Category: sexual difference

gayle rubin’s essay, 35 years later

Rubin, Gayle. “The Traffic in Women” Toward Anthropology of Women.  Ed. Rayna R. Reiter. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1975, pp. 157-210.

🙂 To what extent is Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble the natural heir to Gayle Rubin’s landmark 1975 essay?  Butler wrote her book 15 years later and in it she gave explicit recognition to Rubin’s crucial and innovative theory of the sex/gender system.  That is before Butler then proceeds to ‘jump off’ from where Rubin leaves off.  But perhaps this metaphor is misplaced.  Butler did not jump off from Rubin’s end point and proceed to enlarge upon her argument.  Butler’s early theoretical intervention owes much to Rubin in that it allows Butler a clear platform to articulate a deconstructive strategy that enables her to expose the clear lines of an argument regarding ‘sex’ and ‘gender’ that she would go on then to dismantle and that would produce the concept of “performativity” which gave a generation of social and political theorists a way out of a post-Althusserian quandary of thinking the materiality of subjectivity and ideology in a innovative and theoretically productive ways.

But now Butler herself, 15 or so years on after her landmark intervention is facing a number of challenges of her own.  Are Rubin’s roots in a Marxist problematic that Butler exorcised returning, as ziz would say, in the real, to haunt Butler?  This is not to argue an argument maintaining that Butler’s straying from a Marxist paradigm is coming back to haunt her.  Such calls for orthodoxy are not what is needed given what is required in political theory in the 21st C.

She starts with what is ‘the’ cause of women’s oppression, doesn’t dismiss a sole cause out of hand but states, ‘Instead, I want to sketch some elements of an alternate explanation of the problem.” 158 She begins with Claude Lévi-Strauss and Sigmund Freud. Because reading these works enables one to begin to understand within their social apparatus how it takes females as ‘raw materials and fashions domesticated women as products.”   She mentions the necessity of women in the sphere of reproduction of labor, domestic duties in order to maintain the health of the workers. But makes the important point that “Capitalism has taken over, and rewired, notions of male and female which predate it by centuries. No analysis of the reproduction of labour power under capitalism can explain foot-binding, chastity belts … … the analysis of reproduction of labor power does not even explain why it is usually women who do domestic work in the home rather than men. 163   Rubin quotes Marx regarding the fact that along with human biology and physical conditions, what also factors into the equation with regards to a clear understanding of what is required to reproduce the working class is a historical and moral element.  And finishes her part on Marx by stating, “Only be subjecting this “historical and moral element” to analysis can the structure of sex oppression be delineated (164).

“Sex is sex, but what counts as sex is equally culturally determined and obtained.  Every society also has a sex/gender system – a set of arrangements by which the biological raw material of human sex and procreation is shaped by human, social intervention … ”

It is this sex/gender system that Rubin targets as ripe for analysis, like the mode of production was for Marx.  In fact Rubin’s analysis so far draws many analogies and even a homology to Marxist analysis.  Just as Marxists begin with the an understanding of how material life of society is reproduced, Rubin looks at the way in which all societies “will have some systematic ways to deal with sex, gender, and babies.”  But she states, “it is important … to maintain a distinction between the human capacity and necessity to create a sexual world, and the empirically oppressive ways in which sexual worlds have been organized.”  In order for Rubin to properly study sex/gender system she must turn to the study of kinship systems.  To this end Rubin sees herself as taking up where Engels left off in his study “The Origins of Family, Private Property and the State.”  And she starts with Claude Lévi-Strauss whose The Elementary Structures of Kinship in Rubin’s mind is a bold attempt to conceive of kinships as “an imposition of cultural organization upon the facts of biological procreation.” 170-171

[T]he incest taboo imposes the social aim of exogamy and alliance upon the biological events of sex and procreation.  The incest taboo divides the universe of sexual choice into categories of permitted and prohibited sexual partners.  Specifically, by forbidding unions within a group it enjoins marital exchange between groups. … [T]he taboo on incest results in a wide network of relations, a set of people whose connections with one another are a kinship structure 174.

But here Rubin drills down a bit further and asks, if it is women, along with yams, pigs, mats and shells etc. that are being exchanged, and these exchanges create and organization.  Who is being organized.  It is the men who exchange the women, who give and take the women who are linked, “the women being a conduit of a relationship rather than a partner to it.” 174

“Exchange of women” is a shorthand for expressing that the social relations of a kinship system specify that men have certain rights in their female kin, and that women do not have the same rights either to themselves or to their male kin.  In this sense, the exchange of women is a profound perception of a system in which women do not have full rights to themselves. 177

“Gender is a socially imposed division of the sexes” 179  “Far from being an expression of natural differences, exclusive gender identity is the suppression of natural similarities” 180

“Moreover the incest taboo presupposes a prior, less articulate taboo on homosexuality. 180

In summary, some basic generalities about the organization of human sexuality can be derived from an exegesis of Lévi-Strauss’s theories of kinship. These are the incest taboo, obligatory heterosexuality, and an asymmetric division of the sexes.  The asymmetry of gender -the difference between exchanger and exchanged-entails the constraint of female sexuality. 183

But there is an “economics” of sex and gender, and what we need is a political economy of sexual systems.  We need to study each society to determine the exact mechanisms by which particular conventions of sexuality are produced and maintained.  The “exchange of women” is an initial step toward building an arsenal of concepts with which sexual systems can be described. 177

Žižek on Butler

Žižek, Slavoj.  “Passionate (Dis)Attachments, or, Judith Butler as a Reader of Freud” The Ticklish Subject. London: Verso, 1999, 247-312.

247 – 248 opposition between hysteria and perversion

🙂 Žižek argues the pervert sidesteps the unconscious in his direct acting out of his fantasies directly. Whereas the hysteric is always questioning, the pervert knows exactly what the other wants.

This opposition of perversion and hysteria is especially pertinent today, in our era of the ‘decline of Oedipus’, when the paradigmatic mode of subjectivity is no longer the subject integrated into the paternal Law through the symbolic castration, but the ‘polymorphously perverse’ subject following the superego injunction to enjoy.  The question of how we are to hystericize the subject caught in the closed loop of perversion (how we are to inculcate the dimension of lack and questioning in him) becomes more urgent in view of today’s political scene: the subject of late capitalist market relations is perverse, while the ‘democratic subject’ (the mode of subjectivity implied by the modern democracy) is inherently hysterical (the abstract citizen correlative to the empty place of Power). In other words, the relationship between the bourgeois caught up in the market mechanisms and the citoyen engaged in the universal political sphere is, in its subjective economy, the relationship between perversion and hysteria.  So when Rancière calls our age ‘post-political’, he is aiming precisely at this shift in political discourse (the social link) from hysteria to perversion: ‘post-politics’ is the perverse mode of administering social affairs, the mode deprived of the ‘hystericized’ universal/out-of-joint dimension (248).

🙂 I think Žižek is pulling Butler’s chain. 249 he cites coprophagy (eating shit) and breaks it down into its hysterical (if I eat shit will the other still love me? Will he leave me? What am I to the Other’s desire?)  Žižek is implying that her form of theory is ‘perverse’ to the core.  Calling Foucault (and Deleuze and Guttari’s Anti-Oedipus) a perverse philosopher.  Why?

… the pervert bravely goes to the limit in undermining the very foundations of symbolic authority and fully endorsing the multiple productivity of pre-symbolic libidinal flux … the model of false subversive radicalization that fits the existing power constellation perfectly … the model of the false transgressive radicality (250-251).

It is not enough to say as Foucault does, that power in invoking its law engenders a flourishing of objects it itself was set up to legislate and control, they “set in motion a wild proliferation of what they endeavour to suppress and regulate: the very ‘repression’ of sexuality gives rise to new forms of sexual pleasure.  But what Foucault misses according to Žižek, is the erotic, libidinal element that comes about in the subject as they are getting the whip.  In other words subjection is kind of sexy for the subjected, in that, for example, the confessional activity “itself becomes sexualized” (253).  Žižek cites political correct attitude of not calling stupid people ‘retarded’ but instead ‘mentally challenged.’  For Žižek the guy that self-flagellates himself in an attempt to prevent himself falling prey to sexual thoughts, is itself getting off, getting a sexual charge from the act of flagellation.

255 Žižek makes the interesting point that resisting colonial domination was inherent to colonial domination itself.  “anti-colonialist national liberation movements are strict sensu generated by colonialist oppression” (255).  The native moves from his passive identity in traditions and culture, to an identity spurred on by the event of colonial domination.  “it is this oppression which brings about the shift from passive ethnic self-awareness grounded in mythical tradition tot he eminently modern will to assert one’s ethnic identity in the form of a national-state” (255).

Although Chechens evoke their hundred-year-old struggle against Russian domination, today’s form of this struggle is clearly the outcome of the modernizing effect of the Russian colonization of traditional Chechen society (255).

🙂  For Žižek active resistance is inherent to the forces of domination itself, by producing an excess the forces of domination thereby produce a resistance that goes beyond, an excess of resistance.  So just because resistance is generated by the very power that it opposes, doesn’t mean its co-opted in advance.

… the key point is that through the effect of proliferation, of producing an excess of resistance, the very inherent antagonism of a system may well set in motion a process which leads to its own ultimate downfall (256).

The Effect Can ‘Outdo’ Its Cause

[Foucault] precludes the possibility that the system itself, on account of its inherent inconsistency, may give birth to a force whose excess it is no longer able to master and which thus detonates its unity, its capacity to reproduce itself. In short, Foucault does not consider the possibility of an effect escaping, outgrowing its cause, so that although it emerges as a form of resistance to power and is as such absolutely inherent to it, it can outgrow and explode it. … (the effect can ‘outdo’ its cause) (256).

And this is why Foucault lacks the appropriate notion of the subject: the subject is by definition in excess over its cause, and as such it emerges with the reversal of the repression of sexuality into the sexualisation of the repressive measures themselves (257).

From Resistance to the Act

For Lacan, radical rearticulation of the predominant symbolic Order is altogether possible – this is what his notion of point de capiton (the ‘quilting point’ or the Master-Signifier) is about: when a new point de capiton emerges, the socio-symbolic field is not only displaced, its very structuring principle changes. One is thus tempted to reverse the opposition between and Lacan and Foucault as elaborated by Butler (Lacan constrains resistance to imaginary thwarting, while Foucault, who has a more pluralistic notion of discourse as a heterogeneous field of multiple practices, allows for a more thorough symbolic subversion and rearticulation): it is Foucault who insists on the immanence of resistance to Power, while Lacan leaves open the possibility of a radical rearticulation of the entire symbolic field by means of an act proper, a passage through ‘symbolic death’. In short, it is Lacan who allows us to conceptualize the distinction between imaginary resistance (false transgression that reasserts the symbolic status quo and even serves as a positive condition of its functioning) and actual symbolic rearticulation via the intervention of the Real of an act (262).

ONLY ON THIS LEVEL – IF WE TAKE INTO ACCOUNT THE LACANIAN NOTIONS OF POINT DE CAPITON AND THE ACT AS REAL – DOES A MEANINGFUL DIALOGUE WITH BUTLER BECOME POSSIBLE.

🙂 Have to hand it to him, Žižek finds the crucial Butler quote, here it is:

What would it mean for the subject to desire something other than its continued ‘social existence’?  If such an existence cannot be undone without falling into some kind of death, can existence nevertheless be risked, death courted or pursued, in order to expose and open to transformation the hold of social power on the conditions of life’s persistence?  The subject is compelled to repeat the norms by which it is produced, but the repetition establishes a domain of risk, for if one fails to reinstate the norm ‘in the right way,’ one becomes subject to further sanction, one feels the prevailing conditions of existence threatened.  And yet, without a repetition that risks life – in its current organization – how might we begin to imagine the contingency of that organization, and performatively reconfigure the contours of the conditions of life?

One should criticize Butler for conflating this act in its radical dimension with the performative reconfiguration of one’s symbolic condition via its repetitive displacements: the two are not the same – that is to say, one should maintain the crucial distinction between a mere ‘performative reconfiguration’, a subversive displacement which remains within the hegemonic field and, as it were, conducts an internal guerrilla war of turning the terms of the hegemonic field against itself, and the much more radical act of a thorough reconfiguration of the entire field which redefines the very conditions of socially sustained performativity.  It is thus Butler herself who ends up in a position of allowing precisely for marginal ‘reconfigurations’ of the predominant discourse – who remains constrained to a position of ‘inherent transgression’, which needs as a point of reference the Other in the guise of a predominant discourse that can only be marginally displaced or transgressed (264).

From the Lacanian standpoint, Butler is thus simultaneously too optimistic and too pessimistic. On the one hand she overestimates the subversive potential of disturbing the functioning of the big Other through the practices of performative reconfiguration/displacement: such practices ultimately support what they intend to subvert, since the very field of such ‘transgressions’ is already taken into account, even engendered, by the hegemonic form of the big Other – what Lacan calls ‘the big Other’ are symbolic norms and their codified transgression. The Oedipal order, this gargantuan symbolic matrix embodied in a vast set of ideological institutions, rituals and practices, is a much too deeply rooted and ‘substantial’ entity to be effectively undermined by the marginal gestures of performative displacement.  On the other hand, Butler does not allow for the radical gesture of the thorough restructuring of the hegemonic symbolic order in its totality (264).

🙂 And Slavoj, what, pray tell, is that ‘radical gesture’?

Butler Bodies that Matter

Butler, Judith. Bodies That Matter New York: Routledge, 1993.

Performativity definition

… that reiterative power of discourse to produce the phenomena that it regulates and constrains (2)

Sex is no longer construed as a bodily given on which the construct of gender is artificially imposed, but as a cultural norm which governs the materialization of bodies (3)

Abject definition

JHeterosexual imperative, is an “exclusionary matrix by which subjects are formed” thus requiring “a simultaneous production of a domain of abject beings, those who are not yet “subjects,” but who form the constitutive outside to the domain of the subject” 3

The abject designates here precisely those “unlivable” and “unthinkable” zones of social life which are nevertheless densely populated by those who do not enjoy the status of the subject, but whose living under the sing of the “unlivable” is required to circumscribe the domain of the subject.  This zone of uninhabitability will constitute the defining limit of the subject’s domain; it will constitute that site of dreaded identification against which – and by virtue of which – the domain of the subject will circumscribe its own claim to autonomy and to life. In this sense, then, the subject is constituted through the force of exclusion and abjection, one which produces a constitutive outside to the subject, an abjected outside, which is, after all “inside” the subject as its own founding repudiation (3).

The forming of a subject requires an identification with the normative phantasm of “sex,” and this identification takes place through a repudiation which produces a domain of abjection, a repudiation without which the subject cannot emerge.  This is a repudiation which creates the valence of “abjection” and its status for the subject as a threatening spectre.  Further, the materialization of a given sex will centrally concern the regulation of identifcatory practices such that the identification with the abjection of sex will be persistently disavowed.  And yet, this disavowed abjection will threaten to expose the self-grounding presumptions of the sexed subject, grounded as that subject is in a repudiation whose consequences it cannot fully control.

The task will be to consider this threat and disruption not as a permanent contestation of social norms condemned to the pathos of perpetual failure, but rather as a critical resource in the struggle to rearticulate the very terms of symbolic legitimacy and intelligibility.

Indeed, it may be precisely through practices which underscore disidentification with those regulatory norms by which sexual difference is materialized that both feminist and queer politics are mobilized.  Such collective disidentification can facilitate a reconceptualization of which bodies matter, and which bodies are yet to emerge as critical matters of concern.

Crucially then, construction is neither a single act nor a causal process initiated by a subject and culminating in a set of fixed effects. Construction not only takes place in time, but is itself a temporal process which operates through the reiteration of norms, sex is both produced and destabilized in the course of this reiteration.*  As a sedimented effect of a reiterative or ritual practice, sex acquires its naturalized effect, and, yet, it is also by virtue of this reiteration that gaps and fissures are opened up as the constitutive instabilities in such constructions, as that which escapes or exceeds the norm, as that which cannot be wholly defined or fixed by the repetitive labor of that norm. This instability is the deconstituting possibility in the very process of repetition, the power that undoes the very effects by which “sex” is stabilized, the possibility to put the consolidation of the norms of “sex” in a potentially productive crisis (10).

*Note 7 page 244

It is not simply a matter of construing performativity as a repetition of acts, as if “acts” remain intact and self-identical as they are repeated in terms, and where “time” is understood as external to the “acts” themselves.  On the contrary, an act is itself a repetition, a sedimentation, and congealment of the past which is precisely foreclosed in its act-like status. In this sense an “act” is always a provisional failure of memory.  In what follows, I make use of the Lacanian notion that every act is to be construed as a repetition, the repetition of what cannot be recollected, of the irrecoverable, and is thus the haunting spectre of the subject’s deconstitution.

One might read this prohibition that secures the impenetrability of the masculine as a kind of panic, a panic over becoming “like” her, effeminized, or a panic over what might happen if a masculine penetration of the masculine were authorized, or a feminine penetration of the feminine, or a feminine penetration of the masculine or a reversibility of those positions – not to mention a full-scale confusion over what qualifies as “penetration” anyway.  Would the terms “masculine” and “feminine” still signify in stable ways, or would the relaxing of the taboos against stray penetration destabilize these gendered positions in serious ways? (51)

And whereas this can appear as the necessary and founding violence of any truth regime (construction of a constitutive outside) … it is important to resist that theoretical gesture of pathos in which exclusions are simply affirmed as sad necessities of signification. The task is to reconfigure this necessary “outside” as a future horizon, one in which the violence of exclusion is perpetually in the process of being overcome.  But of equal importance is the preservation of the outside, the site where discourse meets its limits, where the opacity of what is not included in a given regime of truth acts as a disruptive site of linguistic impropriety and unrepresentability, illuminating the violent and contingent boundaries of the normative regime precisely through the inability of that regime to represent that which might pose a fundamental threat to its continuity.  In this sense, radical and inclusive representability is not precisely the goal: to include, to speak as, to bring in every marginal and excluded position within a given discourse is to claim that a singular discourse meets its limits nowhere, that it can and will domesticate all signs of difference.  If there is a violence necessary to the language of politics, then the risk of that violation might well be followed by another in which we begin, without ending, without mastering, to own-and yet never fully to own-the exclusions by which we proceed (53).

Judy Butler “Arguing with the Real” Bodies That Matter New York: Routledge 1993.

🙂 Abject definition

The normative force of performativity – its power to establish what qualifies as “being” – works not only though reiteration, but through exclusion as well. And in the case of bodies, those exclusions haunt signification as its abject borders or as that which is strictly foreclosed: the unlivable, the nonnarrativizable, the traumatic (188).

🙂 Here are JB’s guiding questions, and they are good.

1.      How might those ostensibly constitutive exclusions be rendered less permanent, more dynamic?

2.      How might the excluded return, not as psychosis or the figure of the psychotic within politics, but as that which has been rendered mute, foreclosed from the domain of political signification?

3.      How and where is social content attributed to the site of the “real,” and then positioned as the unspeakable?

4.      Is there not a difference between a theory that asserts that, in principle, every discourse operates through exclusion and a theory that attributes to that “outside” specific social and sexual positions?

5.      To the extent that a specific use of psychoanalysis works to foreclose certain social and sexual positions from the domain of intelligibility – and for all time – psychoanalysis appears to work in the service of the normativizing law that it interrogates.

6.      How might such socially saturated domains of exclusion be recast from their status as “constitutive” to beings who might be said to matter? (189)

🙂  And JB comes out swinging right away

The production of the unsymbolizable, the unspeakable, the illegible is also always a strategy of social abjection (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 meanings 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).

If the “outside” is, as Laclau insists, linked to the Derridean logic of the supplement (Laclau NRRT, 84 n.5), then it is unclear what moves must be taken to make it compatible with the Lacanian notion of the “lack”, indeed … I will attempt to read the Lacanian “lack” within Žižek’s text according to the logic of the supplement, one which also entails a rethinking of the social specificity of taboo, loss, and sexuality (194).

The “Law of the Father” induces trauma and foreclosure through the threat of castration, thereby producing the “lack” against which all symbolization occurs. And yet, this very symbolization of the law as the law of castration is not taken as a contingent ideological formulation.

🙂 And here’s my favourite line:

As the fixing of contingency in relation to the law of castration, the trauma and “substantial identity” of the real, Žižeks theory thus evacuates the “contingency” of contingency.

If symbolization is itself circumscribed through the exclusion and/or abjection of the feminine, and if this exclusion and/or abjection is secured through Žižek’s specific appropriation f the Lacanian doctrine of the real, then how is it that what qualifies as “symbolizable” is itself constituted through the desymbolization of the feminine as originary trauma?

What limits are placed on “women” as a political signifier by a theory that installs its version of signification through the abjection/exclusion of the feminine?  And what is the ideological status of a theory that identifies the contingency in all ideological formulations as the “lack” produced by the threat of castration, where the threat and the sexual differential that it institutes are not subject ot the discursive rearticulation proper to hegemony?

If this law is a necessity, and it is that which secures all contingency in discursive and ideological formulations, then that contingency is legislated in advance as a nonideological necessity and is, therefore, no contingency at all.  Indeed, the insistence on the preideological status of the symbolic law constitutes a foreclosure of a contingency in the name of that law, one which, if admitted into discourse and the domain of the symbolizable, might call into question or, at least, occasion a rearticulation of the oedipal scenario and the status of castration (196).

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 [family, concentration camps, the Gulag]?

(202).

Michael Walsh [in] “Reading the Real,” … the process of … foreclosure that institutes the real is described as a matter of “the exclusion of fundamental signifiers from the Symbolic order of the subject”  In other words, these are signifiers that have been part of symbolization and could be again, but have been separated off from symbolization to avert the trauma with which they are invested.  … These are not signifiers that are merely repressed but could be worked through, they are signifiers whose re-entry into symbolization would unravel the subject itself.

The notion of foreclosure offered here implies that what is foreclosed is a signifier, namely, that which has been symbolized, and that the mechanism of that repudiation takes place within the symbolic order as a policing of the borders of intelligibility. What signifiers qualify to unravel the subject and to threaten psychosis remains unfixed in this analysis, suggesting that what constitutes the domain of what the subject can never speak or know and still remain a subject remains variable, that is, remains a domain variably structured by contingent relations of power (204-205).

Žižek’s rendition of the real presupposes that there is an invariant law that operates uniformly in all discursive regimes to produce through prohibition this “lack” that is the trauma induced by the threat of castration, the threat itself.   But if we concur that every discursive formation proceeds through constituting an “outside,” we are not thereby committed to the invariant production of that outside as the trauma of castration (nor the generalization of castration as the model for all historical trauma). … (a) there may be several mechanisms of foreclosure that work to produce the unsymbolizable in any given discursive regime, and (b) the mechanisms of that production are – however inevitable -still and always the historical workings of specific modalities of discourse and power (205).

To claim that there is an “outside” to the socially intelligible and that this “outside” will always be that which negatively defines the social is, I think, a point on which we can concur. To delimit that outside through the invocation of a preideological “law” that works invariantly throughout all history, and further, to make that law function to secure a sexual differential that ontologizes subordination, is an “ideological” move in a more ancient sense, one that might only by understood through a rethinking of ideology as “reification.”  That there is always an “outside” and, indeed, a “constitutive antagonism” seems right, but to supply the character and content to a law that secures the borders between the “inside” and the “outside” of symbolic intelligibility is to pre-empt the specific social and historical analysis that is required, to conflate into “one” law the effect of a convergence of many, and to preclude the very possibility of a future rearticulation that boundary which is central to the democratic project that Žižek, Laclau, and Mouffe promote (206-207).

As resistance to symbolization, the “real” functions in an exterior relation to language, as the inverse of mimetic representationalism, that is, as the site where all efforts to represent must founder.  The problem here is that there is no way within this framework to politicize the relation between language and the real. What counts as the “real,” in the sense of the unsymbolizable, is always relative to a linguistic domain that authorizes and produces the foreclosure and achieves that effect through producing and policing a set of constitutive exclusions. Even, if every discursive formation is produced through exclusion, that is not to claim that all exclusions are equivalent: what is needed is a way to assess politically how the production of cultural unintelligibility is mobilized variably to regulate the political field, i.e., who will count as a “subject,” who will be required not to count.  To freeze the real as the impossible “outside” to discourse is to institute a permanently unsatisfiable desire for an ever elusive referent: sublime object of ideology. The fixity and universality of this relation between language and the real produces, however, a prepolitical pathos that precludes the kind of analysis that would take the real/reality distinction as the instrument and effect of contingent relations of power (207).

Is not the defilement of sovereignty, divine and paternal, performed by calling the aardvark “Napoleon” precisely the catachresis by which hegemony ought to proceed? (214)

If referentiality is itself the effect of a policing of the linguistic constraints on proper usage, then the possibility of referentiality is contested by the catachrestic use of speech that insists on using proper names improperly, that expands or defiles the very domain of the proper by calling the aardvark ‘Napoleon’ (218).

If “women” within political discourse can never fully describe that which it names, that is neither because the category simply refers without describing nor because “women” are the lost referent, that which “does not exist,” but because the term marks a dense intersection of social relations that cannot be summarized through the terms of identity.  The term will gain and lose its stability to the extent that it remains differentiated and that differentiation serves political goals.  To the degree that that differentiation produces the effect of a radical essentialism of gender, the term will work to sever its constitutive connections with other discursive sites of political investment and undercut its own capacity to compel and produce the constituency it names. The constitutive instability of the term, its incapacity every fully to describe what it names, is produced precisely by what is excluded in order for the determination to take place.  That there are always constitutive exclusions that condition the possibility of provisionally fixing a name does not entail a necessary collapse of that constitutive outside with a notion of a lost referent, that “bar” which is the law of castration, emblematized by the woman who does not exist. Such a view not only reifies women as the lost referent, that which cannot exist, and feminism, as the vain effort to resist that particular proclamation of the law (a form of psychosis in speech, a resistance to penis envy).  To call into question women as the privileged figure for “the lost referent,” however, is precisely to recast that description as a possible signification, and to open the term as a site for a more expansive rearticulation (218).

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 (218-219).

Žižek persuasively describes how once the political signifier has termporarity constituted the unity that it promises, that promise proves impossible to fulfill and a disidentification ensues, one that can produce factionalization to the point of political immobilization. But does politicization always need to overcome disidentification? What are the possibilities of politicizing disidentification, this experience of misrecognition, this uneasy sense of standing under a sign to which one does and does not belong?  And how are to to interpret this disidentification produced by and through the very signifier that holds out the promise of solidarity?

Lauren Berlant writes that “feminists must embrace a policy of female disidentification at the level of female essence.”  … But if the term cannot offer ultimate recognition -and here Žižek is very right to claim that all such terms rest on a necessary méconnaisance-it may be that the affirmation of that slippage, that failure of identification is itself the point of departure for a more democratizing affirmation of internal difference (219).

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 signification 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 non-identity of that which is heralded by the signifier of identity.  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 iterabilty of the signifier for what remains non-self-identical in any invocation of identity, namely the iterable or temporal condition of its own possibility (220).

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 failure 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 by summarized by any given description, and that, for democratic reasons, ought never to be (220-221).

To understand “women” as a permanent site of content, or as a feminist site of agonistic struggle, is to presume that there can be no closure on the category and that, for politically significant reasons, there ought never to be. That the category can never be descriptive is the very condition of its political efficacy.

Here the numerous refusals on the part of “women” to accept the descriptions offered in the name of “women” not only attest to the specific violences that a partial concept enforces, but to the constitutive impossibility of an impartial or comprehensive concept or category.  …. To ameliorate and rework this violence, it is necessary to learn a double movement: to invoke the category and, hence, provisionally to institute an identity and at the same time to open the category as a site of permanent political contest. That the term is questionable does not mean that we ought not to use it, but neither does the necessity to use it mean that we ought not perpetually to interrogate the exclusions by which it proceeds, and to do this precisely in order to learn how to live the contingency of the political signifier in a culture of democratic contestation (222).

foreclosure

Grigg, Russell. Lacan, Language and Philosophy. New York: SUNY Press, 2008.

Thus “foreclosure” refers not to the fact that a speaker makes a statement that declares something impossible — a process closer to disavowal — but to the fact that the speaker lacks the very linguistic means for making the statement at all.

This is where the difference between repression and foreclosure lies. On Lacan’s analysis of Freud’s classic studies on the unconscious —The Interpretation of Dreams, The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious— The mechanisms of repression and the return of the repressed are linguistic in nature. His thesis that the unconscious is structured like a language implies the claim that for something to be repressed it has first of all to be registered in the symbolic. Thus repression implies the prior recognition of the repressed in the symbolic system or register. In psychosis, on the other hand, the necessary signifiers are lacking altogether, and so the recognition required for repression is impossible. However, what is foreclosed does not simply disappear altogether but may return albeit in a different form, from outside the subject (4).

butler desubjectivation

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

According to the logic of conscience, which fully constrains Althusser, the subject’s existence cannot be linguistically guaranteed without passionate attachment to the law. This complicity at once conditions and limits the viability of a critical interrogation of the law. One cannot criticize too far the terms by which one’s existence is secured.

But if the discursive possibilities for existence exceed the reprimand voiced by the law, would that not lessen the need to confirm one’s guilt and embark on a path of conscientiousness as a way to gain a purchase on identity? What are the conditions under which our very sense of linguistic survival depends upon our willingness to turn back upon ourselves, that is, in which attaining recognizable being requires self-negation, requires existing as a self-negating being in order to attain and preserve a status as “being” at all?

In a Nietzschean vein, such a slave morality may be predicted upon the sober calculation that it is better to “be” enslaved in such a way than not to “be” at all. But the terms that constrain the option to being versus not being “call for” another kind of response. Under what condition does a law monopolize the terms of existence in so thorough a way? Or is this a theological fantasy of the law?

Is there a possibility of being elsewhere or otherwise, without denying our complicity in the law that we oppose? Such a possibility would require a different kind of turn, one that, enabled by the law, turns away from the law, resisting its lure of identity, an agency that outruns and counters the conditions of its emergence. Such a turn demands a willingness not to be — a critical desubjectivation —in order to expose the law as less powerful than it seems. What forms might linguistic survival take in this desubjectivized domain. How would one know one’s existence? Through what terms would it be recognized and recognizable?

How are we to understand the desire to be as a constitutive desire? How is such a desire exploited not only by a law in the singular, but by laws of various kinds such that we yield to subordination in order to maintain some sense of social “being”? (129-130)

Butler on kinship and symbolic

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

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

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

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

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

Butler Psychic Life of Power Chapter 5 part 2

The masculine and feminine are not dispositions but accomplishments

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

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

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

___

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

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

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

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

Butler Psychic Life of Power Chapter 5

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

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

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

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

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.

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 february 2008

Italian interview Feb 2008 in Monthy Review Magazine (wow, times are a changin)

This interview took place in February 2008 on the occasion of talk by Judith Butler at the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona (CCCB).

F.B.: Could you explain your conception of critical thought and its relation with Foucault’s famous words: I do not know if today it is necessary to say that critical work still implies faith in the Enlightenment; I consider that it must always work on our limits, that is, a patient labour that forms the impatience for freedom”? In one of your latest texts you refer to this; perhaps you could relate the task of critical thought and its connection with feminism.

J.B.: The critical task demands a preoccupation with limits, and Foucault was particularly interested in the problem of how this delimited field shapes the subject.  Thus, if we are formed as obedient subjects, if the state or some other regulated form of power imposes itself on us and we accept it, we become obedient subjects. But in the moment we begin to ask ourselves about the legitimacy of this power we become critical, we adopt a point of view that is not completely shaped by the state and we question ourselves about the limits of the demands that can be placed on us. Foucault is very clear in this respect: questioning the demand for obedience made of us by the state means questioning our ontology as subjects.

And if I am not wholly formed by this power of the state, in what way am I, or might I be, formed?  Asking yourself this question means you are already beginning to form yourself in another way, outside this relation with the state, so critical thought distances you to some extent.  When someone says “no” to power, they are saying “no” to a particular way of being formed by power.  They are saying: I am not going to be subjected in this way or by these means through which the state establishes its legitimacy.  The critical position implies a certain “no”, a saying “no” as an “I”, and this, then, is a step in the formation of this “I”.

Many people ask about the basis on which Foucault establishes this resistance to power. What he is saying to us is that in the practice of critical thought we are forming ourselves as subjects, through resistance and questioning. Foucault does not presuppose a pre-existing subject that can say “no” and criticise authority. Rather that the subject forms him or herself through the practice of criticism.

And, in my view, some forms of criticism involve a questioning of the intelligibility of the norms that constitute us as people. If the powers that be address me as a citizen or as a non-citizen, in terms of a gender or a racial category, I must fight against this social determination. The norms establish my social intelligibility, the categories through which I understand myself and other people. If, from the very outset, a gender is attributed to me, if I am called a “girl”, then I actively am a girl; the “I” that emerges through this gender is intelligible, in part, as a social being: the gender attributed to me guarantees my intelligibility and my legibility as a person, and if I question this gender, I risk a certain unintelligibility, risk losing my place and my social legibility as a particular person.

However, the “I” could say “no” or could ask “why?” With what means, for what end have I been generated, with what right has this medical establishment attributed a particular gender to me, or with what right has the law attributed this gender to me?  The “I” steps back from these gender norms, even if such norms are the conditions that have determined its formation; that is, it does not abandon or destroy them, but it does wrestle with them. Is it possible to reconstruct gender? And if so, can this be understood as a practice of freedom?

Can it be understood as a way of becoming? And if so, what other formations are possible? In my opinion, feminism implies thinking about the practices of freedom: when we object to discriminatory practices at work, to forced reclusion within the private domain, when we protest about violence against women. . . , it is not only because we want women to achieve equality, to be treated justly. Equality and justice are very important norms, but there are more: we want certain freedoms for women so they are not totally limited to the established ideas of femininity or even of masculinity. We want them to be capable of innovating and creating new positions. Insofar as feminism has been, at least in part, a kind of philosophy, it is crucial that it develops new notions of gender. If feminism suggests that we cannot question our sexual positions or affirm that we have no need of the category of gender, then it would be saying, in some sense, that I should accept a particular positionality or a particular structure — restrictive for me and for others — and that I am not free to make and remake the form, or the terms in which I have been made. And it is true that I cannot change these terms radically, and even if I decide to resist the category of woman, I will have to battle with this category throughout my whole life. In this way, whenever we question our gender we run the risk of losing our intelligibility, of being labelled ‘monsters’. My struggle with gender would be precisely that, a struggle, and that has something to do with the patient labour that forms the impatience for freedom. Thus, gender perfomativity can be understood: the slow and difficult practice of producing new possibilities of experiencing gender in the light of history, and in the context of very powerful norms that restrict our intelligibility as human beings. They are complex struggles, political in nature, since they insist on new forms of recognition. In fact, from my experience of feminism, these political struggles have been being waged for the last hundred years, at the very least. I only offer a radical language for these struggles.

F.B.: Speaking about performativity and the possibility of new forms of being, the question arises of how to evaluate the diverse innovative forms of agency, because not everything that is novel is necessarily ‘good’.  In your Undoing Gender you speak a little about this, but is there any single criterion that will allow us to make this distinction?  Is it pertinent here to speak of universality?

J.B.: If we are referring to the various ways in which gender is understood as a form or a cultural interpretation of the body, I believe it is not appropriate to speak of good or bad genders: gender is extra-moral.  Those who wish to establish the distinction between normal genders and pathological genders, or who set out to regulate gender are making a mistake.  They are absolutely and universally wrong.  There are illegitimate operations of power that attempt to restrict our idea of what gender might be, for example in the areas of medicine, law, psychiatry, social policy, immigration policy, or the policies against violence.

My commitment involves opposition to all restrictive and violent measures that are used to regulate and restrict the life of gender.  There are certain types of freedoms and practices that are very important for human flourishing.  Any excessive restriction of gender limits, or undermines, the capacity of humans to flourish.  And, what is more, I would add that this human flourishing is a good thing.  I am aware that there I am taking a moral standpoint here; I know that I have a strong normative structure, but this has nothing to do with saying “this kind of gender is good and this one is bad”.  To do so would constitute a dangerous use of morality; rather, I am trying to shift the moral structure towards another framework in which we can ask ourselves: how does a body survive?  What is a flourishing body?  What does it need to flourish in the world?  And it needs various things: it needs to be nourished, to be touched, to be in social settings of interdependence, to have certain expressive and creative capacities, to be protected from violence, and to have its life sustained in a material sense.

Today there are many people with modalities of gender that are considered unacceptable — the sexual or gender minorities — and who are discriminated against, considered abnormal, by the discourses of psychiatry or psychology, or who are the object of physical violence.  These people are not being given the opportunity of having their lives recognised as worthy of being protected or helped, not even as lives that deserve to be mourned.  I question the norms of gender that prevent us or make us incapable of recognising certain lives as being worth living, and which stop us providing the material conditions necessary for these lives to be lived, to flourish.  For these lives to be publicly recognised also means their being understood as lives whose disappearance would be felt as a loss.

The same thing happens in war: certain lives are deemed worthy of being protected, while others are considered expendable, of negligible importance, radically dispensable.

One could say that all my work revolves around this question: what is it that counts as a life?  And in what way do certain restrictive norms of gender decide for us?  What kind of life is worth protecting and what kind of life is not?

F.B.: In recent years important changes have taken place in many aspects of the lives of gays, lesbians and even transsexuals.  For example, in our country same-sex marriages have been made legal.  In the light of your reflections about the way in which a broader context of intelligibility has ontological consequences, it might be useful to ask to what extent this recognition could end up leading to new forms of restriction, other forms of normality.

J.B.: Of course, if marriage exists, then homosexual marriage should also exist; marriage should be extended to all couples irrespective of their sexual orientation; if sexual orientation is an impediment, then marriage is discriminatory.  For my part, I don’t understand why it should be limited to two people, this appears arbitrary to me and might potentially be discriminatory; but I know this point of view is not very popular.  However, there are forms of sexual organisation that do not imply monogamy, and types of relationship that do not imply marriage or the desire for legal recognition — even if they do seek cultural acceptance.  There are also communities made up of lovers, ex-lovers and friends who look after the children, communities that constitute complex kinship networks that do not fit the conjugal pattern.

I agree that the right to homosexual marriage runs the risk of producing a conservative effect, of making marriage an act of normalisation, and thereby presenting other very important forms of intimacy and kinship as abnormal or even pathological.  But the question is: politically, what do we do with this?  I would say that every campaign in favour of homosexual marriage ought also to be in favour of alternative families, the alternative systems of kinship and personal association.  We need a movement that does not win rights for some people at the expense of others.  And imagining this movement is not easy.

The demand for recognition by the state should go hand in hand with a critical questioning: what do we need the state for?  Although there are times that we need it for some kinds of protection (immigration, property, or children), should we allow it to define our relationships?  There are forms of relation that we value and that cannot be recognised by the state, where the recognition of civil society or the community is enough.  We need a movement that remains critical, that formulates these questions and keeps them open.

F.B.: I would like to bring up a thinker I have been working on in the last few years, Hannah Arendt.  I believe there are aspects of her thought that interest you.  Where would you situate Arendt’s distinction between liberation and liberty in your work?  Similarly, how does the concept of responsibility fit into your reflections about the importance of performativity and resignification as political practices?

J.B.: It is true that, in general, I do not think of freedom in terms of liberation.  I continue to be very strongly influenced by Foucault’s History of Sexuality, in which he warns us against imagining a complete liberation from power.  There can never be a total liberation from power, especially in relation to the politics of sexuality.  Foucault says two things at the same time: we can never totally liberate ourselves from power (there is no space from which to say “no” to power) and, on the other hand, we are never completely determined by power.  Thus, despite the impossibility of transcending power, a space of liberty opens up, and both determinism and radical voluntarism are refuted. What is this space of freedom that opens up once we have understood this?  Here freedom is a kind of practice, a struggle, a continuous process with neither a beginning nor an end.  When this practice is systematically attacked we cannot function as political subjects, our political capacities have been undermined.

When referring to freedom, I am not alluding to the idea of an individual subject, alone, since a subject is free to the extent that s/he is conditioned by conventions, norms and cultural possibilities that make freedom possible, though they do not determine it.  They are the conditions of possibility of freedom.  Who we are as subjects of freedom depends on non-voluntary forms of connection with others; I was not only born within a series of rules or conventions that form me, but also within a series of relationships on which I depend for my survival and which constitute me as an interdependent creature in this world.  The questions of responsibility emerge in the context of this sociality, this interdependence.

On the matter of responsibility I am interested in the productive formulations made by Levinas.  For Levinas, I am not responsible for my actions — though in fact I also am — but rather responsible for the Other, for the demands of the Other.  And any demand made by the Other is prior to any possibility of social contract: whatever the demand the Other puts before me, it affects me, it involves me in a relation of responsibility.

Legal contracts cannot adequately describe this situation of primary responsibility.  That means that I am responsible even for those who are not in any form of contractual relationship with me, or who do not form part of my community, or my nation, or who are not covered by the same legal framework as me.  This helps to understand, for example, how I can be responsible for those who live at a distance from me, who are under a different form of political organisation, or those who are stateless.  In Levinas’ framework, even those we never meet, those whose names and faces we do not know, present us with a demand.  It is, then, a question of accepting our global interdependence and even our obligation to protect the lives of those we do not know. For Levinas, this primary obligation is expressed through what we commonly call commandments, “Thou shall not kill”: a requirement to preserve life.  This does not mean that I can or should preserve the life of every individual (of course I cannot do so, and to imagine I could would be unhealthy, it would imply some sort of narcissism, a certain messianism), but rather that I should think about what kind of political structures we need to sustain life and minimise those forms of violence that extinguish it. This does not mean I am capable of making these structures come into existence — responsibility is not the same as efficacy — but rather that I can fight for a world that maximises the possibility of preserving and sustaining life and minimises the possibility of those forms of violence that, illegitimately, take life, or at least reduce the conditions that make it possible for this to happen.  This is part of what I am thinking about at the moment.  And I have to say that it is not easy to situate Arendt in this context.

Despite the fact that Levinas himself was not a pacifist, I believe that, taking his ideas as a starting point, it is possible to develop a philosophy of non-violence and even a conception of a trans-national political community that holds these values to be fundamental.  We have to take Levinas’ framework and develop a kind of trans-national ethics based on non-violence, and thus it is necessary to disagree with him with respect to the difference between ethics and politics, to his stand on pacifism, and on Israel.

F.B.: Certainly, we are not only responsible for what we have done; responsibility points towards the interplay of autonomy and limit.  To the extent that we always live and survive through some sort of consent that can hardly be considered voluntary, political responsibility also has to do with the idea that we are aware of, that we hope will continue, that we want to innovate or conserve.  In this sense, unless our attitude towards the world is one of indifference, we can talk about a kind of political responsibility in the maintenance of structures and habits or values that, in many spheres, impede the possibility of feminine freedom.

J.B.: Let me start with a criticism Derrida made of Levinas: if it is necessary to respond to all demands, that means an infinite number of demands, and how should we decide which group of demands to respond to?  Perhaps responsibility is only made possible by circumscribing a group of demands, that is, by becoming irresponsible in relation to all other demands.  In a way that is characteristic of him, Derrida affirms that responsibility, in Levinas’ sense, leads to a necessary irresponsibility.  Yet this is to continue to misunderstand the singularity of the demands made on us.  It’s not enough to deal with them case by case.  Let’s think, for example, about violence against women: it is true that we can consider a rapist or an aggressor to be responsible before the law; in a legal framework, he will have to pay for his acts, will have to be punished, once evidence of his guilt has been provided.  No doubt we need a punitive legal institution, but the question is whether, once legal responsibility has been assumed, this means that full responsibility has now been apportioned.  Legal responsibility is not an adequate model for conceptualising the whole range of responsibilities we have, because there remains a fundamental question to resolve: rape and domestic violence continue.  Why do these social practices reproduce themselves time and again in a culture?  A broader kind of intervention seems to me to be necessary, a kind of outcry about violence against women, and against sexual minorities; I believe it is very important to relate them: violence against transsexuals, for example, against sex workers, against illegal immigrants who can have no recourse to law, and violence against many groups who have been dispossessed of all their rights.  I consider that we need a strong policy that connects all these forms of violence, and also demands the production, through the mass media, of an education, an ethos, that would act as a counterweight to these forms of violence.  If you examining all this, case by case, you lose sight of the horizon: these forms of violence form part of a social practice — are even socially acceptable amongst certain types of men — of a social model.  But how can we intervene at the level of social practices?  By using the law, certainly, but not only in this way, given that we have a responsibility to remake the world, and to institute certain standards of non-violence on a more general level.  Political responsibility must go hand in hand with legal responsibility.

F.B.: In your latest books you deal with the issue of the place occupied by passions and emotions, like pain and vulnerability in politics.  Similarly, you point to the urgency of asking ourselves: “what does it mean to be human?”  Isn’t it a little surprising that all this should be written by an author who appears to form part of the anti-humanist tradition, part of the tradition that is known in the USA as French Theory?

J.B.: It is necessary to be careful when we talk about ‘humanism’.  We only have to look at the various legacies of humanism to see that there is not just one kind of humanism: the forms that emerge in Italy are very distinct from those that emerge in France.  There is also a humanism based in classical liberal political philosophy that can not be assimilated into literary humanism.  In any case, if we agree that philosophical anthropology is a form of humanism that supposes that there is just one single idea of what it is to be human, and that it is possible to attribute defining traits to this human subject, then we are taking that which is human as something given, something that already exists.

What I want to suggest is the following: for humanness to become possible — in specific times and places — depends on certain types of social norms that are involved in the exercise of producing and ‘de-producing’ humanness.  In other words, for that which is human to be human, it must be in relationship with that which is inhuman or non-human, and this is a differential operation of power.  Humanness is produced and sustained in one form and is ‘de-produced’ and not sustained in other forms: the human being is a differentiating effect of power.

In the USA, for example, at present there is a very powerful discourse that sets out to define humanness as being a product of the Judeo-Christian tradition.  Similarly, we have some morphological policies that define humanness in terms of certain ideas about what a human body should be like.  And this produces a population with disabilities, or of disabled individuals whose bodies do not match the morphological idea.  Remember that any regulatory ideal of humanness always produces exclusions, ‘outsiders’, and creates a problem: how should we refer to these beings that appear human but are not?  We only have to think of the history of slavery, something which survives in the USA, where it remains unclear if all the black men who are imprisoned are human or not.

Humanness is not something given, it is a differentiating effect of power, but we need the term because without it we cannot understand what is happening.  I am worried by those positions that say: “that which is human belongs to humanism, so we can never talk any more about humanness”; “choice belongs to voluntarism, we have to stop talking about choice”; “the Enlightenment belongs to that which we have dismantled, so we can no longer speak of Enlightenment”.  But they don’t ask themselves what the Enlightenment was.  Why go back to that which was?  Why go back to humanness?  Well, because these concepts, these really important ideals, have not left us, they continue to form us.  And there is a new way of understanding them that starts with the idea that they do not have a single form and that, in fact, their regulation operates politically to produce exclusions that we must challenge.  For someone to say that a person who is considered non-human is, in fact, human means a resignification of humanness and emphasises that humanness can work in another form.  On occasions it is important to use the term precisely in the way that the Human Rights discourse sometimes does: taking someone to whom the defining characteristics of humanness are not attributed and affirming that person is human is a performative act that redefines humanness in terms of liberation, as emancipation. It is not a question of searching for what was already there, but of making it happen.

F.B.: In your recent reflections, when you talk about ‘that which is human’ you connect it with the question of which lives deserve to be recognised as being worthy of being protected or helped.  When you speak about ‘life’, are you taking as your starting point the distinction between bios and zoe?

J.B.: The question of life is difficult; I have my doubts about the way in which the distinction that Arendt establishes in The Human Condition has been popularised by Giorgio Agamben.  Despite the fact that bios and zoe are analytically distinguishable, each is always implied in the other.  I have problems when Arendt affirms that the point of life cannot be life itself.  For her it is a terrible idea, since she only understands life as something that is bound up with very important principles and values.  Arendt wanted to distinguish between life that was not worth living and life itself, and in this she was following Socrates: an unexamined life was not worth living.  That is why, for her, thinking, judging and responsibility were so important, because she understood that these human activities make life worth living, and if these are not possible, then neither is life.  But this does not help us to understand why it is necessary to preserve the life of sensate beings, including human beings.

Arendt distinguishes between the public and private spheres.  The public domain is where we think, judge act; the private domain means that someone looks after the home, the food, the reproduction of the material conditions of life.  It seems to me to be worth remembering that there is a politics of this sphere, a politics of the domestic, there is a politics of private life.  Who does the work of cleaning the house, of keeping it all together?  The questions about relationships, about the family, about work, are political questions.

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.

F.B.: In your latest books you deal with the idea of thinking the community in terms of relatability.  This perspective seems to me very interesting, since it allows us to establish a nexus between the misnamed ‘domestic’ violence and the violence of war.  Do you believe that this would allow us to rethink global international politics?

J.B.: 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.

F.B.: To round off our conversation, I would like to formulate some of the questions that ideas of sexual difference have raised: how do you explain, from your conception of gender, the historical asymmetry between the sexes?  How do you explain that lack of recognition of our first origins, of having been given birth to by a woman?

J.B.: 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 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.