Bruce Fink’s take on Christopher Bollas (it isn’t pretty)
Note that Bollas (1983), who is referenced by many relationalists, tried to co-opt Lacan’s term Other by situating the Other in himself as analyst. He wrote, “It is a feature of our present day understanding of the transference, that the Other source of the analysand’s free association is the psychoanalyst’s countertranference” (p.3). This reduces the triad Lacan presented as crucial to the analytic situation — the analysand’s ego, the Other (as the analysand’s unconscious), and the analyst’s ego — to a dyad, which amounts to a collapse of the symbolic dimension into the imaginary. For example, rather than simply ask his analysand “Helen” why she thought she often lapsed into silence (or what was going through her mind at such times, to see if anything had occurred to her from the Freudian “Other scene” known as the unconscious — the “anderer Schauplatz” that Freud 1900/1958 pp. 48 and 536, borrows from Fechner — or if anyone had ever lapsed into silence like that with her in the past, to see if the pauses were related to her history) Bollas responded to her by saying that it must be difficult for her “to speak to this stranger (the analyst) and … to entrust the simplest things to him” (p. 13). This total presumption on his part is based on his own sense of what it must be like to talk to someone new (many of my analysands, for example, have no such trouble at the outset). Moreover, this interpretation, like several others he made based on his countertransference, had little if any effect, and Helen’s silences only seemed to stop when they were connected the experience of her mother — that is, her history with her mother. Note that this is probably what she would have told him at the outset ( that is, approximately a year earlier) had he simply asked if anyone had ever lapsed into silence like that with her in the past, since it was her mother who had done so. The detour he took via his own subjectivity — that is, his attempt to understand her experience through his own experience of himself with her in the analytic setting — seems quite sterile, requiring him to make a series of guesses based on his own personality and countertranference, none of which really seem to hit the mark. And this detour (this attempt to fathom her subjectivity on the bases of his own subjectivity) is necessitated by his failure to ask one of the most elementary questions imaginable. [Fundamentals of Psychoanalytic Technique: A Lacanian Approach for Practitioners. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2007. Page 149. note 26.]
Tag: givingaccount
Butler take on Bollas
The analyst is, in her own way, dispossessed in the moment of acting as its site of transfer for me, and for reason that I cannot know. What am I calling on her to be? And how does she take up that call? GA 55
… Bollas makes the case that the analyst must not only allow himself to become used but even “be prepared on occasion to become situationally ill” (Bollas 204). The analyst allows hims to be deployed in the environmental idiom of the analysand at the same time as he develops a reflective and deliberate capacity for analysis within that difficult situation. … One patient speaks and then falls silent, leaving Bollas with a sense of aloneness and disorientation. When he finally gives voice to this sense within the session, it is to suggest that for and with him the patient has effectively recreated the environment in which she had felt suddenly isolated and lost as a young child. He asks whether she has asked him to inhabit this experience through her long pauses so that he can know what it was she then felt. What she offers, then, is less a narrative than a recreated scene of suddenly abandoned communication and a disorienting loss of contact.
There is a narrative dimension to his subsequent intervention since he asks whether this experience belongs to her past. The point, however, is less to reconstruct the precise details of the story than to establish another possibility for communication within the transference.
When he suggests that she has given him the position of re-experiencing her own experience of loss and absence, he communicates to her in a way that has not been done before, and the conversation that follows, explicitly thematizing this broken form of communication, constitutes a more connected mode of communication, working to alter the default scene of address.
The model of psychoanalytic intervention that Bollas affirms constitutes a significant departure from the classical notion of the cold and distant analyst who keeps every counter-transferential issue to himself. For Bollas, “the analyst will need to become lost in the patient’s world, lost in the sense of not knowing what his feelings and states of mind are in any one moment” (qtd in Butler 57).
Later he remarks that only when the analyst presents himself to be used by the patient is there any hope that the counter-transference can facilitate a new set of object relations:
“Only by making a good object (the analyst) go somewhat mad can such a patient believe in his analysis and know that the analyst has been where he has been and has survived and emerged intact” (qtd in Butler 57).
Bollas clearly suggests that the analyst must allow him- or herself to be impinged upon by the client, even undergo a kind of dispossession of self, as well as to maintain a reflective psychoanalytic distance and attitude.
His interpretations were meant to be played with — kicked around, mulled over, torn to pieces — rather than regarded as the official version of the truth. [Bollas qtd in Butler 57].
Butler structure of address
If I give an account, and give it to you, then my narrative depends upon a structure of address. But if I can address you, I must first have been addressed, brought into the structure of address as a possibility of language before I was able to find my own way to make use of it. This follows, not only from the fact that language first belongs to the other and I acquire it through a complicated form of mimesis, but also because the very possibility of linguistic agency is derived from the situation in which one finds oneself addressed by a language one never chose. GA 53
I would suggest that the structure of address is not a feature of narrative, one of its many and variable attributes, but an interruption of narrative. The moment the story is addressed to someone, it assumes a rhetorical dimension that is not reducible to a narrative function. It presumes that someone, and it seeks to recruit and act upon that someone. Something is being done with language when the account that I give begins: it is invariably interlocutory, ghosted, laden, persuasive, and tactical. It may well seek to communicate a truth, but it can do this, if it can, only by exercising a relational dimension of language. GA 63
This view has implications for the making of moral judgements as well: namely, that the structure of address conditions the making of judgements about someone or his or her actions; that it is not reducible to the judgement; and that the judgement, unbeholden to the ethics implied by the structure of address, tends toward violence. … To hold a person accountable for his or her life in narrative form may even be to require a falsification of that life in order to satisfy the criterion of a certain kind of ethics, one that tends to break with relationality. GA 63
.. we must think of a susceptibility to others that is unwilled , unchosen, that is a condition of our responsiveness to others, even a condition of our responsibility for them. It means, among other things, that this susceptibility designates a nonfreedom and, paradoxically, it is on the basis of this susceptaibility over which we have no choice that we become responsible for others. GA 87-88
“Perhaps most importantly, we must recognize that ethics requires us to risk ourselves precisely at moments of unknowingness, when what forms us diverges from what lies before us, when our willingness to become undone in relation to others constitutes our chance of becoming human. To be undone by another is a primary necessity, an anguish, to be sure, but also a chance—to be addressed, claimed, bound to what is not me, but also to be moved, to be prompted to act, to address myself elsewhere, and so to vacate the self-sufficient ‘I’ as a kind of possession. If we speak and try to give an account from this place, we will not be irresponsible, or, if we are, we will surely be forgiven.”
butler Hegel life as sociality
Public lecture presented by the Humanities and Arts Research Centre of Royal Holloway, the School of Psychosocial Studies (Birkbeck) and the Birkbeck Institute for Social Research 4th February, 2009.
Norms constitute specific ontologies of the Subject, historically contingent ontologies, being of the subject given over to norms, to be a body is to be exposed to social crafting and form, the body is a social ontology, NORMATIVE PRODUCTION OF ONTOLOGY, HISTORICALLY CONTINGENT ONTOLOGY
Our very capacity to discern and name the being of the subject is dependent on norms that facilitate that recognition.
differential allocation of precarity
Apprehension of precariousness leads to heightening of violence, insight into vulnerability increases desire to destroy them
Butler on Hegel
At begin of Lordship and Bondage: a self-consciousness sees another self-consciousness and is scandalized by this event.
Some Other appears, at first that Other appears to be me, how is it possible that this is me over there? How can I account for this apparent distance between me over there and the “I” who regards this “me”.
If I have come outside myself then I am no longer localized and this tells me something new about who I am, my relation to space. If I am no longer localized, I am not fully or in exclusively a bounded being, I have the capacity to appear elsewhere.
I am a kind of being here and there apparently at once. I can as it were face myself, and this involves a certain amount of self-loss. I am then not quite bounded in space as I apparently assumed, this unboundedness by which I am now characterized, seems bound up as it were with a redoubling of myself. The I seems to have become 2.
The problem is that the Other whom I face, is in some sense me and is some sense not-me. I encounter myself at a spatial distance re-doubled. I encounter at the same time and through the same figure the limit to what I can call myself. Both of these things happen at the same time, but this does not mean that these two encounters are reconciled. On the contrary they exist in a certain tension with one another. This Other who appears to be me is at once me and not-me. So what I have to live with is not just the fact that I have become 2, but that I can be found at a distance from myself and what I find at that distance is also and at once not myself.
This Other who appear as me is at once me and not-me. I encounter myself at a spatial distance redoubled.
—————-
Hegel has established through these steps the constitutive sociality of this self-consciousness. The apprehension of the Other as a living being, one whose living is like my own is essential to this process of developing a social bond. There’s a shape over there, a living one and its understood as belonging to this or that living thing.
The living consciousness can only return to its absolute singularity by risking its own life, but dead that living consciousness cannot achieve the self-certainty it seeks. So the question becomes, how best to live and how best to live with others. The defensive effort to shore up one’s singularity in the face of a duplication or substitutability is apparently overwhelming, but is only by considering
Singularity and Substitutability without a dialectical synthesis that an ethical opening to the other can take place.
Who is this I who is on the one hand substitutable and yet also singularly alive on some other hand. If this “I” is to register its substitutability it has to survive as this singular life to do precisely that. In other words its singularity is the precondition of its understanding of substitutability and is presupposed logically by the idea of substitution itself which involves replacing one term by another.
The Non-substitutable, is the persistent, logical and existential condition of substitutability. As much as the “I” might be threatened by negation or threatens the other with negation, so it is clear that the life of the one is dependent on the life of the other. This interdependency becomes a new way of conceiving of life as sociality. Sociality cannot be reduced to the existence of this identity or that identity, this group or that group, but is the open temporal trajectory of interdependency and desire, struggle, fear, murderous dispositions as well as the desire to maintain and repair social bonds.
So although I find my departure here in Hegel, I move in at least two distinct directions:
1. The ethical necessity of a non-coincidence of singularity and substitutability. I’m not interested in a dialectical synthesis of those two terms. The ethical demand to live both singularity and substitutability as an ongoing paradox is something that I affirm.
2. There can be no recognition of my life being like another’s life except through the specific social norms that allow certain populations to emerge as living beings and others to be considered as non-living, as only partially living, or as actually figuring a threat to life itself.
We cannot remain dependent on existing and already established norms of recognition, if we are to try to expand our understanding not only of who deserves to live, who lives are worth protecting but more fundamentally whose lives count as lives and whose lives are finally grievable.
The problems is not merely to include more people in the existing norms but to consider how existing norms allocate recognition differentially? What new norms are possible and how are they wrought.
What might be done to produce a more egalitarian set of conditions for recognizablity. What might be done in other words to shift the very terms of recognizability in order to to produce more radically democratic results.
New egalitarian norms of recognizability.
butler scene of address
Third International Conference of the Whitehead Research Project
Date: December 3-5, 2009
Location: Claremont, California
Judith Butler at the Claremont Graduate School, School of Art and Humanities. Look for it on Itunes or here In her 2 hour talk with students on her book Giving Account of Oneself I found this to be one of her most interesting points. She made this in response to a question at 1:18:30 into the talk.
When we strive for the single, the one account. When we are asked to give an account even of an accident, we go back and tell the story one way, and then another way, we give different accounts at different times, each of these accounts produce a constellation, so there has to be a revisability that should not be understood as falsification, each of these accounts produce a constellation that gives us a more complex idea of what happened.
But when we come to the question of identity, if we say I am this and this and also this and we try to undo the logic of “non-contradiction” that governs our statements about what we are. I am not this, I am rather this and this. I am both, I am both and more. But we are still within what Foucault calls the “regime of ontology.” I’m still trying to determine what I am, I’m just doing it multiplee (multiply? multiple? Judy pronounces it with a long ‘e’ sound, as in ‘multiplicity’).
But maybe the thing is to NOT determine who I am whether singly or multiplee, but to be engaged in a kind of scene of address to oneself, to another, to a set of others, where those terms get re-worked in ways that make a difference, then we are less interested in determining who we are singly or multiply than in some act of communication, or some act of avowing and articulating a relationship which is more ethically significant than establishing who I am. I guess I would displace the framework to some degree.
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).
butler move from hegel
We are not mere dyads on our own, since our exchange is conditioned and mediated by language, by conventions, by a sedimentation of norms that are social in character and that exceed the perspective of those involved in the exchange (28)
Post-Hegelians like Adriana Cavarero ask “who are you” and thus try to suggest that Hegel’s dialectic of recognition gets it wrong when it envelopes the other within the “I.” Although as Butler points out, Hegel reveals the shortcomings of the Master and Slave dyad of recognition, requiring a further incorporation under the sphere of ethics or sittlich.., Butler is drawing parallels between Hegel’s ethical sphere and structure of normativity that underscores the ability for one to recognize an other.
Whereas The Phenomenology of Spirit moves from the scenario of the dyad toward a social theory of recognition, for Caverero it is necessary to ground the social in the dyadic encounter. She writes: “The “you” comes before the we, before the plural you and before the they.
Susceptibility to others that is unwilled, unchosen, that is a condition of our responsiveness to others, even a condition of our responsibility for them. It means, among other things, that this susceptibility designates a nonfreedom and, paradoxically, it is on the basis of this susceptibility over which we have no choice that we become responsible for others (87-88).
butler laplanche
Jean Laplanche contends that the limit to full articulation arrives, not because of a Lacanian “bar” that forecloses the return to a primary jouissance, but because of the overwhelming and enigmatic impressions made by the adult world in its specificity on the child. For Laplanche, there is no Other in some symbolic sense, just the various others who constiutute the caregiving adults in a child’s world. Indeed, for Laplanche there is no reason to assume that these caregivers must be oedipally organized as “father” and “mother.”
Note 19, page 142: Fletcher makes clear that Laplanche’s recourse to the “adult world” as the source of sexual messages is a significant departure from psychoanalytic accounts that assume that an Oedipal scene with Mother and Father structures desire at a primary level. … Fletcher notes that Laplanche’s theory of the “enigmatic signifier” emerges as a clear alternative to the Lacanian symbolic.
This counters the paternal law, linked to the structuralist account of the exchange of women and the universalist premises of “culture,” with a conception of the enigmatic signifier, which assumes not only that primary unconscious and sexual messages are impressed upon the child (constituting the meaning and efficacy of “primary seduction”) but that the primary others who make those impressions are themselves in teh grip of similar messages, which can never be fully decoded or recovered.
Fletcher asserts that Laplanche has clearly inaugurated a psychoanalytic possibility for explaining “those psychic trajectories that swerve from or attempt to rework the normalizing function of the paternal Law and its Oedipal polarities (e.g., various female and male homosexualities).” Although Fletcher does not show us precisely how this might work, he holds out this possibility as following from the displacement of the paternal law by the enigmatic signifier.
Second, he (Fletcher) points to a future project, namely, how to account for gender in the wake of the Oedipus’s displacement from primacy: “What Laplanche’s reworking of the drives in the context of primary seduction now leaves unclear or untheorised, is how the psychic constitution and inscription of a sexually and genitally differentiated body image (the repression and symbolization of what enigmatic signifiers?), the ground or at least terrain from the formation of gendered identities, is now to be rethought”
butler desire recognition
The norms by which I seek to make myself recognizable are not fully mine (35).
To revise recognition as an ethical project, we will need to see it as, in principle, unsatisfiable (43).
🙂 Butler maintains that going back to some of her earliest debates over the perils of seeking to come establish common principles on the identity of political subjects in order to engage in political action. At that time Butler discouraged attempts to discipline the feminist subject around a core set of features. But the debate has matured greatly since those early days. Now the political salience of fluid identities has been displaced by Butler who rejects the ontological moorings that would even lay claim to any claim of an ‘identity’ as an ontology of ‘identity’ is rejected. For Butler, it isn’t that identities are bad, or not useful, of course we have identities to a certain degree to function every day, however, in the realm of politics, of being addressed, of having to give an account in various state and other social institutional frames, immigration hearing, marriage ceremony, citizenship hearing, child adoption, job application, and other social arrangements and institutional settings that require one to give an account and stand in judgement of that account. Butler’s ethico-political project is to overturn and open up the the normative frames within which these institution function. The formation of the subject relies on a social ontology and for Butler this means that she underscores the importance of relations that humans depend upon in order for a human life to flourish. Relations with primary caregivers at the start of life, relations with other sentient life forms and the environment, all figure in to Butler’s project of a non-anthropocentric conception of the human
even a non-anthropocentric philosophical anthropology. The other way of saying this is that wherever the human is, it is always outside of itself in the non-human, or it is always distributed among beings, among human and non-human beings, chiasmically related through the idea of precarious life. So we can neither lodge the human in the self, nor ground the self in the human, but find instead the relations of exposure and responsibility that constitute the “being” of the human in a sociality outside itself, even outside its human-ness. (interview in 2009 Theory and Event)
… desire sets the limits and the conditions for the operation of recognition itself. Indeed, a certain desire to persist, we might say, following Spinoza, underwrites recognition, so that forms of recognition or, indeed, forms of judgment that seek to relinquish or destroy the desire to persist, the desire for life itself, undercut the very preconditions of recognition (44).
This failure to narrate fully may well indicate the way in which we are, from the start, ethically implicated in the lives of others. Although some would say that to be a split subject, or a subject whose access to itself is forever opaque, incapable of self-grounding, is precisely not to have the grounds for agency and the conditions for accountability, the way in which we are, from the start, interrupted by alterity may render us incapable of offering narrative closure for our lives. The purpose here is not to celebrate a certain notion of incoherence, but only to point out that our “incoherence” establishes the way in which we are constituted in relationality: implicated, beholden, derived, sustaind by a social world that is beyond us and before us (64).
butler post-hegelian
Butler, Judith. Giving An Account of Oneself. New York: Fordham UP, 2005. Print.
On Recognition: Hegel says I see you, you see me, we’re the same, you and me, looking at each other. For Hegel, the other is at first outside itself, before the subject realizes that “hey, this other is actually alot like me.” In fact this other is constitutive of the subject. Some say this makes Hegel into an imperialist, going around appropriating the other as part of the subject itself. However, others, like Butler, see in Hegel, a more ecstatic subject:
the “I” repeatedly finds itself outside itself, and that nothing can put an end to the repeated upsurge of this exteriority that is, paradoxically, my own. I am, as it were, always other to myself, and there is no final moment in which my return to myself takes place. In fact, if we are to follow The Phenomenology of Spirit, I am invariably transformed by the encounters I undergo; recognition becomes the process by which I become other than what I was and so cease to be able to return to what I was. There is, then, a constitutive loss in the process of recognition, since the “I” is transformed through the act of recognition. Not all of its past is gathered and known in the act of recognition; the act alters the organization of that past and its meaning at the same time that it transforms the present of the one who receives recognition. Recognition is an act in which the “return to self” becomes impossible for another reason as well. An encounter with an other effects a transformation of the self from which there is no return. What is recognized about a self in the course of the exchange is that the self is the sort of being for whom staying inside itself proves impossible. One is compelled and comported outside oneself; one finds that the only way to know oneself is through a mediation that takes place outside of oneself, exterior to oneself, by virtue of a convention or a norm that one did not make, in which one cannot discern oneself as an author or an agent of one’s own making. In this sense, then, the Hegelian subject of recognition is one for whom a vacillation between loss and ecstasy is inevitable. The possibility of the “I,” of speaking and knowing the “I,” resides in a perspective that dislocates the first-person perspective it conditions (27-28).