Tag: excessive

rothenberg non-self-coincidence

I am going to quote at length Rothenberg’s critique of the position of Simon Critchley. Critchley argues that as subjects we are initially called upon by an other with a demand that we cannot meet, which is traumatic. This trauma is what turns one into an ethical subject.

… if the initial state of the subject is unethical because it is self-absorbed, grasping, and autonomous, what motivates this self-centered subject to experience the demand of the other as traumatic?  In fact, what motivates the unethical subject to recognize or respond to the other at all?  What will pierce the self-satisfied autonomy of this possessive selfhood so that it will feel the other’s presence as infinitely demanding? And what will guarantee that the experience of an infinite demand will call forth a sense of insufficiency, a traumatic sense of insufficiency, on the part of the subject? Or, put another way, why doesn’t the subject who encounters the other simply walk away, or try to annihilate the other, or help the other in some limited way and go home to an untroubled sleep?

That is, the Levinasian story as Critchley tells it seems to require that the subject already be ethical in order to respond in the way that would leadit to ethicality.  In this account, the dividual subject is nothing other than an ethical subject from the start, a person who for some unexplainedreason, responds to the presence of others as requiring more of the subject than the subject can give. Nothing in the story accounts for the transformation of the unethical subject, because the change-agent (trauma) can only be generated if the subject is already responsive to the other. And once we start with an ethical subject, the whole circuitous route to ethicality through trauma is superfluous. 197-198

… Critchley never explains what would motivate the subject to attempt to relate to a radical other with whom there can be no relation.  It just seems to him to be obvious that any subject would react to such an encounter with a sense of responsibility, so he never inquires into the means by which that responsiveness is achieved. Still something has to make the subject desire a relation with the other, rather than, for example, a rejection or obliteration …his model doesn’t explicate the production of the ethical subject …  (200).


rothenberg molly anne

Molly Anne Rothenberg’s book Excessive Subjects is the book Žižek always wanted to write but can’t, either because he is unable to grasp what he continually was circling around, which Rothenberg saw and rectified in her book, or Žižek can’t bring himself to criticize Butler in the devastating manner with which Rothenberg accomplishes this task. The chapter on Butler is a devastating critique of what Rothenberg views as Butler’s totally mistaken, misunderstanding and gross misuse of psychoanalytic theory. Rothenberg’s pseudo-Lacanian approach in this book argues that what is key in subject formation is the notion of ‘excess’ or the ‘addition of negation’. Things start to really happen around page 30 when Rothenberg adeptly interprets Badiou using the analogy of a dimly lit garage. You have to read this part a couple of times it’s fascinating, but once the distinction between being and objects is understood, then you are only a hop, skip, jump away from understanding Rothenberg’s general thesis. I have just read the chapter on Butler, and I feel that although Rothenberg makes some good points, she nevertheless limits her treatment of Butler to one work, Excitable Speech (which is my least favourite work btw). In this work, Butler is still agonizingly trying to articulate a conception of agency that is, I feel, better laid out in The Psychic Life of Power. Rothenberg’s two critical points being centred on a criticism of Butler’s interpretation of Austin’s speech act theory and what is quickly becoming the achilles heel of Butler’s theory of agency, her interpretation of psychoanalytic theory. Rothenberg’s criticism of Butler’s take on Lacan is unrelenting. The rumblings began a few years ago regarding Butler’s uptake of the term “foreclosure” and it hits a crescendo pitch in Rothenberg’s chapter. However Butler could really take issue with Rothernberg’s curt dismissal of Butler regarding that latter’s take on Foucault. I believe Butler is a more complex Foucaultian, and as she argues in The Psychic Life of Power her understanding and use of Foucault is complex and attentive to the shortcomings of his theory of agency. I am eager to get into the chapter on Laclau.

Note: the binding job on this book by Polity Press is horrible. This book is falling apart after only 2 days of very polite and gentle handling. Buyer beware!

rothenberg on the symbolic

Rothenberg, Molly Anne. The Excessive Subject. Polity Press, 2010.

Only the encounter with significative excess produces the subject as a social subject, serving as the means for freeing the child from the closed world of dyadic meanings and ushering him into the world of circulating (not completely stable) meanings available for appropriation and re-signification.

The Symbolic is not a systematic set of proscriptions, rules, practices, or any other substantively specifiable content shared alike by everyone else in the social field: it is not a system of stable meanings, even though it may seem that way at times and even though one might fervently wish or imagine it to be so. Rather, the Symbolic is a psychic register, the register of significative excess and appropriability.

In this register, in the mind of the individual, resides a collocation of meanings that have significance for that person, meanings which are always to some extent fantasmatically shared with others. These meanings come from the world of bodily experience, parental behaviours and dicta, extended familial practices and beliefs, the school environment, and the larger social world. Of course, people sometimes overlap in their habitation of these worlds: siblings, schoolmates, neighbors, party members, fellow religionists, countrymen, and conlinguists may share signifiers and contexts. Yet the significance invested in even the most closely overlapping elements may be radically different from person to person — and from time to time for the same person. Even children raised in the same house have different experiences and attach different meanings to the same events, parental actions, family narratives, and emotional states taking place in their home environments (88).

rothenberg molly excessive subjects

I am reading a book that is interfering with my work on Butler, however it doesn’t seem too tangential. It’s by Molly Anne Rothenberg, Excessive Subjects.  It’s a re-thinking of social theory from the perspective of a retelling of the Žižekian tale only this time exposing the critical Lacanian insights in more detail, and talking way slower than Žižek.  Plus Rothenberg includes some nice chapters on Butler and Laclau, so I’m dying to read the rest of the book.

pluth subject and signifiers

Pluth, Ed. Signifiers and Acts: Freedom in Lacan’s Theory of the Subject. New York: SUNY Press, 2007.

Signifiers are not a medium the subject uses to communicate

Rather, just as meaning rigorously speaking, never occurs as a hard and fast relation between a signifier and signified, although there is a meaning effect or signified effect, there is also a subject effect that occurs due to the interaction of signifiers (40).

“You ask me who this person in the dream can be. It’s not my mother”

The “not” is an attempt to efface the signifier “mother” and to lead the analyst to believe that the analysand’s true thoughts are elsewhere, that the dream had nothing to do with his or her mother. This battle against a signifier in signifiers allows us to see how the conscious subject, the ego, is at odds with another tendency, a tendency that the signifier “mother” manages to represent (42).

Signifiers, despite our conscious use of them, despite our illusory control over their emergence and our illusory belief in our control over how they are to be taken and read, reveal that there is a subject in a place other than the conscious speaking subject’s place.  This is the kind of subject Lacan theorizes.

Signifiers … are indifferent to the conscious subject’s (the ego’s) intentions.  Where the analysand wishes to deceive the analyst is where there is truth: this is the very structure of the “false false” and is in fact the strucuture of the basic functions of the unconscious — puns, parapraxes, dreams, and slips of the tongue.  The unconscious produces signifiers that can be embellished by negations, but which are in fact true (42).

The truth appears despite our attempts to falsify it, or rather, the truth appears because of our attempts to falsify it.  One always says more than one intends. So the signifier is in excess of the intention of the conscious subject.  It is in this signifying excess, in saying more than we meant to, that the subject effect is to be situated, and not in consciousness, where we struggle to use signifiers to get a meaning across (42).