desire

carlson pt 2 on tim dean

Carlson, Shanna T. “Transgender Subjectivity and the Logic of Sexual Difference” Volume 21, Number 2, 2010 d i f f e r e n c e s: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies

Footnote 7: Dean goes on to explain, however, that “[a]ll desire entails the presence of the symbolic Other, but since this Other has no gender— there is no ‘Other sex’—desire involves a relation to otherness independent of sexual difference”(137).

In this shift, from questions of Lacan’s theory of desire to questions of sexual difference,
Dean attempts to clarify desire’s independence from the regime of “gender” but obscures the insight of the formulas of sexuation that “gender” and “sexual difference” are not one and the same thing.

Too closely linking gender and sexual difference, Dean runs the risk of mandating “gendered” readings of Lacan, which could in turn result in a theory at times illogically heterosexist. At various moments in his narrations of the formulas, Lacan, too, can be read as too closely linking gender and sexual difference, which is why I have based my meditation primarily on the formulas.

[Quotoing Tim Dean in Beyond Sexuality] takes exception to Butler’s account of sexuality as outlined in Bodies That Matter, for, as he argues, Butler’s is a rhetoricalist approach. According to Dean, “rhetoricalist theories of sexuality effectively evacuate the category of desire from their accounts” by failing to take account of “what in rhetoric or discourse exceeds language” (178). Desire will prove essential to Dean’s own account of sexuality; in his project to deheterosexualize desire, Dean develops the notion of object a in order to theorize sexuality “outside the terms of gender and identity” (222).

According to Dean, the limitation of situating the phallus at the center of a theoretical account of desire is not only that the phallus has such a problematic history but that it is a single term; object a, on the other hand, “implies multiple, heterogeneous possibilities for desire” (250). Dean wishes to figure desire within “terms of multiplicity” (249) rather than principally according to an “ideology of lack” (247).

He cites Lacan’s assertion that “[d]esire is a relation of being to lack” (qtd. in Beyond 247) but emphasizes, too, that “the question of conceptualizing desire in terms of lack remains a stubborn problem” for a variety of queer- and feminist-minded projects (248). Dean identifies the latter resistance as having precisely to do with the way that the ideology of lack intersects with castration in psychoanalytic theory (248). In favor of such a scene, Dean turns instead to polymorphous perversion as a site of multiplicity, contending that theorizing desire from the point of excess instead of from the point of lack “makes desire essentially pluralistic, with all the inclusive implications of pluralism” (249).

For Dean, one of the advantages of theorizing desire from the starting point of polymorphous perversion arises from Freud’s understanding of polymorphous perversion as preceding normative—that is, genital—sexuality; in this way, perversion comes to represent a sort of “paradise lost” that “normal sexuality” will try, but never completely manage, to supplant (235).

In rehearsing Freud’s decision to classify perversion in terms not of content but rather of “exclusiveness and fixation” (236),

Dean will go so far as to suggest that “the process of normalization itself is what’s pathological, since normalization ‘fixes’ desire and generates the exclusiveness of sexual orientation [heterosexual or homosexual] as its symptom” (237).

However, what is not of interest to Dean, at least in this text, is Lacan’s assertion that masculine and feminine subjects relate differently to object a. According to Lacan, it is the masculine subject that is principally occupied with object a. Queer as it is, could Dean’s account of desire be lacking the feminine?

Lacan writes that “the object—from at least one pole of sexual identification, the male pole—the object [. . .] puts itself in the place of what cannot be glimpsed of the Other” (Encore 63). By contrast, for the feminine subject, “something other than object a is at stake in what comes to make up for the sexual relationship that does not exist” (63). Here again, we see Lacan specifying that via sexual difference, something tries to make up for the absence of the sexual relation. However, there is a fundamental asymmetry at play in the making up for lost/fantasized complementarity, for feminine and masculine subjects make up for the loss, in part, with recourse to different types of others.

In both Bodies That Matter and Antigone’s Claim, Butler performs readings of the subject’s entry into the symbolic via sexual differentiation, and two of her principal charges are that Lacan’s symbolic is normative and that the assumption of a sexed position enjoins compulsory heterosexuality. In Antigone’s Claim, Butler turns from matters of discourse and materiality to the scene of kinship in order to explore how psychoanalysis might both/either compel and/or inhibit the forging of new kinds of community ties, ties that Butler subsumes under the promising header “radical kinship.”

Butler’s investment in the possibility of imagining new forms of kinship ties has a strong affective and political attraction, which she wields to good end, for example, in her listing of the ways that “kinship
has become fragile, porous, and expansive” (Antigone’s 22). Butler cites the mobility of children who, because of migration, exile, refugee status, or situations of divorce or remarriage, “move from one family to another, move from a family to no family, move from no family to a family, or live, psychically, at the crossroads of the family, or in multiply layered family situations” (22). She points to the blending of straight and gay families, to gay nuclear families, and to straight or gay families where a child may have no mother or no father, or two mothers or two fathers, or half-brothers as friends (22–23), asking: “What has Oedipus engendered? [. . .] What will the legacy of Oedipus be for those who are formed in these situations, where positions are hardly clear, where the place of the father is dispersed, where the place of the mother is multiply occupied or displaced, where the symbolic in its stasis no longer holds?” (22–23). No doubt this is a time of potentially unprecedented familial mobility. Some would evaluate these realities as the sign of a crisis in “family values”; others would celebrate the more positive effects of the new types of ties and encounters. In this text, though, Butler is also taking aim at a particular strain of psychoanalysis that would seem unexpectedly to ally itself on some levels with defenders of the heterosexual nuclear family. Butler references such positions as she has encountered them, including psychoanalysts opposed to or at least worried about gay adoption as a possible source of psychosis for the adopted children, Jacques-Alain Miller’s alleged opposition to male homosexual marriage on account of its likely infidelity, and others’ suggestion that autism can be traceable to lesbian parenting (70). Butler concludes,“These views commonly maintain that alternative kinship arrangements attempt to revise psychic structures in ways that lead to tragedy again, figured incessantly as the tragedy of and for the child.”

I would like to join Butler in imagining sexuation otherwise than as a scene of compulsory heterosexuality. However, I do not think that doing so requires locating a loophole in the Oedipal narrative, as Butler does in her interpretation of the Antigone story.

For while Butler is quite right to lament and fear the compulsory heterosexuality that provides a potent backdrop to many societal norms and ideals, no one knew better than Lacan that, as he put it, “[i]deals are
society’s slaves” (qtd. in Dean, Beyond 229).

In her argument, Butler seems to cast the Oedipal scene as the only available solution within psychoanalysis to the failure of the sexual relation, as in her observation that, for Lacan, the symbolic is “the realm of the Law that regulates desire in the Oedipus complex” (Antigone’s 18).

… the Oedipal drama is a principally “masculine” (and indeed a principally “obsessional,” if not a principally heterosexual) solution to the failure of the sexual relation, one that hallucinates an object as prohibited. But as we have seen, there is not only one solution to the failure of the sexual relation: there are two! In this way, Butler is quite right to turn to Antigone as an alternative to the Oedipal solution. 60

carlson butler Antigone pt. 3

Carlson, Shanna T. “Transgender Subjectivity and the Logic of Sexual Difference” Volume 21, Number 2, 2010 d i f f e r e n c e s: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies

Butler is quite right to turn to Antigone as an alternative to the Oedipal solution. In Butler’s reading, Antigone helps us envisage new forms of kinship and, correspondingly, the “possibility of social transformation” (24).

Butler indicates that Antigone’s own position in her family represents one of kinship incoherence (22), insofar as Antigone could be read to love her brother incestuously (6), and insofar as her father is also her brother. Butler notes that she is not advocating incest per se as a new, radical form of kinship (24); rather, in reflecting on the end of Sophocles’ play, she writes, “In this light, then, it is perhaps interesting to note that Antigone, who concludes the oedipal drama, fails to produce heterosexual closure for that drama, and that this may intimate the direction for a psychoanalytic theory that takes Antigone as its point of departure” (76).Perhaps Butler is exactly right on this count as well.

Perhaps psychoanalysis should take Antigone as its point of departure. Through the figure of Antigone, Butler explores a non-Oedipal solution to the failure of the sexual relation, one that in Lacan’s reading entails a specifically feminine encounter with the signifier. However, she does so without avowing that this solution was available to subjects from the start, that it was not the Oedipal drama that engendered it. (61)

Lacan is more explicit: the form the nonworking of the incest prohibition takes is femininity. Feminine figures testify precisely to the failure of the prohibition, for, as Copjec eloquently plots out, “Lacan answers that the woman is not-all because she lacks a limit, by which he means she is not susceptible to the threat of castration; the ‘no’ embodied by this threat does not function for her” (226).

While the “universal” incest prohibition does not “work” for the feminine subject, this does not necessarily mean that she has incestuous relations with or desires toward someone in her family (which may be
composed as radically or as porously as permitted by the limits of our imaginations)—though she very well may, and I see no reason to shy away from Butler’s suggestion that Antigone’s desire for her brother Polynices is incestuous: “Is it perhaps the unlivable desire with which she lives, incest itself, that makes of her life a living death, that has no place within the terms that confer intelligibility on life?” (Antigone’s 23).

Nonetheless, I would emphasize that incest as one possible disruptive form of radical kinship is not the only stake here. Rather, according to Lacan, no object— mother, father, brother, sister—is marked as prohibited for the feminine subject. Not only is incest not prohibited; no one thing is prohibited.

Thus, for the masculine subject, the point is not that he need necessarily be a heterosexual, ostensibly “biological” boy barred access to his heterosexual, “biologically” female mother, but that he be a subject who has fallen under the blow of some prohibition and by consequence takes up a position as unconsciously masculine.

And as McNulty has noted, “To believe that [the prohibited object is] the mother is a specific symptom, a particular way of resolving castration [. . .] by attributing it to the father and thereby making it ‘avoidable’ through obedience or submission to norms. [In other words,] it also reveals the ideology of norms as a way of avoiding castration”.

On the other hand, for the feminine subject, the point is perhaps even more radical: regardless of her “gender,” the feminine subject is she to whom no prohibition is addressed. No universal can be made of or for her. The relief given the masculine subject, composing prohibitions as limits, does not transpire for the feminine subject. Instead, the nonworking of the prohibition is what ushers the feminine subject toward . . . maybe (who knows?) her brother/half-sister/stepmother/adoptive cousin/grandfather, and definitely toward a contingent encounter with the symbolic.

With this in mind, I would suggest that Antigone’s claim on a future for kinship, or a future for relationality, as well as a future for psychoanalysis, has just as much, if not more, to offer by way of what she does as a feminine figure confronting a symbolic that she is “totally, that is, limitlessly inscribed within” (Copjec 227) as with what she does as a would-be incestuous figure that “represents not kinship in its ideal form but its deformation and displacement” (Butler, Antigone’s 24).

Curiously, then, if we attempt a still more fragile point of contact between Lacanian psychoanalysis and gender studies, a contact on the question of femininity, we open onto the sort of radical clearing wished
for and envisaged by gender theorists’ calls for a safer, more just world for queer and transgender subjectivities and relations.

What has been overlooked in Dean’s narration of desire and disavowed in Butler’s reading of kinship is the possibility and exploration of a feminine perspective. The feminine perspective brings with it a relation both to the radically contingent and to intractability, or the real, precisely by virtue of the fact that the feminine subject is not afforded the same sort of support and limits by the phallic function spared the masculine subject. (63)

Where psychoanalysis may appear limited resides in part in what I interpret as the too easy capitulation of the terms feminine and masculine to “gendered” readings.

As we saw earlier, some Lacanians participate in a logic of sexual difference whereby it magically turns out again and again that subjects with apparently female genitalia “are” “women,” and so on. Butler damningly maps out the consequences of such readings with respect to family relations:

And when there are two men or two women who parent, are we to assume that some primary division of gendered roles organizes their psychic places within the scene, so that the empirical contingency of two same-gendered parents is nevertheless straightened out by the presocial psychic place of the Mother and
the Father into which they enter? Does it make sense on these occasions to insist that there are symbolic positions of Mother and Father that every psyche must accept regardless of the social form that kinship takes? (Antigone’s 69)

It seems important to imagine a queerer future for Lacanian psychoanalysis wherein terms like “the desire of the mother” and “the law of the father,” still very much in currency, might be replaced (not, of course, without haunting remainders) by some new terminology that would better reference the psychical functions these terms index. But terminology shifts alone will not a queer theory make of contemporary deployments of psychoanalysis; we must also bear in mind Dean’s rigorous reminder that

objects a emerge outside of and in excess to the frame of gender. And with respect to sexual difference, we must insist on the ways in which, for Lacan, the terms masculine and feminine signal two different logics, two different modes of ex-sistence in the symbolic, two different approaches to the Other, two different stances with respect to desire, and (at least) two different types of jouissance. Nothing here indicates “gender” as we might more conventionally conceive of it. 64

exclude or exploit

Jodi Dean, The Communist Horizon part 2

I also want to emphasize that for communists the binary inclusion/exclusion does not indicate the primary axis of justice (although it functions quite nicely for liberal democrats who insist that the true political issue is making sure that no one is excluded from opportunities to participate in the democratic process or from the possibility of striking it rich in the capitalist market). The remedy for those without papers, for example, is to have papers—and thus membership in the state. This isn’t a bad goal, but it is a goal that extends rather than takes or changes state power. The remedy for those without property (slum dwellers, say), is a right to property, a remedy that incorporates the owner into the official market economy, in effect eliminating the threat to the market that uncounted use and exchange pose.

But is capitalism best understood as a system that constitutively excludes persons or one that constitutively exploits them?

Building from Alain Badiou and Jacques Ranciere, Zizek claims that the antagonism between the included and the excluded is the fundamental antagonism rupturing capitalism today (and hence crucial to the idea of communism). Zizek recognizes that the focus on exclusion easily elides with “the liberal-tolerant-multicultural topic of ‘openness’ . . . at the expense of a properly Marxist notion of social antagonism.” Yet he argues that the inclusion of the proletariat is an inclusion of a different sort, an inclusion of the capitalism’s point of symptomal exclusion (“part of no part”) that effectively dismantles it.

A lot rides on the notion of “proletariat” here, especially insofar as contemporary capitalism relies on communication as a productive force, rather than industrial labor. On the one hand, Zizek detaches “proletarian” from the factory, treating “proletarianization” as a process that deprives humans of their “substance” and reduces them to pure subjects. On the other, he identifies exclusion as a particular kind of proletarianization, one by which some are made directly to embody “substanceless subjectivity.” They are the material remainders of the system, its unavoidable and necessary byproducts. Because the entire system relies on their exclusion (or their inclusion as remainders), because they embody the truth that capitalism produces human refuse, surplus populations with no role or function, to include them would destroy the system itself.

Capitalist productivity derives from its expropriation and exploitation of communicative processes. Cesare Casarino’s distinction between the common and the commons is helpful here.

The expropriation of language in the spectacle opens up a new experience of language and linguistic being: ‘not this or that content of language, but language itself, not this or that true proposition, but the very fact that one speaks.’ Failure to communicate provides its own satisfaction, the enjoyment of language itself.

The movement from commons to common repeats, in a way, this shift from active to passive or, the movement from desire to drive.

Blogs, Facebook, YouTube—they each and together take our ensemble of actions and return them to us as an endless communicative common. Rather than “I make,” there is production, a production of thoughts and affects, opinions and contributions that circulate, accumulate, and distract. Words were spoken.

Agamben’s answer to the expropriation of the common is drive. The communist answer is desire, a desire already manifest in our active linking and adding and making, our creating and contributing without pay, just for ourselves and for each other

marcuse repressive desublimation

Repressive Desublimation:

A means of insidious domination was what Marcuse called “repressive desublimation,” again an amalgamation of Freud and Marx. Sublimation, recall, is where instinctual energy gets deflected from its natural expression and appears, instead, in some other form of expression or satisfaction. “Desublimation,” then, is a system that permits some degree of natural expression or satisfaction of instinctual energy. Desublimation is obviously so powerful that even a small dose can succeed in capturing us. We will return repetitively to satisfy ourselves even in small ways. As an example, something like Playboy magazine could be allowed to feed men a measure of unusual — that is, formerly tabooed — sexual satisfaction, but this would happen only by becoming a regular buying customer. When one turned to look at American society of the 60s, it was clear that sexuality was being desublimated in a variety of ways so long as people were ready to consume the right things. Thus, people were actually being repressed anew to the specific advantages of capitalist producers. Looking at American society, today, little has changed, I would say. We have become progressively more narrow (repressed) in our satisfaction of even recreation! Being convinced that we can buy it in the form of ever-more-expensive mountain clothing or recreational vehicles. Meanwhile, most people who buy mountain clothing and four-wheel-drive vehicles never go to the mountains. We have become implicitly convinced (and victimized), believing that recreation is achieved in the purchase and ownership itself. This after all is what capitalism requires — a never ending will to consume products.

desire and drive

Dean, Jodi. “Drive as the Structure of Biopolitics, Economy, Sovereignty, and Capture” Krisis: Journal for Contemporary Philosophy. number 2, 2010. 2-15.

The first concerns the difference between drive and desire as relations of jouissance, in other words, as economies through which the subject structures her enjoyment. Desire is always a desire to desire, a desire that can never be filled, a desire for a jouissance or enjoyment that can never be attained (Žižek 2000: 291). In contrast, drive attains jouissance in the repetitive process of not reaching it. Failure (the thwarting of the aim, the missing of the goal) provides its own sort of success insofar as one cannot not enjoy. Such failure or thwarting is key to sublimation, itself premised on the providing of the drive with a satisfaction different from its aim (Lacan 1997: 111).

In drive, one doesn’t have to reach the goal to enjoy. Enjoyment attaches to the process, thereby capturing the subject. Enjoyment, no matter how small, fleeting, or partial, is why one persists in the loop of drive.

Explaining the difference between desire and drive via Lacan’s objet a, Žižek adds a second feature to the notion of drive, namely, loss.

He writes: ‘Although, in both cases, the link between object and loss is crucial, in the case of the objet a as the object of desire, we have an object which was originally lost, which coincides with its own loss, which emerges as lost,

while, in the case of the objet a as the object of drive, the “object” is directly the loss itself – in the shift from desire to drive, we pass from the lost object to loss itself as an object. That is to say, the weird movement called “drive” is not driven by the “impossible” quest for the lost object; it is a push to directly enact the “loss” – the gap, cut, distance – itself.’ (Žižek 2008: 328). Drive is a kind of compulsion or force. And it’s a force that is shaped, that takes its form and pulsion, from loss. Drive is loss as a force or the force loss exerts on the field of desire.

A third feature of drive important for the argument here is Lacan’streatment of drive as ‘a will to create from zero, a will to begin again’ (Lacan 1997: 213). Even as the drive is destructive, ‘a challenge to everything that exists,’ it is also an opening to something new. Dolar extends the idea of drive as creative destruction to the political, positioning drive as a force of negativity that makes politics possible (Dolar 2009).

[Drive is] an excess that subverts all attempts to reduce politics to the proper arrangement of subjects and institutions, drive prevents an order from permanently stabilizing or closing in upon itself. It marks the crack in the social that opens the way to politics.

For Dolar, then, psychoanalysis contributes to political theory a view of politics as necessarily a dis-locating, a shifting of relations, rather than only or primarily an ordering and its reproduction.

The very attempt to inhibit sovereign power, to reduce sovereignty’s domain by treating the market as an autonomous site of truth with laws immune to sovereign direction, enables the intensification and spread of biopolitics. Biopolitics is thus a by-product of the limitation of sovereignty, a set of mobilized effects of its interiorized critique, limitation, and redirection. Biopolitics takes its form as the loss of sovereign political power, more specifically, in the circumscription of the authority of the people as a collective who thereby come to be passively rendered as the population, a target of multiple, shifting interventions. Drive enables us to understand how it is that the people are captured in the population, a capture that neoliberalism amplifies and extends.

A better way to conceive the division within the people, one capable of expressing the power of the people in and as a common but not a whole and not a unity, makes use of the distinction between desire and drive. The people as desiring have needs, needs they can only address together, collectively, as an active common.

The people as caught in drive are fragmented, dispersed into networks and tributaries. Stuck in drive’s repetitive loops, they pursue their separate enterprises even as they are governmentalized objects, a population.

the gaze

McGowan, Todd. The real gaze: film theory after Lacan. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007.

Ideology constantly works to obscure the traumatic real of the gaze because this real threatens the stability of the social order that ideology protects. This stability depends on the illusion of wholeness and the power to account symbolically for everything. The real marks a point of failure, not just of the subject’s look but also of ideology’s explanatory power. That is to say, the real traumatizes not just the subject that encounters it but also the big Other as well.

The hold that symbolic authority has over subjects depends on the avoidance of the traumatic real that exposes the imposture of all authority.

When the subject experiences the traumatic real, it recognizes symbolic authority’s failure to account for everything. This is the key to the political power of the gaze. Though the encounter with the gaze traumatizes the subject, it also provides the basis for the subject’s freedom—freedom from the constraints of the big Other.(16)

The encounter reveals to the subject the nonexistence of the big Other, its inability to provide support for the subject’s own symbolic identity. The big Other sustains its hold over the subject through the creation of a world of meaning: when one accepts the meaningfulness of this world, one subjects oneself to the big Other and its authority. This process of subjection allows the subject to exist in a world where things make sense. But retaining this world of sense depends on the continued capitulation of the subject to the big Other. The subject pays the price for meaning with its freedom. The encounter with the traumatic real, which is an encounter with a point of non-sense within the big Other (what the big Other cannot render meaningful), frees the subject from its subjection. In the moment of the traumatic encounter, the subject experiences the groundlessness—and ultimately the nonexistence—of the big Other and the symbolic world that the big Other sustains. The traumatic encounter reveals the nonsensical status of our master signifier. As Paul Eisenstein puts it, “It exposes the ridiculousness or stupidity of the principle that enables us to make sense of the world. It reveals the Law as something we institute, but whose ultimate ground cannot be found within the domain of reason.”42 Our dependence on the master signifier for meaning necessarily evaporates as we witness its failure to provide any. (17)

As a result of the traumatic encounter with the real, freedom opens up for the subject. The point at which the symbolic order fails—and our relation to this point—becomes foundational for us as subjects. One finds the basis of one’s being in the failure of ideology’s master signifier rather than in its success. This transforms the ideological subject into a politicized and free subject.

Our ability to contest an ideological structure depends on our ability to recognize the real point at which it breaks down, the point at which the void that ideology conceals manifests itself. Every authentic political act has its origins in an encounter with the real. This is not to say that the encounter with the traumatic real is magical. It simply opens up the possibility of freedom for the subject, which the subject must constantly work to sustain. Film’s ability to facilitate an encounter with the real represents a threat to the power of ideology. However, the history of the film, perhaps more than the history of any other art form, is also a record of capitulation to ideological demands. Classical Hollywood cinema and its contemporary descendants consistently provide a fantasmatic support for the ideology of capitalist society. As Theodor Adorno describes it in Minima Moralia, “The film has succeeded in transforming subjects so indistinguishably into social functions, that those wholly encompassed, no longer aware of any conflict, enjoy their own dehumanization as something human, as the joy of warmth.” At the same time that it promises an encounter with the traumatic real, film works to domesticate every trauma by producing docile subjects. The coexistence of these countercurrents suggests that the ideological valence of film remains up for grabs—to be decided on a case-by-case basis. And we can look to a Lacanian film theory to provide a way of embarking on this kind of analysis. When we look at and analyze a particular film, the question concerns the relationship to the gaze—and, in general, to the trauma of the real—that the film takes up.

Does a particular film obscure the gaze throughout? Does it sustain the gaze as an unapproachable absence? Does it domesticate the trauma of the gaze through a fantasmatic scenario? Does it take this fantasmatic scenario so far as to undermine it from within? And perhaps most importantly, does it allow us to encounter the gaze in its full traumatic import? (17)

tuhkanen critique of butler

Tuhkanen, Mikko. “Performativity and Becoming” Cultural Critique. 72, Spring (2009): 1-35.

For example, her description of Antigone as “the limit without which the symbolic cannot be thought” or the “unthinkable within the symbolic” might seem to be referring to the real, yet she goes on to identify Antigone’s position as possibly embodying an “alternative symbolic or imaginary” (Antigone’s Claim, 40) and, immediately afterward, turns to Lacan’s second seminar to criticize his totalizing theory of the symbolic law (41–42; see also 47). Arguably, this conflation of different stages in Lacan’s work forces (or allows) her to ignore Lacan’s divergence from a structuralist understanding of a system (see also Penney, 19).

Relevant here is Shepherdson’s suggestion that “the ‘real’ can be understood as a concept that was developed in order to define in a clear way how there is always an element that ‘does not belong’ within the structure, an ‘excluded’ element which escapes the law, but which can nevertheless be approached in a precise theoretical fashion.” Consequently, “psychoanalysis is not in fact committed to the ‘law’ in the manner of classical structuralist thought” (“Intimate Alterity,” paras. 13, 24).

In No Future, Lee Edelman argues that, rather than making good on its claim to conjure up from the tragic heroine’s tomb a radical challenge to the protocols of symbolic legitimation, Butler’s rendering of Antigone “returns us, instead, to familiar forms of a durable liberal humanism whose rallying cry has always been, and here remains,‘the future’” (105–6). For Edelman, such seamless domestication of the real to symbolic meaning is symptomatic of the inherent failure of futurity to be evoked in terms of anything but what he calls “reproductive futurism” (2 and passim). In the figure of the Child, politics premised on futurism “generates generational succession, temporality, and narrative sequence, not toward the end of enabling change, but, instead, of perpetuating sameness, of turning back time to assure repetition” (60). In this schema of enabling the future to unfold as a reassuringly recognizable continuation of the present, queers are “stigmatized as threatening an end to the future itself” (113). Given the unquestioned reflex of seeing “every political vision as a vision of futurity” (13), Edelman’s exhilaratingly counterintuitive argument that queer respond to its stigmatization with a kind of an answer of the real, with an embrace of its status as an embodiment of “the arbitrary, future-negating force of a brutal and mindless drive” (127), has a strong appeal. If there are reasons to resist this appeal, they must come from the fact that queer theory may not yet have come to grips with the specificity of the consequences of its paradigmatic groundings.

I would propose that, because of the Butlerian paradigm on which much of queer theory has developed, the question of becoming, of futurity’s claim on our thinking, may not yet have been adequately posed.

With Deleuze, for example, we must ask whether futurity as becoming is reducible to breeding, in the sense in which fag slang uses the term to signal the mindless, mechanic, and (in Foucault’s terms) docile reproduction of the same. Edelman writes:

“the true oppositional politics implicit in the practice of queer sexualities lies not in the liberal discourse and patient negotiation of tolerances and rights, important as these undoubtedly are to all of us still denied them, but in the capacity of queer sexualities to figure the radical dissolution of the contract, in every sense social and Symbolic, on which the future as putative assurance against the jouissance of the Real depends” (16).

While not precisely disagreeing with Edelman, I would ask whether we have quite exhausted the question of futurity before we abandon it. To do this, we may want to shift our paradigmatic perspective such that our grounding assumptions are defamiliarized and our concepts—here the question of becoming—are necessarily rethought. Such a shift, I propose, would allow us to see that the futurity of performative politics may constitute only a partial understanding of what Deleuze, for example, sees as becoming.

desire and recognition 2

Hegel’s anthropocentric reorientation of Spinoza’s monism results in a reformulation of Spinoza’s notion of self-actualization. The journeying subject of the Phenomenology also seeks its own actualization, but finds that this does not happen without the paradoxical assistance of negativity.

The human subject does not exhibit greater potency through an unobstructed expression of selfhood, but requires obstruction, as it were, in order to gain reflection of itself in its environment, recognition of itself by Others.

Hence, actualization only occurs to the extent that the subject confronts what is different from itself, and therein discovers a more enhanced version of itself. The negative thus becomes essential to self-actualization, and the human subject must suffer its own loss of identity again and again in order to realize its fullest sense of self.

But once again, can this full self be found, and does Hegel’s introduction of essential negativity effectively preclude the possibility of achieving full selfhood consonant with completed metaphysical knowledge? Can the living human subject reconstitute every external relation as internal, and simultaneously achieve adequacy to itself and its world?

Is the ideal of substance recast as subject merely that, a regulative ideal which one longs for and suffers under but never appropriates existentially? If this is the case, has Hegel then created the notion of a subject as perpetual striving?

Although Hegel is often categorizd as the philosopher of totality, of systematic completeness and self-sufficient autonomy, it is not clear that the metaphysical totality he defends is a finite system. Indeed, the abiding paradox of Hegel’s metaphysics seems to consist in the openness of this ostensibly all-inclusive system (13).

desire and recognition 1

I am going to re-read these 40 torturous pages in Subjects of Desire

Butler defines Hegelian Desire thus on page 6:

… for DESIRE, according to Hegel, is the incessant human effort to overcome external differences, a project to become a self-sufficient subject for whom all things apparently different finally emerge as immanent feature of the subject itself.

… desire increasingly becomes a principle of the ontological displacement of the human subject, and in its latest stages, in the work of Lacan, Deleuze, and Foucault, desire comes to signify the impossibility of the coherent subject itself (6).

How is it that desire, once conceived as the human instance of dialectical reason, becomes that which endangers dialectics, fractures the metaphysically integrated self, and disrupts the internal harmony of the subject and its ontological intimacy with the world? 7

[desire] is established early on in the text as a permanent principle of self-consciousness. Hegel claims that “self-consciousness in general is Desire” (Para 167), by which he means that desire signifies the reflexivity of consciousness, the necessity that it become other to itself in order to know itself. As desire, consciousness is outside itself, and as outside itself, consciousness is self-consciousness. 7

Clearly, the meaning of this “outside” is yet to be clarified, and becomes a crucial ambiguity in the section “Lordship and Bondage.” … The Hegelian subject cannot know itself instantaneously or immediately, but requires mediation to understand its own structure (7).

… the Hegelian subject expands in the course of its adventure through alterity; it internalizes the world that it desires, and expands to encompass, to be, what it initially confronts as other to itself. The final satisfaction of desire is the discovery of substance as subject, the experience of the world as everywhere confirming that subject’s sense of immanent metaphysical place (8-9).

Hyppolite suggests that desire is “the power of the negative in human life” … Conceived as lack, a being-without, desire initially signifies negativity; as the pursuit of substance, desire thus implicitly raises the question of whether human negativity, that which constitutes its ontological difference, can be resolved into an encompassing network of being. Human desire articulates the subject’s relationship to that which is not itself, that which is different, strange, novel, awaited, absent, lost. And the satisfaction of desire is the transformation of difference into identity: the discovery of the strange and novel as familiar, the arrival of the awaited, the reemergence of what has been absent or lost. Thus, human desire is a way of thematizing the problem of negativity; it is the negative principle of human life, its ontological status as a lack in pursuit of being — Plato’s vision in the Symposium.

🙂 Butler adds this:

But desire is also the mode in which consciousness makes its own negativity into an explicit object of reflection, something to be labored upon and worked through. In effect, we read our negativity in the objects and others we desire; as desirable, detestable, solicitous, or rejecting, these emotional facts of the world mirror our ontological insufficiency in Hegelian terms; they show us the negativity that we are, and engage us with the promise of plenitude or the threat of reaffirming our nothingness. Whatever the emotional permutation of desire, we are, in virtue of desire, posing the question of final destination. And for Hegel, in posing the question, we presume the possibility of an answer, a satisfaction, an ultimate arrival (9-10).

The gradual yet insistent effort of Hegel’s journeying subject in the Phenomenology of Spirit never relinquishes this project to relate itself to externality in order to rediscover itself as more inclusive being. The insurpassability of externality implies the permancence of desire. In this sense, insofar as Hegel’s subject never achieves a static union with externality, it is hopelessly beyond its own grasp, although it retains as its highest aim the thorough comprehension of itself. This thoroughgoing self-determination is the ideal of integrity toward which self-consciousness strives, and this striving is denoted by desire (44).

After all, desire revealed an implicit intentional aim, namely, to disclose and enact a common ontological structure with the world. Hence, despite the alleged object of desire … “the consumption of this brute being which poses as other to me,” desire has at base a metaphysical project which, while requiring determinate objects, transcends them as well, i.e., to effect a unity with the realm of externality which both preserves that realm and renders it into a reflection of self-consciousness. (44)

Because desire is the principle of self-consciousness’ reflexivity or inner difference, and because it has as its highest aim the assimilation of all external relations into relations of inner difference, desire forms the experiential basis for the project of the Phenomenology at large … the gradual sophistication of desire —expanding inclusiveness of its intentional aims —is the principle of progress in the Phenomenology (45).

butler hegel unhappy consciousness

Butler, Judith. “Stubborn Attachment, Bodily Subjection Rereading Hegel on the Unhappy Consciousness” Psychic Life of Power. 31-62

The ineluctability of the body in the “Unhappy Consciousness” parallels the ineluctability of “instinct” in Freud and that of the will in Nietzsche (56).

Lotsa people liked the liberation narrative of Lordship and Bondage but have neglected to look at the resolution of freedom into self-enslavement at the end of the chapter. The whole idea of the progressive history that is now in question, not to mention the status of the subject, so now “the dystopic resolution of ‘Lordship and Bondage’ has perhaps regained a timely significance (31).

The bondsman in Hegel throws off the apparently external “Lord” only to find himself in an ethical world, subjected to various norms and ideals. Or, to put it more precisely, the subject emerges as an unhappy consciousness through the reflexive application of these ethical laws (32).

A certain structuring attachment to subjection becomes the condition of moral subjectivation (33).

🙂 What JB is getting at here is the notion of the development of a subjective interiority. She like Foucault, but his limitation is a view of subject as purely a effect of power, yo bro, what about resistance?

Butler wants to underscore a Relationship Between Self-Enslavement as Bodily Subjection and Self-Imposed Ethical Norms

On the Geneology of Morals Nietzche draws relation between Self-Enslavement and the moralized “Man” of Conscience

This quote from Foucault is one of JB’s favourites:

The man described for us, whom we are invited to free, is already in himself the effect of a subjection [assujettissement] much more profound than himself. A ‘soul’ inhabits him and brings him to existence, which is itself a factor in the mastery that power exercises over the body. The soul is the effect and instrument of a political anatomy; the soul is the prison of the body” (Psychic Life 33, quoting Discipline and Punish 30-34).

How precisely are we to read this “inhabiting” of the body by the soul? Can a return to Hegel help us read it? What are the points of convergence and divergence in Hegel, Nietzsche, and Foucault on the structure of subjection?

Hegel’s account in “The Unhappy Consciousness” prefigures a critical discourse on ethical positions that not only seek to institute the denial or sacrifice of bodily life, but that fall into instructive paradoxes when they do.

Hegel shows that if the suppression of the body requires an instrumental movement of and by the body, then the body is inadvertently preserved in and by the instrument of its suppression (33). This formulation prefigures the possibility of a convergence with Nietzschean, Foucaultian, and, as we shall see, Freudian perspectives on self-abasement, which Hegel’s text in the transition to Spirit, forecloses. … Arresting the text prior to its resolution into Spirit, this inquiry seeks to know whether a suppressed link with a Nietzchean and Freudian account of conscience is embedded in Hegel’s chapter.

Hegel and the Production of Self-Enslavement

Hegel’s insights in the “Unhappy Consciousness” on the ineluctability of the attachment of and to the body in subjection are reiterated in Foucaultian frameworks, and that the Foucaultian account of subjection, despite its significant moves beyond dialectical logic, remains unwittingly tethered to the Hegelian formulation. Furthermore, Hegel tacitly presumes that subjection is understood as a self-negating attachment and, in this way, shares an operative assumption with the Freudian notion of libidinal investment.

bondsman is instrumental body, the lord’s body “but in such a way that the lord forgets or disavows his own activity in producing the bondsman, a production which we will call a projection (35).

This disavowal involves a clever trick. It is an action by which an activity is disavowed, yet, as an action, it rhetorically concedes the very activity that is seeks to negate.” [huh]

To disavow one’s body, to render it “Other” and then to establish the “Other” as an effect of autonomy, is to produce one’s body in such a way that the activity of its production —and its essential relation to the lord— is denied. … the “Other” become complicit with this disavowal.

YOU BE MY BODY FOR ME, BUT DO NOT LET ME KNOW THAT THE BODY YOU ARE IS MY BODY.

Not only does he labor for another, who takes the yield of his labor, but he gives up his signature for the signature of the other, no longer marking ownership of his own labor in any way. This expropriation of the object does not negate the bondsman’s sense of himself as a laboring being, but it does imply that whatever he makes, he also loses. The determinate thing that the bondsman makes reflects the bondsman himself as a determinate thing. But because the object is given away, he becomes that which can be forfeited. If the object is the congealing or forming of labor, and if the labor is that of the bondsman, then the determinate and transient character of the thing will imply the determinate and transient character of the bondsman. The laboring body which now knows itself to have formed the object also knows that it is transient. The bondsman not only negates things (in the sense of transforming them through labor) and is a negating activity, but he is subject to a full and final negation in death (40-41).

self-recognition is achieved through a certain fearful transience, absolute fear:

Unhappy Consciousness [Bondsman becomes Lord over himself, lord over his own body], this form of reflexivity requires a SPLITTING of the psyche into two parts

Unhappy consciousness seeks to overcome this duality (essential, unchangeable and inessential, changeable) (47)

1. Lordship

2. Bondage internal to a single consciousness: body is still split off from consciousness, reconstituted as an interior alien, the body is sustained through its disavowal as what consciousness must continue to disavow.

Consciousness clings or ATTACHES TO ITSELF, and this clinging to consciousness is at the same time a disavowal of the body, which appears to signify the terror of death, “the absolute fear”

The unhappy consciousness requires and engages this ATTACHMENT by invoking an IMPERATIVE, an ETHICAL NORM: CLING TO ONESELF (43)

Hence the imperative to cling to oneself is motivated by this absolute fear and by the need to refuse that fear.

The section on unhappy consciousness explains the genesis of the sphere of the ethical as a defense against the absolute fear by which it is motivated. The fabrication of norms out of (and against) fear, and the reflexive imposition of those norms, subjects the unhappy consciousness in a double sense: the subject is subordinated to norms, and the norms are subjectivating, that is, they give an ethical shape to the reflexivity of this emerging subject. The subjection that takes place under the sign of the ethical is a flight from fear, and so is constituted as a kind of flight and denial, a fearful flight from fear that covers its fear first with stubbornness and then with religious self-righteousness. (43).

[…] As a dual structure, the unhappy consciousness takes itself as its own object of scorn.

The philosophical elaboration of this scorn takes the following form: consciousness is now divided into two parts, the “essential” and “unchangeable,”on the one hand, and the “inessential” and “changeable,” on the other. … it renders this contradictory self into an INessential part of itself. It thus parts with itself in order to purify itself of contradiction.

As a result the unhappy consciousness BERATES itself constantly, setting up one part of itself as a pure judge aloof from contradiction and disparaging its changeable part as inessential, although ineluctably tied to it. … ethical self-judgment in the context of the unhappy consciousness: … the unchangeable consciousness “passes judgment” on the changeable.

[…] Before the introduction of the “mediator” and the “priest,” the chapter on the unhappy consciousness appears to proceed as if it contained a trenchant critique of ethical imperatives and religious ideals, a critique which prefigures the Nietzschean analysis that emerges some sixty years later.

Significantly, it is here, in the effort to differentiate itself from its excretory functions, indeed from its excretory identity, that consciousness relies on a “mediator,” what Hegel will call “the priest.” In order to reconnect with the pure and the unchangeable, this bodily consciousness offers up its every “doing” to a priest or minister. This mediating agency relieves the abject consciousness of its responsibility for its own actions. Through the institution of counsel and advice, the priest offers the reason for the abject consciousness’s actions. Everything that the abject consciousness offers that is, all of its externalizations, including desire, work, and excrement, are to construed as offerings, as paying penance. The priest institutes bodily self-abnegation as the price of holiness, elevating the renunciatory gesture of excrement to a religious practice whereby the entire body is ritualistically purged. The sanctification of abjection takes place through rituals of fasting and moritification. Because the body cannot be fully denied, as the stoic thought, it must be ritualistically renounced (51).

At this juncture Hegel departs from what has been the pattern of explanation, in which a self-negating posture is underscored as a posture, a phenomenalization that refutes the negation it seeks to institute.

In the place of such an explanation Hegel asserts the will of another operates through the self-sacrificial actions of the penitent. In effect self-sacrifice is not refuted through the claim that self-sacrifice is itself a willful activity; rather, Hegel asserts that in self-sacrifice one enacts another’s will. … [The penitent disclaims his act as his own, avowing that another’s will, the priest’s, operates through his own, avowing that another’s will, the priest’s operates through his self-sacrifice … (52)]

One might expect that the penitent would be shown to be reveling in himself, self-aggrandizing, narcissistic, that his self-punishments would culminate in a pleasurable assertion of self.

But Hegel eschews this explanation and thus breaks with the pattern of explanation in the chapter in favor of a religious solution to in Spirit (52).

Whereas in all of the earlier examples of self-negation pleasure was understood to INHERE in pain (the pleasurable aggrandizement of the stoic, the pleasurable sadism of the skeptic), pleasure is here temporally removed from pain, figured as its future compensation. For Hegel, this eschatological transformation of the pain of this world into the pleasure of the next establishes the transition from self-consciousness to reason.

Every effort to reduce itself to inaction or to nothing, to subordinate or mortify its own body, culminates inadvertently in the production of self-consciousness as a pleasure-seeking and self-aggrandizing agent. Every effort to overcome the body, pleasure, and agency proves to be nothing other than the assertion of precisely these features of the subject (53).

Post-Hegelian Subjections

Recall for Hegel ethical imperatives first emerge in a defensive response to absolute fear, and their emergence must be construed as a permutation and refusal of that fear. This absolute fear was the fear of death, hence a fear conditioned by the finite character of the body. The ethical refusal and subordination of the body might then be understood as a magical effort to preempt that existential negation. Moreover, the ideal of radical self-sufficiency is jeopardized by the body’s permeability and dependency. In this sense, excretion is not the only “animal function” that would signify “defilement” for this subject. The repeated efforts to sacrifice the body which become repeated assertions of the body are also efforts to defend it against everything that “jeopardizes ” it, where to be in “jeopardy” denotes a danger slightly less dire than death, a kind of penetrative paroxysm that implies being moved or shaken sexually “through and through.”

One could then see in the various forms of self-beratement and self-mortification typologized in “The Unhappy Consciousness” a prefiguration of neurosis and perhaps also a specific modality of homosexual panic. (54)

We might then reread the mobilizing fear that is both refused and rerouted by the ethical imperative in terms of the feared “expropriability” of the body. If the bondsman’s laboring activity could be expropriated by the lord and the essence of the bondsman’s body be held in ownership by that lord, then the body constitutes a site of contested ownership, one which through domination or the threat of death can always be owned by another. The body appears to be nothing other than a threat to the project of safety and self-sufficiency that governs the Phenomenology’s trajectory. The anal preoccupation that directly precedes the ascendance into a religious concept of an afterlife suggests that bodily permeability can only be resolved by escape into an afterlife in which no bodies exist at all.

This affirmation of the absolute negation of the body contradicts all the earlier efforts to subordinate or master the body WITHIN life, efforts which culminated in the assertion of the ineluctability of the body. Whereas other religious notions turned out to be surreptitious [stealth, clandestine] ways of reasserting the body, this one appears exempt from the dialectical reversal that it resolves (54-55).

Psychoanalysis

The repression of the libido is always understood as itself a libidinally invested repression. Hence, the libido is not absolutely negated through repression, but rather becomes the instrument of its own subjection. … In other words, prohibition becomes the displaced site of satisfaction for the “instinct” or desire that is prohibited, an occasion for reliving the instinct under the rubric of the condemning law. This is, of course, the source of the form of comedy in which the bearer of the moral law turns out to be the most serious transgressor of its precepts … In this sense, then, renunciation takes place through the very desire that is renounced, which is to say, the desire is never renounced, but becomes preserved and reasserted in the very structure of renunciation (55-56).

I do not mean to suggest that Freud’s highly problematic notion of instinct, Hegel’s inchoate body, and Nietzsche’s will are strictly equivalent. Yet I do want to suggest that these three thinkers circumscribe a kind of dialectical reversal which centers on the impossibility of a full or final reflexive suppression of what we might loosely call “the body” within the confines of life.

Within the Hegelian framework, the subject, which splits itself off from its body, requires that body in order to sustain its splitting activity; the body to be suppressed is thus marshalled in the service of that suppression. For Foucault, the body to be regulated is similarly marshalled in the service of suppression, but the body is not constituted prior to that regulation. On the contrary, the body is produced as an object of regulation, and for regulation to augment itself, the body is proliferated as an object of regulation. This proliferation both marks off Foucault’s theory from Hegel’s and constitutes the site of potential resistance to regulation. The possibility of this resistance is derived from what is unforeseeable in proliferation.. But to understaad how a regulatory regime could produce effects which are not only unforeseeable but constitute resistance, it seems that we must return to the question of stubborn attachments and, more precisely, to the place of that attachment in the subversion of the law (59-60).

… the logic of subjection in both Hegel and Freud implies that the instrument of suppression becomes the new structure and aim of desire, at least when subjection proves effective (60).

What Hegel implies in “The Unhappy Consciousness” is not merely that moral wretchedness cannot be coherently sustained, that it invariably concedes the bodily being that it seeks to deny, but that the pursuit of wretchedness, the attachment to wretchedness, is both the condition and the potential undoing of such subjection. If wretchedness, agony, and pain are sites or modes of stubbornness, ways of attaching to oneself, negatively articulated modes of reflexivity, then that is because they are given by regulatory regimes as the sites available for attachment, and a subject will attach to pain rather than not attach at all. … the desire to desire is a willingness to desire precisely that which would foreclose desire, if only for the possibility of continuing to desire. (61)

If desire has as its final aim the continuation of itself —and here one might link Hegel, Freud, and Foucault all back to Spinoza’s connatus— then the capacity of desire to be withdrawn and to reattach will constitute something like the vulnerability of every strategy (62).

hegel recognition jessica benjamin

Butler, Judith. “Longing for Recognition: Commentary on the Work of Jessica Benjamin” (2000) in Undoing Gender. New York: Routledge, 2004. Print.

When Hegel introduces the notion of recognition in the section on lordship and bondage in The Phenomenology of Spirit, he narrates the primary encounter with the Other in terms of self-loss. “Self-consciousness … has come out of itself. … it has lost itself, for it finds itself as an other being” (Phenomenology 111). One might understand Hegel to be describing merely a pathological state in which a fantasy of absorption by the Other constitutes an early or primitive experience. But he is saying something more. He is suggesting that whatever consciousness is, whatever the self is, will find itself only through a reflection of itself in another.

To be itself, it must pass through self-loss, and when it passes through, it will never be “returned” to what it was. To be reflected in or as another will have a double significance for consciousness, however, since consciousness will, through the reflection, regain itself in some way. But it will, by virtue of the external status of the reflection, regain itself as external to itself and, hence, continue to lose itself. (147)

Thus, the relationship to the Other will be, invariably, ambivalent. The price of self-knowledge will be self-loss, and the Other poses the possibility of both securing and undermining self-knowledge. What becomes clear, though, is that the self never returns to itself free of the Other, that its “relationality” become constitutive of who the self is.
Hegel has given us an ek-static notion of the self, one which is, of necessity, outside itself, not self-identical, differentiated from the start. It is the self over here who considers its reflection over there, but it is equally over there, reflected, and reflecting. Its ontology is precisely to be divided and spanned in irrecoverable ways. Indeed, whatever self emerges in the course of the Phenomenology of Spirit is always at a temporal remove from its former appearance;

it is transformed through its encounter with alterity, not in order to return to itself, but to become a self it never was. Difference casts it forth into an irreversible future.

To be a self is, on these terms, to be at a distance from who one is, not to enjoy the prerogative of self-identity (what Hegel calls self-certainty), but to be cast, always, outside oneself, Other to oneself. I believe that this conception of the self emphasizes a different Hegel from the one found in Benjamin’s work. It is surely one for which the metaphor of “inclusion,” as in “the inclusive self” would not quite work. 148

[…] I would suggest that the ek-static notion of the self in Hegel resonates in some ways with this notion of the self that invariably loses itself in the Other who secures that self’s existence. The “self” here is not the same as the subject, which is a conceit of autonomous self-determination. The self in Hegel is marked by a primary enthrallment with the Other, one in which that self is put at risk. The moment in “Lordship and Bondage” when the two self-consciousnesses come to recognize one another is, accordingly, in the “life and death struggle,” the moment in which they each see the shared power they have to annihilate the Other and, thereby, destroy the condition of their own self-reflection. Thus, it is at a moment of fundamental vulnerability that recognition becomes possible, and need becomes self-conscious. What recognition does at such a moment is, to be sure, to hold destruction in check. But what it also means is that the self is not its own, that it is given over to the Other in advance of any further relation, but in such a way that the Other does not own it either. And the ethical content of its relationship to the Other is to be found in this fundamental and reciprocal state of being “given over.” In Hegel, it would only be partially true to say that the self comes to “include” the Other. For the self is always other to itself, and so not a “container” or unity that might “include” Others within its scope.

On the contrary, the self is always finding itself as the Other, becoming Other to itself, and this is another way of marking the opposite of “incorporation.” It does not take the Other in; it finds itself transported outside of itself in an irreversible relation of alterity. In a sense, the self “is” this relation to alterity. 149-150

Although Benjamin sometimes refers to “postmodern” conceptions of the self that presume its “split” and “decentered” character, we do not come to know what precisely is meant by these terms. It will not do to say that there is first a self and then it engages in spllitting, since the self as I am outlining it here is beyond itself from the start, and defined by this ontological ek-stasis, this fundamental relation to the Other in which it finds itself ambiguously installed outside itself. This model is, I would suggest, one way of disputing any claim concerning the self-sufficiency of the subject or, indeed, the incorporative character of all identification. ….

If we assume that the self exists and then it splits, we assume that the ontological status of the self is self-sufficient before it undergoes its splitting (an Aristophanic myth, we might say, resurrected within the metapsychology of ego psychology). But this is not to understand the ontological primacy of relationality itself and its consequences for thinking the self in it necessary (and ethically consequential) disunity. 150

yes, it is necessary to say that the subject splits, but it does not follow from that formulation that the subject was a single whole or autonomous. For if the subject is both split and splitting, it will be necessary to know what kind of split was inaugurative, what kind is undergone as a contingent psychic event, and how those different levels of splitting relate to one another, if at all.

It is, then, one perspective on relationality derived from Hegel which claims that the self seeks and offers recognition to another, but it is another which claims that the very process of recognition reveals that the self is always already positioned outside itself. This is not a particularly “postmodern” insight, since it is derived from German idealism and earlier medieval ecstatic traditions. It simply avows that that “we” who are relational do not stand apart from those relations and cannot think of ourselves outside of the decentering effects that that relationality entails.

Moreover, when we consider that the relations by which we are defined are NOT DYADIC, but always refer to a historical legacy and futural horizon that is not contained by the Other, but which constitutes something like the Other of the Other, then it seems to follow that who we “are” fundamentally is a subject in a temporal chain of desire that only occasionally and provisionally assumes the form of the dyad.

I want to reiterate that displacing the binary model for thinking about relationality will also help us appreciate the triangulating echoes in heterosexual, homosexual, and bisexual desire, and complicate our understanding of the relation between sexuality and gender. 151