subjectivity – Page 22

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?

houlgate difference between Kant and Hegel

Houlgate, Stephen. “G.W.F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit (1807): Thinking Philosophically Without Begging the Question” in The classics of Western philosophy: a reader’s guide. Gracia, Jorge. J.E. and Gregory M. Reichberg, Bernard N. Schumacher Oxford: Blackwell, 2003.

Hegel maintains that the categories contain the objective structure not just of the objects of human experience (Kant’s position), but of being itself. This, of course, is a belief that Kant does not share. For Kant the categories allow us to understand as objective what we perceive, and so constitute the conditions of objective experience. They do not, however disclose the intrinsic character of things themselves. Hegel goes beyond Kant, therefore, by retaining the metaphysical idea — embaced by Spinoza and Liebniz — “that thinking grasps what things are IN-THEMSELVES”

The project of the Phenomenology is thus clear: it does not provide a logical-metaphysical account of the nature of being, but shows how the assumptions and certainties of consciousness lead by themselves to the standpoint of absolute knowing.

Note that phenomenology as Hegel conceives it, is not epistemology: it does not try to justify the claims of ordinary consciousness itself (and so is not interested in determining, for example, whether or not the colors we see are really there). Nor is phenomenology to be confused with transcendental philosophy (as practiced by Kant and Fichte): it does not aim to uncover the epistemic conditions of ordinary consciousness. Phenomenology is a new discipline that seeks to understand the perspective of consciousness on its own terms,whatever its conditions may be and whether or not its claims are justified.

Phenomenology examines not what being is absolutely, but the way being is understood by, and so appears to, consciousness. Similary phenomenology does not try to establish definitively what knowledge or mind is (and so is not philosophy of mind), but studies the way knowledge is understood by, and so appears to, consciousness.

There is, however, another, more positive nuance to Hegel’s phrase, The Phenomenology also shows how absolute knowing is gradually caused to emerge or “appear” by the certainties of consciousness itself. Hegel’s book thus examines both how knowledge appears to consciousness and how that very appearance leads logically and immanently to the appearance on the scene of absolute knowing.

houlgate master slave

Houlgate, Stephen. “G.W.F. Hegel: The Phenomenology of Spirit”

Insofar as one’s identity arises and is defined only with other people, killing the others is self-defeating, for one loses precisely that source of recognition that one has come to require.

If either self-consciousness is to attain recognition, therefore, one of them must back down. This is not to say that in every such struggle one party will in fact back down, but that the logic of the situation requires that one capitulate. The one that does so shows thereby that it is not absolutely free after all. It is actually attached to life and afraid of death, and accepts that its identity is (at least in part) determined and limited by what is given to and other than it. This consciousness thus acknowledges that its identity depends on its own body and the realm of natural things around it, and in consciousness of this dependence it becomes the servant, bondsman, or slave of the other. The other self-consciousness, having succeeded in proving itself to be absolutely free and fearless, is recognized by the slave as his (or her) lord and master. The life and death struggle thus leads logically — if not always in fact — to the relation of master and slave (21).

This relation — Hegel’s famous account of which profoundly influenced Marx — is not intrinsic to social life. It is not to be encountered, for example, where there is genuine mutual recognition. It is the result of a struggle for recognition by two (or more) primitive self-consciousnesses, one of which — the slave– finally accepts what Tom Rockmore rightly calls the “deep truth” that “life is as essential to it as pure self-consciousness” and thereby lets the other enjoy the feeling of unencumbered freedom.

Desire in the Master and Slave

Desire, we recall, negates and consumes things; but it also runs up against the independence of things, and so fails to “have done with the thing altogether” and thereby to achieve complete satisfaction. By interposing the slave between himself and things, the master succeeds in separating these two sides of desire from one another. He leaves the slave to deal with the independence and resistant “thereness” of the thing, and reserves for himself “the pure enjoyment of it.” With the help of the slave, the master thus frees himself from the frustrations of desire and revels in the pure joy of consuming.

The problem faced by the master is twofold. On the one hand, though he receives recognition from the slave, the master does not recognize the slave in turn, and so cannot find true value in the slave’s recognition of him. The outcome, Hegel writes, “is a recognition this is one-sided and unequal.” On the other hand, the very relation that embodies for the master his absolute freedom — his dominance over the slave — also reminds him that in his freedom he is actually dependent on another.[…]

There is a further sense, however, in which “the truth of the independent consciousness” — the master — is to be found by looking to the slave: for in the slave we begin to see what the freedom and indepence to which the master lays exclusive claim are in truth. …

How, then does the slave prove to be free? First of all, through his labour: for even though he is forced to work by the master, his labor is nonetheless his own activity. Furthermore, unlike the master’s unchecked desire, which consumes the object and leaves nothing behind to mark its activity, labor enables the slave to give enduring objective expression to his freedom. The slave may not find himself recognized by the other self-consciousness, but he does find his freedom embodied in the object of his labour.

Equally important to the slave’s freedom is his fear of death. In the original life and death struggle, both self-consciousnesses seek recognition for themselves as “purely negative being” — being that is “self-identical” yet not tied to being anything in particular. …

Fear is sometimes understood by commentators merely to be that which forces the slave to labor in the service of the master in the first place. Hegel’s point, however, is more subtle. It is that fear alters the slave’s understanding of the meaning of labor itself.

The slave has to labor because he is subservient to the master. Through his labor, however, the slave discovers that he has the freedom to transform things himself and, indeed, to transform them according to his own will and intention. In working on things, he thus acquires what Hegel calls “a mind of his own”. The slave’s freedom, however, is the freedom to transform the particular things that he encounters: to turn this piece of wood into a chair or these ingredients into bread. Accordingly, the slave develops particular skills, depending on what he is required to work on. The freedom that he exhibits in his labor is thus still a limited freedom: it consists in the particular ability to give new shape to these particular objects, and bears witness to the fact that the slave’s consciousness is still mired in the world of given particularities (or, as Hegel puts it, that “determinate being still in principle attaches to it”).

mutual recognition

Houlgate, Stephen. “G.W.F. Hegel: The Phenomenology of Spirit.” The Blackwell Guide to Continental Philosophy. Eds. Solomon, Robert C. and David Sherman, 2003. 8-29. Print.

On what makes self-consciousness social

page 16: For Kojeve, what drives self-consciousness to become social is its desire to assimilate (as well as be desired by) another’s desire; for Hegel, by contrast, what renders self-consciousness social is its acceptance of the other as an independent source of recognition for itself.

page 17According to Kojève, the direct consequence of desire’s entrance into social relations is struggle and conflict. Each desire, Kojève insists, “wants to negate, to assimilate, to make its own, to subjugate, the other Desire as Desire.” Furthermore, each seeks to have its exclusive right to satisfaction recognized by all desires. This “fight” or struggle in turn leads to the creation of masters and slaves. Human social and historical existence is thus distinguished principally by fighting, slavery and work. For Kojève’s Hegel there is a point at which historical development stops: namely, when a community of mutual recognition is produced that puts an end to struggle and domination. … Nevertheless, what has prevailed throughout history prior to this point is nothing but struggle and domination, because these are generated by the very desire that gives rise to social interaction in the first place.

Achieving self-consciousness as we have seen, requires that I relate to myself in relating to that which is other than me. This means that I must relate to another self-consciousness that recognizes me alone. Self-consciousness must, therefore, be social and intersubjective. We now know that by itself recognition accorded to me by the other is not sufficient to enable me to be concretely self-conscious. To attain that end I must be recognized by another that I recognize in turn as a free and independent other. Genuine self-consciousness thus requires not just recognition of my identity by the other, but mutual recognition by each of us of the other. Self-consciousness must be a “double movement of the two self-consciousnesses” working freely together. In such a movement, Hegel writes, “each sees the other do the same as it does; each does itself what it demands of the other, and therefore also does what it does only in so far as the other does the same. Action by one side only, would be useless because what is to happen can only be brought about by both.”

Mutual recognition, for Hegel, requires the uncoerced cooperation of the two (or more) self-consciousnesses involved. Indeed, not only must the two self-consciousnesses freely recognize one another; in fact, they must both recognize that their mutual recognition and cooperation is needed for either to be concretely and objectively self-conscious. In Hegel’s own words, they must “recognize themselves as mutually recognizing one another.”

Genuine self-consciousness involves much more than mere desire (though it must also incorporate desire). Whereas desire “seizes upon and negates the object,” genuine self-consciousness requires recognition from the other, which in turn entails “allowing the other to be what it is” and “letting the other go free.” Self-consciousness would like to know only itself in the other and be the sole object of the other’s recognition. Such self-certainty can be achieved, however, only “through membership or partnership with Other.” For one person to have a concrete and objective understanding of himself, he must join together with somebody else.

as beings who are by necessity conscious of what is other than ourselves, we can achieve certainty of ourselves only when we are recognized by another whom we recognize as free in turn. This conception of mutual recognition, I contend, lies at the heart of Hegel’s whole social and political philosophy. (20)

Žižek subjectivity

houlgate on kojève

Houlgate, S. G. W. F. Hegel: The Phenomenology of Spirit.

Houlgate opines on page 13:

In my view, however, Kojève seriously distorts Hegel’s account of self-consciousness in the Phenomenology by conflating the idea that desire is the activity of negation with the further idea that the subject of desire is essentially “empty.” According to Kojève, the desiring subject is “an emptiness (vide) greedy for content; an emptiness that wants to be filled by what is full”; that is to say, “desire is absence of being” that seeks to fill itself “with a natural, biological content.” To my mind, this distinctively Kojèvian conception of desire finds no place in Hegel’s account. Desire does, indeed, negate the object. Yet it does so not to fill a void in the subject, but rather to confirm and enhance the subject’s sense of self: desire, Hegel writes, is simply the movement of consciousness whereby its “identity of itself with itself becomes explicit for it.” Pace Kojève, the desiring self in the Phenomenology does not lack a sense of its own being. If anything, it is rather too full of itself, for it regards everything around it as there for it alone. In so doing, desire considers the other to be nothing but an opportunity for desire itself to negate it. Desire is thus for Hegel “certain of the nothingness of this other,” but it is by no means clear that desire takes itself to be sheer “absence” or “emptiness.”

houlgate phenomenology desire

Houlgate, Stephen. “G.W.F. Hegel: The Phenomenology of Spirit.” Solomon, Robert C. and David Sherman eds. The Blackwell Guide to Continental Philosophy. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2003. Print.

According to Hegel, I cannot fully understand who I am, if I remain alone by myself with only the objects of nature to attend to. I gain a proper consciousness of myself only when my self-understanding is recognized and confirmed by others.

The Phenomenology describes … the development of consciousness from its most primitive or naive form which Hegel names “sensuous certainty” to its most mature form: self-knowing spirit or “absolute knowing.”

Sensuous certainty: form of consciousness that takes itself to be aware of the simple immediate presence of things, eschewing all mediating categories and is certain in its own mind that what it has before it is nothing but this, here, now in all its simplicity.

Perception: the more developed standpoint of perception is logically implicit in that of sense certainty, and those wedded to immediate sensuous certainty should acknowledge that the objects they relate to are more complex than they first think. Hegel argues that perception grasps its object as a complex unity of many “nows” and many “heres,” but that it cannot decide whether the true nature of the object lies more in its unity or in its multiplicity. Perception ends up distinguishing between the manifold character and the inner unity of the object. As soon as it regards its object as having an inner unity, however, it ceases to be mere perception and becomes understanding.

Understanding: then learns that inner unity of the thing actually consists in lawfulness, reason, and life. When this happens, Hegel claims, understanding proves to be not just consciousness of objects, but also self-consciousness — because it finds in its objects the very qualities that constitute its own nature.

Prior to its mutation into self-consciousness, understanding already incorporates an element of self-understanding: it knows that it is precisely the understanding, rather than mere perception of objects.

Yet only when it encounters in the objects themselves nothing but qualities belonging to itself does it come to be self-consciousness in the full sense, that is, consciousness of itself above all else.

Hegel points out that understanding always takes itself to be conscious of what is other than it and does not realize that it is self-conscious. It is we phenomenologists, not understanding itself, who recognize that understanding is in fact conscious of itself. In Hegel’s own words, “it is only for us that this truth exists, not yet for consciousness.” Nevertheless, in understanding something else to be rational and law-like, understanding is, indeed, “communing directly with itself, enjoying only itself” … Hegel’s next task is to examine what is involved in being explicitly self-conscious, or “what consciousness knows in knowing itself.”

We become explicitly self-conscious when we make our selves and our own identity the explicit and all consuming object of our concern, when we become wholly and overtly absorbed by ourselves.

1. consciousness comes to be wholly absorbed by itself while remaining conscious of what is other than it. When consciousness wakes up to the fact that it is primarily conscious of and concerned with itself, the objects of perception and understanding do not suddenly disappear from view. ON the contrary, they remain before us as the external objects in relation to which we are principally conscious of ourselves. For Hegel, self-consciousness is thus not exclusively consciousness of oneself; it is a relation to something other than me in which I relate to myself above all.

This is not to deny that, like Descartes in the Mediations, I can “shut my eyes, stop my ears, withdraw all my senses” and “converse with myself” in total separation from things. What can be reached through Cartesian doubt, however, is no more than abstract self-consciousness, because such doubt abstracts from the conditions under which alone concrete, all-embracing self-consciousness is possible: namely, consciousness of an external world in relation to which we find ourselves. … Hegel acknowledges that such abstract self-consciousness is possible and is an important moment of true, concrete self-consciousness. He claims, however, that true self-consciousness itself does not merely abstract from but (to borrow Kant’s term) “accompanies” our consciousness of objects.

From Hegel’s point of view Descartes overlooks the moment of other-relatedness that is essential to true consciousness of oneself. Yet there is nevertheless something to be learned from Descartes about true self-consciousness: for in remaining conscious of real, external objects, self-consciousness must also seek to negate those objects. Consciousness finds itself in what is other than it; but the very otherness of the objects I encounter inevitably prevents me from relating wholly to myself. In order to achieve unalloyed self-consciousness, therefore, I must regard the object before me as something that is not essentailly other than or independent of me after all, but there merely for me. I continue to consider the object to be real, and (unlike Descartes) do not declare it to be a figment of my imagination: but I deem it to offer no resistance to me and to yield to my ability to negate or consume it for my own satisfaction and self-enjoyment. Insofar as self-consciousness relates to itself through negating objects around it, it is, in Hegel’s word, desire (Begierde). Self-consciousness necessarily takes the form of desire, therefore, because Descartes is half-right: consciousness does enhance its sense of itself by negating the objects around it, but it directs its activity of negation at a realm of objects whose reality is not in doubt and that, consequently, forever remains to be negated.

Note that desire arises at this point in the Phenomenology not (or, rather, not just) because we are organic, embodied beings, but because of the very nature of self-consciousness itself. Concrete self-consciousness is not immediate self-awareness, but self-awareness mediated by and inseparable from the awareness of what is other. Self-consciousness is interested in itself above all, and yet, as a complex form of consciousness, it is necessarily related to external things.

If it is to attain an undiluted consciousness of itself, it must thus negate and destroy the other things in encounters. As this activity of negating what is other than itself, self-consciousness is desire. In Hegel’s own words, the origin of desire is thus the fact that “self-consciousness is … essentially the return from otherness.”

Note that what we desire, in Hegel’s view, is not the object as such, but rather, as Jean Hyppolite puts it, “the unity of the I with itself.” If Hegel is right, in seeking to enjoy the object, we are in fact seeking to enjoy ourselves.

Sittlichkeit

Sittlichkeit pronunciation

Sittlichkeit is intimate and cozy, but unconscious and uncritical. It is a simple, almost instinctive obedience to established law and custom. In this sort of moral community people live unreflectively by tradition and not by their own lights. But here always comes a time when the tradition s are questioned; this is an age of enlightenment or Aufklärung, as a result of which Sittlichkeit gives way to Moralität. The latter is an individualistic morality that has its source in individual conscience. In Hege’s veiw, Socrates … is responsible for having opened the Athenians up to the dangers f subjective or reflective morality.

In the Hegelian view, the Greek world was animated by a collective “we” that personified a spontaneous harmony of ideas and feelings. Those who were part of this collectivity were at home in the world because their personal feelings and inclinations were in complete concord with the social order. They did not suffer from the alienation, isolation, and estrangement so characteristic of men in modern society. The Greeks created a world in which order and liberty existed side by side in perfect harmony. Hegel envied them this harmony, but by the same token, he thought that they were morally infantile. Their freedom and harmony was the product of thoughtless conformity to conventional morality. It was Socrates who broke the spell of this happy coincidence of freedom and order. Socrates represented a new sensibility that was richer, deeper ..

Drury, Shadia. Alexandre Kojève: the roots of postmodern politics. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994.

kant 1724 – 1804

West, David. An Introduction to Continental Philosophy. Cambridge MA: Polity Press, 1996.

Analytic truth: straightforward definitions, can be found to be either true or false simply in virtue of the meanings of the terms they contain or, in other words, by analysis. “A bachelor is an unmarried male” is, simply true by definition. In Kantian terms, the concept of the predicate (‘… is an unmarred male’) is included in the concept of the subject (‘A bachelor’). Analytic truths, which depend simply on the meanings of the terms we use and tell us nothing about the real world, are plausible examples of a priori knowledge. We don’t find out that they are true by observation or experience.

The truth of synthetic peopositions, on the other hand, cannot be decided in this way. That “No woman has ever been President of the USA” is a truth that can be known only synthetically. In this case the concept of the predicate is clearly not included in the concept of the subject (being male is not part of the definition of President). factually informative based on actual evidence or experience, and therefore are a posteriori truths

Kant’s philosophy imples that we can have substantive or non-trivial knowledge of the structure of experience independently of all experience. TRANSCENDENTAL IDEALISM

A moral action must be motivated purely by the intention to do what is right, not by any particular interest or desire of the individual. The ‘synthetic a priori principles of orality must be derived, therefore, fromteh abstract notion of a rational will or agent, from which all distinguishing inidivudal features have been expunged. The inidivudla acts freely andmorally when he or she acts purely in obedience to a universal moral law that is the product of reason alone.

Accordingly, Kant’s famous ‘categorical imperative’ invites agents to ‘universalize’ the maxim of their actions: ‘Act only on that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.’

* Lacan’s four 4 discourses *

Bracher, Mark. “On the Psychological and Social Functions of Language: Lacan’s Theory of the Four Discourses” Lacanian Theory of Discourse. New York UP: New York. 1994. Mark Bracher, Marshall W. Alcorn et al. (eds) pp. 107-128.

Evans, Dylan. An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psycho- analysis. Routledge: New York, 1996.

Fink, Bruce. “Master Signifier and the Four Discourses.” Key Concepts in Lacanian Psychoanalysis. Danny Nobus (ed), Rebus Press. 1998.

Lacan’s 4 discourses stress the nature of intersubjectivity, that speech always implies another subject. Lacan identifies four possible types of social bond, four possible articulations of the symbolic network which regulates intersubjective relations. These ‘four discourses’ are the discourse of the master, the discourse of the university, the discourse of the hysteric, and the discourse of the analyst. Lacan represents each of the four discourses by an algorithm: each algorithm contains the following four algebraic symbols:

S1 (Master Signifier)

The force then —psychological and social— of the articulated systems of knowledge derives from the systems’ positioning the subject at certain points within them and thus establishing a certain “identity” for the subject.

These positionings entail a certain sense of identity (or ego), a certain jouissance, and a certain structuring of the unconscious. The most significant factor in these positionings is the imposition of the trait unaire, or singular characteristic. This singular characteristic is the earliest significance through which the child experiences itself —as a result of significations attributed to it by the Other (mother, father, and ultimately society as large).

This constitutes the subject’s primary identification, and this primary identification continues throughout the subject’s existence to exercise a decisive influence on the subject’s desire, thought, perception, and behaviour. But the trait unaire established by primary identification is supplemented and extended by various secondary identifications that serve as its avatars. It is, in fact, only through these secondary identifications that the primary identification manifests itself. And these secondary identifications, which are certain (usually collective) values or ideals, play a crucial role in discourse. They are what Lacan calls master signifiers, S1

A master signifier is any signifier that a subject has invested his or her identity in —any signifier that the subject has identified with (or against) and that thus constitutes a powerful positive or negative value. Master signifiers are thus the factors that give the articulated system of signifiers (S2) — that is, knowledge, belief, language —purchase on a subject: they are what make a message meaningful, what make it have an impact rather than being like a foreign language that one can’t understand.

Master signifiers would include words like “God”, “Satan”, “sin” “heaven”, and “hell” in religious discourse and “American”, “freedom”, “democracy” and “communism” in political discourse. [Mark Bracher, 1994. 111]

S2 (Knowledge)

a (The Plus-de-Jouir)

The Real, that which is simultaneously produced and excluded by the system of knowledge and its master signifiers

When the divided subject $, arises inthe intervention of S1 in S2, another factor isproduced as well: the object a.

(The barred subject)

The subject split between the identity to which it is interpellated (S₁) and the plus-de-jouir (a), the jouissance that it sacrifices in assuming that identity.

What distinguishes the four discourses from one another is the positions of these four symbols. There are four positions in the algorithms of the four discorses, each of which is designated by a different name. Each discourse is defined by writing the four algebraic symbols in a different position. The symbols always remain in the same order, so each discourse is simple the result of rotating the symbols a quarter turn.

Speaker Receiver

Agent —–> Other
Truth Production

Production: the enjoyment/jouissance produced by discourse

The left-hand positions designate the factors active in the subject who is speaking or sending a message, and the right-hand positions are occupied by the factors activated or elicited in the subject who receives the message.

The top position on each side represents the overt or manifest factor

The bottom position the covert, latent, implicit, or repressed factor — the factor that acts or occurs beneath the surface.

More specifically, the top left position is the place of agency or dominance; it is occupied by the factor in a discourse that is most active and obvious. The bottom left position is the place of (hidden) truth — that is, of the factor that supports, grounds, underwrites, and gives rise to the dominant factor, or constitutes the condition of its possibility, but is repressed by it.

On the right, the side of the receiver, the top position is designated as that of the other, which is occupied by the factor in the receiving subject that is called into action by the dominant factor in the message. The activation of this factor is a prerequisite for receiving and understanding a given message or discourse. For example, if systematic knowledge is the dominant element of a discourse (occupying the top left position), receivers, in order to understand this discourse, must (for a moment, at least) be receptive to a preconstituted knowledge, which means emptying themselves of any knowledge that might interfere with the knowledge in the discourse and becoming an amorphous, nonarticulated substance, a, to be articulated by the discourse. What is produced as a result of their allowing themselve to be thus interpellated by the dominant factor of a discourse is represented by the position of production, the bottom right. (Bracher, 1994, 109).

The Discourse of the Master

S1 —> S2
$ a

Žižek, Slavoj Iraq: The Borrowed Kettle. London: Verso, 2004.

There is no reason to be dismissive of the discourse of the Master, to identify it too hastily with ‘authoritarian repression’: the Master’s gesture is the founding gesture of every social bond. Let us imagine a confused situation of social disintegration, in which the cohesive power of ideology has lost its efficiency: in such a situation, the Master would be the one who invented a new signifier, the famous ‘quilting point’, which again stablized the situation and made it readable; the University discourse, which would then elaborate the network of Knowledge which sustained this readability, would by definition presuppose and rely on the initial gesture of the Master. The Master adds no new positive content; he merely adds a signifier which suddenly turns disorder inot order — into ‘new harmony’ … Let us take as an example anti-Semitism in Germany in the 1920s: people felt disorientated, succumbing to an undeserved military defeat, an economic crisis which ate away at their life savings … and the Nazis provided a single agent which accounted for it all: the Jew, the Jewish plot. That is the magic of a Master: although there is nothing new at the level of positive content, ‘nothing is quite the same’ after he pronounces his Word (Ž 138).

The most salient feature: dominance of the master signifier S1. Upon reading or hearing such a discourse, one is forced, in order to understand the message, to accord full explanatory power and/or moral authority to the proffered master signifiers and to refer all other signifiers (objects, concepts, or issues) back to these master signifiers. In doing this, the receiver of the message enacts the function of knowledge (S2). As a result of enacting this function, the receiver produces a plus-de-jouir that is, the suppressed (i.e., beneath the bar) excess of enjoyment, no longer to be enjoyed, for which there is no place in the system of knowledge or belief (S2) enacted by the receiver in response to the master’s S1. It is this a, this plus-de-jouir, that carries the power of revolution, of subverting and disrupting the system of knowledge (S2) and its master signifiers (S1). (Bracher 1993, 121)

[All attempts at totalization are doomed to failure. The discourse of the master ‘masks the division of the subject’ The master (S1) is the agent who puts the slave (S2) to work; the result of this work is a surplus (a) that the master attempts to appropriate. Dylan Evans 45]

The discourse of the Master restricts this a, the unsymbolized cause of desire, to the receiver (the slave, the one in the position of powerlessness), who has no voice (no legitimation of his or her own subjectivity).; The speaker, or master, is oblivious to the cause of his own desire (a)and has even repressed his own self-division ($) The essence of the position of the master is to be castrated: a certain jouissance is forbidden to him. The speaker is totally oblivious, unaware of the reason for promulgating its master signifiers.

Discourses that promote mastery, discourses that valorize and attempt to enact an autonomous, self-identical ego by instituting dominance of master signifiers (S1), which order knowledge (S2) according to their own values and keep fantasy ($♦a) in a subordinate and repressed position.

It is only by confronting this lack in its relation to the cause of desire (a) that the impetus behind S1 can be understood and, perhaps redirected, displaced. By interrogating the something of the subject that is left out by the master signifier, it becomes possible to reclaim that which has been suppressed and repressed and thus institute a new economy of both the psychological and the social structure. If one wants to be subversive, Lacan suggests, one might do worse that to approach “the hole from which the master signifier gushes”. (Bracher 121)

All teaching begins as a discourse of mastery with the imposition of basic concepts of a discipline i.e., master signifiers that serve to ground and explain the procedure of a body of knowledge that constitutes the discipline. Medical teaching for example, consists of acts of reverence to terms considered sacred, that is master signifiers. Philosophy is a clear instance of the discourse of the Master. Philosophical works are ultimately nothing other than attempts to promote a certain way of speaking, to promote certain master signifiers.

No discourse can operate without master signifiers, rather the question is what use we put the master signifiers to. My aim is to use these (Lacanian) master signifiers as means to promote change rather than as holy words with which we might baptize or consecrate certain phenomena and thereby ascend to some state of blessedness.

Lacanian master signifiers and knowledge S1 and S2 like any others, as soon as they become the dominant factor in a discourse, constellate a discourse of the Master and a discourse of the University, respectively, unless subordinated to an alternative aim, which the discourse of the Analyst provides.

From Paul Verhaeghe, Does the Woman Exist? 1997, 1999 rev. ed.

He (the master) is blind to his own truth, he cannot recognise this truth, because if he did he would fall from his position and cease to be master. 108

The Discourse of the University

For centuries, knowledge has been pursued as a defense against truth. Jacques Lacan

S2 —> a
S1 $

[The dominant position is occupied by knowledge. This illustrates the fact that behind all attempts to impart an apparently ‘neutral’ knowledge to the other can always be located an attempt at mastery (master of knowledge, and domination of the other to whom this knowledge is imparted). The discourse of the university represents the hegemony of knowledge, particularly visible in modernity in the form of hegemony of science. Evans 46]

We begin our academic careers as students in the position of a receivers of the system of knowledge S2. Subjected in this position to a dominating totalized system of knowledge/belief (S2), we are made to produce ourselves as (alienated) subjects ($) of this system.

Our position as the a simply continues the position we are born into. Before we learn to speak — and even before we are born — we occupy the position of the receiver of speech, and we do so in the form of the a as the as yet unassimilated piece of the Real that is the object of the desires of those around us, particularly our parents, for whom children often function as the object a that promises to compensate for the Other’s lack and thus fill the subject’s lack as well. As we have seen, our preverbal experience of ourselves and the world, mediated as it is by the actions and demeanor of our primary caretakers, is partially determined by the system of knowledge/belief, or language, inhabited by them, and by the position they attribute to us within that system, speaking and thinking of us, as son or daughter, delicate or hearty, future beauty queen or athlete, etc. In the second instance it means that when we begin to understand language and to speak it, we must fashion our sense of ourselves (our identity) out of the subject positions made available by the signifiers (i.e., categories) of the System S2. (Bracher 115)

This discursive structure and hence the totalizing and tyrannical effect of the S2 are not limited however to our infancy or to education. Bureaucracy is perhaps the purest form of the discourse of the University; it is nothing but knowledge — i.e., pure impersonal system: The System, and nothing else. No provision is made for individual subjects and their desires and idiosyncrasies. Individuals are to act, think and desire onlytin ways that function to enact reproduce, or extend The System. Bureaucracy thus functions to educate, in the root sense of that term: it forms particular types of subjects. (Bracher 1993, 55) (1994, 115)

The kind of knowledge involved in the university discourse amounts to mere rationalization, in the most pejorative Freudian sense of the the term. We can imagine it, not as the kind of thought that tries to come to grips with the Real, to maintain the difficulties posed by apparent logical and/or physical contradictions, but rather as a kind of encyclopaedic endeavour to exhaust a field. Working in the service of the master signifier, more or less any kind of argument will do, as long as it takes on the guise of reason and rationality (Fink 34).

The Discourse of the Hysteric (from Bruce Fink)

$ —> S1
a S2

In the hysteric’s discourse the split subject occupies the dominant position and addresses S1 calling it into question. Whereas the university discourse takes its cue from the master signifier, glossing over it with some sort of trumped-up system, the hysteric goes at the master and demands that he or she show his or her stuff, prove his or her mettle by producing something serious by way of knowledge.

The hysteric’s discourse is the exact opposite of the university discourse, all the positions reversed. The hysteric maintains the primacy of subjective division, the contradiction between conscious and unconscious, and thus the conflictual, or self-contradictory nature of desire itself.

In the lower right-hand corner, we find knowledge S2. This position is also the one where Lacan situates jouissance, the enjoyment produced by a discourse, and he thus suggests here that an hysteric gets off on knowledge. Knowledge is perhaps eroticized to a greater extent in the hysteric’s discourse than elsewhere. In the master’s discourse, knowledge is prized only insofar as it can produce something else, only so long as it can be put to work for the master; yet knowledge itself remains inaccessible to the master. In the university discourse, knowledge is not so much an end in itself as that which justifies the academic’s very existence and activity. Hysteria thus provides a unique configuration with respect to knowledge, and I believe this is why Lacan finally identifies the discourse of science with that of hysteria (Fink 37).

The hysteric pushes the master ”incarnated in a partner, teacher, or whomever” to the point where he or she can find the master’s knowledge lacking. Either the master does not have an explanation for everything, or his or her reasoning does not hold water. In addressing the master, the hysteric demands that he or she produce knowledge and then goes on to disprove his or her theories. Historically speaking, hysterics have been a true motor force behind the medical, psychiatric, and psychoanalytic elaboration of theories concerning hysteria. Hysterics led Freud to develop psychoanalytic theory and practice, all the while proving to him in his consulting room the inadequacy of his knowledge and know-how.

Hysterics, like good scientists, do not set out to desperately explain everything with the knowledge they already have ”that is the job of the systematizer or even the encyclopedaedist” nor do they take for granted that all the solutions will be someday forthcoming. … In the hysteric’s discourse, object (a) the Real appears in the position of truth. That means that the truth of the hysteric’s discourse, its hidden motor force, is the Real. Physics too, when carried out in a truly scientific spirit, is ordained and commanded by the real, that is to say by that which does not work, by that which does not fit. It does not set out to carefully cover over paradoxes and contradictions, in an attempt to prove that the theory is nowhere lacking” that it works in every instance” but rather to take such paradoxes and contradictions as far as they can go (Fink 37).

The Discourse of the Analyst

a —> $
S2 S1

The discourse of the analyst is produced by a quarter turn of the discourse of the hysteric (in the same way as Freud developed psychoanalysis by giving an interpretive turn to the discourse of his hysterical patients.) The position of the agent, which is the position occupied by the analyst in the treatment, is occupied by objet petite a this illustrates the fact that the analyst must, in the course of treatment, become the cause of the analysand’s desire. The fact that this discourse is the inverse of the discourse of the master emphasises that, for Lacan, psychoanalysis is an essentially subversive practice which undermines all attempts at domination and mastery.

The analyst plays the part of pure desirousness (pure desiring subject), and interrogates the subject in his or her division, precisely at those points where the split between conscious and unconscious shows through: slips of the tongue, bungled and unintended acts, slurred speech, dreams, etc. In this way, the analyst sets the patient to work, to associate, and the product of that laborious association is a new master signifier. The patient in a sense ‘coughs up’ a master signifier that has not yet been brought into relation with any other signifier.

As it appears concretely in the analytic situation, a master signifier presents itself as a dead end, a stopping point, a term, word, or phrase that puts an end to association, that grinds the patient’s discourse to a halt. It could be a proper name (the patient’s or the analyst’s), a reference to the death of a loved one, the name of a disease (AIDS, cancer, psoriasis, blindness), or a variety of other things. The task of analysis is to bring such master signifiers into relation with other signifiers, that is, to dialecticize the master signifiers it produces. That involves reliance upon the master’s discourse … recourse to the fundamental structure of signification: a link must be established between each master signifier and a binary signifier such that subjectification takes place. The symptom itself may present itself a s a master signifier; in fact, as anlysis proceeds and as more and more aspects of a person’s are taken as symptoms, each symptomatic activity or pain may present itself in the analytic work as a word or phrase that simply is, that seems to signify nothing to the subject. Lacan refers to S1 in the analyst’s discourse as la betise (stupidity or ‘funny business’), a reference back to the case of Little Hans who refers to his whole horse phobia as la betise. It is a piece of nonsense produced by the analytic process itself.

S2 appears in analytic discourse in the place of truth (lower left-hand position). S2 represents knowledge here, but obviously not the kind of knowledge that occupies the dominant position in the university discourse. The knowledge in question here is unconscious knowledge, that knowledge that is caught up in the signifying chain and has yet to be subjectified. Where that knowledge was, the subject must come to be.

Now according to Lacan, while the analyst adopts the analytic discourse, the analysand is inevitably, in the course of analysis, hystericized. The analysand, regardless of his or her clinical structure — whether phobic, perverse, or obsessive compulsive — is backed into the hysteric’s discourse. Why is that? Because the analyst puts the subject as divided, as self-contradictory, on the firing line, so to speak. The analyst does not question the obsessive neurotic’s theories about Dostoevsky’s poetics, for example, attempting to show the neurotic where his or her intellectual views are inconsistent. Such an obsessive may attempt to speak during his or her analytic sessions from the position of S2, in the university (academic) discourse, but to engage the analysand at that level allows the analysand to maintain that particular stance. Instead, the analyst, ignoring, we can imagine, the whole of a half-hour long critique of Bakhtin’s veiws on Dostoevsky’s dialogic style, may focus on the slightest slip of the tongue or ambiguity in the analysand’s speech — the analysand’s use, for example, of the graphic metaphor ‘near misses’ to describe her bad timing in the publishing of her article on Bakhtin, when the analyst knows that this analysand had fled her country of origin shortly after rejecting an unexpected an unwanted marriage proposal (‘near Mrs.’).

Thus the analyst, by pointing to the fact that the analysand is not master of his or her own discourse, instates the analysand as divided between conscious speaking subject and some other (subject) speaking at the same time through the same mouthpiece, as agent of a discourse wherein the S1s produced in the course of analysis are interrogated and made to yield their links with S2 (as in the hysteric’s discourse). Clearly the motor force of the process is object (a)— the analyst operating as pure desirousness.

What does it mean concretely for the analyst to occupy the position of object (a) for an analysand, the position of cause of the analysand’s desire? Many analysands tend, at an early stage of analysis, to thrust responsibility for slips and slurs onto the analyst. As one patient said to her therapist, ‘You’re the one who always sees dark and dirty things in everything I say!’ At the outset, analysands often see no more in a slip than a simple problem regarding the control of the tongue muscles or a slight inattention. The analyst is the one who attributes some Other meaning to it.

As time goes on, however, analysands themselves begin to attribute meaning to such slips, and the analyst, rather than standing in for the unconscious, for that strange Other discourse, is viewed by the analysand as its cause: ‘I had a dream last night because I knew I was coming in to see you this morning.’ In such a statement, very often heard in analysis, the analyst is case in the role of the cause of the analysand’s dream: ‘I wouldn’t have had such a dream were it not for you.’ ‘The dream was for you.’ You were in my dream last night.’ Unconscious formations, such as dreams, fantasies, and slips, are produced for the analyst, to be recounted to the analyst, to tell the analyst something. The analyst, in that sense, is behind, is the reason for their production, is, in a word, their cause.

When the analyst is viewed as an other like the analysand, the analyst can be considered an imaginary object or other for the analysand. When the analyst is viewed as a judge or parent, the analyst can be considered a sort of symbolic object or Other for the analysand. When the analyst is viewed as the cause of the analysand’s unconscious formations, the analyst can be considered a ‘real’ object, object (a) for the analysand.

Once the analyst has manoeuvred in such a way that he or she is placed in the position of cause by the analysand (cause of the analysand’s dreams and of the wishes they fulfil — in short, cause of the analysand’s desire), certain manifestation of the analysand’s transference love or ‘positive transference,’ typically associated with the early stages of analysis, may well subside, giving way to something far less ‘positive’ in coloration. The analysand may begin to express his or her sense that the analyst is ‘under my skin,’ like an irritant. Analysands who seemed to be comfortable or at ease during their sessions at the outset (by no means the majority however) may well display or express discomfort, tension, and even signs that they are rebelling against the new configuration, the new role the analyst is taking on in their lives and fantasies. The analyst is becoming too important, is showing up in their daydreams, in their masturbation fantasies, in their relationships with the significant other and so on.

Lacan considers this to be the ARCHIMEDEAN POINT OF ANALYSIS, that is the very point at which the analyst can apply the lever that can move the symptom.

The analyst in the position of cause of desire for the analysand is, according to Lacan, THE MOTOR FORCE OF ANALYSIS; in other words, it is the position the analyst must occupy in order for tranference to lead to something other than identification with the analyst as the endpoint of an analysis (identification with the analyst being considered the goal of analysis by certain psychoanalysts).

‘Negative transference’ is by no means the essential sign indicating that the analysand has come to situate the analyst as cause of desire; it is but one possible manifestation of the latter. Nevertheless, the attempt by therapists of many ilks to avoid or immediately neutralize any emergence of negative transference … means that aggression and anger are turned into feelings which are inappropriate for the analysand to project onto the therapist … Patients thereby learn not to express them in therapy … thereby defusing the intensity of the feeling and possible therapeutic uses of the projection. Anger and aggression are thus never worked out with the therapist, but rather examined ‘rationally.’ … It is only by making psychical conflicts — such as aggression against one’s parent or hatred of a family member — present in the relationship with the analyst that the patient can work them through. To work them through means not that they are intellectually viewed and processed,’ but rather that the internal libidinal conflict which is holding a symptomatic relationship to someone in place must be allowed to repeat itself in the relationship with the analyst and play itself out. If verbalization (putting things into words) is the only technique allowed the analysand, a true separation from the analyst and from analysis never occurs. Projection must be allowed to go so far as to bring out all the essential aspects of a conflict-ridden relationship, all the relevant recollections and dynamics, and the full strength of the positive/negative affect. It should be recalled that one of the earliest lessons of Freud and Breuer’s Studies on Hysteria was that verbalizing traumatic events without reliving the accompanying affect left the symptom intact.

Transference, viewed as the transference of affect (evoked in the past by people and events) in the here and now of the analytic setting, means that the analysand must be able to project onto the analyst a whole series of emotions felt in relation to significant figures from his or her past and present. If the analyst is concerned with ‘being himself’ or being herself’ or with being the ‘good father’ or ‘good mother’ he or she is likely to try ot immediately distance him or herself from the role in which the analysand is casting him or her, by saying something like, ‘I am not your father’ or ‘You are projecting.’ The message conveyed by such a statement is, ‘Don’t confuse me with him’ or ‘It is not appropriate to project.’ But the analyst would do better to neither encourage or discourage the case of mistaken identity that arises through the transfer of feeling, and to let the projection of different personas occur as it will — unless, of course, it goes so far as to jeopardize the very continuation of the therapy.

Rather than interpreting the fact of transference, rather than pointing out to the analysand that he or she is projecting or transferring something onto the analyst, the analyst should direct attention to the content (the ideational and affective content) of the projection, attempting to get the analysand to put it into words. Not to dissipate it or prohibit it, not to make the analysand feel guilty about it, but to speak it. Here the analyst works — often more by asking questions than by interpreting — to re-establish the connections between the content (thought and feeling) and the persons, situation, and relationships that initially gave rise to it.

Just as one should interpret not the fact of transference but rather its content, one should avoid interpreting ‘resistance,’ transference being but one manifestation of resistance. Resistance, rather than being nothing more than an ego defense, is in Lacan’s view, structural, arising because the real resists symbolization; when the analysand’s experience resists being put into words, he or she grabs onto, digs into, or takes it out on the only other person present: the analyst. Transference is thus a direct product of resistance, of the resistance the real (e.g. trauma) erects against its symbolization, against being spoken. … Of course the analysand resists — that is a given, a structural necessity. Interpretation must aim at the traumatic event or experience that is resisting verbalization, not the mere fact of resistance (Fink 43-45).

Fink, Bruce. “Master Signifier and the Four Discourses.” Key Concepts in Lacanian Psychoanalysis. Danny Nobus (ed), Rebus Press. 1998.

on Hegel

Fichte

Given the fact that an individual shares the external world with other free subjects, this is possible only if individuality is recognized by those other beings as setting limits to their own free agency. This mutual recognition [Anerkennung] is an important influence on Hegel’s move from subjectivity to intersubjectivity.

Mutual recognition, or … subjectivity requires intersubjectivity. Furthermore, rights cannot be deduced from ethical individualism but require intersubjectivity. In a sense, Fichte is criticizing all previous philosophies, particularly those dealing with rights, for not first demonstrating the need for intersubjectivity, or the impossibility of thinking of the individual as isolated, which he sees as the same thing. For Fichte, intersubjectivity is a necessary condition for the very existence of individuality and self-awareness. The idea of natural rights outside of a community is a fiction:

There is no condition in which original rights exist; and no original rights of human beings. The human being has actual rights only in community with others, just as—according to the higher principles noted above—the human being can be thought of only in community with others. An original right, therefore, is a mere fiction, but one that must necessarily be created for the sake of a science of right.

Thus, it is impossible to think of rights without thinking of an individual in relation to other individuals. Hegel’s attempt to reconcile individual liberty with community follows Fichte’s lead. Nor, for Fichte, can we think of free beings as existing together unless their rights mutually limit each other (39).

butler hegel

Norms govern recognizability: There’s a million quotes I can find to underscore this argument. What I need to outline with regards to this is

– The geneology of the emergence of Butler’s turn to normativity, which I’ll find as the Foucault Effect no doubt

– The more difficult part is the exegesis of this quote:

“Does recognition, as Hegel argues, consist in a reciprocal act whereby I recognize that the other is structured in the same way I am? And do I recognize that the other also makes, or can make, this recognition of sameness? Or is there perhaps another encounter with alterity here that is irreducible to sameness? If it is the latter, how are we to understand this alterity?” (27)

🙂 Is Butler saying in effect that introducing difference into Hegelian dialectic of recognition forces now not any reconciliation with sameness

– norms and language, decentre the subject, as Hegel mentions as the system of customs Sittlichkeit and in this way Žižek and JB are not that far apart. As both in their respective way resist pegging down Hegel as this authoritarian philosopher of logocentric identity.

There is a language that frames the encounter, and embedded in that language is a set of norms concerning what will and will not constitute recognizability. (30)

Adriana Cavarero

Cavarero is a post-Hegelian in her approach to ethics and the other.

– “there is an other not fully known or knowable to me”

– “exposure and vulnerability of the other makes a primary ethical claim upon me”

Butler agrees and disagrees. She definitely likes the part about exposure and vulnerability, but she offsets Cavarero’s emphasis on singularity, which can slide into an individualist ethics. Butler instead emphasizes ‘substitutability’ of the account. This is because …

“discourse is not life its time is not yours (36)

indifferent structures, a sociability that exceeds me, which gets to the fact that for Butler any emphasis on singularity effaces the extent to which this originality resembles too strictly a frame of referencing that doesn’t correspond to the deconstructionist framework. That is for Butler, the account is impossible because the exposure and vulnerability undoes the subject, the other’s opaqueness is my opaqueness and this is the substitutable condition of subjectivity, and to that extent it is substitutable.

The account I give of myself exceeds narration, it can not be narrated. It can’t be a story, there is no stable subject, it doesn’t unfold in a linear way.

If I try to give an account of myself, if I try to make myself recognizable and understandable, then I might begin with a narrative account of my life. But this narrative will be disoriented by what is not mine, or not mine alone. And I will, to some degree, have to make myself substitutable in order to make myself recognizable. The narrative authority of the “I” must give way to the perspective and temporality of a set of norms that contest the singularity of my story. (37)

butler immanence nietzsche foucault 3-25

After reading Molly Anne Rothenberg’s book and her critique of Foucault and Butler, I’m intrigued by this problematic of immanentism. It happens when relations take place entirely within, that is, without any causal agent developing from the outside, without being effected by an ‘outside.’

… a subject produced by morality must find his or her relation to morality. One cannot will away this paradoxical condition for moral deliberation and for the task of giving an account of oneself. Even if morality supplies a set of norms that produce a subject in his or her intelligibility, it also remains a set of norms and rules that a subject must negotiate in a living and reflective way (10).

Molly Anne Rothenberg says if the subject is produced by a morality, in what sense can it develop a relation to that morality, how can it distance itself such that it can be properly reflective of its relationship with a morality? This is the problem of immanence and why Rothenberg moves to a version of extimate causality, with its emphasis on the non-coincident subject, but unlike Foucaultian immanentism, there is a space, an opening, in the subject’s ‘non-coincidence’ that allows it recognize it’s own relationship and defensive posturing with relationship to his/her own excess and yet instead of playing a game of ‘hot potato’ instead, absorb the excess via a identification with the sinthome. Thus becoming in Rothenberg’s words (I think), a sinthomic subject. That is, a subject that takes on the place of where jouissance formerly was, now the subject [Here I am] emerges.

Nietzsche

On page 10, Butler begins w/ Nietzsche because he offers an account of how we become reflective in the first place: “we become conscious of ourselves only after certain injuries have been inflicted.” In the interests of meting out a just punishment that the lawyer for the claimant asks the defendant, give an account of yourself, what were your actions? “And so, in fearful response, I offer myself as an “I” and try to reconstruct my deeds … For Nietzsche accountability follows only upon an accusation or, minimally, an allegation, one made by someone in a position to deal out punishment if causality can be established. And we become reflective upon ourselves, accordingly as a consequence of fear and terror. Indeed we become morally accountable as a consequence of fear and terror (11).

N. did well to understand that I begin my story of myself only in the face of a “you” who asks me to give an account. Only in the face of such a query or attribution from an other —”Was it you?”— do any of us start to narrate ourselves, or find that, for urgent reasons, we must become self-narrating beings (11).

In The Psychic Life of Power, I perhaps too quickly accepted this punitive scene of inauguration for the subject. According to that view, the institution of punishment ties me to my deed, and when I am punished for having done this or that deed, I emerge as a subject of conscience and, hence, a subject who reflects upon herself in some way. This view of subject formation depends upon an account of a subject who internalizes the law or, minimally, the causal tethering of the subject to the deed for which the institution of punishment seeks compensation (15).

Foucault

For N. the elaboration of a morality… is the sublimated … effect of this primary aggression turned against oneself, the idealized consequence of a turn against one’s own destructiveness and, for Nietzsche, one’s own life impulses … Foucault turns …. to codes of morality, understood as codes of conduct —and not primarily to codes of punishment —to consider how subjects are constituted in relation to such codes, which do not always rely on the violence of prohibition and its internalizing effects. … For Foucault, reflexivity emerges in the act of taking up a relation to moral codes, but it does not rely on an account of internalization or of psychic life more generally, certainly not a reduction of morality to bad conscience (16).

In the early 1980s Foucault’s interest shifts to a consideration of how, “certain historically established prescriptive codes compelled a certain kind of subject formation. Whereas in his earlier work, he treats the subject as an “effect” of discourse, in his later writings he nuances and refines his position as follows: The subject forms itsellf in relation to a set of codes, prescriptions, or norms … This work on the self … takes place within the context of a set of norms that precede and exceed the subject. … setting the limits to what will be considered to be an intelligible formatio nof the subject within a given historical scheme of things.

There is no making of oneself (poiesis) outside of a mode of subjectivation (assujettisement) and, hence, no self-making outside of the norms that orchestrate the possible forms that a subject may take. The practice of critique then exposes the limits of the historical scheme of things, the epistemological and ontological horizon within which subjects come to be at all. To make oneself in such a way that one exposes those limits is precisely to engage in an aesthetics of the self that maintains a critical relation to existing norms. (Quoting Foucault) “Critique would insure the desubjugation of the subject in the course of what we could call, in a word, the politics of truth.” (17)

The Immanence Thing, Listen Up:

A practice of self-stylization in relation to norms … (means) neither conforming to the prescriptions entailed by a given code nor of internalizing a primary prohibition or interdiction (Hey Oedipal!)

However, the “I” engendered by morality is not conceived as a self-berating psychic agency. From the outset, what relation the self will take to itself, how it will craft itself in response to an injunction, how it will form itself, and what labor it will perform upon itself is a challenge, if not an open question (18).

the subject’s self-crafting … always takes place in relation to an imposed set of norms. the norm does not produce the subject as its necessary effect, nor is the subject fully free to disregard the norm that inaugurates its reflexivity; one invariably struggles with conditions of one’s own life that one could not have chosen. If there is an operation of agency or, indeed, freedom in this struggle, it takes place in the context of an enabling and limiting field of constraint. This ethical agency is neither fully determined nor radically free. It’s struggle or primary dilemma is to be produced by a world, even as one must produce oneself in some way. This struggle with the unchosen conditions of one’s life, a struggle —an agency— is also make possible, paradoxically, by the persistence of this primary condition of unfreedom (19).

Does the postulation of a subject who is not self-grounding, that is, whose conditions of emergence can never fully be accounted for, undermine the possibility of responsibility and, in particular, of giving an account of oneself? (19)

I will argue otherwise by showing how a theory of subject formation that acknowledges the limits of self-knowledge can serve a conception of ethics and, indeed, responsibility.

[…] primary relations are formative in ways that produce a necessary opacity in our understanding of ourselves. An account of oneself is always given to another, whether conjured or existing, and this other establishes the scene of address as a more primary ethical relation than a reflexive effort to give an account of oneself. Moreover, the very terms by which we give an account, by which we make ourselves intelligible to ourselves and to others, are not of our making. They are social in character, and they establish social norms, a domain of unfreedom and substitutability within which our “singular” stories are told (21).

With the help of Foucault’s self-criticism, it may be possible to show that the question of ethics emerges precisely at the limits of our schemes of intelligibility, the site where we ask ourselves what it might mean to continue in a dialogue where no common ground can be assumed. where one is, as it were, at the limits of what one knows yet still under the demand to offer and receive acknowledgment: to someone else who is there to be addressed and whose address is there to be received. (21-22).

Recognition

Thus if I question the regime of truth, I question, too, the regime through which being, and my own ontological status, is allocated. Critique is not merely of a given social practice or a certain horizon of intelligibility within which practices and institutions appear, it also implies that I come into question for myself. Self-questioning becomes an ethical consequence of critique for Foucault, as he makes clear in “What is Critique?” It also turns out that self-questioning of this sort involves putting oneself at risk, imperiling the very possibility of being recognized by others, since to question the norms of recognition that govern what I might be, to ask what they leave out, what they might be compelled to accommodate, is, in relation to the present regime, to risk unrecognizability as a subject or at least to become an occasion for posing the questions of who one is (or can be) and whether or not one is recognizable.

These questions imply at least two kinds of inquiry for an ethical philosophy.

First, what are the these norms, to which my very being is given over, which have the power to install me or, indeed, to disinstall me as a recognizable subject?
Second, where and who is this other, and can the notion of the other comprise the frame of reference and normative horizon that hold and confer my potential for becoming a recognizable subject? (23)

If we conclude that Foucault’s failure to think the other is decisive, we have perhaps overlooked the fact that the very being of the self is dependent, not just on the existence of the other in its singularity (as Levinas would have it), but also on the social dimension of normativity that governs the scene of recognition. The social dimension of normativity precedes and conditions any dyadic exchange, even though it seems that we make contact with that sphere of normativity precisely in the context of such proximate exchanges. (23-4)

The norms by which I recognize another or, indeed myself are not mine alone. They function to the extent that they are social, exceeding every dyadic exchange that they condition. Their sociality, however, can be understood neither as a structuralist totality nor as a transcendental or quasi-transcendental invariability. Some would doubtless argue that norms must already be in place for recognition to become possible, and there is surely truth in such a claim. It is also true that certain practices of recognition or, indeed, certain breakdowns in the practice of recognition mark a site of rupture within the horizon of normativity and implicitly call for the institution of new norms, putting into question the giveness of the prevailing normative horizon. The normative horizon within which I see the other or, indeed, within which the other sees and listens and knows and recognizes is also subject to a a critical opening.

It will not do, then, to collapse the notion of the other into the sociality of norms and claim that the other is implicitly present in the norms by which recognition is conferred. Sometimes the very unrecognizability of the other brings about a crisis in the norms that govern recognition. If and when, in an effort to confer or to receive a recognition that fails again and again, I call into question the normative horizon within which recogntion takes place, this questioning is part of the desire for recognition, a desire that can find no satisfaction, and whose unsatisfiability establishes a critical point of departure for the interrogation of available norms (24).

In asking the ethical question “How ought I to treat another?” I am immediately caught up in a realm of social normativity, since the other only appears to me, only functions as an other for me, if there is a frame within which I can see and apprehend the other in her separateness and exteriority. So, though I might think of the ethical relation as dyadic or, indeed, as presocial, I am caught up not only in the sphere of normativity but in the problematic of power when I pose the ethical question in its directness and simplicity: “How ought I to treat you?” If the “I” and the “you” must first come into being, and if a normative frame is necessary for this emergence and encounter, then norms work not only to direct my conduct but to condition the possible emergence of an encounter between myself and the other (25).

S1 (Master Signifier)

Speaker Receiver

Agent —–> Other Truth Production

Agent —–> Other
Truth Production