desire – Page 10 – objet (a)

McGowan on prohibition and fantasy

McGowan, Todd. “Relocating Our Enjoyment of the 1950s: The Politics of Fantasy in Far From Heaven.” The Cinema of Todd Haynes ed. James Morrison, New York: Wallflower Press, 2007.

Faced with the absolute prohibition against miscegenation or gay sexuality, characters in Far From Heaven nonetheless explore these behaviours in violation of the prohibition. Formally, the film stresses that the enjoyment of these activities stems from the very prohibition that interdicts them. It is in this sense that prohibition authorises enjoyment. Prohibition, as Far From Heaven shows us, carves out a space in which subjects can experience enjoyment. It transforms a quotidian activity —interracial relationships, gay sex— into a sublime experience, an experience that lifts the subject outside the sphere of the quotidian.

In a contemporary world replete with images of enjoyment and with imperatives to enjoy ourselves, the demand for enjoyment grows as the possibilities for it shrink. Today, we suffocate from so many images of enjoyment while feeling ourselves increasingly deprived of it. As a result, we turn to nostalgic fantasies of the 1950s in order to envision the possibility of an enjoyment that the contemporary imperative to enjoy renders more inaccessible. We fantasize about an era of strict prohibition not because we want our enjoyment restricted in a contemporary world that places no limits o nit, but because we crave the enjoyment that we imagine strict limits enabling.

The point here is not that they (Frank Cathy Raymond) enjoy in spite of the widespread disapproval; it is instead that this disapproval enables and fuels their enjoyment. Their time together has the significance it does precisely because the social prohibition does not permit it. The prohibition has the effect of elevating their ordinary love relationship to the status of a sublime Thing.

The Law prohibits and thereby creates a barrier that the subject cannot go beyond. In so doing, it ‘raises an object … to the dignity of the Thing (Lacan cited in McGowan) In Far From Heaven, the relationship between Cathy and Raymond becomes a sublime thing, and we enjoy it as such. It achieves this status due to the powerful prohibition that prevents its ultimate fulfillment. This barrier at once prevents the relationship and makes it possible (119).

lloyd interpellation subjection assujettisement

Psychic subjectivity is formed in dependence

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

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

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

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

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

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

stephen white interpellation

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

Don’t just think in terms of isolated scenes. Imagine rther a lifetime of being hailed into discourse, beginning with the doctor who announces: “It’s a girl!” Keeping in mind the earlier analysis of gender as performative, Butler would have us reconstrue this familiar speech act as the beginning of a lifelong chain of “girling” utterances that enact certain scripts as normal and others as abnormal. With this expansion of the temporal horizon and application of the notion of performativity, the relatively sovereign subjectivity of the passerby begins to dissolve. It is replaced by the image of a subjectiviy produced or constituted by the insistent, interpellating “demand” of “discursive power”. (82)

The policeman who hails the person in the street is enabled to make that call through the force of reiterated convention. This is one of the speech acts that police perform, and the temporality of the act exceeds the time of the utterance in question. In a sense, the police cite the convention of hailing, participate in an utterance that is indifferent to the one who speaks it. The act “works” in part because of the citational dimension of the speech act, the historicity of convention that exceeds and enables the moment of its enunciation. (Butler Excite 33 cited in White 82)

Thus it is the reiterating function of language that is primarily carrying and reproducing dominant norms and crating the effect of sovereign, disengaged subjects by the continual process of calling them into social existence. We are, in short,“interpellated kinds of beings” continually being called into linguistic life, being “given over to social terms that are never fully [our] own.”

Butler’s ontology is one in which the basic “things” are persistent forces or processes. We must be careful not to imagine these as having qualities of subjectivy. Thus, power is not an anonymous subject that initiates discrete acts of constitution or construction. There is rather only “a process of reiteration by which both ‘subjects’ and ‘acts’ come to appear at all. There is no power that acts, only a reiterated acting that is power in its persistence. (83)

But none of this … implies a notion that subjexts are dopes of discursive power. Reiterating is always potentially open to resignifying in ways that may contest the smooth reproduction of the dominant terms of discourse. Butler has described this subversive potential as “power’s own possibility of being reworked.”

What is not yet clear in Butler’s account is why or how this imperfection mightever be taken advantage of intentionally by an actor (83).

Thinking power together with a theory of the psyche

Why does the passerby turn to answer the policeman? Power “hails,” but why does one submit to its call?

The violence of the prohibition, the frustrated desire, self-beratement, self-denial, desire turns back upon itself in the form of a will in the service of the regulating regime, that is of terms not one’s own. There is an investment of erotic libidinal energy in this turning back, in this prohibitive activity of the emergent entity of conscience. The conscience can never be an adequate site for thinking critical agency, since it is, in its very constitution, in complicity with the violent appropriation of desire by power.

thiem desire foreclosure repression

Thiem, Annika. Unbecoming Subjects: Judith Butler, Moral Philosophy and Critical Responsibility. New York: Fordham UP, 2008.

[D]esires are formed insofar as they cannot simply take any object; rather object choices take place only in relation to norms (43).

Despite being inevitable, the loss occasioned by foreclosure is never prior to the social but occurs through the horizon of and in relation to social norms. These can and must be interrogated, criticized, and possibly reworked and changed (45). The ego-ideal controls the desires of the ego, demands the repression of certain desires, and becomes the agency of producing and preserving precisely the desires it seeks to regulate.

It is not possible to seek recourse to discovering more original versions of desire that might precede social regulation. Further, matters become complicated with regard to attempts to rework patterns of social regulation.

Critique cannot mean simply to impart knowledge and give reasons about what is repressive, as if this means that we could then simply get rid of these conditions. Instead, critique comes to be bound to an archaeology of passionate attachments, and such an archaeology means an unbecoming practice of undoing the very subject and its passionate investments in that which it is opposed. Such an archaeology will constantly run into its own limits, because these attachments are not transparent and hence readily avowable (46).

conscience Nietzsche foreclose

Freud and Nietzsche offer differing accounts of subject formation that rely on the productivity of the norm. Both account for the fabrication of conscience as the effect of an internalized prohibition (thereby establishing “prohibition” as not only privative but productive).

In Freud and Nietzsche, a prohibition on action or expression is said to turn “the drive” back on itself, fabricating an internal sphere, the condition for self-inspection and reflexivity. The drive turning back on itself becomes the precipitating condition of subject formation, a primary longing in recoil that is traced in Hegel’s view of the unhappy consciousness as well. Whether the doubling back upon itself is performed by primary longings, desire, or derives, it produces in each instance a psychic habit of self-beratement, one that is consolidated over time as conscience.

Conscience is the means by which a subject becomes an object for itself, reflecting on itself, establishing itself as reflective and reflexive. The “I” is not simply one who thinks about him- or herself; it is defined by this capacity for reflective self-relation or reflexivity. For Nietzsche reflexivity is a consequence of conscience; self-knowing follows from self-punishment. (Thus one never “knows” oneself prior to the recoil of desire in question.)

In order to curb desire, one makes of oneself an object for reflection; in the course of producing one’s own alterity, one becomes established as a reflexive being, one who can take oneself as an object. Reflexivity becomes the means by which desire is regularly transmuted into the circuit of self-reflection. The doubling back of desire that culminates in reflexivity produces, however, another order of desire: the desire for that very circuit, for reflexivity and, ultimately, for subjection. 22

Foreclosed Desire

The foreclosure of homosexuality appears to be foundational to a certain heterosexual version of the subject. 23

Freud distinguishes between repression and foreclosure, suggesting that a repressed desire might once have lived apart from its prohibition, but that foreclosed desire is rigorously barred, constituting the subject through a certain kind of preemptive loss. Elsewhere I have suggested [See chap. 5 of Psychic Life] that the foreclosure of homosexuality appears to be foundational to a certain heterosexual version of the subject. The formula “I have never loved” someone of similar gender and “I have never lost” any such person predicates the “I” on the “never-never” of that love and loss. Indeed, the ontological accomplishment of heterosexual “being” is traced to this double negation, which forms its constitutive melancholia, an emphatic and irreversible loss that forms the tenuous basis of that “being.”

Significantly Freud identifies heightened conscience and self-beratement as one sign of melancholia, the condition of uncompleted grief. 23

The foreclosure of certain forms of love suggests that the melancholia that grounds the subject (and hence always threatens to unsettle and disrupt that ground) signals an incomplete and irresolvable grief. Unowned and incomplete, melancholia is the limit to the subject’s sense of pouvoir, its sense of what it can accomplish and, in that sense, its power. Melancholia rifts the subject, marking a limit to what it can accommodate. Because the subject does not, cannot, reflect on that loss, that loss marks the limit of reflexivity, that which exceeds ( and conditions) its circuitry. Understood as foreclosure, that loss inaugurates the subject and threatens it with dissolution (23).