Tag: whoa

pluth other’s desire mirror stage

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

In the mirror stage, I am presented with an image (or a signifier, a unary trait, in Lacan’s later revision of the mirror stage), and I get identified with it.  Lacan’s article on the mirror stage does not offer a very satisfactory account of how this identification happens. It just seems to happen.

In Lacan’s later discussion of the mirror stage, we do get an account of why mirror-stage identification occurs. It occurs because the Other identifies me with the image. This is my motivation to identify with the image.  It is as if my identity is already “out there,” affirmed by the Other as “me” before I have anything to do with it (72).

A subject is not consciousness

nor is it a “vital immanence.” We have already seen that Lacan rejects these ideas.

When the idea of the Other’s desire is added to this account of identity, the subject can finally be conceived as something that is neither consciousness nor an ineffable lived experience. In other words, the Other’s desire makes it possible to account for how a subject is something other than its identity or its ego.  In the encounter with the Other’s desire I am given neither an image nor a signifier for what I am, and I am not encouraged by the other to identify with anything.  The Other’s desire is in this way different from the Other’s affirmation of a place for me in identification.  With respect to the Other’s desire, I am without a place.  I am not even really addressed by the Other. … The Other’s desire is not at all directed toward me (73).

butler 2008 italy

Excerpt from “Antigone’s Claim: A Conversation With Judith Butler”
Theory & Event Volume 12, Issue 1, 2009

This conversation was held in Pordenone, Italy, in September 2008, during a major cultural event that takes place every year. What follows is an expanded version of our conversation, including a few questions she received from the public and a few more questions that Judith Butler kindly took from us after the event.

Your work has attracted much attention both in America and outside of America, and your books are translated in many languages. What kind of audience do you have in mind when you write philosophy (We are still thinking of Giving an Account of Oneself)? Who is your implied reader?

Judy Butler: Let me say two things in response. I’m not sure I set out to write philosophy. I think sometimes I write philosophically. But those might be different things, to write philosophically and to write philosophy. When one writes philosophy one usually tries to stay within a genre that will be regarded as philosophical, or in accord with a protocol that has been accepted as part of philosophy. In either case, one writes in relation to the norm that governs philosophical thought at a given time. I consider philosophy as a resource, and it remains true that some of the questions I pose are derived from philosophical traditions. But it is very rarely the case that I actually write for a philosophy audience. Who, then, is my reader? When I write, I’m asking that question. Are you there? Who are you? I don’t have an image of the reader in mind; writing is more like an open petition, trying to find out whether there is someone there, opening up the place of the other within one’s own writing.

Maybe it would be worthwhile for me to go back for a moment to talk about what the questions are, because sometimes when I write I’m posing a set of questions to a reader, but that presupposes that the reader and I share some set of cultural predicaments. For instance, consider Simon De Beauvoir’s The Second Sex: do we call that philosophy or not? Is it a philosophical work? I would say yes. Does it stay within the boundaries of philosophy? No. She is asking relevant questions: what is a woman? Is a woman a person? Can she become a person? What does it mean to become a woman? In her work I saw that someone could take a philosophical question and bring it to bear on a concrete cultural and political problem. Consider Antigone. As we know, she buried her brother in spite of Creon’s order, and then, when she is asked to deny that she has done this, she enters a very interesting and particular position. Because she is not a citizen, she is not allowed to speak; she is prohibited from speaking, and yet she is compelled by the sovereign law to speak. So, when she does speak, she defies that law, and her speech exceeds the law that governs acceptable speech. To what extent, then, can Antigone figure for us in the position of the speaker who is outside of the accepted discourse, who nevertheless speaks, sometimes intelligently, sometimes critically, within and against that discourse? Perhaps the norms that govern philosophy work that way, producing a mimetic excess that questions the legitimacy of those norms. More broadly, these questions may have larger appeal and prove relevant to any number of people who are in minority positions or understand themselves as excluded from official public discourse – but somehow are still talking.

We read with great interest an unpublished paper in which you address a point that keeps coming up in your work, at least since the early 1990s. It is the question “who is the subject of responsibility?” In our post-Kantian world, the individual, by definition is subject of responsibility, while it seems that you question this standard assumption, criticizing its premises.

Judy Butler: Perhaps we might rephrase the question by asking, who qualifies as the subject of responsibility today? I know that under the Bush regime, the government promoted a very strong discourse about responsibility: the moral rationale for the devastation of the social welfare state was that individuals should take responsibility for themselves; the moral rationale for unilateral military incursions into sovereign nations has been that the US is understood to be responsible for the free world (I’m not sure, though, that the US will take its fair share of responsibility for the current economic crisis as a result of the deregulation of the stock market). The word is used in political ways that are quite interesting. In France and in Italy there is the term called ‘responsabilization’, which is the process of making citizens responsible for themselves – a process which would seem to contradict the very idea of selflegislation and self-formation that follows from Kantian notions of moral autonomy. “Responsibilization” is a way of describing a government procedure for the making of moral subjects. Not only is the government’s agency occluded by this term, but moralization in general seeks to ground behaviour and action in individual agents and so to deflect from the power of government in the regulated making of such subjects. It deflects as well from nongovernmental powers, including NGOs, that regulate who may become a subject of responsibility and who may not. In the US, we assume responsibility for the lives of those who are like us (and here “responsibility” means “compelled to make an intervention on behalf of”); we assume responsibility for the lives of Americans, but we don’t always recognize as a life those whose cultural backgrounds do not transparently conform to prevalent images of “our own,” especially when it is a question of racial difference and religious alterity.

The questions,’to whom am I responsible?’, ‘for whom am I responsible?’, seem, in these cases, to be limited in advance by the question, ‘with whom can I identify?’. And implicitly, if not forcibly, identification within the national frame assumes the kind of subject already recognizable to me, a subject, in other words, who poses no challenge to the norms of recognizability with which I operate. I confess that when I first started to think about responsibility I was worried primarily about forms of moralism, especially on the Left, where individuals with certain “subject positions” were held responsible for the entire history of social domination. I wanted then to think about a different idea of responsibility, one surely influenced by Levinas, but perhaps also by Arendt, that would not make responsibility into a purely individual matter. What interested me most was the idea that when I’m asked to take responsibility for my actions, I’m asked by someone, and this is also true when I pose such a question to myself. Derrida surely makes this clear in bringing out the sense of “response” in “responsibility”: I’m asked to respond to another human being, so I am already in a social situation. And if I am the one who asks myself to assume responsibility, I have become, through my own doubling, a social creature at the moment in which I pose the question. It is not just the fact of alterity, however, that makes the exchange a social one, but the fact that I am asked in a specific language or through a specific medium, and so am compelled to take responsibility in a language or medium that is understandable to the person who asks this of me; in that sense my efforts to take responsibility for myself are socially prompted and mediated, if not socially constructed, in a specific sense. Within such frameworks, we can situate moral theory within social theory essentially – and not contingently. I would suggest that the same holds for politics and political theory as well, since we have to ask about the political context in which the notion of responsibility emerges – and be able to parse the various meanings of “responsibility”. This is not, however, in my view, an effort to relativize and vanquish the use of the term, but to understand the concrete changes in political conditions that are necessary to establish responsibility on non-cynical grounds. The changing of those conditions is itself a responsibility, but it also leads to a realization of responsibility as part of the very process of instituting a more egalitarian and just organization of social life. This allows us to distinguish between spurious and non-spurious uses, even though the “spurious” is a risk to which any operative notion of responsibility is subject.

We see this most starkly when “responsibility” becomes one of the instruments for sustaining the condition of global irresponsibility, i.e., when under the Bush regime the US actively distinguishes between those populations worthy of protection and grief and those who are not. Let us hope that this modality changes substantially under the Obama administration.

We understand that the notion of “precarious life” is critical to your attempt at identifying the subject of responsibility. In fact, my life is precarious so long as I, as a subject, “am already in the hands of the other.” Could you elaborate on this point? If I, as a subject, am already in the hands of others, it means that I’ve lost a fundamental normative prerogative, meaning to consider my actions as consititutionally mine.

Judy Butler: (yay go judy!)

In the last two wars that the US has been fighting in Iraq and in Afghanistan, it has become very clear that the lives of US citizens, who were killed in 9/11, or the lives of US soldiers, are considered to be precious, are considered invaluable, grievable, openly grievable in public, and therefore made into heroic lives. But the lives that were taken in Iraq — and right now we can see it very clearly, when US army bombed a village in Pakistan, our ally, and it continues to disavow responsibility for this — are not considered lives at all, they are already dead before we killed them, they are already non-living before we deprive them of life. This is kind of schism that characterizes US foreign policy, but also public discourse in a number of venues, including the popular media. If we offer an alternative to this schism between lives that are grievable and lives that are ungrievable, it seems to me that we start with the presumption that human life is precarious life — I could also say that non-human life is also precarious life and that maybe precariousness links human and non-human life in ethically significant ways. When we start understanding our lives as precarious, we understand that we are linked to one another, but how can I take responsibility, how can I assume responsibility if I do not recognize that link?

When I say that we are already in the hands of others, or others are already in our hands, I’m saying that there is a link and that link is precariousness and it is by virtue of that link that we must assume responsibility for shared life.

You ask about what is properly “my own” – I think we can only lay claim to what is “my own” if there is someone before whom the claim is made and/or a language through which the claim is made legible. In this sense, “mineness” is made possible by sociality, and it is only secured through social and political arrangements; otherwise, it becomes a kind of madness.

Question:

You are wary of invocations of “global responsibility” since it is on the basis of such invocations that some countries seek to bring or install democracy in other countries. Carl Schmitt famously argued that “whoever invokes humanity is trying to cheat”… You see a moral puzzle in the ways people invoke global responsibility, and you point to a difficulty in determining whether such invocations are “responsible.” Is this talk of precarious life a way to go about the notion of “human rights” by possibly avoiding some of the difficulties (moral and theoretical) that such a notion (inevitably) involves?

Since I am, in general, less sure than Schmitt about who is cheating or how the cheat takes place, I would suggest that invoking humanity is ambivalent. For instance, when we (any of us) respond with horror when we witness the destruction of human life, is it because we recognize our common or shared “humanity” with those destroyed? Or is it that we become “humane” (and so give evidence to our own humanity) in reacting with a moral sentiment such as horror? What is less evident, but everywhere pressing, is the tacit framework presupposed by this burst of fierce and sudden sentiment. To the degree that certain scenes of destruction compel our horror more than others (equally destructive), it makes sense to ask, who is, without question, included and who is excluded from that humanity? In other words, which lives emblematize humanity, and which ones cannot so easily wield that signifying power?

So, one has to be critical about how and when the notion of humanity is invoked, but I am not convinced that it is always a lie or, indeed, a way of cheating. It is important to ask what it occludes, and how whatever it illuminates presupposes a consequential occlusion – one that turns the idea of “humanity” against the universality by which it is supported and seems, invariably, to reinstitute a certain anthropocentrism. As a result, I think it might be more helpful to consider instead a term such as ‘precarious life’ which, though it has strong resonances with the idea of humanity, functions very differently. There are at least two differences: the first is that

precarious life is a life that is shared in a specific sense: “shared life” is not simply a “life” that functions as a common element in which individuals participate on the order of a mathesis. Rather, it is common in the sense that we are reciprocally exposed and invariably dependent, not only on others, but on a sustained and sustainable environment.

Humanity seems to be a kind of defining ontological attribute, who I am, or who we are, that properly belongs to us as persons, and in that sense, it keeps the human within the humanistic frame. But what if our ontology has to be thought otherwise? If humans actually share a condition of precariousness, not only just with one another, but also with animals, and with the environment, then this constitutive feature of who we “are” undoes the very conceit of anthropocentrism. In this sense, I want to propose ‘precarious life’ as a non-anthropocentric framework for considering what makes life valuable.

Even when we ask the question, who is the human in human rights? In an effort to ground human rights in the conception of the human, we fail to ask what the human “is” such that it requires certain kinds of protections and entitlements. The “human” is not so much the presupposition of such a discourse, but a continually contested and rearticulated term. As a result, you find political organizations that at once expose the limits of the concept of the human and call for its reformulation: women’s human rights, the human rights of gays and lesbians, or the human rights of the physically challenged or the sans-papiers. Such populations are not only outside some conception of the “human” and requesting inclusions, but they are also establishing that precarious “outside” as the site from which certain kinds of claims can and should be made. If there is a language in which the claim is made, and if it is made before someone, then it establishes a social domain that exceeds the idea of the social presupposed by an historically contingent notion of human rights. Antigone, again, to be sure.

Question:
In your recent work, the focus on the “national subject” or the subject of violence or, for that matter, the subject of responsibility, has eclipsed the notion of a gendered subject, that had been a quite dominant issue in your work for almost twenty years. Here in Italy many people still think of Judith Butler as a feminist philosopher. Do you think this definition is still a valid one?

I am quite sure that I am a feminist thinker of some kind. Sometimes I am a feminist philosopher. I continue to work in feminism, and I will always work in feminism, there is no question about that. And maybe I am not always thinking in feminist terms, but if I am thinking that is probably a feminist achievement (laughs). I continue to work on transgender issues, on questions of violence on women, on sexual minorities; I work with clinical psychoanalysts to rethink the explanatory frameworks and categories that tend to pathologize sexual and gender minorities. That’s surely part of my ongoing work, and it will always be.

I would add that the idea of precarious life also emerges from a certain kind of feminist perspective, a critique of a certain presumptively masculine idea, embedded in classical liberal political forms, of the subject who is selfsufficient and a-social. Surely the critique of the idea that any of us can exist outside a condition of dependency is an important, enduring contribution of feminist theory and politics.

Perhaps what links my work on gender and my more recent work on war has to do with how social ontologies are regulated. I have been interested in how certain kinds of heterosexual frames and normative gender schemes make certain kinds of lives unliveable and ungrievable. That was an important dimension of AIDS activism, and remains one now, especially in light of the sufferings and losses on the African continent: it is very often a struggle to make certain kinds of lost life publicly grievable. The deaths by AIDS were not shameful deaths, but horrible deaths that deserved and deserve a public mourning. In a way, that point brought me to consider Antigone, her insistence on burying her brother even when the open public burial and grieving was against the law. The politics of mourning within war is clearly linked to that question of the distribution and regulation of grievable lives. How do we think about who is grievable and who is not, who is allowed to grieve openly and who is not? And what kind of public speech, parrhesia, is needed to call attention to the horrifying way that our capacity to feel horror is differentially distributed and naturalized?

As we titled this conversation “Antigone’s Claim”, so we may ask what would Antigone’s claim be for the present and how we understand her claim in the present. It seems to me that in insisting on the public grievability of lives, Antigone becomes for us a war critic who opposes the arbitrary and violent force of sovereignty. In a way, she stands in advance for precarious lives, including new immigrants, the sans-papiers, those who are without health insurance, those who are differentially affected by the global economy, questions of poverty, of illiteracy, religious minorities, and the physically challenged. That she, in some sense, becomes a figure through whom we can think what it means to understand certain lives as more precarious than others, who live out a precariousness so that others can engage in the fantasy of their impermeability and omnipotence.

Question:

Would it be possible to define your concept of “precarious life” as a new form of “humanism”?

Currently, I do not want a new humanism. If we ask what the human could be beyond humanism, then it seems we resituate the human within the non-human, not as a contingent fact of existence, but as a necessary ontology, an ontology that articulates certain constitutive bonds and binds. So I am struggling toward a non-anthropocentric conception of the human, if that is possible – 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.

Question:

You are defining the human in its frailty and at the limits of its capacity to make sense of the world. It’s a weak subject (although not in the sense of Vattimo’s). Do you see a form of universalism (perhaps the only one) in this idea? The universality of frailty, of mourning and loss? Are we relapsing though in a form of essentialism? Moreover, does this frailty entail a negative counterpart: the universality of violence, oppression, subjugation?

I am amused by this idea of a “relapse”! What is at stake is a way of thinking about what is ‘essential’ that implies a dispossession of the self. What strikes me as much more problematic is the idea of a self-aggrandizing subject, the kind that gets nationally instituted at times of war. But I am not just working with grief and frailty, but also with aggression and the various forms it takes. The point is to think about the frailty, the necessity, and the demands of the ties by which we are bound

In your book, you comment on Adriana Cavarero’s work, as much as she borrows from you in her Orrorismo, for instance regarding the vulnerability of the subject or the ethics of self-narrative. In spite of the transatlantic divide between European essentialism and Anglo-American postmodernism (or non-foundational post-structuralism), there are several points of convergence for the definition of an ethical and political (feminist) agenda. Which one do you think is the more prominent and relevant, but also do you see any major point of disagreement between you and Cavarero?

Cavarero is the one who has read Arendt and Levinas quite effectively to show that the singularity of the “you” requires a certain story. I am most interested in this move, and I have been led to rethink my own relation to these figures by virtue of her compelling analyses. Perhaps my own work tried to think more about the social and political conditions under which horror and grief are regulated, and this might be a bit different from hers, which tries to establish an ethical framework for moral sentiments. But yes, as you can imagine, the link between our work is an important one.

When you talk about war and conflict, you seem to adopt a language that has religious rather than simple ethical undertones. When you talk about non-violence, to break the cycle of revenge, for instance in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which implies forgiveness, you seem to open up your discourse to an ethical ground that resonates with a broad Judeo-Christian frame of reference. How do you stand in relation to religion and the new centrality of religious in contemporary thought, considering that it has become a central issue and concern for many intellectuals like Habermas, Zizek, Vattimo and others?

I don’t see a term like “forgiveness” as necessarily implicated in a religious framework. Maybe that seems odd, but it seems to me that the term, whatever its religious background, has and does travel outside of explicitly religious circles and can operate within ostensibly secular contexts. There will be those for whom the resonance exists, but I think we have to consider more closely, for instance, how reparation works in the theory of Melanie Klein, or how “forgiveness” operates in various international human rights commissions. What interests me most are modes of operating within conflict that find ways of expressing rage without retribution. This problematic is articulated in the Oresteia and, if I am right, marks a certain distinction between matters of justice and ideas of religious authority.

That said, I think it is important that we take note of the ways in which religious discourse informs many of our secular understandings of politics, and to see how such terms become resignified over time and through the shifting of contextual frames. I have been interested in Walter Benjamin’s appropriation of ‘forgiveness’ in some of his early writings on aesthetics. There, it is actually linked with the eradication of traces of guilt and the inauguration of a new temporal modality. Perhaps there continues to be ways of thinking revolution in such terms.

In recent years you have been writing and speaking about Israeli politics, and the problem of the ‘anti-Semitic’ charge to quell public criticism of Israel that it is almost inevitably advocated in many quarters. Anti-Semitism is indeed an oversensitive issue in the collective Western consciousness. How do you place yourself, being Jewish but anti-Zionist, in reference to this? And do you see the danger of a ‘culture of victimhood’ in the critical political discourse?

I want to suggest that public criticisms against gratuitous state violence form an important, if underappreciated, dimension of Jewish values, and that ideals of co-habitation with the non-Jew are also central to early strains of Zionist thought and to contemporary dissenting positions within Jewish intellectual life. I understand that my position is difficult to defend, since it would be important to know what is meant by “Jewish” here. But I want to suggest that the term refers to both secular and religious positions, but also to historical situations that are agnostic both in relation to secularism and religious belief. Within this broad domain, public criticism of gratuitous state violence has been crucial to a number of Jewish intellectual positions. I wish to underscore both the risks and obligations of public criticism, since whatever the motivations are for levelling criticisms against certain forms of state violence, it remains true that the criticism of Israeli state violence, for instance, can be construed in any number of anti-Semitic ways. This situation became acute, for instance, for Primo Levi, whose criticisms of Israel were exploited by those who covered the walls of Turin, his home town, with anti-Semitic slogans. How, then, does one unequivocally oppose anti-Semitism at the same time that one revives and furthers that Jewish tradition of public criticism that is formulated as a critique of state violence, an opposition to the forcible dispossession of minority populations? It is clearly impossible to accept anti-Semitism, just as it is to jettison key values furnished by this internally complicated Jewish tradition of public criticism. Much depends on our ability to distinguish between forms of public criticism that are part of democratic deliberation and those that propose violent and non-democratic means to achieve political ends. So perhaps my hope is that active and internal dissension among Jews on the topic of Israel can work in tandem with other political efforts to oppose the occupation and the radical disenfranchisements of 1948.  In a way, this is to shift the “moral” discourse from persecution\victimization to an affirmative responsibility for cohabitation that links not only with precarious life as a social ontology, but also with a new fathoming of global responsibility for this time.

Pierpaolo Antonello is Senior Lecturer in Italian at the University of Cambridge, England, and Fellow of St John’s College.

Roberto Farneti is an Assistant Professor of Politics at the Free University of Bozen/Bolzano, in northern Ital

Žižek in Albania

Early 1980s early Yugoslav commie regime undergo a crisis of legitimation.  Milosevic, providing legitimacy for the local Serb republic, devil’s pact with nationalist intelligentsia.  The Poetic Military Complex.  Warriors together with Poets, look out.

Pere Josef, the Catholic France made a pact with Protestant Sweden against Catholic Austrian Empire to prevent unification of Germany.  This led to Hitler around  hundred years later

Pere Josef was a brutal torturer.  But something real crazy, wrote the most beautiful mystical reflections.  How is it possible that the same person who was a monster was in his inner life a breathtakingly refined mysticist.   For some the solution for this is Eastern Spirituality.  But this doesn’t work for Žižek.  The true heroic greatness is to sacrifice his soul, his ethics for his country.  Any fool can give his life.  But it’s the real here that will do evil for his country, rape woman, kill children.  The ethical temptation is presented as a weakness. If you can’t kill, you are weak the true here does it.  Himmler’s solution: Bhagavad Gita, the Indian epic.  Bhagavad appeals to God, how can I do it, women and children will suffer, people will suffer, answer of Christna is: substantial reality doesn’t exist, what we perceive of reality is false appearance. If you arrive at spiritual enlightenment, then you see that that’s the only reality. You can kill as much as you want, kill do it, it doesn’t count, nothing is really killed, it’s all only appearance.  So Himmler always carried Bhagavad Gita in his pocket. Buddhists are the same.   Suzuki, how to kill without feeling guilty.  False illusion of substantial reality, the Buddhist enlightenment, you are no longer part of reality, your mind is a medium of only observation, you only see a dance of shadows and appearance.  Somehow your body gets stuck on the point of the knife my hand is holding.   Rorty says, we don’t have any substantial identity, we are stories we tell ourselves.  “We listen to each other’s stories” the way to bring peace is to listen to each other’s stories, your folkloric dances … An enemy is someone whose stories we were not ready to hear.  Would you say that Hitler was our enemy because we were not ready to hear his story?  Abandon this conclusion of trying to understand each other

🙁 Žižek Inner authenticity is a LIE.   when someone approaches you trying to understand your dances and songs in order to understand you, this tribe just wanted to be good hosts to their guests, and so as good hosts they invented the dance and masks because this is what they thought the other wanted.

You should not do to them what they are doing to you.  Underground the movie is specifically for the Western Gaze. An image of Balkans, outside history, where they each drink fuck all the time. This is what the West wants to see and he stages it for them, the spectacle, what they want to see.

: ( Žižek its Racist Jokes that play a great progressive role.   They were not racist jokes attacking each other but a sharing of obscenities.  I’ll tell you a joke about me, you tell me a joke about yours.  The correct heroic thing to do is not to say “ohhh that’s racist” but to ironically assume it.    A Fairy comes to a Slovene farmer and asks him, I will do anything you want me to do, but I’ll give it to your neighbour twice as much. So the Slovene farmer says, take one of my eyes. So Montenegro, how does a Montenegro masturbate, he digs a whole in ground sticks his penis in and waits for an earthquake etc.  So Žižek argues that its the exchange of these racist jokes etc.  “I fucked your mother” and the message was let’s be truly friends and Žižek replies, only after I do your sister.  So after that they conducted this, they didn’t have to replay it, their friendship developed, in the morning all they would exchange was “mother” and “sister.”  A good feminist would say “after I fuck your father” etc.  [huh?]

He’s not saying let’s start telling dirty jokes about each other.   This ironic populist low humour.  In each culture this works in a specific way. It’s a general feature of culture.  When you look at a culture, how a community is held together, large and small.  You have explicit rules, and then you have ‘meta rules’ higher level rules that tell you how to relate to these rules.   We should never underestimate, the subversion, undermining of community … order but underneath, obsenity total.   Croatia … we had only a med student.  He slept in a room with a wash basin, and a mirror, photos of half-naked girls. Once a weeks  doc came from military hospital.  One guy stood up and said, “he had pains in his penis” What did you say? the doc asked.  Undress. He undressed, his penis is painful.  It’s only when I have an erection.  Okay, the doctor says jerk off.  Do it.  He tries to get erection, it doesn’t work. The doc goes to mirror and gets the photo and takes them back. The doc was looking at us and laughing. This is the most oppressive, there was no underming of power.  You need this OBSCENE underside.

Cold distanct dignity, undermine it with obscenity.  But the problem with today’s liberal ideology: a decaffinated Other, they celebrate the Other but its a decaffeneited Other.   Drinking, depair disappears, and Other becomes holistic and spiritual.  The problem of “tolerance”, excessive harrasment, ‘toxic’ neighbour:  pedophile, abusive father etc.   It went from Albanians, Northern Africa, now Romanians.  Italy is now a democracy becoming more and more insubstantial After the last elections, the Centre if falling apart and Buslusconi is the boss.  But what is it about Berlusconi.  Did you notice that B. is systematically undermining the minimal dignity of what it is to be the head of state.  His mistresses, his wife.  An obscene soap opera.  Ronald Reagan was the first that played upon presenting himself as an idiot.  He would mock his own stupidity.  Richard Nixon was the last AUTHENTIC TRAGIC president.  Italy is still a formal democracy but its becoming insubstantial, now you have an obscene head of state who openly mocks his wife’s affairs.  This shouldn’t deceive you, its the like the army in the army, ha ha, masturbate, but the POWER remains there.  POSTMODERN power, permissivity, the right to choice, but underneath its all the more powerful.  Old type patriarch, I don’t care how you feel, behave but you’re going to grandma.  Postmodern permissive non-authoritarian Father, You know how much your grandmother loves you but only visit her if you want to.  Under the permissiveness of free choice, is the message not only must you go … you must enjoy.

Death of liberal Fukuyama utopia died after 9/11.  Western liberal utopia is not the recipe for the rest of world.  The true utopia was the 1990s, the happy era of Clinton … this moment is dangerous.  It is because SHOCK THERAPY, Capitalism needs a new boost, this financial crisis a SHOCK THERAPY for capitalism.  How to use this crisis to break the last of the union trade syndicate.  Let’s use this crisis to break the trade unions.  There was 1 good argument for Capitalism until now, capitalism did need a dictator to survive, Chile etc. but after 10-20 years it did bring democracy.  But now this game is OVER.  CHINA, can we imagine to which person from our time will they be raising statues 100 years in the future.  The long time president of SINGAPORE.  He invented Capitalism with ASIAN values.  that is, Authoritarian Capitalism.     China today is now an ideal capitalist country.   Something is emerging in China, capitalism with Asian values, a capitalism more dynamic and productive than western capitalism but without democracy.  ITS OVER the natural alliance with Capitalism and Democracy.  BERLUSCONI is a European version of it.  Berlusconi plays a clown but he’s got the POWER.  What should be politics, the economy, is de-politicized, the economy is starting to function in an authoritarian way.  What is happening in today’s capitalism, contrary to NEGRI, it NEEDS more than EVER A STRONG STATE. the STATE is getting stronger and stronger, but it won’t be able to do so in a formally DEMOCRATIC way.  When Bush confronted the crisis and addressed the American people. He used almost the same terms as when he reacted to 9/11. Our way of live is in danger.  Bush presented the first bail out money 700 billion dollars.  First vote it was against, then all politicians came together and said to Congress Fuck Off, this is not time for democracy.  They declared an economic state of emergency.  Capitalism is less and less able to function in a democratic state.   Italy since Sept 2008 is in a state of emergency.  This enables government to use army against immigrants, mafia … it will not be classical emergency state, where you wake up and there is curfew, no, its gradual, you’ll still be able to have all your pleasures.  The rise of IMMATERIAL LABOUR. when Marx spoke about it GENERAL INTELLECT, the collective practical knowlecge which is more imporatant than labour time. The source of capitalist wealth is no longer primarily worker exploitation, but COLLECTIVE KNOWLEDGE.  Labour measured by time becomes meaningless.  What Marx didn’t see is the possibility, that capitalism succeeded in REPRIVATISING the general intellect itself.  BILL GATES, how is he rich?  He didn’t exploit his workers, he didn’t get extra profit.  It isn’t from Rent to profit, but from profit to RENT.  It’s not PROFIT, this price is basically totally independent of production costs, he does take into consideration production costs, ITS RENT.  Bill Gates privatised part of the COMMON SPACE and we have to pay him rent.  the moment you deal with immaterial property, knowledge property.  It’s not like making a widget to sell on the market.  With immaterial goods, the state has to intervene.  Bill Gates, with intellectual property, it’s more complex.  Try to privatize some genetic structure. You need an exceptionally strong state to set the parameters. All the problem of copyright. The stronger and stronger state is needed and CANNOT do it in a democratic way.

COMMUNISM NOW!  Commies before were not strong enough in realizing what a terrifying experience communism was.  The German FIlm Lives of OTHERS.  Liberals don’t get the commie tragedy.  If you know anything of how socialism functions, if you have a corrupted secret police, where the film goes wrong, in a country East Germany, the writer would have been total observation even without somebody wanting to sleep with his wife.  Without religion good people do good things, and bad people do bad things. With religion good people do bad things.  The tragedy, is not bad people doing bad things, its good people starting to do good end up doing BAD things.  We have a whole series of antagonisms today:

– IMMIGRANTS  The walls are going up, West Bank EU, Mexico

– ECOLOGY: you can’t solve with market measure.

– Intellectual property

– Bio genetics; Fukuyama thinks now, biogenetics is strong argument enough all the coordinates are mixed.  There is now a wheel chair run totally by thought.  He can read if you think strongly about forward, backward, left right.  The wheelchair moves according to thought  Our being human is I have my FREE THOUGHT.  The problem is, what goes out, also goes in.  They already isolated the area of brain when you go into panic, then they bombard you and you are already in panic.  They have a machine, press a button all people are in panic.  Things are happening, the affects most ELEMENTARY what it is to be HUMAN.  This is getting underminded the inside/outside. what I think is inside, and reality is outside.

Clinton says this.  The result is hunger, many countries Indonesia, Haiti, the best land was privatized companies, who bought up best lands to export. This export industrial agriculatural plants.   HUNGER IS NEW PHENOMENON. Haiti is selling mud cakes. Cakes made of mud. They have minerals that fill your stomach.  FOOD IS TOO IMPORTANT TO BE LEFT TO THE MARKET says bill clinton. But Z. says what about education, arms industry, and health can’t simply be left to the market.

🙂 Butler argues about the conflation of desire with the real.  What does she mean by this?  That parts of the “literal” penis and the “literal” vagina, which cause pleasure and desire

Chiesa

In what precise sense should Marx’s materialism be regarded as a doctrine that conceives of truth as a material cause?

And, most importantly, can Marx still be, in spite of marxism, the man of truth whose revolution of thought psychoanalysis should escort until a new political paradigm is formed?

The reason why class struggle should remain the privileged model, to insist on class struggle occupying a position of centrality is precisely not to invoke the ‘working class’ as the only agent of emancipation. In a sense, that is already to treat class insurgency as if it were yet another ‘multi-cultural’ demand for recognition.

It’s perfectly possible to imagine a capitalism in which, for instance, the demand for recognition of alternative sexualities has been entirely satisfied. But class struggle in the Marxist sense could not be satisfied by anything short of the ‘obliteration of bourgeoisie as a symbolic social space’ (which is by no means the same thing as the extermination of the members of the bourgeoisie).

In a very real sense, the proletariat is that very obliteration. This point is perhaps best made by a joke recently recounted by Lenin on the Tomb. An IRA man in a balaclava is at the gates of heaven when St Peter comes to him and says, ‘I’m afraid I can’t let you in’. ‘Who wants to get in?’ the IRA man retorts. ‘You’ve got twenty minutes to get the fuck out.’

For Zizek, Laclau makes the mistake of treating the critique of political economy as a ‘positive ontic science’ (just as his dismissal of class struggle makes the mistake of treating the proletariat as if it were a positive ontic entity, ‘the working class’, rather than a ‘substance-less subject’). What this ignores is what Zizek, after Derrida, called the ‘spectral’ dimension of Marx. In Marx’s ‘hauntology’ – where undead labour is the correlate of vitalized commodities – it is understood that fiction structures reality. To call capital a ‘self-engendering monster’ is not at all to speak metaphorically.

There is a lot to be done with this. Firstly, we can recognize the current political landscape as inherently populist. It is not only, as Zizek said, that populism (whether it be the ‘progressive’ populism of the anti-capitalist or anti-globalization movements or the reactionary populism of the fuel protesters or the Countryside Alliance) is the complement to administrative post-politics. It is that administrative post-politics is already itself populist. Badiou has argued that post-political malaise is not some accidental side-effect of parliamentary democracy but the terminal phase into which it inevitably declines.  Populism projects a restricted sense of possibilities, always offers us a choice from a fixed and pre-existent menu. It is the expression of the always-already, the anti-Event.

butler interview february 2008

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

This interview took place in February 2008 on the occasion of talk by Judith Butler at the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona (CCCB).

F.B.: Could you explain your conception of critical thought and its relation with Foucault’s famous words: I do not know if today it is necessary to say that critical work still implies faith in the Enlightenment; I consider that it must always work on our limits, that is, a patient labour that forms the impatience for freedom”? In one of your latest texts you refer to this; perhaps you could relate the task of critical thought and its connection with feminism.

J.B.: The critical task demands a preoccupation with limits, and Foucault was particularly interested in the problem of how this delimited field shapes the subject.  Thus, if we are formed as obedient subjects, if the state or some other regulated form of power imposes itself on us and we accept it, we become obedient subjects. But in the moment we begin to ask ourselves about the legitimacy of this power we become critical, we adopt a point of view that is not completely shaped by the state and we question ourselves about the limits of the demands that can be placed on us. Foucault is very clear in this respect: questioning the demand for obedience made of us by the state means questioning our ontology as subjects.

And if I am not wholly formed by this power of the state, in what way am I, or might I be, formed?  Asking yourself this question means you are already beginning to form yourself in another way, outside this relation with the state, so critical thought distances you to some extent.  When someone says “no” to power, they are saying “no” to a particular way of being formed by power.  They are saying: I am not going to be subjected in this way or by these means through which the state establishes its legitimacy.  The critical position implies a certain “no”, a saying “no” as an “I”, and this, then, is a step in the formation of this “I”.

Many people ask about the basis on which Foucault establishes this resistance to power. What he is saying to us is that in the practice of critical thought we are forming ourselves as subjects, through resistance and questioning. Foucault does not presuppose a pre-existing subject that can say “no” and criticise authority. Rather that the subject forms him or herself through the practice of criticism.

And, in my view, some forms of criticism involve a questioning of the intelligibility of the norms that constitute us as people. If the powers that be address me as a citizen or as a non-citizen, in terms of a gender or a racial category, I must fight against this social determination. The norms establish my social intelligibility, the categories through which I understand myself and other people. If, from the very outset, a gender is attributed to me, if I am called a “girl”, then I actively am a girl; the “I” that emerges through this gender is intelligible, in part, as a social being: the gender attributed to me guarantees my intelligibility and my legibility as a person, and if I question this gender, I risk a certain unintelligibility, risk losing my place and my social legibility as a particular person.

However, the “I” could say “no” or could ask “why?” With what means, for what end have I been generated, with what right has this medical establishment attributed a particular gender to me, or with what right has the law attributed this gender to me?  The “I” steps back from these gender norms, even if such norms are the conditions that have determined its formation; that is, it does not abandon or destroy them, but it does wrestle with them. Is it possible to reconstruct gender? And if so, can this be understood as a practice of freedom?

Can it be understood as a way of becoming? And if so, what other formations are possible? In my opinion, feminism implies thinking about the practices of freedom: when we object to discriminatory practices at work, to forced reclusion within the private domain, when we protest about violence against women. . . , it is not only because we want women to achieve equality, to be treated justly. Equality and justice are very important norms, but there are more: we want certain freedoms for women so they are not totally limited to the established ideas of femininity or even of masculinity. We want them to be capable of innovating and creating new positions. Insofar as feminism has been, at least in part, a kind of philosophy, it is crucial that it develops new notions of gender. If feminism suggests that we cannot question our sexual positions or affirm that we have no need of the category of gender, then it would be saying, in some sense, that I should accept a particular positionality or a particular structure — restrictive for me and for others — and that I am not free to make and remake the form, or the terms in which I have been made. And it is true that I cannot change these terms radically, and even if I decide to resist the category of woman, I will have to battle with this category throughout my whole life. In this way, whenever we question our gender we run the risk of losing our intelligibility, of being labelled ‘monsters’. My struggle with gender would be precisely that, a struggle, and that has something to do with the patient labour that forms the impatience for freedom. Thus, gender perfomativity can be understood: the slow and difficult practice of producing new possibilities of experiencing gender in the light of history, and in the context of very powerful norms that restrict our intelligibility as human beings. They are complex struggles, political in nature, since they insist on new forms of recognition. In fact, from my experience of feminism, these political struggles have been being waged for the last hundred years, at the very least. I only offer a radical language for these struggles.

F.B.: Speaking about performativity and the possibility of new forms of being, the question arises of how to evaluate the diverse innovative forms of agency, because not everything that is novel is necessarily ‘good’.  In your Undoing Gender you speak a little about this, but is there any single criterion that will allow us to make this distinction?  Is it pertinent here to speak of universality?

J.B.: If we are referring to the various ways in which gender is understood as a form or a cultural interpretation of the body, I believe it is not appropriate to speak of good or bad genders: gender is extra-moral.  Those who wish to establish the distinction between normal genders and pathological genders, or who set out to regulate gender are making a mistake.  They are absolutely and universally wrong.  There are illegitimate operations of power that attempt to restrict our idea of what gender might be, for example in the areas of medicine, law, psychiatry, social policy, immigration policy, or the policies against violence.

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

Today there are many people with modalities of gender that are considered unacceptable — the sexual or gender minorities — and who are discriminated against, considered abnormal, by the discourses of psychiatry or psychology, or who are the object of physical violence.  These people are not being given the opportunity of having their lives recognised as worthy of being protected or helped, not even as lives that deserve to be mourned.  I question the norms of gender that prevent us or make us incapable of recognising certain lives as being worth living, and which stop us providing the material conditions necessary for these lives to be lived, to flourish.  For these lives to be publicly recognised also means their being understood as lives whose disappearance would be felt as a loss.

The same thing happens in war: certain lives are deemed worthy of being protected, while others are considered expendable, of negligible importance, radically dispensable.

One could say that all my work revolves around this question: what is it that counts as a life?  And in what way do certain restrictive norms of gender decide for us?  What kind of life is worth protecting and what kind of life is not?

F.B.: In recent years important changes have taken place in many aspects of the lives of gays, lesbians and even transsexuals.  For example, in our country same-sex marriages have been made legal.  In the light of your reflections about the way in which a broader context of intelligibility has ontological consequences, it might be useful to ask to what extent this recognition could end up leading to new forms of restriction, other forms of normality.

J.B.: Of course, if marriage exists, then homosexual marriage should also exist; marriage should be extended to all couples irrespective of their sexual orientation; if sexual orientation is an impediment, then marriage is discriminatory.  For my part, I don’t understand why it should be limited to two people, this appears arbitrary to me and might potentially be discriminatory; but I know this point of view is not very popular.  However, there are forms of sexual organisation that do not imply monogamy, and types of relationship that do not imply marriage or the desire for legal recognition — even if they do seek cultural acceptance.  There are also communities made up of lovers, ex-lovers and friends who look after the children, communities that constitute complex kinship networks that do not fit the conjugal pattern.

I agree that the right to homosexual marriage runs the risk of producing a conservative effect, of making marriage an act of normalisation, and thereby presenting other very important forms of intimacy and kinship as abnormal or even pathological.  But the question is: politically, what do we do with this?  I would say that every campaign in favour of homosexual marriage ought also to be in favour of alternative families, the alternative systems of kinship and personal association.  We need a movement that does not win rights for some people at the expense of others.  And imagining this movement is not easy.

The demand for recognition by the state should go hand in hand with a critical questioning: what do we need the state for?  Although there are times that we need it for some kinds of protection (immigration, property, or children), should we allow it to define our relationships?  There are forms of relation that we value and that cannot be recognised by the state, where the recognition of civil society or the community is enough.  We need a movement that remains critical, that formulates these questions and keeps them open.

F.B.: I would like to bring up a thinker I have been working on in the last few years, Hannah Arendt.  I believe there are aspects of her thought that interest you.  Where would you situate Arendt’s distinction between liberation and liberty in your work?  Similarly, how does the concept of responsibility fit into your reflections about the importance of performativity and resignification as political practices?

J.B.: It is true that, in general, I do not think of freedom in terms of liberation.  I continue to be very strongly influenced by Foucault’s History of Sexuality, in which he warns us against imagining a complete liberation from power.  There can never be a total liberation from power, especially in relation to the politics of sexuality.  Foucault says two things at the same time: we can never totally liberate ourselves from power (there is no space from which to say “no” to power) and, on the other hand, we are never completely determined by power.  Thus, despite the impossibility of transcending power, a space of liberty opens up, and both determinism and radical voluntarism are refuted. What is this space of freedom that opens up once we have understood this?  Here freedom is a kind of practice, a struggle, a continuous process with neither a beginning nor an end.  When this practice is systematically attacked we cannot function as political subjects, our political capacities have been undermined.

When referring to freedom, I am not alluding to the idea of an individual subject, alone, since a subject is free to the extent that s/he is conditioned by conventions, norms and cultural possibilities that make freedom possible, though they do not determine it.  They are the conditions of possibility of freedom.  Who we are as subjects of freedom depends on non-voluntary forms of connection with others; I was not only born within a series of rules or conventions that form me, but also within a series of relationships on which I depend for my survival and which constitute me as an interdependent creature in this world.  The questions of responsibility emerge in the context of this sociality, this interdependence.

On the matter of responsibility I am interested in the productive formulations made by Levinas.  For Levinas, I am not responsible for my actions — though in fact I also am — but rather responsible for the Other, for the demands of the Other.  And any demand made by the Other is prior to any possibility of social contract: whatever the demand the Other puts before me, it affects me, it involves me in a relation of responsibility.

Legal contracts cannot adequately describe this situation of primary responsibility.  That means that I am responsible even for those who are not in any form of contractual relationship with me, or who do not form part of my community, or my nation, or who are not covered by the same legal framework as me.  This helps to understand, for example, how I can be responsible for those who live at a distance from me, who are under a different form of political organisation, or those who are stateless.  In Levinas’ framework, even those we never meet, those whose names and faces we do not know, present us with a demand.  It is, then, a question of accepting our global interdependence and even our obligation to protect the lives of those we do not know. For Levinas, this primary obligation is expressed through what we commonly call commandments, “Thou shall not kill”: a requirement to preserve life.  This does not mean that I can or should preserve the life of every individual (of course I cannot do so, and to imagine I could would be unhealthy, it would imply some sort of narcissism, a certain messianism), but rather that I should think about what kind of political structures we need to sustain life and minimise those forms of violence that extinguish it. This does not mean I am capable of making these structures come into existence — responsibility is not the same as efficacy — but rather that I can fight for a world that maximises the possibility of preserving and sustaining life and minimises the possibility of those forms of violence that, illegitimately, take life, or at least reduce the conditions that make it possible for this to happen.  This is part of what I am thinking about at the moment.  And I have to say that it is not easy to situate Arendt in this context.

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

F.B.: Certainly, we are not only responsible for what we have done; responsibility points towards the interplay of autonomy and limit.  To the extent that we always live and survive through some sort of consent that can hardly be considered voluntary, political responsibility also has to do with the idea that we are aware of, that we hope will continue, that we want to innovate or conserve.  In this sense, unless our attitude towards the world is one of indifference, we can talk about a kind of political responsibility in the maintenance of structures and habits or values that, in many spheres, impede the possibility of feminine freedom.

J.B.: Let me start with a criticism Derrida made of Levinas: if it is necessary to respond to all demands, that means an infinite number of demands, and how should we decide which group of demands to respond to?  Perhaps responsibility is only made possible by circumscribing a group of demands, that is, by becoming irresponsible in relation to all other demands.  In a way that is characteristic of him, Derrida affirms that responsibility, in Levinas’ sense, leads to a necessary irresponsibility.  Yet this is to continue to misunderstand the singularity of the demands made on us.  It’s not enough to deal with them case by case.  Let’s think, for example, about violence against women: it is true that we can consider a rapist or an aggressor to be responsible before the law; in a legal framework, he will have to pay for his acts, will have to be punished, once evidence of his guilt has been provided.  No doubt we need a punitive legal institution, but the question is whether, once legal responsibility has been assumed, this means that full responsibility has now been apportioned.  Legal responsibility is not an adequate model for conceptualising the whole range of responsibilities we have, because there remains a fundamental question to resolve: rape and domestic violence continue.  Why do these social practices reproduce themselves time and again in a culture?  A broader kind of intervention seems to me to be necessary, a kind of outcry about violence against women, and against sexual minorities; I believe it is very important to relate them: violence against transsexuals, for example, against sex workers, against illegal immigrants who can have no recourse to law, and violence against many groups who have been dispossessed of all their rights.  I consider that we need a strong policy that connects all these forms of violence, and also demands the production, through the mass media, of an education, an ethos, that would act as a counterweight to these forms of violence.  If you examining all this, case by case, you lose sight of the horizon: these forms of violence form part of a social practice — are even socially acceptable amongst certain types of men — of a social model.  But how can we intervene at the level of social practices?  By using the law, certainly, but not only in this way, given that we have a responsibility to remake the world, and to institute certain standards of non-violence on a more general level.  Political responsibility must go hand in hand with legal responsibility.

F.B.: In your latest books you deal with the issue of the place occupied by passions and emotions, like pain and vulnerability in politics.  Similarly, you point to the urgency of asking ourselves: “what does it mean to be human?”  Isn’t it a little surprising that all this should be written by an author who appears to form part of the anti-humanist tradition, part of the tradition that is known in the USA as French Theory?

J.B.: It is necessary to be careful when we talk about ‘humanism’.  We only have to look at the various legacies of humanism to see that there is not just one kind of humanism: the forms that emerge in Italy are very distinct from those that emerge in France.  There is also a humanism based in classical liberal political philosophy that can not be assimilated into literary humanism.  In any case, if we agree that philosophical anthropology is a form of humanism that supposes that there is just one single idea of what it is to be human, and that it is possible to attribute defining traits to this human subject, then we are taking that which is human as something given, something that already exists.

What I want to suggest is the following: for humanness to become possible — in specific times and places — depends on certain types of social norms that are involved in the exercise of producing and ‘de-producing’ humanness.  In other words, for that which is human to be human, it must be in relationship with that which is inhuman or non-human, and this is a differential operation of power.  Humanness is produced and sustained in one form and is ‘de-produced’ and not sustained in other forms: the human being is a differentiating effect of power.

In the USA, for example, at present there is a very powerful discourse that sets out to define humanness as being a product of the Judeo-Christian tradition.  Similarly, we have some morphological policies that define humanness in terms of certain ideas about what a human body should be like.  And this produces a population with disabilities, or of disabled individuals whose bodies do not match the morphological idea.  Remember that any regulatory ideal of humanness always produces exclusions, ‘outsiders’, and creates a problem: how should we refer to these beings that appear human but are not?  We only have to think of the history of slavery, something which survives in the USA, where it remains unclear if all the black men who are imprisoned are human or not.

Humanness is not something given, it is a differentiating effect of power, but we need the term because without it we cannot understand what is happening.  I am worried by those positions that say: “that which is human belongs to humanism, so we can never talk any more about humanness”; “choice belongs to voluntarism, we have to stop talking about choice”; “the Enlightenment belongs to that which we have dismantled, so we can no longer speak of Enlightenment”.  But they don’t ask themselves what the Enlightenment was.  Why go back to that which was?  Why go back to humanness?  Well, because these concepts, these really important ideals, have not left us, they continue to form us.  And there is a new way of understanding them that starts with the idea that they do not have a single form and that, in fact, their regulation operates politically to produce exclusions that we must challenge.  For someone to say that a person who is considered non-human is, in fact, human means a resignification of humanness and emphasises that humanness can work in another form.  On occasions it is important to use the term precisely in the way that the Human Rights discourse sometimes does: taking someone to whom the defining characteristics of humanness are not attributed and affirming that person is human is a performative act that redefines humanness in terms of liberation, as emancipation. It is not a question of searching for what was already there, but of making it happen.

F.B.: In your recent reflections, when you talk about ‘that which is human’ you connect it with the question of which lives deserve to be recognised as being worthy of being protected or helped.  When you speak about ‘life’, are you taking as your starting point the distinction between bios and zoe?

J.B.: The question of life is difficult; I have my doubts about the way in which the distinction that Arendt establishes in The Human Condition has been popularised by Giorgio Agamben.  Despite the fact that bios and zoe are analytically distinguishable, each is always implied in the other.  I have problems when Arendt affirms that the point of life cannot be life itself.  For her it is a terrible idea, since she only understands life as something that is bound up with very important principles and values.  Arendt wanted to distinguish between life that was not worth living and life itself, and in this she was following Socrates: an unexamined life was not worth living.  That is why, for her, thinking, judging and responsibility were so important, because she understood that these human activities make life worth living, and if these are not possible, then neither is life.  But this does not help us to understand why it is necessary to preserve the life of sensate beings, including human beings.

Arendt distinguishes between the public and private spheres.  The public domain is where we think, judge act; the private domain means that someone looks after the home, the food, the reproduction of the material conditions of life.  It seems to me to be worth remembering that there is a politics of this sphere, a politics of the domestic, there is a politics of private life.  Who does the work of cleaning the house, of keeping it all together?  The questions about relationships, about the family, about work, are political questions.

I would like to go back and ask about the conditions of survival: what do we need to survive?  We depend on our surroundings and on food; the food should be well distributed and eating habits healthy.  We depend on justice and the distribution of economic resources.  I believe there could be a politics of this sphere that looked on life as simply that, life, bare life; a politics that allowed us to see that life is never just naked life, that it is always politically saturated.  Hence my disagreement with Agamben’s characterisation of ‘naked life’, for example when he refers to the Palestinians in Gaza, stripped of their rights, exposed to brutality without any defence, reduced to mere life; it is not a question of ‘mere life’, these lives are politically saturated: there is a battle taking place to cross the border, to find food, to rebuild the house destroyed by bombs, or to get medicine.  All these actions are struggles, even, I would say, practices of freedom.  The practices of survival are extremely important; if we say they are simple mere organic life, we cannot recognise them as political struggles.

F.B.: In your latest books you deal with the idea of thinking the community in terms of relatability.  This perspective seems to me very interesting, since it allows us to establish a nexus between the misnamed ‘domestic’ violence and the violence of war.  Do you believe that this would allow us to rethink global international politics?

J.B.: When the USA was attacked in September 2001, the government set out to quickly construct an idea of the country as sovereign, impermeable, invulnerable, because it was unacceptable that its frontiers had been breached.  The system involved creating very powerful images, normally of men: men of the government, men fighting to save people inside the World Trade Center.  There was a kind of resurgence of the idea of a strong, efficacious, militarised man, a man whose body will never be destroyed nor affected by anyone, who will be pure action and pure aggression.  A certain idea of the subject was produced: who is the American subject?  Who is America?  A very aggressive affirmation was made about masculine sovereignty, a certain idea of what the body is — of the masculine body, a certain idea of masculine subjectivity, which also amounts to a national self-comprehension — and then naturally they annihilated the sovereignty of Iraq, of Afghanistan, they resorted to Guantanamo because it is not under Cuban sovereignty and is also outside the borders of US sovereignty, in such a way that they could do what they wanted.  They play with sovereignty; they take a certain kind of sovereignty as a prerogative, but do not respect sovereignty as a principle.

Another possibility would have been to say: we have been attacked, we accept the fact that we live in a global community, our frontiers are porous, people can cross them, we have to decide how we want to live this.  Instead of defending ourselves, what we need are new international agreements and also to show the USA as being committed to international law, because we should remember that since 2001, and even before, Bush has refused to sign almost any international treaties: the anti-missile treaty, that establishing the International Court; anything to do with international cooperation, including the UN.  He exercised his sovereignty over them and against them.

Perhaps because international cooperation is an ethos: we are dependent on a global world, we are all vulnerable, there can be accusations and agreements.  How do we live together?  What kind of agreements do we accept?  But it is the nation-states that establish agreements between themselves and the real question is that of the stateless peoples: insurgent populations, people who live within political organisations that are not permitted to participate in international agreements.  What kind of connection can be established here?  This implies another kind of politics, a global politics, one that does not restrict itself to the nation-states. I am referring to other ways of thinking our vulnerability as nations, our limits as nations, and that include the conception of the subject as being fundamentally dependent or fundamentally social, as well as the forms of political organisation that seek to structure global politics in such a way as to gain recognition of our interdependence.

F.B.: To round off our conversation, I would like to formulate some of the questions that ideas of sexual difference have raised: how do you explain, from your conception of gender, the historical asymmetry between the sexes?  How do you explain that lack of recognition of our first origins, of having been given birth to by a woman?

J.B.: I am always surprised that, in Europe, these great divisions are made between Irigaray and the philosophers of sexual difference, on one side, and Butler, on the other, because in the USA we work in both lines.  For me, this supposed contrast does not exist; in my classes I teach Irigaray.  In my opinion, when we study the significances that have been conferred on sexual reproduction and how it has been organised, we find important convergences between Irigaray’s work and mine, because the question is: how does the scene of reproduction come to be the defining moment of sexual difference?  And what do we do with this?  And, in this respect, we find various points of view: that of psychoanalysis, which underlines masculine dependence on the mother and at the same time its rejection; that which emphasises the importance of the maternal as a feminine value, as the basis for the feminist critique; and we can also find another perspective that raises questions like: why has sexuality been thought of in a restrictive form within the framework of sexual reproduction?  What does it mean to think of non-reproductive sexuality in relation to this burdensome symbolic scene of reproduction? Every nation-state, every national religious unit, wants to control reproduction, everybody is very uneasy about reproduction: the Spanish conservatives want to control reproduction, they say “no” to abortion.  Why?  Because it is through the control of women’s bodies that reproduction of the population is achieved and it becomes possible to reproduce the nation, the race, masculinity.

We are all trying to change these values and work on them, trying to find other spaces and possibilities for femininity, for masculinity, for that which is neither feminine nor masculine.  We have distinct conceptions about how to think this difference, but, for sure, we are all interested in exploring this difference.  Given that we cannot assume a hard and fast division between these positions, I think there could be a dialogue between them: none of us want to accept the conception of sexual reproduction that transforms woman into a non-being that makes possible the being of man.  We all start here, though we all have different strategies about how to move on.

lacan’s symbolic logic of sexuation

Male ………………. Female

∃x : ‘There is at least one x.’
__
∃x : ‘There is not a single x which …’

Φx : ‘x is subject to the phallic function.’
__
Φx : ‘x is not subject to the phallic function’

∀x : ‘ All x‘s’
__
∀x : ‘Not all x‘s.’

x : jouissance
a : The object (a), Desire’s cause remains beyond signification, unsignifiable. Signifies the Other’s desire insofar as it serves as cause of the subject’s desire; but object (a), considered to play a role “outside of theory,” that is, as REAL, does not signify anything: it IS the Other’s desire, it is desirousness as REAL, not signified.

Φ : The phallic function: the function that institutes lack, that is, the alienating function of language.  The phallic function plays a crucial role in the definition of masculine and feminine structure, for the latter are defined differently in terms of that loss, that lack instituted by alienation, by the splitting brought on by our use of —or rather use by— language (TLS Fink 103).  The phallus is the signifier of lack. The phallus is never anything but a signfier, it is the signifier of desire.  Insofar as desire is always correlated with lack, the phallus is THE signifier of lack.

La: Indicates Woman‘ who does not fall into a set, as she is not completely defined by the phallic function.  “Woman does not exist”: there is no signifier for, or essence of, Woman as such. Woman can thus only be written under erasure: Woman.

-image deleted- signifier of the barred Other, feminine jouissance, Other jouissance (TLS 115).

***********

It is precisely because masculinity and femininity represent two non-complementary structures, defined by different relationships to the Other, that there can be no such thing as a sexual relationship. What we do in any relationship is either try to turn the other into what we think we desire or turn ourselves into that which we think the other desires, but this can never exactly map onto the other’s desire. In other words, the ‘major problem of male and female subjects is that they do not relate to what their partners relate to in them’ (citing Salecl 2002:93, in Homer 106). In a sense, we always miss what we aim at in the other and our desire remains unsatisfied. It is this very asymmetry of masculinity and femininity in relation to the phallus and the objet a that means that there can be no such thing as a sexual relationship (Homer 106).

butler foreclosure

I also don’t think that the foreclosures that produce the subject are fixed in time in the way that most Lacanians do. They really understand foreclosure as a kind of founding moment. My sense is that it is always the case that the subject is produced through certain kinds of foreclosure-certain things become impossible for it; certain things become irrecoverable-and that this makes for the possibility of a temporarily coherent subject who can act. But I also want to say that its action can very often take up the foreclosure itself; it can renew the meaning and the effect of foreclosure.

For instance, many people are inaugurated as subjects through the foreclosure of homosexuality; when homosexuality returns as a possibility, it returns precisely as the possibility of the unraveling of the subject itself: “I would not be I if I were a homosexual. I don’t know who I would be. I would be undone by that possibility. Therefore, I cannot come in close proximity to that which threatens to undo me fundamentally.” Miscegenation is another moment-it’s when you suddenly realize that a white subject assumes that its whiteness is absolutely essential to its capacity to be a subject at all: “If I must be in this kind of proximity to a person of color, I will become undone in some radical way.” We see forms of segregation and phobic forms of organizing social reality that keep the fiction of those subjects intact. Now, I think it’s possible sometimes to undergo an undoing, to submit to an undoing by virtue of what spectrally threatens the subject, in order to reinstate the subject on a new and different ground. (Butler interview with Salih, 2000)

lloyd interpellation subjection assujettisement

Psychic subjectivity is formed in dependence

subjection (assujetissement) in order to continue as a subject, individuals have to submit to the very power that subordinates them. Their evident willingness to do so suggests … a ‘passionate attachment’ to their subjection.

The policeman in the street calls out, “Hey you there!” and the individual recognizing that it is being spoken to, turns towards the policeman’s voice. At that moment the individual is transformed into a subject, or in Althusserian terms, a subject of ideology.

The turn to the voice of the law is the action that constitutes the individual’s subjection by power. Subjection, as Butler summarizes it, is best thought of, through the rhetorical idea of the trope, or turn (Psychic 3, Lloyd 98).

This turn is figurative since it cannot be made by an actual subject —the subject only comes into existence through the turn. In Althusser’s case, prior to the turn there is only the individual; after the turn there is a subject. What intrigues Butler however, is why the individual turns in the first place; why, that is, does it respond to the voice of the law? Althusser, according to Butler, offers no explanation for this. So she provides one.

The individual responds to the voice of the law because it assumes that it is guilty of some infraction —otherwise why would the policeman be calling out to it? It responds, that is, because its conscience tell it to. But if the individual has a conscience prior to its subjection by the law, then … The individual has already been subjected to a prior psychic operation of power, in which it has become both self-conscious and self subjugating (Psychic 106-131 Lloyd 98-99)

On its own, therefore, the theory of interpellation cannot explain subjection. What is needed here is a theory of the formation of the psyche.

lloyd melancholia

Lloyd, Moya. Judith Butler: From Norms to Politics. Cambridge MA: Polity Press, 2007.

Mourning: takes place when an object (such as a loved one, an ideal or a country) is lost. In such cases, the libido (mental energy) that was once invested in that object gradually detaches from it and is cathected onto (invested in) another object. The subject thus comes to terms with its loss and is able to form a new emotional attachment —to fall in love for instance. At this point, ‘the ego becomes free and uninhibited again’ and the work of mourning is completed.

Melancholia: The individual in this case is unable to get over its loss in the usual way. Instead it incorporates the lost object into its ego. It identifies with it, taking on certain of its characteristics. As a consequence, ‘a new structure of identity’ is created in which certain qualities of the lost other are permanently internalized in the ego. Diana Fuss captures this process nicely when she notes that ‘by incorporating, the spectral remains of the dearly departed love-object, the subject vampiristically comes to life’. Where mourning is the ‘normal’ reaction to loss, melancholia is a pathological response (since the melancholic subject is unable to accept its loss).

“the character of the ego is a precipitate of abandoned object-cathexes and … it contains the history of those object-choices.” To rephrase, the ego is formed melancholically. It is an effect of its identifications. It is this idea that Butler takes over and applies to the question of gender identity.

When Butler talks about the gender identity being structured melancholically she writes that ‘the process of internalizing and sustaining lost loves is crucial to the formation of the ego “and its object-choice”‘ (Gender T. 74 cited in Lloyd 84). It is not only the ego that is formed melancholically, it is also the subject’s sexual orientation — their object choice. That is, whether they choose an object (person) of the opposite sex to or of the same sex as themselves.

According to Butler, when the child reaches the Oedipal phase, they have already been ‘subjected to prohibitions which “dispose” them in distinct sexual directions’ (GT 82, Lloyd 84). They have already acquired heterosexual desires, albeit incestuous ones.

The fact that at the resolution of the Oedipal phase the boy identifies with his father, following the logic of melancholia, must mean that he has lost his father as an object of desire and has not been able to let go of —or grieve— that loss. Ego formation, after all, requires the internalization of —or identification with— the lost object. Similarly the fact that the girl identifies ultimately with her mother must again mean that she has lost her as a love object and has been unable to grieve that loss.

In both cases the lost desire for the parent of the same sex is installed melancholically in the ego. Heterosexual desire is bought at the price of denying —or, in psychoanalytic language, disavowing or foreclosing (what we might think of as negating or repressing)— prior homosexual desire. Heterosexuality thus has a melancholic structure. (85)

When Freud tells the story of the Oedipus complex he narrates it in terms of the taboo against incest, a taboo which he, like Lévi-Strauss … saw as foundational to culture and society. When Butler re-tells the story, she does so in order to uncover what is hidden in Freud’s narrative: that the Oedipus complex relies upon a prior taboo against homosexuality.

The psychoanalytic story of desire, as told by Freud, is thus incomplete: it does not, perhaps cannot, tell of the loss of same-sex desire that exists prior to the Oedipal scene where the incestuous heterosexual love object is renounced and where the subject is initiated into both their sexual identity and the moral order (85).

lloyd oedipal

Lloyd, Moya. Judith Butler: From Norms to Politics. Cambridge MA: Polity Press, 2007.

According to Lévi-Strauss there is a universal law that regulates the exchange of women in all kinship systems: this is the incest taboo, which ensures that women are exchanged between clans of men not related by blood. The incest taboo is crucial in two ways

1. it generates a non-incestuous heterosexuality

2. the taboo represents the crucial step in the transition from nature to culture. It inaugurates society. … the taboo leads to compulsory heterosexuality. How?

It divides the universe of sexual choice into categories of permitted and prohibited sexual partners and it presupposes a prior less articulate taboo on homosexuality. Incest taboo = invariant transcultural symbolic law

Because Rubin believes all humans are sexually polymorphous, she adheres to an idea of ‘sexuality “before the law”‘ rather than as Butler would have it, sexuality as an effect of the law (81).

… it is clear that much of the conceptual apparatus Butler deploys in her own analysis of Lévi-Strauss, Freud and Lacan is borrowed from Rubin’s earlier text: her assumption of a prior prohibition on homosexuality, an understanding of heterosexuality as compulsory and a concern with the intractability of symbolic law (81).

In Freud’s estimation, all infants experience incestuous desires for their parents. How these desires are resolved determines not only the subject’s future sexual orientation but also how its ego and superego (conscience) develop.

Key to Freud’s account, according to Butler, is the idea of primary bisexuality. Freud assumes, that is, that all babies are born with both feminine and masculine dispositions… A masculine disposition, he suggests, is expressed in the child’s desire for its mother, while a feminine disposition is expressed in the child’s desire for its father. The sex of the child in question is irrelevant.

For Butler this can mean only one thing. Freud understands primary bisexuality heteronormatively: as ‘the coincidence of two heterosexual desires within a single psyche’ (Butler Gender Trouble 77 cited in Lloyd 83).

Why is Freud unable to imagine the possibility of pre-oedipal homosexuality? Butler’s supposition (echoing Rubin) is that the reason for this is that the Oedipus complex, and thus Freud’s theory of psycho-sexual development, presumes a prior prohibition on homosexuality.

In order to expose this prior prohibition, Butler set about demonstrating that far from masculinity and femininity being dispositions that naturally inhere in persons, they are, in fact, effects of identification.

Identification refers to the process whereby the individual acquires its identity, or aspects thereof, from someone (or something) else. One of the ways in which this occurs is through … introjection.

Introjection: is when the subject takes into its ego —into him or herself— objects from the outside world in order to preserve them. Introjection is a response to loss.

thiem deviance

🙂 Don’t look at accountability in terms of justifying actions, I did this BECAUSE of this reason, this is the justification for why I did this and that …

Subject formation .. is important because it provides us with an analytic of power and social normalization by clarifying the material effects of schemes of intelligibility. Critique is concerned with … the question of asking how subjects are formed and how schemes of social and political intelligibility determine who counts as a subject, as an individual, and as a human being (218).

Anything that we can call morality today merges into the question of the organization of the world. we might even say that the quest for the good life is the quest for the right form of politics, if indeed such a right form of politics lay within the realm of what can be achieved today (Adorno in Butler Giving 133) (219)

Individuals and groups are marginalized when the social recognition that is available implies and demands the denial of attachments, taking on positions of inferiority or pathologization. The struggles of the transgender community are an example of how deviant bodies and desires can be made recognizable only when they are contained within the discourse of medical cure… Recourse to a medical diagnosis means that recognition is made available through a therapeutic medical discourse that considers the current state of the individual’s body and desires as pathological. …

While transgendered bodies and desires are not utterly denied recognition, they are recognized only through the available schemes of normality, as a medical condition to be cured. To push this point beyond the particular,

instead of idealizing social recognition, the critical potential of thinking about recognition lies in examining how recognition is administered and what social, institutional, and psychic formations sustain which kinds of lives as normal and recognizable and which other lives as marginal and exposed to violence. (244)

thiem levinas past that never was present

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

If we follow Levinas, we begin with responsibility, but it is not an unambivalent responsibility, because the emergence of the moral subject is marked by the emergence of a desire for violence. (106)

This means that the awakening to the face of the other is constitutively an awakening to being conflicted, and if the temptation to violence is issued by the face itself, then there is not only no subject but also no responsibility that could be pure and uncompromised (107).

Responsibility, in other words, emerges as what remains irreducible to and propels one beyond self-reflexive questioning of the moral self (107).

There is no time of the subject when and no place for the subject where there is no responsibility. there is no time or place when or where the subject has not already been approached by the other.

Precisely because the address absolutely exceeds the subject, “responsibility” in Levinas’s account can no longer be thought of primarily in terms of one’s accountability for one’s actions and choices. The responsibility for the other is not a responsibility that one could have chosen, to which one could have agreed; the other overwhelms, and the “I” cannot even remember being overwhelmed and enjoined (108).

Consciousness thus can only belatedly and never adequately reconstruct and grasp this scene that conditioned its own possibility.

Levinas’s account of ethical subject formation is radical because there is no subject who could remember and decide before the encounter with the other.

Hence one’s responsibility radically exceeds one’s ability to account for oneself and to assume this responsibility consciously, because one has become responsible for the other’s death before there was even an “I” that could have accepted or refused this responsibility and before there was an “I” that could have acted mindfully (108).

This “before,” this “prior to every memory” … is not a nonpresence in the sense of a past that once was present and now is no longer present. It is a past that has never been present, but as such, it also has never been past. … this “past” is not one that could be remembered, recollected, and re-presented in memory. …

… but this nonpresence impossible to remember … while not being present and having never been present, is precisely not absent. It signifies that which cannot be surpassed and that continues to interrupt the present.

The address has always already happened, and any response is coming irrecoverably too late, but nonetheless, precisely because of its belatedness, is only ever so much more urgent. (109)