undoinggender – objet (a)

hegel recognition jessica benjamin

Butler, Judith. “Longing for Recognition: Commentary on the Work of Jessica Benjamin” (2000) in Undoing Gender. New York: Routledge, 2004. Print.

When Hegel introduces the notion of recognition in the section on lordship and bondage in The Phenomenology of Spirit, he narrates the primary encounter with the Other in terms of self-loss. “Self-consciousness … has come out of itself. … it has lost itself, for it finds itself as an other being” (Phenomenology 111). One might understand Hegel to be describing merely a pathological state in which a fantasy of absorption by the Other constitutes an early or primitive experience. But he is saying something more. He is suggesting that whatever consciousness is, whatever the self is, will find itself only through a reflection of itself in another.

To be itself, it must pass through self-loss, and when it passes through, it will never be “returned” to what it was. To be reflected in or as another will have a double significance for consciousness, however, since consciousness will, through the reflection, regain itself in some way. But it will, by virtue of the external status of the reflection, regain itself as external to itself and, hence, continue to lose itself. (147)

Thus, the relationship to the Other will be, invariably, ambivalent. The price of self-knowledge will be self-loss, and the Other poses the possibility of both securing and undermining self-knowledge. What becomes clear, though, is that the self never returns to itself free of the Other, that its “relationality” become constitutive of who the self is.
Hegel has given us an ek-static notion of the self, one which is, of necessity, outside itself, not self-identical, differentiated from the start. It is the self over here who considers its reflection over there, but it is equally over there, reflected, and reflecting. Its ontology is precisely to be divided and spanned in irrecoverable ways. Indeed, whatever self emerges in the course of the Phenomenology of Spirit is always at a temporal remove from its former appearance;

it is transformed through its encounter with alterity, not in order to return to itself, but to become a self it never was. Difference casts it forth into an irreversible future.

To be a self is, on these terms, to be at a distance from who one is, not to enjoy the prerogative of self-identity (what Hegel calls self-certainty), but to be cast, always, outside oneself, Other to oneself. I believe that this conception of the self emphasizes a different Hegel from the one found in Benjamin’s work. It is surely one for which the metaphor of “inclusion,” as in “the inclusive self” would not quite work. 148

[…] I would suggest that the ek-static notion of the self in Hegel resonates in some ways with this notion of the self that invariably loses itself in the Other who secures that self’s existence. The “self” here is not the same as the subject, which is a conceit of autonomous self-determination. The self in Hegel is marked by a primary enthrallment with the Other, one in which that self is put at risk. The moment in “Lordship and Bondage” when the two self-consciousnesses come to recognize one another is, accordingly, in the “life and death struggle,” the moment in which they each see the shared power they have to annihilate the Other and, thereby, destroy the condition of their own self-reflection. Thus, it is at a moment of fundamental vulnerability that recognition becomes possible, and need becomes self-conscious. What recognition does at such a moment is, to be sure, to hold destruction in check. But what it also means is that the self is not its own, that it is given over to the Other in advance of any further relation, but in such a way that the Other does not own it either. And the ethical content of its relationship to the Other is to be found in this fundamental and reciprocal state of being “given over.” In Hegel, it would only be partially true to say that the self comes to “include” the Other. For the self is always other to itself, and so not a “container” or unity that might “include” Others within its scope.

On the contrary, the self is always finding itself as the Other, becoming Other to itself, and this is another way of marking the opposite of “incorporation.” It does not take the Other in; it finds itself transported outside of itself in an irreversible relation of alterity. In a sense, the self “is” this relation to alterity. 149-150

Although Benjamin sometimes refers to “postmodern” conceptions of the self that presume its “split” and “decentered” character, we do not come to know what precisely is meant by these terms. It will not do to say that there is first a self and then it engages in spllitting, since the self as I am outlining it here is beyond itself from the start, and defined by this ontological ek-stasis, this fundamental relation to the Other in which it finds itself ambiguously installed outside itself. This model is, I would suggest, one way of disputing any claim concerning the self-sufficiency of the subject or, indeed, the incorporative character of all identification. ….

If we assume that the self exists and then it splits, we assume that the ontological status of the self is self-sufficient before it undergoes its splitting (an Aristophanic myth, we might say, resurrected within the metapsychology of ego psychology). But this is not to understand the ontological primacy of relationality itself and its consequences for thinking the self in it necessary (and ethically consequential) disunity. 150

yes, it is necessary to say that the subject splits, but it does not follow from that formulation that the subject was a single whole or autonomous. For if the subject is both split and splitting, it will be necessary to know what kind of split was inaugurative, what kind is undergone as a contingent psychic event, and how those different levels of splitting relate to one another, if at all.

It is, then, one perspective on relationality derived from Hegel which claims that the self seeks and offers recognition to another, but it is another which claims that the very process of recognition reveals that the self is always already positioned outside itself. This is not a particularly “postmodern” insight, since it is derived from German idealism and earlier medieval ecstatic traditions. It simply avows that that “we” who are relational do not stand apart from those relations and cannot think of ourselves outside of the decentering effects that that relationality entails.

Moreover, when we consider that the relations by which we are defined are NOT DYADIC, but always refer to a historical legacy and futural horizon that is not contained by the Other, but which constitutes something like the Other of the Other, then it seems to follow that who we “are” fundamentally is a subject in a temporal chain of desire that only occasionally and provisionally assumes the form of the dyad.

I want to reiterate that displacing the binary model for thinking about relationality will also help us appreciate the triangulating echoes in heterosexual, homosexual, and bisexual desire, and complicate our understanding of the relation between sexuality and gender. 151

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?

Butler on kinship and symbolic

Butler, Judith. “Quandaries of the Incest Taboo” (2000) in Undoing Gender. 2004, 152-160.

To insist that kinship is inaugurated through linguistic and symbolic means which are emphatically not social is, I believe, to miss the point that kinship is a contingent social practice. In my view, there is no symbolic position of Mother and Father that is not precisely the idealization and ossification of contingent cultural norms. 158

Thus, the law that would secure the incest taboo as the foundation of symbolic family structure states the universality of the incest taboo as well as its necesary symbolic consequences. One of the symblic consequences of the law so formulated is precisely the derealization of lesbian and gay forms of parenting, singly-mother households, blended family arrangements in which there may be more than one mother or father, where the symblic position is itself dispersed and rearticulated in new social formations.

If one holds to the enduring symbolic efficacy of this law, then it seems to me that it becomes difficult, if not impossible, to conceive of incestuous practice as taking place. It also becomes difficult if not impossible, to conceive of the psychic place of the parent or parents in ways that challenge heterosexual normativity. Whether it is a challenge to the universality of exogamic heterosexuality from within (through incest) or from rival social organizations of sexuality (lesbian, gay, bisexual, as well as nonmonogamous), each of these departures from the norm becomes difficult to acknowledge within the scheme that claims that the efficacious incest taboo determines the field of sexual intelligibility. In a sense, incest is disavowed by the law on incest, and the forms of sexuality that emerge at a distance from the norm become unintelligible (sometimes, for instance, even psychosis-inducing, as when analysts argue in the structuralist vein that same-sex parenting risks psychosis in the children who are raised under such conditions). 158

It might then be necessary to rethink the prohibition on incest as that which sometimes protects against a violation, and sometimes becomes the very instrument of a violation. What counters the incest taboo offends not only because it often involves the exploitation of those whose capacity for consent is questionable, but because it exposes the aberration in normative kinship, an aberration that might also, importantly, be worked against the strictures of kinship to force a revision and expansion of those very terms. If psychoanalysis, in its theory and practice, retains heterosexual norms of kinship as the basis of its theorization, if it accepts these norms as coextensive with cultural intelligibility, then it, too, becomes the instrument by which this melancholia is produced at a cultural level. Or if it insists that incest is under taboo and, therefore, could not exist, what forfeiture of analytic responsibility toward psychic suffering is thereby performed? These are both surely discontents with which we do not need to live. 160

jb on braidotti butch desire sexual d

Braidotti argues that sexual difference is often rejected by theoriests because femininity is itself associated with a pejorative understanding of tis meaning. She dislikes this pejorative use of the term, but thinks that the term itself can be releaased into a different future. … But is it fair to say that those who oppose this framework therefore demean or debase femininty …. If is fair to say that those who do not subscribe to this framework are therefore against the feminine, or even misogynist? It seems to me that the future symbolic will be one in which femininity has multiple possibilities, where it is, as Braidotti herself claims, released from the demand to be one thing, or to comply with a singular norm, the norm devised for it by phallogocentric means.

But must the framework for thinking about sexual difference be binary for this feminine multiplicity to emerge? Why can’t the framework for sexual difference itself move beyond binarity into multiplicity? (196-197)

Butch Desire

There may be women who love women, who even love what we might call “femininity,” but who cannot find a way to understand their own love through the category of women or as a permutation of femininity. Butch desire may, … be experienced as part of “women’s desire,” but it can also be experienced, that is, named and interpreted, as a kind of masculinity, one that is not to be found in men. There are many ways of approaching this issue of desire and gender. We could immediately blame the butch community, and say that they/we are simply antifeminine or that we have disavowed a primary femininity, but then we would be left with the quandary that for the most part (but not exclusively) butches are deeply, if not fatally, attracted to the feminine and, in this sense, love the feminine.

We could say, extending Braidotti’s frame of reference, that this negative judgement of butch desire is an example of what happens when the feminine is defined too narrowly as an instrument of phallogocentrism, namely, that the full range of possible femininity is not encompassed within its terms, and that butch desire ought properly to be described as another permutation of feminine desire. This last view seeks a more open account of femininity, one that goes against the grain of the phallogocentric version. … But if there is masculinity at work in butch desire, that is, if that is the name through which that desire comes to make sense, then why shy away from the fact that there may be ways that masculinity emerges in women, and that feminine and masculine do not belong to differently sexed bodies? Why shouldn’t it be that we are at an edge of sexual difference for which the language of sexual difference might not suffice, and that this follows, in a way, from an understanding of the body as constituted by, and constituting, multiple forces? If this particular construction of desire exceeds the binary frame, or confounds its terms, why could it not be an instance of the multiple play of forces that Braidotti accepts on other occasions? (197-198).

I just think that heterosexuality doesn’t belong exclusively to heterosexuals. Moreover, heterosexual practices are not the same as heterosexual norms; heterosexual normativity worries me and becomes the occasion of my critique. No doubt, practicing heterosexuals have all kinds of critical and comedic perspectives on heterosexual normativity. On the occasions where I have sought to elucidate a heterosexual melancholia, that is, a refulsal of homosexual attachment that emerges within heterosexuality as the consolidation of gender norms (“I am a woman, therefore I do not want one”), I am trying to show how a prohibition on certain forms of love becomes installed as an ontological truth about the subject: The “am” of “I am a man” encodes the prohibition “I may not love a man,” so that the ontological claim carries the force of prohibition itself. This only happens, however, under conditions of melancholia, and it does not mean that all heterosexuality is structured in this way or that there cannot be plain “indifference” to the question of homosexuality on the part of some heterosexuals rather than unconscious repudiation … Neither do I mean to suggest that I support a developmental model in which first and foremost there is homosexual love, and then that love becomes repressed, and then heterosexuality emerges as a consequence. I do find it interesting, though, that this account would seem to follow from Freud’s own postulates.

I firmly support Braidotti’s view, for instance, that a child is always in love with a mother whose desire is directed elsewhere, and that this triangulation makes sense as the condition of the desiring subject. If this is her formulation of oedipalization, then neither of us rejects oedipalization, although she will not read oedipalization through the lack, and I will incorporate prohibition in my account of compulsory heterosexuality. It is only according to the model that posits heterosexual disposition in the child as a given, that it makes sense to ask, as Freud asked in The Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, how heterosexuality is accomplished. In other words, only within the thesis of a primary heterosexuaity does the question of a prior homosexuality emerge, since there will have to be some account given of how heterosexuality becomes established. My critical engagement with these developmental schemes has been to show how the theory of heterosexual dispositions presupposes what would defeat it, namely a preheterosexual erotic history from which it emerges. If there is a triangularity that we call oedipalization, it emerges only on the basis of a set of prohibitions or constraints. Although I accept that triangularity is no doubt a condition of desire, I also have trouble accepting it. The trouble is no doubt a sign of its working, since it is what introduces difficulty into desire, psychoanalytically considered (199-200).

What interests me most however, is disarticulating oedipalization from the thesis of a primary or universalized heterosexuality (200).

JB sexual d irigaray

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

social transformation

“The Question of Social Transformation” in Undoing Gender. Routledge. 2004. pp. 204-231. First appeared in Spanish Mujeres y transormaciones sociales, with Lidia Puigvert and Elizabeth Beck Gernsheim. 2002.

In this essay JB writes less theoretically, and in a style that is almost chatty. JB states:

[…] we norms in order to live, and to live well, and to know in what direction to transform our social world, we are also constrained by norms in ways that sometimes do violence to us and which, for reasons of social justice, we oppose.

ohhh, this is good, here JB talks about the “double meaning” of normativity.

[…] On the one hand it refers to the aims and aspirations that guide us, the precepts by which we are compelled to act or speak to one another, the commonly held presuppositions by which we are oriented, and which give direction to our actions.

On the other hand, normativity refers to the process of normalization, the way that certain norms, ideas and ideals hold sway over embodied life, provide coercive criteria for normal “men” and “women”. And in this second sense, we see that norms are what govern “intelligble” life, “real” men and “real” women. And that when we defy these norms, it is unclear whether we are still living, or ought to be, whether our lives are valuable, or can be made to be, whether our genders are real, or ever can be regarded as such.