Category: resistance

Žižek communist hypothesis pt 4

This brings us to the next elementary definition of communism: in contrast to socialism, communism refers to singular universality, to the direct link between the singular and the universal, bypassing particular determinations.

When Paul says that, from a Christian standpoint, “there are no men or women, no Jews or Greeks;’ he thereby claims that ethnic roots, national identities, etc., are not a category of truth. To put it in precise Kantian terms: when we reflect upon our ethnic roots, we engage in a private use of reason, constrained by contingent dogmatic presuppositions; that is, we act as “immature” individuals, not as free humans who dwell in the dimension of the universality of reason. (104)

In his vision of public space characterized by the unconstrained exercise of Reason, he invokes a dimension of emancipatory universality outside the confines of one’s social identity, of one’s position within the order of (social) being —precisely the dimension so crucially missing in Rorty.

This space of singular universality is what, within Christianity, appears as the “Holy Spirit” -the space of a collective of believers subtracted from the field of organic communities, or of particular lifeworlds (“neither Greeks nor Jews”) . Consequently, is Kant’s “Think freely, but obey!” not a new version of Christ’s “Render therefore untoCaesar the things which are Caesar’s; and unto God the things that  are God’s” ? ” Render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s” : in other words, respect and obey the “private” particular life —world of your community; “and unto God the things that are God’s”: in other words, participate in the universal space of the community of believers. The Paulinian collective of believers is a proto-model of the Kantian “world-civil – society;’ and the domain of the state itself is thus in its own way “private”: private in the precise Kantian sense of the “private use of Reason” in the State administrative and ideological apparatuses (106).

The ex-slaves of Haiti took the French revolutionary slogans more literally than did the French themselves: they ignored all the implicit qualifications which abounded in Enlightenment ideology (freedom-but only for rational “mature” subjects, not for the wild immature barbarians who first had to undergo a long process of education in order to deserve freedom and equality . . . ) . This led to sublime “communist” moments, like the one that occurred when French soldiers (sent by Napoleon to suppress the rebellion and restore slavery) approached the black army of (self-)liberated slaves. When they heard an initially indistinct murmur coming from the black crowd, the soldiers at first assumed it must be some kind of tribal war chant; but as they came closer, they realized that the Haitians were singing the Marseillaise, and they started to wonder out loud whether they were not fighting on the wrong side. Events such as these enact universality as a political category. In them, as Buck-Morss put it, “universal humanity is visible at the edges”:

rather than giving multiple, distinct cultures equal due, whereby people are recognized as part of humanity indirectly through the mediation of collective cultural identities, human universality emerges in the historical event at the point of rupture. It is in the discontinuities of history that people whose culture has been strained to the breaking point give expression to a humanity that goes beyond cultural limits. And it is in our emphatic identification with this raw, free, and vulnerable state, that we have a chance of understanding what they say. Common humanity exists in spite of culture and its differences. A person’s nonidentity with the collective allows for subterranean solidarities that have a chance of appealing to universal, moral sentiment, the source today of enthusiasm and hope. (112-113)

Buck-Morss provides here a precise argument against the postmodern poetry of diversity: the latter masks the underlying sameness of the brutal violence enacted by culturally diverse cultures and regimes: “Can we rest satisfied with the call for acknowledging ‘multiple modernities: with a politics of ‘diversity: or ‘multiversality,’ when in fact the inhumanities of these multiplicities are often strikingly the same?” But, one may ask, was the ex -slaves’ singing of the Marseillaise ultimately not an index of colonialist subordination-even in their self-liberation, did not the Blacks have to follow the emancipatory model of the colonial metropolis? And is this not similar to the idea that contemporary opponents of US politics should be singing the Stars and Stripes? Surely the true revolutionary act would have been for the colonizers to sing the songs of the colonized?

The mistake in this reproach is double. First, contrary to appearances, it is far more acceptable for the colonial power to see its own people singing others’ (the colonized’s) songs than songs which express their own identity  — as a sign of tolerance and patronizing respect, colonizers love to learn and sing the songs of the colonized . . . Second, and much more importantly, the message of the Haitian soldiers’ Marseillaise was not “You see, even we, the primitive blacks, are able to assimilate ourselves to your high culture and politics, to imitate it as a model!” but a much more precise one: “in this battle, we are more French than you, the Frenchmen, are —we stand for the innermost consequences of your revolutionary ideology, the very consequences you were not able to assume.”  Such a message cannot but be deeply unsettling for the colonizers— and it would certainly not be the message of those who, today, might sing the Stars and Stripes when confronting the US army.

(Although, as a thought experiment, if we imagine a situation in which this could be the message, there would be nothing a priori problematic in doing so.)

🙂 Žižek says the politically correct guilt felt by Western countries over its colonialist past, inhibits their ability to see things clearly

The French colonized Haiti, but the French Revolution also provided the ideological foundation for the rebellion which liberated the slaves and established an independent Haiti; the process of decolonization was set in motion when the colonized nations demanded for themselves the same rights that the West took for itself. In short, one should never forget that the West supplied the very standards by which it (and its critics) measures its own criminal past. We are dealing here with the dialectic of form and content: when colonial countries demand independence and enact a “return to roots;’ the very form of this return (that of an independent nation-state) is Western. In its very defeat (losing the colonies) , the West thus wins, by imposing its social form on the other (115).

… the point is simply that the British colonization of India created the conditions for the double liberation of India: from the constraints of its own tradition as well as from colonization itself (116).

The standard position adopted by the unconditional defenders of the rights of illegal immigrants is to concede that, at the level of state, the counter-arguments may well be “true” (ie., of course a country cannot accept an endless flow of immigrants; of course they compete in ways which threaten local jobs, and may also pose certain security risks), but their defense moves at a different level altogether, a level which has a direct link with demands of reality, the level of principled politics where we can unconditionally insist that “qui est ici est d’ici” (“those who are here are from here’) . But is this principled position not all too simple, allowing for the comfortable position of a beautiful soul?

I insist on my principles, and let the state deal with pragmatic constraints of reality . . . In this way, do we not avoid a crucial aspect of the political battle for the rights of immigrants: how to convince the workers opposing those immigrants that they are fighting the wrong battle; and how to propose a feasible form of alternative politics?

The “impossible” (an openness to immigrants) has to happen in reality-this would be a true political event.

But why should the immigrant not be satisfied with his normalization? Because, instead of asserting his identity, he has to adapt to his oppressor’s standards: he is accepted, but defacto in a secondary role. His oppressor’s discourse defines the terms of his identity. One should remember here the programmatic words of Stokely Carmichael (the founder of Black Power) :

“We have to fight for the right to invent the terms which will allow us to define ourselves and to define our relations to society, and we have to fight that these terms will be accepted. This is the first need of a free people, and this is also the first right refused by every oppressor.”

The problem is how, exactly, to do this. That is to say, how to resist the temptation to define oneself with reference to some mythical and totally external identity (“African roots”) , which, by way of cutting links with “white” culture, also deprives the oppressed of crucial intellectual tools for their struggle (namely, the egalitarian emancipatory tradition) as well as potential allies.

One should thus slightly correct Carmichael’s words: what the oppressors really fear is not some totally mythical self-definition with no links to white culture, but a self-definition which, by way of appropriating key elements of the “white” egalitarian-emancipatory tradition, redefines that very tradition, transforming it not so much in terms of what it says as in what it does not say —that is, obliterating the implicit qualifications which have defacto excluded Blacks from the egalitarian space. In other words, it is not enough to find new terms with which to define oneself outside of the dominant white tradition —one should go a step further and deprive the whites of the monopoly on defining their own tradition.

In this precise sense, the Haitian Revolution was “a defining moment in world history. The point is not to study the Haitian Revolution as an extension of the European revolutionary spirit, that is, to examine the significance of Europe (of the French Revolution) for the Haitian  Revolution, but rather to assert the significance of the Haitian Revolution for Europe.

It is not only that one cannot understand Haiti without Europe —one cannot understand either the scope or the limitations of the European emancipation process without Haiti. Haiti was an exception from the very beginning, from its revolutionary struggle against slavery which ended in independence in January 1804: “Only in Haiti was the declaration of human freedom universally consistent. Only in Haiti was this declaration sustained at all costs, in direct opposition to the social order and economic logic of the day:’ For this reason, “there is no single event in the whole of modern history whose implications were more threatening to the dominant global order of things.” (Hallward Damning the Flood) 121

discourse social fictions excluded objet a

Campbell, Kirsten. Jacques Lacan and Feminist Epistemology. Florence, KY, USA: Routledge, 2004. p 127-128

In my earlier model of feminist discourse, I propose that feminist knowledges articulate what a phallocentric Symbolic order does not represent. In this model, these knowledges articulate the symbolic a of discourse. By linking this model to the theory of social fictions, it becomes possible to include an account of intersubjective relations. The theory of social fictions gives social content to the concept of ‘discourse’, which otherwise functions as an abstract term.

Social fictions produce imaginary identities. These identities collapse fantasies of self and the ‘idealizing capital I of identification’ (S11: 272), so that they operate as the phantasy that ‘I am a woman’ or ‘I am a man’ and so on. We can therefore understand social fictions as producing the self as imaginary a – an imaginary object filled with phantasmic content (the objet petit a):

Social fictions: s-s-s-s-s-s identity (imaginary a)

However, Zizek points out that the a ‘stands simultaneously for the imaginary fantasmic lure/screen and for that which this lure is obfuscating, for the void behind the lure’ (1998a: 80). Social fictions therefore have imaginary and symbolic registers:

Social fictions: s-s-s-s-s-s identity | symbolic a

That ‘void behind the lure’ is the symbolic a, that which marks the excluded term of discourse, the gap in or void of its symbolic structure.

Feminism traverses the phantasies of identities that social fictions produce, insisting that those social discourses found themselves upon a repudiated term. This recognition of the symbolic a of social fictions symbolizes it, so that it no longer functions as a term which social discourse excludes. Like psychoanalytic discourse, feminist discourse seeks to sustain the distance between the imaginary object and identity so that it becomes possible to articulate the repudiated a of discourse. Unlike psychoanalytic discourse, feminism seeks to interrogate social discourses. Feminist discourse symbolizes the excluded a in relation to social fictions as descriptions of social relations. A feminist politics permits recognition of this founding lack or excluded a term of social fictions. This repudiated other is the a, the excluded and necessary term of that discourse. Feminist knowledges link that excluded a to women.

For example, two classical themes of feminist analysis concern the exclusion of particular realities of gendered identity from the social representation of women, whether the unequal distribution of wealth between men and women, or the cost of a normative ‘feminine’ identity. In each case, feminist discourses identify the social discourses of gender and the reality of the social experience of women that those discourses exclude. Social fictions represent a fictional identity that excludes from that representation the complex and specific social experiences of women.

An example of this operation can be seen in sexual difference. The operation of social fictions substitutes an imaginary and fictional myth of ‘The Woman’ for the complexity of social experience of women. In their operation, social fictions repudiate that reality and put in its place certain fictional ways to be a female subject. For example, those fictional representations of ‘The Woman’ render her as ‘sexuality’. Yet at the same time, those representations refuse the real bodies of women that have physical existence and functions, a refusal that manifests itself in an array of social taboos that surround the female body. This conception of social fictions does not claim that ‘women’ do not exist (either as fact or in discourse). However, social fictions produce their social experiences as the excluded of discourse, namely as its repudiated a term.

This excluded a of social fictions is the ‘real’ of women. Social fictions do not represent the ‘reality’ of women’s experience – an experience of oppression and domination as well as pleasure and desire …

That excluded term, the symbolic a, is an effect of discourse, just as much as the social fiction is. Social discourses produce it as a term that is excluded from a hegemonic ordering of representation.

phallic signifier

Campbell, Kirsten. Jacques Lacan and Feminist Epistemology. Florence, KY, USA: Routledge, 2004. p 122.

Social fictions are not seamless and unitary, but multiple and contradictory. For example, Gloria Anzaldúa argues that for the Hispanic lesbian markers of ‘identity’ often conflict, and that ‘self’ is negotiated in those conflictual identificatory demands (1987: 77– 91). Anzaldúa describes a process in which master signifiers of the subject – those markers of ‘self’ – produce a subject with multiple discursive interpellations.

Anzaldúa’s account is in clear contrast to the white bourgeois and heterosexual masculine subject whose markers of identity seem to ‘match’ the master signifiers of social fictions of modern Western society. The subject is produced in both personal and social histories that are fundamentally imbricated. In this way, social fictions are discourses of both the subjective and the social, because an imaginary and symbolic relation to other subjects always produces the subject.

This description of the subject draws on the Lacanian psychoanalytic insight that the psychic and the social are moments of each other, produced in the basic ‘nature’ of humans not to be natural.

However, the concept of the social fiction does not imply the liberal idea of the social contract in which individual subjects of consciousness agree at a mythical moment of origin to enter rational social arrangements. Rather, it retains the Lacanian insistence that there is no pre-discursive reality since the world is always already inscribed in discourse (S20: 32).

The subject does not therefore emerge into a neutral social world but is inserted into already existing social relations. Social fictions exist prior to the subject and its very existence is contingent upon them. Social fictions are discursive relations between subjects that have material effect because they are ‘lived’ by subjects. This material effect can be seen in the operations of fictions of gender.

For example, while the Symbolic order is a symbolic relation between subjects, the phallic signifier orders that relation, positing some subjects as having the phallus and others as not having it.

At this symbolic level, the possession or absence of the phallus defines subjects. However, at a discursive level, the symbolic relation is filled with content as to the ‘nature’ of sexed identity. The social fictions of ‘masculinity’ and ‘femininity’ attach respectively to a subject with or without the phallus. The fictions of gender interpellate male and female bodies as masculine and feminine subjects, so that it fixes the contingency of the relation between phallus and penis. The fictions of gender render penis, phallus and masculinity as male subjectivity. In the Western social world, the phallus is a signifier that proliferates in a multitude of discourses of masculinity, which in turn produce a number of recognizably ‘masculine’ subjects.

Male subjects can recognize themselves as ‘masculine’, and equally importantly, other subjects are able to recognize them as ‘masculine’. Social fictions are symbolic relations that have material effects, and those material effects give substance, reality and existence to these symbolic relations between subjects.

Jane Gallop points out that it is not just the referentiality of phallus/penis that produces ‘masculinity’ but also the social arrangements that attach power of many forms to the masculine subject (1988: 53). The social world of the fictions of gender is still riven with material and structural inequality for women.

… The social fiction of gender operates such that even if a female subject were to want to take up a ‘masculine’ position, she would find innumerable difficulties in doing so. These difficulties arise not only because she may not identify with the social fiction of masculinity, but also because other subjects may insist on her insertion into the social discourses of femininity, regardless of her identificatory position.

In this sense, the subject is not its own creation, for it must always contend with the realities of social life. The world of the social fiction has facticity, in the sense that it is prior to the subject and has a material and psychic reality for the subject.

Positing the subject
Social fictions produce a subjective position of social identity, in which ‘position’ describes a temporal and spatial moment of subjectivation rather than an ontological foundation. The true subject of the social fiction, like the subject of the Lacanian account it draws upon, is empty.

Fraser claims that ‘Lacan’s account of identity construction cannot account for identity shifts over time’ (1992: 183). However, the Lacanian subject is never an ‘essence’, not even an Oedipal essence. Identity is fictional, for otherwise psychoanalysis could not have as its aim ‘identity shifts’. The Lacanian account fundamentally engages with the spatial and temporal formation of subjectivity and intersubjectivity, and my model of the subject of social fictions takes up the Lacanian emphasis upon its continual production.

In this model of the social fiction, two key and ongoing processes of interpellation produce a speaking position of the subject. The first key process is the personal history of the subject, that is, its production within familial networks. However, these familial relationships are not ‘outside’ the symbolic networks of social fictions, so that a personal history describes a position formed at the intersection of both psychic and social histories.

In this first process of interpellation, the subject comes into existence as a ‘being’ which possesses a ‘self’. These imaginary relations to self and others make discursive relations lived or ‘real’. That child becomes an adult, a social being that lives in and through its formative social fictions.

In this second key process of interpellation, the subject ‘mis/recognizes’ itself in discourse, in terms of its already given ‘identity’ and ‘self’. In this sense, identification with the master signifiers of social fictions reproduces the subject, because it reiterates the imaginary and symbolic relations which were formative of the subject and which capture the subject in social fictions. That capture is a process both of an experience of ‘identity’ and of an enactment of an ‘identity’ for others. This subject does not simply reflect existing social identities, because it also has agency. It can ‘read’ social fictions for their representation of dominant identities and act on that reading, such that the subject can represent itself through different master signifiers of social identity and come to occupy a different position of identity.

An example of this process can be seen in class mobility, in which the subject takes on the cultural markers of its aspirant class.

‘Identity’ in social fictions is not a social construct imposed upon a passive subject. The subject itself acts to produce its identity by reproducing or resisting fictive identities. Nevertheless, it is not necessarily easy to attain subjective mobility, particularly in relation to sexualized and racialized bodies, since sexuality and race are read on to and mark the body itself.

Transsexuals recognize that social fact in their desire to be bodily ‘men’ or ‘women’, rather than only presenting the signs of ‘masculinity’ or ‘femininity’. The desire for surgical intervention shows how immobile gender ‘mobility’ can be. In transsexuality, the subject represents itself to others through master signifiers of ‘masculinity’ or ‘femininity’. In this example, the subject is concerned with its representation of its ‘self’ to others. However, those others may insist that the subject embody particular and ‘fixed’ master signifiers of sexual difference, and it is this insistence that the transsexual often seeks to evade. In its relations to others, the subject engages with the imaginary and symbolic relations of social fictions that others seek to impose upon it. Because of sexist or racist others, it may not be possible to evade another’s signification of our ‘selves’ in discourses of social fictions.

Subjective engagement with social fictions is performative in Butler’s sense and is therefore open to change. However, others will constrain the mobility of that performance of identity. The subject has agency in relation to social fictions because of their contingency. The relation of subject to social fictions is a contingent one, as it is fixed by imaginary and symbolic relations. For example, the relation between the female body and ‘femininity’ is conditional upon the fixing of cultural difference to bodily difference (Chanter 1997: 59). However, to argue that this relation is contingent is not to argue within a sex/gender model that has generally dominated feminist thinking.

The psychoanalytic inflection of the social fiction emphasizes the production of sexed subjectivity within imaginary and symbolic relations. If the subject is always already sexed, then feminist resistance is not merely a matter of reinscribing the female body (although this may be a strategy of that resistance), but also requires intervention in the symbolic and imaginary orders that produce our relation to ourselves and others.

For this reason, my account of the social fiction should not be misread as a social constructivist account of the imposition of a social order upon a passive being, with an additional psychoanalytic emphasis on the psychic mechanisms that produce social identity. … Joan Copjec points out that if the constructivist model was an accurate description of the production of subjects, the social world would create content and happy beings whose pleasures were commensurate with its normative roles (1994: 53– 54). This clearly is not the case. 125

My account of the social fiction is distinguishable from that influential sociological account by its Lacanian insistence that social integration is neither ‘successful’ nor complete. As a psychoanalytic social theory, the social fiction emphasizes the cost and failure of production of the subject in social (re)production.

Psychoanalysis posits a moment of failure of and excess to the social that is produced in the social order itself: the unconscious. The unconscious marks the failure of the social order to complete and fix the subject. The unconscious marks that failure of the social order to integrate the subject fully or satisfactorily into its discursive demands. However, the unconscious also marks an excess to the social. Unconscious desires, fantasy and identification interpellate the subject in discursive formations, but they also mark subjective demands that exceed those social discourses, as the unconscious describes culturally repudiated desires of the subject.

For this reason, Jacqueline Rose is right to argue that a political project which is also psychoanalytically inflected cannot reify the unconscious – for the unconscious represents what we (and the social order) do not want as much as that which we do (1986: 8).

For example, the hysteric’s dilemma is an outcome of that repudiation of desire. In this sense, the unconscious marks that which the social order repudiates and represses, and so represents its excess. Psychoanalysis recognizes the anti-social, aggressive and solipsistic nature of an unconscious for which there is no negation.

In my psychoanalytic model of intersubjective relations, the subject is fictional and the signifier ambiguous. The subject and meaning are never determined; where they are fixed in a monologic symbolic economy, it is always at some cost to the subject.

The psychoanalytic insight of the cost of civilization concerns the suffering of the subject that the fixity of repetition causes. This failure of complete interpellation not only reveals the cost of securing social identity, but also creates the possibility of its contestation. If social integration is never complete, then the dominant fictions of our social order cannot ever entirely succeed, and where they are secured, it is only at a cost to the subject itself. Most importantly, in this account a moment of failure founds social relations themselves.

Social relations as symbolic relations fail because they are structured by an order which itself suffers a limit and concomitant failure in its symbolic logic. The Symbolic order is structured in an absence – a lack that founds and produces that order. Rose argues that both psychoanalysis and feminism share the position that a limit and a failure of the social order is sexual difference – specifically, the sexual difference of women (1986: 91).

In the modern socio-symbolic order, the social stumbles upon ‘Woman’ which functions as an unstable ‘break’ upon which it is founded and founders. If the cost of sociality is borne by all subjects, that cost is borne differently by sexuated subjects. Subjects may exchange a common loss which is the price of sociality, but the bearer of that loss is the female subject who represents all subjects’ lackin-being. For this reason, Freud is correct to see ‘women’ as a problem of the social, since ‘women’ represent its limit as well as its ground (1930: 293). Yet this position of women can also be reread as possibility – for the possibility that the phallic social order fails to define all that women are produces feminist knowledge. In this reading, women do not represent the ‘problem’ of sociality, but rather that ‘problem’ is a symbolic and social order that would posit women as a defining limit. This political shift is made by feminism. While social fictions of gender may constitute female subjectivity, feminist discourse articulates their inability to symbolize the ‘not all’ of women. It represents the possibility that a social fiction is fictional, and as such it is possible to contest and change it. 126-127

female feminine feminist

Campbell, Kirsten. Jacques Lacan and Feminist Epistemology. Florence, KY, USA: Routledge, 2004.

How does that subject become a political subject? Is there a relationship between female and feminist subjects? To answer these questions, we need next to consider the relationship between the formation of female and feminist subjects. In the Lacanian account of the production of the female subject, while the phallic function may fail to secure the position of the not all, that position may also resolve into normative ‘masculine’ or ‘feminine’ Oedipal identifications. These ‘normative’ identifications reflect norms of how to be a sexuated subject, and as such are fictional representations of ‘masculinity’ and ‘femininity’. While these Oedipal norms may (and do) fail, they nevertheless represent masculine and feminine identity. Although all identifications are labile, they work to secure the otherwise ‘unstable’ female subject within the ideals of ‘masculinity’ or ‘femininity’.

For Lacan, all speaking beings are inscribed on either side of the Graph of Sexuation (S20: 79). Subjects are by definition sexed, and therefore have masculine or feminine structures.

The female subject can ‘choose’ to take up a place on the masculine side of sexuation. Lacan describes how ‘[o]ne ultimately situates oneself there by choice – women are free to situate themselves there if it gives them pleasure to do so. Everyone knows there are phallic women’ (S20: 71). This female subject takes up a masculine position in phallic identification. This is a subject position of identification with the Law of the Father. 90

In this position, it is not that the female subject exhibits ‘masculine’ traits, but rather that she refuses to recognize that she does not have the phallus. In this position, the subject accepts the terms by which the Law of the Father defines ‘masculinity’ and ‘femininity’, with a concomitant privileging of masculine identity and consolidation of the father’s law.

Alternatively, the female subject can take up a feminine position. That position also requires a masculine identification, insofar as the female subject identifies with the Law of the Father and the operation of the phallus (as the mark of desire) (Evans 1996: 220). In the Lacanian account, the female subject recognizes that the father has what she does not, the phallus. She arrives at the feminine position through the desire for the phallus and its symbolic substitute, the child of the father. For that female subject, the phallus/child operates as the objet a, or the object of desire. Unsurprisingly, that position is arrived at with difficulty because of the absence of the threat of castration and the necessity of identification with the other (masculine) sex. These operations of normative Oedipal identification confront the female subject with a Symbolic order that says all and nothing. In both positions, the female subject identifies with the Law of the Father, the phallic signifier becomes a masculine all, rendering her not all as a nothing.

The female subject appears to be caught within a symbolic field that appears as a universal and transcendental, rather than a contingent, order. These normative identifications do not disrupt a phallocentric subject or socio-symbolic order. They do not disrupt the operation of the phallic signifier, nor contend that other signifiers could structure the subject or the Symbolic order.

However, a fundamental tenet of psychoanalytic theory is the ‘problematic, if not impossible, nature of sexual identity’; the contingency of sexuation, the failure of identity, and the incompleteness of the symbolic field (Rose 1982a: 28). For psychoanalysis, ‘femininity’ is a symptom of that contingency, failure and incompleteness. It is a symptom because female subjectivity is an ‘indetermination’ of a not all, posited as an exception to the phallic function.

For this reason, the ‘riddle’ of femininity has proven to be a source of much difficulty for psychoanalysis. For example, both Freud and Lacan begin by understanding the production of the female subject in the same identificatory structures as the male subject, but in their later work come to recognize the inadequacy of this account. They encounter the difficulty that the phallus ‘guarantees’ the masculine but not feminine subject.

Phallic identification does not determine the female subject because it does not necessarily secure, nor is it secured in, her formation. How, then, do we provide an account of the identificatory instability of the female subject? 91

butler injurious interpellations

Butler, Judith. Psychic Life of Power. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1997.

We cannot simply throw off the identities we have become … can we reformulate psychic resistance in terms of the social without that reformulation becoming a domestication or normalization? (Must the social always be equated with the given and the normalizable?) 103

If Foucault could argue that a sign could be taken up, used for purposes counter to those for which it was designed, then he understood that even the most noxious terms could be owned, that the most injurious interpellations could also be the site of radical reoccupation and resignification.

But what lets us occupy the discursive site of injury? How are we animated and mobilized by that discursive site and its injury, such that our very attachment to it becomes the condition for our resignification of it?

Called by an injurious name, I come into social being, and because I have a certain inevitable attachment to my existence, because a certain narcissism takes hold of any term that confers existence, I am led to embrace the terms that injure me because they constitute me socially. 104

🙂 I think Butler veers off into taking up the argument of Wendy Brown’s book States of Injury.

Interpellation is “barred” from success not by a structurally permanent form of prohibition (or foreclosre), but by its inability to determine the constitutive field of the human. 129

butler interview feb 2008

Italian interview Feb 2008 in Monthy Review Magazine (wow, times are a changin)

There are illegitimate operations of power that attempt to restrict our idea of what gender might be, for example in the areas of medicine, law, psychiatry, social policy, immigration policy, or the policies against violence. My commitment involves opposition to all restrictive and violent measures that are used to regulate and restrict the life of gender. There are certain types of freedoms and practices that are very important for human flourishing. Any excessive restriction of gender limits, or undermines, the capacity of humans to flourish. And, what is more, I would add that this human flourishing is a good thing. I am aware that there I am taking a moral standpoint here; I know that I have a strong normative structure, but this has nothing to do with saying “this kind of gender is good and this one is bad”. To do so would constitute a dangerous use of morality; rather, I am trying to shift the moral structure towards another framework in which we can ask ourselves: how does a body survive? What is a flourishing body? What does it need to flourish in the world? And it needs various things: it needs to be nourished, to be touched, to be in social settings of interdependence, to have certain expressive and creative capacities, to be protected from violence, and to have its life sustained in a material sense.

[…] These people are not being given the opportunity of having their lives recognised as worthy of being protected or helped, not even as lives that deserve to be mourned. I question the norms of gender that prevent us or make us incapable of recognising certain lives as being worth living, and which stop us providing the material conditions necessary for these lives to be lived, to flourish. For these lives to be publicly recognised also means their being understood as lives whose disappearance would be felt as a loss.

The same thing happens in war: certain lives are deemed worthy of being protected, while others are considered expendable, of negligible importance, radically dispensable. One could say that all my work revolves around this question: what is it that counts as a life? And in what way do certain restrictive norms of gender decide for us? What kind of life is worth protecting and what kind of life is not?

It is true that, in general, I do not think of freedom in terms of liberation. I continue to be very strongly influenced by Foucault’s History of Sexuality, in which he warns us against imagining a complete liberation from power. There can never be a total liberation from power, especially in relation to the politics of sexuality. Foucault says two things at the same time:

– we can never totally liberate ourselves from power (there is no space from which to say “no” to power) and, on the other
hand,

– we are never completely determined by power.

Thus, despite the impossibility of transcending power, a space of liberty opens up, and both determinism and radical voluntarism are refuted. What is this space of freedom that opens up once we have understood this? Here freedom is a kind of practice, a struggle, a continuous process with neither a beginning nor an end. When this practice is systematically attacked we cannot function as political subjects, our political capacities have been undermined. When referring to freedom, I am not alluding to the idea of an individual subject, alone, since a subject is free to the extent that s/he is conditioned by conventions, norms and cultural possibilities that make freedom possible, though they do not determine it. They are the conditions of possibility of freedom.

Who we are as subjects of freedom depends on non-voluntary forms of connection with others; I was not only born within a series of rules or conventions that form me, but also within a series of relationships on which I depend for my survival and which constitute me as an interdependent creature in this world. The questions of responsibility emerge in the context of this sociality, this interdependence. On the matter of responsibility I am interested in the productive formulations made by Levinas. For Levinas, I am not responsible for my actions — though in fact I also am — but rather responsible for the Other, for the demands of the Other. And any demand made by the Other is prior to any possibility of social contract: whatever the demand the Other puts before me, it affects me, it involves me in a relation of responsibility. Legal contracts cannot adequately describe this situation of primary responsibility. That means that I am responsible even for those who are not in any form of contractual relationship with me, or who do not form part of my community, or my nation, or who are not covered by the same legal framework as me. This helps to understand, for example, how I can be responsible for those who live at a distance from me, who are under a different form of political organisation, or those who are stateless. In Levinas’ framework, even those we never meet, those whose names and faces we do not know, present us with a demand. It is, then, a question of accepting our global interdependence and even our obligation to protect the lives of those we do not know. For Levinas, this primary obligation is expressed through what we commonly call commandments, “Thou shall not kill”: a requirement to preserve life. This does not mean that I can or should preserve the life of every individual (of course I cannot do so, and to imagine I could would be unhealthy, it would imply some sort of narcissism, a certain messianism), but rather that I should think about what kind of political structures we need to sustain life and minimise those forms of violence that extinguish it. This does not mean I am capable of making these structures come into existence — responsibility is not the same as efficacy — but rather that I can fight for a world that maximises the possibility of preserving and sustaining life and minimises the possibility of those forms of violence that, illegitimately, take life, or at least reduce the conditions that make it possible for this to happen. This is part of what I am thinking about at the moment. And I have to say that it is not easy to situate Arendt in this context.

Despite the fact that Levinas himself was not a pacifist, I believe that, taking his ideas as a starting point, it is possible to develop a philosophy of non-violence and even a conception of a trans-national political community that holds these values to be fundamental. We have to take Levinas’ framework and develop a kind of trans-national ethics based on non-violence, and thus it is necessary to disagree with him with respect to the difference between ethics and politics, to his stand on pacifism, and on Israel.

Žižek capitalist crisis

But was the financial meltdown of 2008 not a kind of ironic comment on the ideological nature of this dream of the spiritualized and socially responsible ecocapitalism? As we all know, on December 11 2008 Bernard Madoff, a great investmentmanager and philanthropist from Wall Street, was arrested and charged with allegedly running a $50 billion “Ponzi scheme” (or pyramid scheme). Madoff’s funds were supposed to be low-risk investments, reporting steady returns, usually gaining a percentage point or two a month. The funds’ stated strategy was to buy large cap stocks and supplement those investments with related stock-option strategies. The combined investments were supposed to generate stable returns and also cap losses – what attracted new and new investors was the regularity of high returns, independent of the market fluctuations – the very feature that should have made his funds suspicious. Sometime in 2005 Madoff’s investment-advisory business morphed into a Ponzi scheme, taking new money from investors to pay off existing clients who wanted to cash out. Madoff told senior employees of his firm that “it’s all just one big lie” and that it was “basically, a giant Ponzi scheme,” with estimated investor losses of about $50 billion.

What makes this story so surprising are two features: first, how the basically simple and well-known strategy still worked in today’s allegedly complex and controlled field of financial speculations; second, Madoff was not a marginal eccentric, but a figure from the very heart of the US financial establishment (Nasdaq), involved in numerous charitable activities.

Is it not that the Madoff case presents us with a pure and extreme case of what caused the financial breakdown? One has to ask here a naïve question: but didn’t Madoff know that, in the long term, his scheme is bound to collapse? What force counteracted this obvious insight? Not Madoff’s personal evil or irrationality, but a pressure, a drive, to go on, to expand the circulation in order to keep the machinery running, which is inscribed into the very system of capitalist relations –

the temptation to “morph” legitimate business into a pyramid scheme is part of the very nature of the capitalist circulation. There is no exact point at which the Rubicon was crossed and the legitimate investment business “morphed” into an illegal pyramid scheme: the very dynamic of capitalism blurs the frontier between “legitimate” investment and “wild” speculation, because capitalist investment is in its very core a risked wager that the scheme will turn out to be profitable, an act of borrowing from the future.

A sudden shift in uncontrollable circumstances can ruin a very “safe” investment – this is what the capitalist “risk” is about. This is the reality of the “postmodern” capitalism: the ruinous speculation raised to a much higher degree than it was even imaginable before.

The self-propelling circulation of the Capital thus remains more than ever the ultimate Real of our lives, a beast that by definition cannot be controlled, since it itself controls our activity, making us blind for even the most obvious insights into the dangers we are courting. It is one big fetishist denial: “I now very well the risks I am courting,
even the inevitability of the final collapse, but nonetheless … I can protract the collapse a little bit more, take a little bit greater risk, and so on indefinitely.”

Again, it is thus not enough to remain faithful to the Communist Idea – one has to locate in historical reality antagonisms which make this Idea a practical urgency. The only true question today is: do we endorse the predominant naturalization of capitalism,or does today’s global capitalism contain strong enough antagonisms which prevent its indefinite reproduction? There are four such antagonisms:

  1. the looming threat of ecological catastrophy,
  2. the inappropriateness of private property for the so-called “intellectual property,”
  3. the socio-ethical implications of new techno-scientific developments (especially in biogenetics
  4. new forms of apartheid, new Walls and slums.

There is a qualitative difference between the last feature, the gap that separates the Excluded from

Part of no part is universality

What one should add here, moving beyond Kant, is that there are social groups which, on account of their lacking a determinate place in the “private” order of social hierarchy, directly stand for universality; they are what Jacques Ranciere called the “part of no-part” of the social body. All truly emancipatory politics is generated by the shortcircuit between the universality of the “public use of reason” and the universality of the “part of no-part” -this was already the Communist dream of the young Marx: to bring together the universality of philosophy with the universality of the proletariat. From Ancient Greece, we have a name for the intrusion of the Excluded into the socio-political space: democracy.

The predominant liberal notion of democracy also deals with those Excluded, but in a radically different mode: it focuses on their inclusion, on the inclusion of all minority voices. All positions should be heard, all interests taken into account, the human rights of everyone guaranteed, all ways of life, cultures and practices respected, etc. – the obsession of this democracy is the protection of all kinds of minorities: cultural, religious, sexual, etc. The formula of democracy is here: patient negotiation and compromise. What gets lost is the proletarian position, the position of universality embodied in the Excluded.

The new emancipatory politics will no longer be the act of a particular social agent, but an explosive combination of different agents.

What unites us is that, in contrast to the classic image of proletarians who have “nothing to lose but their chains,” we are in danger of losing ALL: the threat is that we will be reduced to abstract empty Cartesian subject deprived of all substantial content,

  1. dispossessed of our symbolic substance,
  2. with our genetic base manipulated,
  3. vegetating in an unlivable environment.

This triple threat to our entire being make us all in a way all proletarians, reduced to “substanceless subjectivity,” as Marx put it in Grundrisse. The figure of the “part of no-part,” confronts us with the truth of our own position, and the ethico-political challenge is to recognize ourselves in this figure – in a way, we are all excluded, from nature as well as from our symbolic substance. Today, we are all potentially a HOMO SACER, and the only way to prevent actually becoming one is to act preventively.

thiem subject formation

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

On of the key achievements of Butler’s theoretical interventions is that they take what might be assumed to be ontological questions and make them legible as ethical, political, and social problematics, because, as she demonstrates, ontologies are conditioned by histories of power embodied in social and cultural institutions (74).

Moreover her work importantly offers a language and conceptual framework for lucidly demonstrating how this exclusion of the abnormal is part of what guarantees the normal its status. Butler demonstrates how the stabilities of gendered and sexed identities are attained through repressing what calls them into question and what attests to the ambivalence of gender and sex, of bodies and desires and their potentials and vulnerability (76).

Against understanding subjectivity as an achievement of self-consciousness and autonomous agency, Butler’s work argues for thinking of subjectivity as an unending process of formation that never culminates in full independence or self-sufficiency. Instead becoming a subject means to be formed and undone in relations to others and norms in ways that one can never fully reflectively grasp (78).

Despite the important role that Butler attributes to social norms in subject formation, individuals are not the marionettes of those norms.

Rather, Butler accounts for subject formation in subjection to norms as being irreducible to either a deterministic or an arbitrary relation to these norms. One key concept of these debates as well as of Butler’s attempts to explain her account of subject formation has been the notion of performativity.(78)

… the key insight from Butler’s concept of performativity is that acts cannot simply be traced back to agents and the intentions that preceded them. There is no original or authentic self or individual that only later enters into relations with others and comes to act on a social scene. Rather, Butler’s account offers a rigorous way of considering how social norms, practices, and institutions need to be taken into account as co-constitutive of subjects as well as of their acts.

… norms and their repetition are at the heart of how we come to be conscious and deliberating subjects. To understand subject formation as orchestrated by norms, normalization, and subjection, … does not mean to argue that subjects are fully determined by these norms. … performativity is the reiteration of norms by which one becomes intelligible as a subject (see BTM 94-95).

The performatively emerging subject is the product of the repetition of the social norms that confer intelligibility. It would be to mistake the core idea of performativity to understand this subject as one of PERFORMING the repetition of norms, as if in a theatrical performance …

Instead, the repetition of norms is “what enables a subject and constitutes the temporal condition for the subject” (BTM 95), and this repetition occurs in a ritualized form, constituting the subject over time.

As Butler has repeatedly argued, this mode of subjection does not make subjects into puppets determined by norms; instead, subjection brings about unruly subjects because of the excess of indeterminacyof meaning, power, and agency as norms work by producing their own failures.

The points of resistances that these failures produce are not the conscious acts of subjects, but these gaps and breakages are the condition of possibility for directed action and transformation. (80)

Political action and concerted efforts to change our circumstances are not necessary outcomes of being at odds with the norms, as Butler indicates when she asks, “what are the possibilities of politicizing DISidentifiction, this experience of MISRECOGNITION, this uneasy sense of standing under a sign to which one does and does not belong?” (BTM 219) (84-85).

thiem norms foucault psychoanalysis

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

By putting psychoanalysis and Foucault in conversation, Butler offers an explanation of how the subject emerges as passionately attached to the scenes of its subjection only through a necessary disavowal of these attachments and how passionate attachments thus never work independently of frameworks of social norms and cultural horizons but also never work deterministically in accordance with them.  The relation between social norms and subject formation with regard to desire is traversed and made possible through the emergence of the unconscious (42).

“Norms are not first external to preexisting subjects and then subsequently encountered by those subjects and possibly internalized. Rather, the differentiation between the “I” and the others and the world, the differentiation between internal and external, is formed in relation to these norms (42).

The social and the psychic are implicated within each other because the differentiation between the perspective of the “I” and the world outside which is “not me” happens only through internalization of norms (43).

Drawing on psychoanalysis thus allows Butler to consider both the complexity of psychic life and those instabilities that ensue from the ambivalences of our relations to social norms and practices insofar as they produce attachments and identifications. With psychoanalysis we can understand subject formation as a process of subjection that is not simply externally imposed but fueled as well by the subject’s investments in this subjection. (82)

Butler elaborates an account of how normalization brings forth a divided subject. That which does not conform to normality neither is annihilated nor preexists the subject as such; what does not conform to normality is produced and reproduced within the subject: “the unconscious is … a certain mode in which the unspeakably social endures.” (bulazi 153).

As the subject emerges through its subjection to rules and norms, it is never fully fitting, never fully reducible to these rules and norms, but constantly undone from within. With psychoanalysis, Butler theorizes how norms address and bring about attachments as well as sustain (albeit not in an easily accessible manner) that which threatens the coherence and normality of the subject.

Rather, the difficulty lies in the confluence of social normalization and psychic investments and identification. Consequently the potential that disrupts the normalization cannot be mobilized easily but also always threatens to disrupt both the subject as well as the social horizon of its formation.

The efficacy of norms’ ordering social relations relies on a self-subversion and repetition by reproducing that which resists not only in terms of certain subjects who are on the fringes of what counts as normal and acceptable, but within the subject itself.

“The Foucaultian subject is never fully constituted in subjection …; it is repeatedly constituted in subjection, and it is in the possibility of a repetition that repeats against its origin that subjection might be understood to draw its inadvertently enabling power.” (Psychic 94)

In the repeated inhabiting and appropriating of the norms and practices that animate this subjection and subject formation lies the potential for change, for repeating the norms and practices in not quite the same way they arrived. Insofar as the regulating norms and practices are actualized and sustained only be being rehearsed and enacted, this repetition is precisely where the possibility of change and reworking is located. (83)

thiem foucault assujetissement

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

This kind of Foucaultian assujetissement is not merely a subjection in the sense of domination; it is not merely an exertion of power on a preexisting body that shapes the substance that has existence outside and prior to the workings of power and social norms.  There is no “raw” body or materiality prior to and outside of power; power itself, in return, is for Foucault not an immaterial form but exists and works in the form of political and social practices and institutions.  Assujetissement thus is a bringing of the bodily subject into existence, since “there is no body outside of power, for the materiality of the body —indeed, materiality itself— is produced by and in direct relation to the investment of power” (Butler Psychic 91)

campbell power subjection subjectivity

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).

– operation of power and the formation of subjectivity

– a theory of subjection requires a theory of the psyche

– the psychic formation of subjectivity

Butler ties the psychoanalytic concept of foreclosure to ‘the Foucauldian notion of a regulatory ideal’, hence linking the psychoanalytic account of the psyche to Foucault’s theory of the regulatory workings of power (Psychic 25) (83).

– Heterosexual identity is thus constituted through a repudiation of homosexual desire and hence through the irresolvable loss o the homosexual object. That ‘ungrieved and ungrievable loss’ produces the melancholia of heterosexual identity (Psychic 138) (84).

– Because heterosexual identity disavows homosexual attachment, it cannot be acknowledged and hence cannot be named and so cannot be mourned.

– Instead of claiming that there is one repressive and normative ‘law’ as in psychoanalysis, Butler understands the normative constraints upon psychic production as an effect of networks of regulatory norms. These normative and regulating discourses produce the subject and generate desire (86).

Psychoanalysis provides a supplementary theory of the subject, which addresses a gap in Foucault’s work concerning a theory of the formation of subjectivity. Butler does not provide a psychoanalytic reading of Foucault that challenges, disrupts, or contests that theory. Rather, Butler seeks to address what she perceives as a ‘missing’ dimension to Foucault’s work — a theory of the constitution of the subject — by supplementing Foucault with a psychoanalytic theory of the subject (86).