible failure and resignification (92).