lacan – Page 53 – objet (a)

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— and here one might link Hegel, Freud, and Foucault all back to Spinoza’s conatus— then the capacity of desire to be withdrawn and to reattach will constitute something like the vulnerability of every strategy of subjection.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

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 in a very different way from Žižek’s. She does not intend ot 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) (130)

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, “however inevitable — still and always the historical workings of specific modalities of discourse and power” (Butler Bodies 205) (130).

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).

ziarek on Žižek real

Butler, in the process of deconstructing sexual difference, contests nothing less than the Real itself. … The Lacanian Real, central to Copjec’s and Žižek’s reading of sexual difference, is the realm of being that is radically unsymbolizable, that remains foreclosed from the symbolic order. In this formulation, the Real constitutes a necessary outside of any symbolization — a limit to the totalization of the social or discursive filed. Like Copjec, Žižek suggests that any attempt to define the Real leads to paradoxical formulations … the Real is the starting point, the “impossible kernel” of symbolization and, at the same time, an effect of the symbolic order, an excess, or left-over of symbolization (124)

At stake in the argument about the Real is, on the one hand, a renegotiation of the relations between contingency and compulsion in social and discursive formations, and, on the other, the status of the concept of the outside of history and symbolization.

On the basis of the conceptualization of the Real as the necessary outside of the symbolic order, Žižek condemns both the universalization of the symbolic and its obverse side, its “rapid historicization,” which treats the subject merely as the effect or the actualization of its historical conditions. Both of these gestures … ignore that which is foreclosed from historicization. In order to take into account the incompleteness and contingency of the historical process, the critical accounts of history, Žižek argues, have to presuppose an empty place, an non-historical kernel, that which cannot be symbolized and yet is produced by symbolization itself (Žižek Sublime 135) (Ziarek 125).

Butler’s argument with the Real neither disputes the contingency of social formations nor denies the constitutive outside to symbolization. On the contrary, through her reading of Laclau and Mouffe, she links such contingency and incompleteness to the promise of radical democracy: “The incompleteness of every ideological formulation is central to the radical democratic project’s notion of political futurity. The subjection of every ideological formation to REarticulation … constitutes the temporal order of democracy as an incalculable future, leaving open the production of new subject-positions, new political signifiers …” (Butler, Bodies 193)

What she does contest … is the fixity of the Real (or rather, to articulate it more cautiously, the invariable failure of its inscription) and the permanent structure of its exclusion.

Even though the foreclosure of the Real “guarantees” contingency and incompleteness of all social relations, the process of this foreclosure is not marked by the contingency or historicity, and therefore is not open to redescription. We are confronted here, Butler argues, with the unchangeable production of the outside, even though the ‘production’ in question is marked by the instability of cause and effect. As Butler points out, “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 to the generalization of castration as the model for all historical trauma) (Butler Bodies, 205) (125).

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).

butler sexual d

Sönser Breen, Margaret and Warren J. Blumenfeld. Butler Matters: Judith Butler’s Impact on Feminist and Queer Studies. Hampshire: Ashgate Publishing Ltd. 2005.

‘There is a Person Here” Interview with JB, first appeared in International Journal of Sexuality and Gender Studies (Winter 2000) reprinted in Butler Matters (9-25).

The notion that sexual difference is fundamental to culture, for instance, which became something like a structuralist truth that survives in Lacanian discourse today, has a way of making sure we consider as unintelligible forms of sexual differentiation that do not conform to the ‘sexual difference’ at hand. Thus, I wonder whether we can even begin to think transgender and intersex within such a restrictive framework.

The point is not to argue that there are more than two sexes, but that we do not know that cultural variations differences may take. There are not only important overlaps between the sexes, but people don’t always stay with the sex to they have been assigned. Moreover, if we take sexual difference to be a foundation of culture, we can not ask how the assignment of sex — which is such a volatile political issue — takes place as a cultural practice. My view is that it is crucial to understand sex as assigned rather than assumed, and to recognize that these are systematically obscured by the presumption that sexual difference is a condition of every and all culture (13).

JB sexual d irigaray

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

For many, I think, the structuring reality of sexual difference is not one that one can wish away or argue against, or even make claims about in any reasonable way. It is more like a necessary background to the possibility of thinking, of language, of being a body in the world. And those who seek to take issue with it are arguing with the very structure that makes their argument possible. … Sexual difference — is it to be thought of as a framework by which we are defeated in advance? Anything that might be said against it is oblique proof that it structures what we say. Is it there in a primary sense, haunting the primary differentiations or structural fate by which all signification proceeds? (177)

Irigaray makes clear that sexual difference is not a fact, not a bedrock of any sorts, and not the recalcitrant “real” of Lacanian parlance. On the contrary, it is a question, a question for our times. As a question, it remains unsettled and unresolved, that which is not yet or not ever formulated in terms of an assertion. Its presence does not assume the form of facts and structures but persists as that which makes us wonder, which remains not fully explained and not fully explicable. If it is the question for our time, as she insists in The Ethics of Sexual Difference, then it is not one question among others, but, rather a particularly dense moment of irresolution within language, one that marks the contemporary horizon of language as our own. Like Drucilla Cornell, Irigaray has in mind an ethics which is not one that follows from sexual difference but is a question that is posed by the very terms of sexual difference itself: how to cross this otherness? How to cross it without crossing it, without domesticating its terms? How to remain attuned to what remains permanently unsettled about the question?

Irigaray then would not argue for or against sexual difference but, rather offer a way to think about the question that sexual difference poses, or the question that sexual difference is, a question whose irresolution forms a certain historical trajectory for us, those who find ourselves asking this question, those of whom this question is posed. The arguments in favor and against would be so many indications of the persistence of this question, a persistence whose status is not eternal, but one, she claims, that belongs to these times. It is a question that Irigaray poses of modernity, a question that marks modernity for her. Thus, it is a question that inaugurates a certain problematic of time, a question whose answer is not forthcoming, a question that opens up a time of irresolution and marks that time of irresolution as our own (177-178).

I begin with Irigaray because I think her invocation of sexual difference is something other than foundational. Sexual difference is not a given, not a premise, not a basis onwhich to build a feminism, it is not that which we have already encountered and come to know; rather, as a question that prompts a feminist inquiry, it is something that cannot quite be stated, that troubles the grammar of the statement, and that remains, more or less permanently, to interrogate (178).

My view is that no simple definition of gender will suffice, and that more important than coming up with a strict and applicable definition is the ability to track the travels of the term through public culture. The term “gender” has become a site of contest for various interests. Consider the domestic U.S. example in which gender is often perceived as a way to defuse the political dimension of feminism, in which gender becomes a merely discursive marking of masculine and feminine, understood as constructions that might be studied outside a feminist framework or as simple self-productions, manufactured cultural effects of some kind. Consider also the introduction of gender studies programs as ways to legitimate an academic domain by refusing to engage polemics against feminism, as well as the introduction of gender studies programs and centers in Eastern Europe where the overcoming of “feminism” is tied to the overcoming of Marxist state ideology in which feminist aims were understood to be achievable only on the condition of the realization of Communist aims (184).

As if that struggle internal to the gender arena were not enough, the challenge of an Anglo-European theoretical perspective within the academy casts doubt on the value of the overly sociological construal of the term. Gender is thus opposed in the name of sexual difference precisely because gender endorses a socially constructivist view of masculinity and femininity, displacing or devaluing the symbolic status of sexual difference and the political specificity of the feminine. Here I am thinking of criticisms that have been leveled against the term by Naomi Schor, Rosi Braidotti, Elizabeth Grosz, and others. (185).

Perhaps it is precisely that sexual difference registers ontologically in a way that is permanently difficult to determine (186).

The human, it seems, must become strange to itself, even monstrous, to reachieve the human on another plane. This human will not be “one,” indeed, will have no ultimate form, but it will be one that is constantly negotiating sexual difference in a way that has no natural or necessary consequences for the social organization of sexuality. By insisting that this will be a persistent and open question, I mean to suggest that we make no decision on what sexual difference is but leave that question open, troubling, unresolved, propitious (191-192).

butler gender regulation

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

But for gender to be regulated is not simply for gender to come under the exterior force of a regulation. If gender were to exist prior to its regulation, we could then take gender as our theme and proceed to enumerate the various kinds of regulations to which it is subjected and the ways in which that subjection takes place. The problem, however, for us is more acute. After all, is there a gender that preexists its regulation, or is it the case that, in being subject to regulation, the gendered subject emerges, produced in and through that particular form of subjection? (41)

It is important to remember at least two caveats on subjection and regulation derived from Foucaultian scholarship:

1. regulatory power not only acts upon a preexisting subject but also shapes and forms that subject; moreover, every juridical form of power has its productive effect;

2. to become subject to a regulation is also to become subjectivated by it, that is, to be brought into being as a subject precisely through being regulated

The second point follows from the first in that the regulatory discourses which form the subject of gender are precisely those that require and induce the subject in question.

To assume that gender always and exclusively means the matrix of the “masculine” and “feminine” is precisely to miss the critical point that the production of that coherent binary is contingent, that it comes at a cost, and that those permutations of gender which do not fit the binary are as much a part of gender as its most normative instance. To conflate the definition of gender with its normative expression is inadvertently to reconsolidate the power of the norm to constrain the definition of gender … Whether one refers to “gender trouble” or “gender blending,” “transgender” or “cross-gender,” one is already suggesting that gender has a way of moving beyond that naturalized binary.

The conflation of gender with masculine/feminine, man/woman, male/female, thus performs the very naturalization that the notion of gender is meant to forestall (42-43). Thus, a restrictive discourse on gender that insists on the binary of man and woman as the exclusive way to understand the gender field performs a regulatory operation of power that naturalizes the hegemonic instance and forecloses the thinkability of its disruption.

… the distinction between symbolic and social law cannot finally hold, that the symbolic itself is the sedimentation of social practices, and that radical alterations in kinship demand a rearticulation of the structuralist suppositions of psychoanalysis, moving us, as it were, toward a queer poststructuralism of the psyche (44).

How does a shift from thinking of gender as regulated by symbolic laws to a conception of gender as regulated by social norms contest this indifference of the law to what it regulates? And how does such a shift open up the possiblity of a more radical contestation of the law itself (48).

Norval on Laclau

Norval, Aletta. “Theorizing hegemony: between deconstruction and psychoanalysis.” Radical Democracy: Politics between abundance and lack. eds. Tonder, Lars. and Lasse Thomassen. Manchester UP. 2005. 86-102.

The passage from undecidability to the decision is thought of as an act of politics through and through. Refusing to ground the decision in an ethical moment, Laclau posits a conception of it based on power.

For Laclau, a decision taken in a terrain of structural undecidables means:

1) that the decision is self-grounding;

2) that it consists in ‘repressing possible alternatives that are not carried out’;

3) that it is internally split (this/a decision), emphasising the interplay between the universal and the particular in teh production of any hegemonic discourse.

The terrain of the decision, on this account, is the terrain of the political proper: there is nothing in the dislocated terrain that determines the decision. If it did, it would not be decision proper.

Laclau says:

A true decision escapes always what any rule can hope to subsume under itself … in that case, the decision has to be grounded in its singularity. now, that singularity cannot bring through the back door what it has excluded from the main entrance — i.e., the universality of the rule. It is simply left to its own singularity. It is because or that, as Kierkegaard put it, the moment of the decision is the moment of madness (93).

Thus for Laclau, to take a decision ‘is like impersonating God’, since this act cannot be explained in terms of any underlying rational mediation. This moment of the decision is then, simultaneously, that of the subject. .. the ‘lack is precisely the locus of the subject, whose relation with the structure takes place through various processes of identification‘. For the deepening of the theorisatioin of the subject, Laclau turns to Lacan rather than to Derrida.