butler – Page 38 – objet (a)

incest taboo foucault

From Butler’s Gender Trouble 1990 p. 73

The incest taboo, then, would repress no primary dispositions, but effectively create the distinction between “primary” and “secondary” dispositions to describe and reproduce the distinction between a legitimate heterosexuality and an illegitimate homosexuality. Indeed, if we conceive of the incest taboo as primarily productive in its effects, then the prohibition that founds the “subject’ and survives as the law of its desire becomes the means by which identity, particularly gender identity, is constituted.

Gender refuses a loss

JB, Gender Trouble. 1990. page 60.

Boys repudiation of the mother is the founding moment of what Freud calls gender “consolidation”

Forfeiting the mother as object of desire, the boy either internalizes the loss through identification with her, or displaces his heterosexual attachment, in which case he fortifies his attachment to his father and thereby “consolidates” his masculinity. As the metaphor of consolidation suggests, there are clearly bits and pieces of masculinity to be found within the psychic landscape, dispositions, sexual trends, and aims, but they are diffuse and disorganized, unbounded by the exclusivity of a heterosexual object choice. Indeed, if the boy renounces both aim and object and, therefore, heterosexual cathexis altogether, he internalizes the mother and sets up a feminine superego which dissolves and disorganizes masculinity, consolidating feminine libidinal dispositions in its place (60).

Gender as an identity refusal of a loss (the maternal body) that encrypts itself in the body

antimetaphorical activity, incorporation LITERALIZES the loss ON or IN the body and so appears as the facticity of the body, the means by which the body comes to bear “sex” as its literal truth (68).

Melancholia

Notes from JB’s Gender Trouble 1990, Routledge

little effort has been made so far to look at the melancholic denial/preservation of homosexuality in the production of gender within the heterosexual frame (57).

melancholia does not oppose the work of mourning

identification

incest taboo: internalizes the tabooed object of desire, in prohibited heterosexual union object is denied but not modality of desire

prohibited homosexual union: both desire and object of desire require renunciation and so become subject to internalizing strategies of melancholia

Freud cites bisexual dispositions which should mean that an original sexual love of son for father should not be denied but Freud denies this.

The boy however does sustain a primary cathexis for the mother

That the boy usually chooses the heterosexual would, then, be the result, not of the fear of castration by the father, but of the fear of castration — that is, the fear of “feminization” associated within heterosexual cultures with male homosexuality. In effect, it is not primarily the heterosexual lust for the mother that must be punished and sublimated, but the homosexual cathexis that must be subordinated to a cultually sanctioned heterosexuality (59).

The melancholic refuses the loss of the object and internalization becomes a strategy of magically resuscitating the lost object, not only because the loss is painful, but because the ambivalence felt towards the object requires that the object be retained until differences are settled (61).

Butler Manifesto

Bodies That Matter 1993 pages 15-16

As a result of this reformulation of performativity:

gender performativity cannot be theorized apart from the forcible and reiterative practice of regulatory sexual regimes,
the account of agency conditioned by those very regimes of discourse/power cannot be conflated with the voluntarism or individualism, much less with consumerism, and in no way presupposes a choosing subject;
the regime of heterosexuality operates to circumscribe and contour the “materiality” of sex, and that “materiality” is formed and sustained through and as a materialization of regulatory norms that are in part those of heterosexual hegemony;
the materialization of norms requires those identificatory processes by which norms are assumed or appropriated, and these identifications precede and enable the formation of a subject, but are not, strictly speaking, performed by a subject; and
the limits of constructivism are exposed at those boundaries of bodily life where abjected or delegitimated bodies fail to count as “bodies.” If the materiality of sex is demarcated in discourse, then this demarcation will produce a domain of excluded and delegitimated “sex.” Hence, it will be as important to think about how and to what end bodies are constructed as is it will be to think about how and to what end bodies are not constructed and, further, to ask after how bodies which fail to materialize provide the necessary “outside,” if not the necessary support, for the bodies which, in materializing the norm, qualify as bodies that matter.

How, then, can one think through the matter of bodies as a kind of materialization governed by regulatory norms in order to ascertain the workings of heterosexual hegemony in the formation of what qualifies as a viable body?

How does that materialization of the norm in bodily formation produce a domain of abjected bodies, a field of deformation which, in failing to qualify as the fully human, fortifies those regulatory norms?

What challenge does the excluded and abjected realm produce to a symbolic hegemony that might force a radical rearticulation of what qualifies as bodies that matter, ways of living that count as “life,” lives worth protecting, lives worth saving, lives worth grieving?

cite the law differently

Butler, Judith. Bodies That Matter p. 15

And though the symbolic appears to be a force that cannot be contravened without psychosis, the symbolic ought to be rethought as a series of normativizing injunctions that secure the borders of sex through the threat of psychosis, abjection, psychic unlivability. And further, that this “law” can only remain law to the extent that it compels the differentiated citations and approximations called “feminine” and “masculine.” The presumption that the symbolic law of sex enjoys a separable ontology prior and autonomous to its assumption is contravened by the notion that the citation of the law is the very mechanism of its production and articulation. What is “forced” by the symbolic, then, is a citation of its law that reiterates and consolidates the ruse of its own force.

What would it mean to “cite” the law to produce it differently, to “cite” the law in order to reiterate and coopt its power, to expose the heterosexual matrix and to displace the effect of its necessity?

The process of that sedimentation or what we might call materialization will be a kind of citationality, the acquisition of being throught the citing of power, a citing that establishes an originary complicity with power in the formation of the “I”.

In this sense, the agency denoted by the performativity of “sex” will be directly counter to any notion of a voluntarist subject who exists quite apart from the regulatory norms which she/he opposes. The paradox of subjectivation (assujetissement) is precisely that the subject who would resist such norms is itself enabled, if not produced, by such norms. Although this constitutive constraint does not foreclose the possibility of agency, it does locate agency as a reiterative or reaticulatory practice, immanent to power, and not a relation of external opposition to power.

performativity as citationality

JB on performativity:

Performativity is thus not a singular “act,” for it is always a reiteration of a norm or set of norms, and to the extent that it acquires an act-like status in the present, it conceals or dissimulates the conventions of which it is a repetition. Moreover, this act is not primarily theatrical; indeed, its apparent theatricality is produced to the extent that its historicity remains dissimulated (and, conversely, its theatricality gains a certain inevitability given the impossibility of a full disclosure of its historicity) (12).

The question

Thus the question is no longer, How is gender constituted as and through a certain interpretation of sex? (a question that leaves the “matter” of sex untheorized), but rather, Through what regulatory norms is sex itself materialized? And how is it that treating the materiality of sex as a given presupposes and consolidates the normative conditions of its own emergence (10).

citationality

Butler’s theory of citationality is a core feature of her work post Gender Trouble. It’s a difficult concept but exremely productive. Here is a taste of it from her 1993 book Bodies That Matter. I will quote at length because every sentence is mind numbingly expansive.

To take up the political signifier (which is always a matter of taking up a signifier by which one is oneself already taken up, constituted, initiated) is to be taken into a chain of prior usages, to be installed in the midst of significations that cannot be situated in terms of clear origins or ultimate goals. This means that what is called agency can never be understood as a controlling or original authorship over that signifying chain, and it cannot be the power, once installed and constituted in and by that chain, to set a sure course for its future. But what is here called a “chain” of signification operates through a certain insistent citing of the signifier, an iterable practice whereby the political signifier is perpetually resignified, a repetition compulsion at the level of signification; indeed, an iterable practice that shows that what one takes to be a political signifier is itself the sedimentation of prior signifiers, the effect of their reworking, such that a signifier is political to the extent that it implicitly cites the prior instances of itself, drawing the phantasmatic promise of those prior signifiers, reworking them into the production and promise of “the new,” a “new” that is itself only established through recourse to those embedded conventions, past conventions, that have conventionally been invested with the political power to signify the future.

It is in this sense, then, that political signifiers might be avowed as performative, but that performativity might be rethought as the force of citationality. “Agency” would then be the double-movement of being constituted in and by a signifier, where “to be constituted” means “to be compelled to cite or repeat or mime” the signifier itself. Enabled by the very signifier that depends for its continuation on the future of that citational chain, agency is the hiatus in iterability, the compulsion to install an identity through repetition, which requires the very contingency, the undetermined interval, that identity insistently seeks to foreclose. The more insistent the foreclosure, the more exacerbated the temporal nonidentity of that which is heralded by the signifier of identity [I have no idea what this means]. And yet, the future of the signifier of identity can only be secured through a repetition that fails to repeat loyally, a reciting of the signifier that must commit a disloyalty against identity— a catachresis — in order to secure its future, a disloyalty that works the iterability of the signifier for what remains non-self-identical in any invocation of identity, namely, the iterable or temporal conditions of its own possibility.

For the purposes of political solidarity, however provisional, Žižek calls for a political performative that will halt the disunity and discontinuity of the signified and produce a temporary linguistic unity.

The failure of every such unity can be reduced to a “lack” with no historicity, the consequence of a transhistorical “law,” but such a reduction will miss the failures and discontinuities produced by social relations that invariably exceed the signifier and whose exclusions are necessary for the stabilization of the signifier. The “failure” of the signifier to produce the unity it appears to name is not the result of an existential void, but the result of that term’s incapacity to include the social relations that it provisionally stabilizes through a set of contingent exclusions.

This incompleteness will be the result of a specific set of social exclusions that return to haunt the claims of identity defined through negation; these exclusions need to be read and used in the reformulation and expansion of a democratizing reiteration of the term. That there can be no final or complete inclusivity is thus a function of the complexity and historicity of a social field that can never be summarized by any given description, and that, for democratic reasons, ought never to be (Buter 1993: 219-220).

Butler questions ‘lack’

Here it seems crucial to ask whether the notion of lack taken from psychoanalysis as that which secures the contingency of any and all social formations is itself a presocial principle universalized at the cost of every consideration of power, sociality, culture, politics, which regulates the relative closure and openness of social practices. Can Žižekian psychoanalysis respond to the pressure to theorize the historical specificity of trauma, to provide texture for the specific exclusions, annihilations, and unthinkable losses that structure the social phenomena mentioned above [the family, concentration camps, the Gulag] (Butler 1993: 202).

Paradoxically, the assertion of the real as the constitutive outside to symbolization is meant to support anti-essentialism, for if all symbolization is predicated on a lack, then there can be no complete or self-identical articulation of a given social identity. And yet, if women are positioned as that which cannot exist, as that which is barred from existence by the law of the father, then there is a conflation of women with that foreclosed existence, that lost referent, that is surely as pernicious as any form of ontological essentialism (Butler 1993: 218).

jb on the real which she doesn’t like

Judith Butler, in her 1993 book Bodies That Matter begins her discussion of Zizek thus:

On the notion of the Lacanian Real, she says:

To the extent that the law or regulatory mechanism of foreclosure … this law is exempted from the discursive and social rearticulation that it initiates. This exemption is, I would argue, highly consequential insofar as this law is understood to be that which produces and normativizes sexed positionalities in their intelligibility. To the extent that this law engages the traumatic production of a sexual antagonism in its symbolic normativity, it can do this only by barring from cultural intelligibility — and rendering culturally abject — cultural organizations of sexuality that exceed the structuring purview of that law. The risk, of course, is that contingent regulatory mechanisms of subject-production may be reified as universal laws, exempted from the very process of discursive rearticulation that they occasion (190).

Paradoxically the failure of such signifiers —”women” is the one that comes to mind — fully to describe the constituency they name is precisely what constitutes these signifiers as sites of phantasmatic investment and discursive rearticulation. It is what opens the signifier to new meaning and new possibilities for political resignification. It is this open-ended and performative function of the signifier that seems to me to be crucial to a radical democratic notion of futurity (191)

sexual difference unmarked

For Freud, this superego represents a norm, a standard, an ideal which is in part socially received; it is the psychic agency by which social regulation proceeds. But it is not just any norm; it is the set of norms by which the sexes are differentiated and installed. The super-ego thus first arises, says Freud, as a prohibition that regulates sexuality in the service of producing socially ideal “men” and “women.” This is the point at which Lacan intervened in order to develop his notion of the symbolic, the set of laws conveyed by language itself which compel conformity to notions of “masculinity” and “femininity.” And many psychoanalytic feminists have taken this claim as a point of departure for their own work. They have claimed in various ways that sexual difference is as primary as language, that there is no speaking, no writing, without the presupposition of sexual difference. And this has led to a second claim which I want to contest, namely, that sexual difference is more primary or more fundamental than other kinds of differences, including racial difference. It is this assertion of the priority of sexual difference over racial difference that has marked so much psychoanalytic feminism as white, for the assumption here is not only that sexual difference is more fundamental, but that there is relationship called “sexual difference” that is itself unmarked by race (Butler BTM: 183).

That whiteness is not understood by such a perspective as a racial category is clear; it is yet another power that need not speak its name. Hence, to claim that sexual difference is more fundamental than racial difference is effectively to assume that sexual difference is white sexual difference, and that whiteness is not a form of racial difference.

(Butler 1993 BTM: 181)

agency assujetissement

Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter. Routledge. 1993

The paradox of subjectivation (assujetissement) is precisely that the subject who would resist such norms is itself enabled, if not produced, by such norms. Although this constitutive constraint does not foreclose the possibility of agency, it does locate agency as a reiterative or rearticulatory practice, immanent to power, and not a relation of external opposition to power (15).