foreclosure

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).

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 foreclosure

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

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

lloyd melancholia

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

stephen white desire our own submission

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

Why does desire cooperate with its own submission?

Butler’s answer rests on her postulation of a “desire to be” or “to persist” that characterizes human beings. This is not a desire for mere physical survival or to align with some metaphysical essence; it is rather the desire for social existence, linguistic survival. Moreover, this desire has as its “final aim” not some particular model of existence, but rather merely “the continuation of itself”; it is thus “a desire to desire.”

And this desire will cooperate with the prohibition of any particular desire that endangers its continued access to the terms of social existence … “the desire to desire is a willingness to desire precisely that which would foreclose desire, if only for the possibility of continuing to desire.”

One attaches to what is painful rather than not attach at all (86).

“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 conatus— then the capacity of desire to be withdrawn and to reattach will constitute something like the vulnerability of every strategy of subjection. (Butler Psychic 55, 60-62, 101. Cited in White 87).

Teradacto: White breaks down Butler’s theory of subject into 3 components or “ontological forces”: 1. power, 2. materialization, 3. the desire to desire.

Within such an ontology, critical agency emerges not with the possibility of escaping from the turning, but rather with the possibility of continuing that turning in a somewhat different way, a way in which one redirects how the three forces continue to press upon and partially constitute one another.

lloyd on butler psychic subjectivity

loyd, Moya. “Towards a cultural politics of vulnerability” Judith Butler’s Precarious Politics. eds. Terrell Carver and Samuel Chambers, New York: Routledge, 2008.

Butler’s articulation of a pychoanalytically informed theory of subjectivity. There are 3 elements to this theory.

1. But begins by considering primary human dependency. Her argument is very simple: in infancy all subjects develop a ‘passionate attachment’ to those on whom they depend for life: If ‘the child is to persist in a psychic and social sense’, Butler notes, “there must be dependency and the formation of attachment: there is no possibility of not loving, where love is bound up with the requirements for life’ (Butler Psychic 8). Out of a ‘desire to survive’ subjects are perpetually willing to submit to their own subordination.

2. She highlights the role of foreclosure in the formation of the subject, specifically the foreclosure of certain kinds of passionate attachment or ‘impossible’ loves. ‘If the subject is produced through foreclosure’, she notes, ‘then the subject is produced by a condition from which it is, by definition, separated and differentiated’. Far from being an autonomous subject, the psychic subject is thus a dependent subject, a subject that is produced in subordination and whose continued subordination is essential to its continued existence. While primary attachments are essential to the survival of the child, if the subject is to emerge fully then they must ultimately be disavowed. [Primary attachments are attachments that the subject ‘can never afford fully to see’] That is, the subject must disavow its dependency on the Other in order to become a subject (even though the impossible loves that it disavows continue to haunt it, threatening it with its own unravelling). And so, some aspects of who we ‘are’ are pre-conscious: they are both unknown and unknowable to us.

3. Finally Butler returns to the topic of melancholia. Here, here given her concern with the formation of conscience and guilt she deploys the idea to demonstrate how the subject’s capacity for reflexivity is an effect of the foreclosure and installation of the other within its ego (Lloyd, Norms 98)

It is at this point in her argument that Butler sets out to reveal just exactly how power impinges on psychic formation. Where Freudian theory focuses on the psychic, Foucauldian theory concentrates on the social or political, Butler’s aim is to weave the two together.

She wants to challenge the idea that the unconscious is unaffected by the power relations that structure society. Her goal is thus to advance a ‘critical account of psychic subjection in terms of the regulatory and productive effects of power.’ (psychic 19)

Butler has already shown in Gender Trouble and elsewhere how the subject depends ofr its existence on the operations of particular regulatory norms. Here interest in Psychic Life is to demonstrate how the subject internalizes these norms. This is where melancholia fits.

Melancholia is the way that the internal world of the psyche is produced; it determines both its interiority and exteriority and the boundary between social and psychic. According to Butler, it operates in this way because the psychic sphere is, in fact, organized according to the prevailing ‘norms of social regulation.’ (psychic 171, Lloyd Norms 100). Because it is configured by social norm, the topography of the psyche is, thus, configured according to the operations of power. (Lloyd Norms 100)

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).

constitutive outside

Ziarek, Ewa Ponowska. “From Euthanasia to the Other of Reason: Performativity and the Deconstruction of Sexual Difference” in Derrida and Feminism. eds. Feder, Ellen K. et al. New York: Routledge. 1997, 115-140.

🙂 This is a great note but it stops short with 8 pages to go. I need to track down the article and find Z’s conclusion!

On the Derridian Ethical

Ungraspable in positive terms, and yet irreducible to epistemological contradiction, the signification of alterity confronts us, once again, with the limit, or the outside to the symbolic order. This limit differs, however, from both the psychoanalytic concept of the Real and Butler’s notion of the “constitutive outside.” Unlike the radical non-coincidence, both temporal and spatial, that the signification of the other generates, Copjec’s and Žižek’s discussion of the Real emphasizes the immediate coincidence of opposites. For Butler, the abject —designating the excluded possibilities of signification threatening the purity of the law— functions as the constitutive outside to the symbolic order. The exclusion of the abject is thus an act of violence that ensures heterosexual hegemony. The task of critical intervention, then, is to question the seeming neutrality of this exclusion, and to recover the foreclosed possibilities of signification, even though this recovery will produce different exclusions in its wake.

For Derrida however, the persistence of alterity as a certain beyond or excess of the social and conceptual totality is not a sign of violent exclusion, but the condition of the very possibility of ethics. The other does not belong to the order of the “production” of the constitutive outside —as radically other, the signification of alterity exceeds both the notion of production and constitution.

(131-132).

constitutive outside

If Butler draws on the Derridian theory of performativity in order to underscore the historicity and impurity of the law, she also supplements this theory in order to stress the compulsory character of heterosexuality. According to Butler, the normative power of heterosexuality requires not only the force effecting subjective identifications with its norms but also the force of dis-identifications, the force of exclusions, in particular, the exclusion of homosexuality: “the normative force of performativity — its power to establish what qualifies as ‘being’ — works not only through reiteration, but through exclusion as well.” (Butler Bodies 188) Thus, the compulsory force of “spectral” figures of abject homosexuality: “the feminized fag and the phallicized dyke” (Butler Bodies, 96) (129)

It is precisely because iterability fails to perpetuate the identical and pure from of the law that any identity claims have to be reinforced by exclusions — they require“a constitutive outside.” In other words, Butler, like Žižek, concedes that the normativity of the law works by producing a certain outside to the symbolic universe. Yet, to avoid the ahistorical production of the REAL, Butler proposes to rethink the “constitutive outside” as a social abject, the exclusion of which secures the domain of social intelligibility.

In this formulation, the process of exclusion is never neutral but performs a normative and normalizing social function:

“the abject designates here precisely those “unlivable” and “uninhabitable” zones of social life which are nevertheless densely populated by those who do not enjoy the status 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.” (Butler Bodies 3) (129).

Campbell critique sexual d Ziarek Outside

Campbell, Kirsten. “The Plague of the Subject: Subjects, Politics, and the Power of Psychic Life” in Butler Matters: Judith Butler’s Impact on Feminist and Queer Studies. eds. Sönser Breen, Margaret and Warren J. Blumenfeld. Hampshire: Ashgate Publishing Ltd. 2005, (81-94).

Foreclosure: Freud never uses the term “foreclosure”, he used “repression” and “disavowal” to describe the ego’s refusal of an incompatible idea together with its affect. Instead she uses Lacan’s use of foreclosure as “A foundational psychic exclusion that cannot be represented within the subject’s symbolic economy”. This deployment of Lacan in the name of Freud allows Butler to evade certain theoretical difficulties posed by Lacanian theory to her conception of foreclosure.

Butler’s account implies that the prohibition against the homosexual object is pre-oedipal, because it is prior to the constitution of the subject. This prohibition, however, CANNOT be pre-oedipal. If it is pre-oedipal, then it must be prior to sexual difference. If the prohibition is prior to sexual difference, then the object that is prohibited cannot be a homosexual object, because a homosexual object is defined by sexual difference. The definition of a same-sex object relies upon a notion of sexual difference because such a concept would be meaningless without an already established distinction between the sexes. In order for Butler’s prohibition to operate against desire for same-sex objects, those objects must already be defined by sexual difference and, so, the prohibition described by Butler must be an oedipal prohibition in the register of sexual difference. The failure to address this problem of sexual difference entails that there is a lack of coherence in this theory of the formation of heterosexual identity (89).

In Butler’s interpretation, what is thus foreclosed from the symbolic is not the prediscursive “empty” kernel but those possibilities of signification that threaten the purity and permanence of the law instituting sexual difference. With such a concept of the outside, Butler articulates the main task of her inquiry iin a very diffferent way from Žižek’s. She does not intend to affirm the exclusion of the Real as a guarantee of social contingency but questions the stability and ahistorical character of this exclusion.

“How might those ostensibly constitutive exclusions be rendered less permanent, more dynamic? 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?” (Butler Bodies 189).

By rethinking the historicity and contingency of the law as the sedimentation of subjective approximations through time, Butler can argue that the mechanisms of exclusion are also, … historical workings of specific modalities of discourse and power. … the “constitutive outside” is an inevitable effect of any identity claims, including the claims of queer identities, but the forms of these exclusions are neither invariant nor ahistorical. Undercutting the political neutrality and ahistorical permanence of “the constitutive outside,” Butler’s emphasis on the historicity of exclusion removes the threat of psychosis associated with it and opens the borders of intelligibility to political contestation (Ziarek 130).

zizek reply to butler criticism of symbolic

So when when Butler asks the rhetorical question

Why should we conceive of universality as an empty ‘place’ which awaits its content in an anterior and subsequent event? Is it empty only because it has already disavowed or suppressed the content from which it emerges, and where is the trace of the disavowed in the formal structure that emerges? (JB, 34)

I fully endorse her implicit stance. My answer … is: Lacan’s ‘primoridal repression’ of das Ding (of the pre-symbolic incestuous Real Thing) is precisely that which creates universality as an empty place … This very necessity of the primordial repression shows clearly why one should distinguish between the exclusion of the Real that opens up the empty place of the universal and the subsequent hegemonic struggles of different particular contents to occupy this empty place. … And here I am even tempted to read Butler against herself — say, against her sympathetic recapitulation of Laclau

Inevitable as it is that a political organization will posit the possible filling of that [empty place of the universal] as an ideal, it is equally inevitable that it will fail to do so (JB 32).

It is in endorsing this logic of the ideal to be endlessly approximated that I see the underlying Kantianism of both Butler and Laclau (257).

Here I think it is crucial to defend the key Hegelian insight directed against the Kantian position of the universal a priori frame distorted by empirical ‘pathological’ conditions … it is not enough to posit a universal formal criterion and then to agree that, owing to contingent empirical distortions, reality will never fully rise to its level. The question is rather

how, through what violent operation of exclusion/repression, does this universal frame itself emerge? With regard to the notion of hegemony, this means that it is not enough to assert the gap between the empty universal signifier and the particular signifiers that endeavour to fill its void — the question to be raised is, again, how, through what operation of exclusion, does this void itself emerge?

For Lacan, this preceding loss (the loss of das Ding, what Freud called ‘primary repression’), is not the loss of a determinate object (say, the renunciation of the same-sex libidinal partner), but the loss which paradoxically precedes any lost object, so that each positive object that is elevated to the place of the Thing (Lacan’s definition of sublimation) in a way gives body to this loss. What this means is that the Lacanian Real, the bar of impossibility it stands for, does not primarily cross the subject, but the big Other itself, the socio-symbolic ‘substance’ that confronts the subject and in which the subject is embedded.

In other words, far from signalling any kind of closure which constrains the scope of the subject’s intervention in advance, the bar of the Real is Lacan’s way of asserting the terrifying abyss of the subject’s ultimate and radical freedom, the freedom whose space is sustained by the Other’s inconsistency and lack.

So — to conclude with Kierkegaard, to whom Laclau refers: ‘the moment of decision is the moment of madness’ precisely in so far as there is no big Other to provide the ultimate guarantee, the ontological cover for the subject’s decision (258).