lacan – Page 40 – objet (a)

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)

subject*

social change is irremediably fantasmatic (206)

The excess (*) attending the subject, to repeat, is therefore both the medium of its connection to other subjects and the obstacle to that connection. This dual function comprises the “relation of nonrelation” that undergirds the social field, a relation predicated on an obstacle to relationality.

… because the Möbius subject encompasses both its symbolic properties (elements of the set) and its formal properties (set-ness, empty set), de-personalization doesn’t rid the subject of its ontic properties but it sets them off, revealing them as contingent (rather than necessary) bearers of meaning. By making visible the relation of nonrelation through symbolic divestiture the subject situates itself as the source of the non-orientability of the social field, without however being able to account for its own effects within that field in any predictive or comprehensive sense.

In this way, the subject takes ethical responsibility for its parallax oscillation, exposing the excess that sticks to itself (as if it were being seen from the perspective of others) and establishing distance from it, which is a prerequisite to tolerating it nondefensively (207).

As far as I can see, the suspension of the defense against excess — or the neutralization of the more destructive defenses — is the only way that the subject’s transformation of its relation to its own jouissance can affect others. This suspension means that the subject accepts the relation of nonrelation, giving up its fruitless but often destructive efforts to locate the excess outside itself or to eradicate it. By refusing to defend itself (or by refusing to deploy destructive defenses such as narcissism, aggression, projection, and scapegoating), the subject decreases its contribution to the affective storm in a social field that circulates excess like a hot potato. The potentiation of affect decreases, however temporarily, when the subject absorbs some of the affective energy without releasing it back in a destructive form (207).

… in general the absorption of affect by one member of the group provides an opening for others to change their own affective posture.

In any case, no matter what the specific defense aroused, the encounter with the neosubject will make apparent the dominant identifications and defenses of others. This display of the dominant tendencies in a particular social universe permits reflection on what works and what doesn’t, helping to aggregate and focus social energies. These may be actions that put the brakes on violence, stymie bullies, alleviate suffering, secure privacy, promote stability and so on. That is, the encounter with the neosubject forces into the open the rationalizations for the status-quo, and in so doing can foster the conditions under which people will have a choice to make at the level of practices — individual, familial, institutional.

The setting-off of the subject’s substantive traits — through, for example, self-deprecating humor — both exposes the contingent meaning of those traits and reflects back to others the way those traits get used as explanations for social discord. In this way, the subject brings something new into the social field — not only a de-emphasis on ontic properties and a revelation of a dimension of universality independent of such properties, but also a new way of being in the social field that nondefensively accepts the relation of nonrelation. What is more, unlike the immanent cause or the exceptional cause, the effects of the deployment of the extimate cause, as it generates new behavior and new relations, can be tracked, studied, and analyzed (208).

relation of nonrelation

Although every subject in the field is a Möbius subject, all subjects are marked by their own history and mobilize different defenses against the experience of excess. The individuals within the social space are diverse, even though they share the common characteristic of excess. put another way, the fact that they are subjects of excess makes it possible for them to be individuated differently and still seek out and maintain connections to one another, even as some of those connections are heavily imbued with aggression and hatred (204).

… by placing the relation of nonrelation front and center, the formal properties of the subject clearly emerge as the route to its universalization and the link to its political potential. In order for social change to come about, something new has to enter the situation, something that is not simply a funciton of that situation’s determinates (204).

Möbius subject and the relation of nonrelation

The Möbius subject has two driving motivations, that is, motivations at the level of the drive:

1. The first is to maintain the extimacy that is the ground of its existence: as we know, the drive circulates around objet a, the missing object, established by way of the encounter with the formal negation, the Non/Nom-du-Père.

2. The second is to defend itself against the anxiety generated by its excessive status. This anxiety, understood in Lacanian terms, is simply affect itself, a function of the Möbius condition of subjectivity.

The motivations may be at odds, but they derive necessarily from the subject’s founding. Taken together, they provide the means by which the social space itself is propagated and sustained.

Because, at the level of the drive, the subject comes into existence only if it seems as though objet a is possible, prohibited rather than impossible, the subject has a stake in the very condition that produces anxiety — its status as a signifier depends upon the impossibility of objet a and its status as a signifier makes its ultimate stability, its final meaning or self-consistency, unreachable. In this dynamic, seen from the level of Symbolic relations, it can seem that the other’s failure to stabilize the subject’s meaning is willfully aggressive (or negligent) rather than a function of impossibility.

As a result, the Möbius subject relates to the other both as the solution and the obstacle to its own inconsistency — a relation of nonrelation. That is, thanks to the excess that sticks to each subject, and thanks to the fantasy that the other is consistent in a way that the subject is not, the social relation necessarily emerges as a relation of nonrelation (202).

In the Levinasian version the subject seeks to overcome the radical alterity that, in this view, properly belongs to the other. In the extimate version, the subject must perpetually seek a response from the others because, in fact the subject will never be sure of the meaning of the response it gets, yet the subject has nowhere else to go to get it. The other is not radically other — it is close enough to the subject in kind to warrant the desire tor the relationship while distant enough in its ability to fulfill the subject’s deepest desire to maintain its otherness.

At the same time, the “other” to whom the subject relates does not truly exist in the way the subject believes: the other is a fantasmatic projection of a wish. So the subject has a relation of nonrelation to the actual others in the social space. It is in this relation of nonrelation that we find the sustaining of the duality of subject and other that Levinas requires for ethics but fails to provide.

The hatred and envy that can arise from the subject’s frustration at the other’s inability to repair the subject’s self-inconsistency could easily galvanize the destruction of the very space of the social … (203). The destruction of that space, however, would spell the demise of the subject qua subject. Subjects mobilize a number of (necessarily inadequate) defenses — including perversion and hysteria — to avoid that result. … We don’t want to feel that “we’re all in this together” if that means everyone is subject to excess. We want to feel that someone can solve this problem or be targeted as its source. But because these wishes do not actually resolve the excess, the best we can do is to try to send it on its rounds, even though it inevitably “returns” to us — since, of course, in reality it never left. We are stuck with and to excess. From this point of view, it appears that the motivation for the social relation is not the preservation of the other’s distinct existence, as Levinas and Critichley would have it, but rather the need to preserve the social field itself — the field without which the subject (all subjects) as such cannot exist — from a threat of dissolution.

That is, the subject fantasizes that the continual dissolution and reassemblage of the social field made possible and necessary by excess is a threat to the field rather than the very condition of its perpetuation (203).

subject of the drive and the universal

Rothenberg, Molly. The Excessive Subject. Malden, M.A. : Politiy Press, 2010.

As long as we are fixated — as happens in multiculturalism and identity politics — on the symbolic identifiers of our personal identities, we obscure the link between the subject and the drive as the true engine of the subject’s existence.

Molly isn’t big on ‘subject of desire’
For when we focus on the symbolic dimension of identity, we are conceiving of the subject as a subject of desire, perpetually seeking to overcome its lack by finding its object of desire. Any political action founded on this premise dooms the actors to a futile search for a utopia which, of necessity, must always be deferred (176).

In Žižek’s view, the political meaning of one’s acts has nothing to do with one’s “sincerity or hypocrisy” — that is, one’s “subjective self-experience” is irrelevant to the objective truth of one’s actions. Rather, the subject of the drive institutes a gap between itself and its symbolic subjective dimension.

The subject’s identification with objet a re-casts it, not as a set of symbolic properties, but as connected directly to the order of objectivity. Introducing a distance towards one’s own symbolic identity puts one in a position to act in an “objective-ethical” way (OWB 182).

Presumably, it is this link to the objective that makes solidarity possible. The manifold differences or symbolic properties of individuals move to the background, while each subject, as identified with the object of the drive, finds its way to the objective order, the only terrain on which meaningful change can occur. Solidarity, then, emerges not from intersubjective relations but rather from the relations of subjects purified of their symbolic identities, subjects who meet on the ground of objectivity, as objects (177).

subject of desire

Žižek proposes as the properly political subject an “acephalous subject who assumes the position of the object” (Organs Without Bodies `76).

In this move from desire to drive, he fundamentally alters the picture of a political subject as one who calculates an intervention to bring about the future it desires.

The “acephalous subject” does not function in this intentionalized mode of traditional political discourse: “the subject who acts is no longer a person but, precisely, an object.” That is, in his view, we must give up, once and for all, our sense of the political — the political act, the political domain, and the political collectivity — as based on promise or calculation.

The objet a, the excessive part of the subject, is “the subject’s stand-in within the order of objectivity” (Organs w/o Bodies 175). When the subject identifies directly with this excess, it becomes genuinely rebolutionary because it gains access to the register of the Real, the object. How?

According to Žižek, the identification with the object de-personalizes the subject, instituting a gap between its subjectivated individuation (all the little preferences and properties that make up our social identities) and its subject-ness, the “pure” subject that emerges as a function of the drive. (176).

Non/Nom-du-Père

Rothenberg, Molly Ann. The Excessive Subject. Malden M.A. : Polity Press, 2010.

the Non/Nom-du-Père has no content, much less normative content. the addition of the negation, the Non/Nom-du-Père, makes the subject a signifier, which means that the subject does not control what s/he means to others any more than s/he can know for certain what others mean. In effect, the “paternal metaphor” places a “minus sign,” so to speak, on the immediacy of the presence f the individual, raising the question as to the meaning of the individual, and in this way makes of the individual a signifier, bringing the individual into the realm of signification from the realm of the Real. That is, the Non/Nom-du-Père is a metaphor for the process by which anything, including the child, ceases to simply be and comes to mean, which is to say that it enters into the defiles of linguistic mediation and social appropriation. No object simply means what it is; every object becomes a site of excessive meaning. To be a signifier —and a subject— is to be stuck to an irreducible excess of meaning. In other words, … at its core is the social dimension of language, an unsymbolizable excess (not an unsymbolizable exclusion) produced by the conditions in which meaning arises as perpetually ungovernable (Rothenberg, 111).

butler lacan performativity

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

Footnote 26: On Lacan’s divergence from structuralism, see also Zupancic, Ethics, 29–30. While Butler tends to give undue prominence to the influence of Lévi-Strauss’s structuralist anthropology on Lacan (she repeats this in her latest work: see Undoing Gender, 45), her emphasis on the imaginary in Antigone’s Claim appears to stem from her Althusserian reading of Lacan in The Psychic Life of Power. There, too, she refers to “the unspeakable, the unsignifiable” of the symbolic order in Lacan (94), but, rather than naming this limit as the real, she, as in Antigone’s Claim, moves on to consider the imaginary. Identifying the Althusserian interpellation with Lacan’s subject formation (95), she locates the only possibility for resistance in the psychoanalytic subject’s imaginary misrecognition of the name with which the law hails her. With an imprecision that also characterizes her synthesis of the earlier and later Lacan, she writes: “For the Lacanian, then, the imaginary signifies the impossibility of the discursive—that is, symbolic—constitution of identity” (96–97; emphasis added). In this Althusserian reading of Lacan, “[t]he imaginary thwarts the efficacy of the symbolic law but cannot turn back upon the law, demanding or effecting its reformulation. In this sense, psychic resistance thwarts the law in its effects, but cannot redirect the law or its effects. Resistance is thus located in a domain that is virtually powerless to alter the law that it opposes” (98; see also 89). Here again, as in Subjects of Desire, Butler moves from the dead end she finds in Lacan to Foucault as a more productive theorist of resistance: “where Lacan restricts the notion of social power to the symbolic domain and delegates resistance to the imaginary, Foucault recasts the symbolic as relations of power and understands resistance as an effect of power” (98–99). Shepherdson complicates this reading of Lacan’s and Foucault’s differences in “History and the Real.”

page 19: The political thrust of Butler’s theory is, then, to reevaluate abjected bodies, to shape a symbolic future that would render them culturally recognized and intelligible. I think we can find a description of this Hegelian mechanism in Deleuze’s work: that of the realization of the possible. For Deleuze, who follows here Henri Bergson,

the realization of the possible refers to a materialization of as-yet nonexistent forms of life. Even if these forms do not, in Butler’s terms, “matter,” they are nevertheless prefigured as possible substitutes to, or deviations from, current forms of reality. Possibilities, then, are like a gallery of alternatives from which future reality is selected. Some possibilities are never realized, and here politics comes into existence, in the struggle over making certain possibilities available or refusing the legitimate reality of others.

For Butler, the process that grants this reality is that of recognition. Given her examples of the fag and the dyke as unrecognized, illegitimate bodies, her futurity opens as the horizon of the possible realization of alternatives that have been excluded from and by the heterosexual matrix.

page 19: But to identify the specificity and limits of Butler’s notion of becoming, we should note that, taking his cue from Bergson, Deleuze contrasts this realization of the possible (which I suggest characterizes the politics of performativity) to what he calls the actualization of the virtual. In seeing the future as so many possibilities, we imagine an emergence in which the possible, as “a phantom awaiting its hour” (Bergson, 101), is fleshed out in the process of its realization, its cominginto-being. An already existing form or ideal is given materiality; for Butler, for example, abject but nevertheless existing bodies begin to matter through the legitimizing processes of recognition. Clearly, the importance of politics that seeks to enable the full realization of lives and bodies is not to be dismissed. But quite another thing is to allow the monopolization of our understanding of futurity by this process of realization qua recognition. For Bergson, the error in thinking becoming as the realization of possibilities is that this process can imagine the future only in terms of that which has already come to be. Realization operates through a temporal loop where we retroactively posit in the past the possibilities that “will have been” realized: “the possible is only the real with the addition of an act of mind which throws its image back into the past, once it has been enacted” (100). The possible is realized as a form that, despite its insubstantiality, has been made conceptually available. It is molded according to that which is in existence. Because it is an already imaginable form, we are dealing with “preformism: the real is already preformed in the possible insofar as the real resembles the possible” (Grosz, Nick of Time, 187). According to the model of realization, where out of a plethora of possibilities some pass into existence while others are eliminated, the real resembles and is a limited version of the possible. Consequently, “[r]ealization is a process in which creativity and production have no place” (187); in it, we lose the play of “unforeseeable novelty” that, according to Bergson, only the unfolding of duration allows (Bergson, 91, 93). In thinking “possibles which would precede their own realization,” “the future is outlined in advance” (103).

Unlike the possible, what Deleuze calls the virtual is not a preformed alternative that may be realized, that may come into existence (for example, via the kind of political work that Butler advocates). Rather, it is an undifferentiated realm of potentiality that in no way predicts the actual forms of existence that it produces. As Todd May writes, the virtual can be seen “as the reservoir of difference out of which the speciWc differences that are phenomenologically accessible to us are actualized” (71). Possible futures emerge through the processes of “resemblance and limitation” (Deleuze, Bergsonism, 97): resemblance because that which emerges is a materialization of an already existing possibility; limitation because only a certain number of the possible futures vying for existence can be realized. As opposed to the possible, “the virtual never resembles the real that it actualizes” (Grosz, “Thinking,” 27). It does not have a form, yet as an ontological realm— for Bergson, the realm of nonpsychological, nonindividual memory— it is entirely real. Its actualization takes place through “the rules . . . of difference or divergence and of creation” (Deleuze, Bergsonism, 97). [20]

Deleuze understands actualization as the potential process of radical emergence, of becoming—to borrow Bergson’s term, of creative evolution. Realization, on the other hand, is a double process of unveiling and culling: preexisting forms and models enter existence while others are eliminated (for example, in the political struggle for recognition). According to Bergson and Deleuze, the process of realization does not allow us to think duration, the dimension of becoming that undergirds their metaphysical systems. Only with the virtual can we intuit duration; reversely, it is only durée that enables the unforeseeability of the virtual’s actualization. “Duration,” as Deleuze writes, “is the virtual” (“Bergson’s Conception,” 55). Deleuze turns to Bergson as a source for articulating time as an irreducible dimension of being. For him, Bergsonian metaphysics theorizes devenir in a way that is incompatible with the Werden of Hegelian dialectics, its “false movement” (Difference, 8). Butler, too, clearly acknowledges that, as a theory of becoming, of invention and change, performativity requires and depends on time as an active dimension.

Only in duration can inaccurate repetitions introduce newness into the world.Consequently, performativity does not allow us to think forms of existence that radically diverge from what is currently available to us—forms that, unlike the gender nonconformist beings with which Butler replaces the Lacanian real, are strictly inconceivable from our present perspective. [22]

Grosz writes:

the aim of all radical politics is the production of a future that actively transforms the dynamics of the present, and this may involve precisely an unpredictable leap into virtuality. . . . This leap into the virtual is always a leap into the unexpected, which cannot be directly planned for or anticipated, though it is clear that it can be prepared for. (Nick of Time, 186)

Grosz finds in the virtual an openness that may be useful for thinking about radical change: “perhaps the openendedness of the concept of the virtual may prove central in reinvigorating a politics embracing the future by refusing to tie it to the realization of possibilities . . . and linking it to the unpredictable, uncertain actualization of virtualities” (190). Butler’s argument about the undirectedness and divergence of performatively realized futures seems to echo this call for the unforeseeability of becoming. Yet I have suggested that her Hegelianism cannot tolerate such openness but always, despite her goal of resignifying dialectics, returns to a notion of becoming that makes accessible the possible, not the virtual. For Bergson, a constant interlocutor in Deleuze’s thinking of becoming, duration as radical becoming cannot be thought through the possible:

If this logic [of retrospection] we are accustomed to pushes the reality that springs forth in the present back into the past in the form of a possible, it is precisely because it will not admit that anything does spring up, that something is created and that time is efWcacious. It sees in a new form or quality only a rearrangement of the old—nothing absolutely new.

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.

subjection alterity norms

What is it then, that is desired in subjection? Is it a simple love of the shackles, or is there a more complex scenario at work? How is survival to be maintained if the terms by which existence is guaranteed are precisely those that demand and institute subordination? On this understanding,

subjection is the paradoxical effect of a regime of power in which the very “conditions of existence,” the possibility of continuing as a recognizable social being, requires the formation and maintenance of the subject in subordination. 27

:)Ok, this is the formulation that says all that Butler has been working on towards and which defines her work tout court. She is quoting her favourite quote from Spinoza which is that “desire is always the desire to persist in one’s own being.” This desire to persist in one’s own being “can be brokered only with the risky terms of social life.” And what is this social life but and here we go:

then to persist in ones’ own being requires submitting to a world of others that is fundamentally not one’s own (a submission that does not take place at a later date, but which frames and makes possible the desire to be). Only by persisting in alterity does one persist in one’s “own” being.

Vulnerable to terms that one never made, one persists always, to some degree, through categories, names, terms, and classifications that mark a primary and inaugurative alienation in sociality. If such terms institute a primary subordination or, indeed, a primary violence, then a subject emerges against itself in order, paradoxically, to be for itself. 28

:)Now here is a great moment in Butler. What would it mean to go beyond the simple boundaries of social existence in order to seek change? Now get this:

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 that repetition establishes a domain of risk, for if one fails to reinstate the norm “in the right way,” one beomes 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?

A Critical Analysis of Subjection involves:

1) an account of the way regulatory power maintains subjects in subordination by producing and exploiting the demand for continuity, visibility, and place;

2) recognition that the subject produced as continuous, visible, and located is nevertheless haunted by an inassimilable remainder, a melancholia that marks the limits of subjectivation;

3) an account of the iterability of the subject that shows how agency may well consist in opposing and transforming the social terms by which it is spawned. 29

The analysis of subjection is always double, tracing the conditions of subject formation and tracing the turn against those conditions for the subject —and its perspective— to emerge.

Is there a way to affirm complicity as the basis of political agency, yet insist that political agency may do more than reiterate the conditions of subordination?

Johnston Adrian review of Parallax View

“Slavoj Žižek’s Hegelian Reformation: Giving a Hearing to The Parallax View (PV)”
Adrian Johnston
diacritics / spring 2007
37.1: 3–20

Apart from the task of denouncing falsifying popular pictures of Hegel, one of Žižek’s other driving ambitions in this book is the desire to formulate a fundamental ontology appropriate to the theory of subjectivity mapped out over the course of his entire intellectual itinerary (a theory informed by Kant and post-Kantian German idealism combined with Lacanian psychoanalytic metapsychology). And, herein, the articulation of such an ontology appropriately gets entangled, via reflections on the nature of the brain, with the latest instantiations of the perennial philosophical problem of the relationship between mind and body. Žižek grants that the central nervous system is, in at least several undeniable and important senses, the material, corporeal ground of the subject, the bodily being without which there cannot be the parlêtre (speaking being).

whereas Kantian transcendental idealism treats the subjectively mediated structures (including various dichotomous splits found therein) which it analyzes as inexplicable givens, Žižek’s Hegel-inspired ontology purports to be able to get back behind these structures so as to explain their very emergence in the first place, both historically and materially. Before delving deeper into the essential features of Žižek’s Hegelian dialectical materialism, it should be asked: Why is exhuming the corpus of an allegedly materialist Hegel important, especially today? Žižek depicts the current intellectual situation as one in which a false forced choice between either “mechanical materialism” (that is, a reductive approach in which material being is treated as nothing more than an aggregate of physical bodies bumping and grinding against each other) or “idealist obscurantism” (that is, a reaction against mechanical materialism that insists upon the existence of a sharp dehiscence between the physical and the metaphysical) is repeatedly presented in diverse forms of packaging [PV 4]. Despite cutting-edge work in the contemporary sciences appearing to vindicate after-the-fact the intuitions contained in the philosophies of nature elaborated by the early nineteenth-century German idealists, these sciences and the majority of those who claim to represent them have tended to turn a blind eye to the theoretical resources contained in the writings of, among others, Schelling and Hegel (this is unsurprising, given that twentieth-century Anglo-American Analytic philosophy arose, in part, as a reaction against nineteenth-century British Hegelianism). Throughout The Parallax View, Žižek, departing from the work of others engaged with the natural sciences (especially cognitive neuroscience) who either gesture in the direction of or strive to develop more sophisticated materialist theoretical frameworks (such as Antonio Damasio, Daniel Dennett, Joseph LeDoux, Catherine Malabou, Thomas Metzinger, and Francisco Varela), aims to show not only that today’s sciences would be better able to express their insights if equipped with the concepts and terminology of a dialectical materialism formulated in dialogue with German idealism. Žižek’s thesis goes one step further: the natural sciences cannot even properly come to recognize and realize their true results if their fashions of self-understanding continue to remain mired in the ill-framed debates staged between, on the one hand, varieties of materialism whose notions of matter are no more sophisticated than seventeenth-century conceptions of “corporeal substance” moved solely by the

what psychic price normative gender?

Butler, Judith. Undoing Gender. New York: Routledge, 2004. Print.

the triadic structure for thinking about desire has implications for thinking gender beyond complementarity and reducing the risk of heterosexist bias implied by the doctrine of complementarity.

I’m no great fan of the phallus … I do not propose a return to a notion of the phallus as the third term in any and all relations of desire. Nor do I accept the view that would posit the phallus as the primary or originary moment of desire, such that all desire either extends through identification or mimetic reflection of the paternal signifier. I understand that progressive Lacanians are quick to distinguish between the phallus and the penis and claim that the “paternal” is a metaphor only.

What they do not explain is the way the very distinction that is said to make “phallus” and “paternal” safe for use continues to rely upon and reinstitute the correspondences, penis/phallus and paternal/maternal that the distinctions are said to overcome.

I believe in the power of subversive resignification to an extent and applaud efforts to disseminate the phallus and to cultivate, for instance, dyke dads and the like. But it would be a mistake, I believe, to privilege either the penis or paternity as the terms to be most widely and radically resignified. Why those terms rather than some others? The “other” to these terms is, of course, the question interrogated here, and Benjamin has helped us to imagine, theoretically, a psychic landscape in which the phallus does not control the circuit of psychic effects. But are we equipped to rethink the problem of triangulation now that we understand the risks to phallic reduction (136).

The turn to the preoedipal has been, of course, to rethink desire in relation to the maternal, but such a turn engages us, unwittingly, in the resurrection of the dyad: not the phallus, but the maternal, for the two options available are “dad” and “mom.” But are there other kinds of descriptions that might complicate what happens at the level of desire and, indeed, at the level of gender and kinship? 136

[…] I do think however, that (a) triangulation might be profitably rethought beyond oedipalization or, indeed, as part of the very postoedipal displacement of the oedipal; (b) certain assumptions about the primacy of gender dimorphism limit the radicalism of Benjamin’s critique; and (c) that the model of overinclusiveness cannot quite become the condition for recognizing difference that Benjamin maintains because it resists the notion of a self that is ek-statically [standing outside of oneself] involved in the Other, decentered, through its identifications which neither exludes nor includes the Other in question.

Postoedipal Triangulation

Were we right to presume the binary of man and woman when so many gendered lives cannot assume that binary? Were we right to see the relation as a binary when the reference to the tertiary is what permitted us to see the homosexual aims that run through heterosexual relationality. … At what psychic price does normative gender become established? 144

How is it that presuming complementarity presumes a self-referential heterosexual that is not definitionally crossed by homosexual aims? If we could not ask these questions in the past, do they not now form part of the theoretical challenge for a psychoanalysis concerned with the politics of gender and sexuality, at once feminist and queer?