{"id":5998,"date":"2010-10-27T15:48:22","date_gmt":"2010-10-27T19:48:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/?p=5998"},"modified":"2010-10-27T16:16:35","modified_gmt":"2010-10-27T20:16:35","slug":"carlson-pt-2-on-tim-dean","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/2010\/10\/27\/carlson-pt-2-on-tim-dean\/","title":{"rendered":"carlson pt 2 on tim dean"},"content":{"rendered":"

Carlson, Shanna T. “Transgender Subjectivity and the Logic of Sexual Difference” Volume 21, Number 2, 2010 d i f f e r e n c e s: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies<\/em><\/p>\n

Footnote 7:\u00a0 Dean goes on to explain, however, that \u201c[a]ll desire entails the presence of the symbolic Other, but since this Other has no gender\u2014 there is no \u2018Other sex\u2019\u2014desire involves a relation to otherness independent of sexual difference\u201d(137).<\/p>\n

In this shift, from questions of Lacan\u2019s theory of desire to questions of sexual difference,
\nDean attempts to clarify desire\u2019s independence from the regime of \u201cgender\u201d but obscures the insight of the formulas of sexuation that \u201cgender\u201d and \u201csexual difference\u201d are not one and the same thing.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Too closely linking gender and sexual difference, Dean runs the risk of mandating \u201cgendered\u201d readings of Lacan, which could in turn result in a theory at times illogically heterosexist.<\/strong> At various moments in his narrations of the formulas, Lacan, too, can be read as too closely linking gender and sexual difference, which is why I have based my meditation primarily on the formulas.<\/p>\n

[Quotoing Tim Dean in Beyond Sexuality<\/em>] takes exception to Butler\u2019s account of sexuality as outlined in Bodies That Matter<\/em>, for, as he argues, Butler\u2019s is a rhetoricalist approach. According to Dean, \u201crhetoricalist theories of sexuality effectively evacuate the category of desire from their accounts<\/strong>\u201d by failing to take account of \u201cwhat in rhetoric or<\/strong> discourse exceeds languag<\/strong>e\u201d (178). Desire will prove essential to Dean\u2019s own account of sexuality; in his project to deheterosexualize desire<\/strong>, Dean develops the notion of object a<\/strong> in order to theorize sexuality \u201coutside the terms of gender and<\/em> identity\u201d (222).<\/p>\n

According to Dean, the limitation of situating the phallus at the center of a theoretical account of desire is not only that the phallus has such a problematic history but that it is a single term; object a<\/strong>, on the other hand, \u201cimplies multiple, heterogeneous possibilities for desire\u201d (250).\u00a0 Dean wishes to figure desire within \u201cterms of multiplicity\u201d (249) rather than principally according to an \u201cideology of lack\u201d (247).<\/p>\n

He cites Lacan\u2019s assertion that \u201c[d]esire is a relation of being to lack\u201d (qtd. in Beyond 247) but emphasizes, too, that \u201cthe question of conceptualizing desire in terms of lack remains a stubborn problem\u201d for a variety of queer- and feminist-minded projects (248). Dean identifies the latter resistance as having precisely to do with the way that the ideology of lack intersects with castration in psychoanalytic theory (248). In favor of such a scene, Dean turns instead to polymorphous perversion<\/strong> as a site of multiplicity, contending that theorizing desire from the point of excess instead of from the point of lack \u201cmakes desire essentially pluralistic, with all the inclusive implications of pluralism<\/strong>\u201d (249).<\/p>\n

For Dean, one of the advantages of theorizing desire from the starting point of polymorphous perversion arises from Freud\u2019s understanding of polymorphous perversion as preceding normative\u2014that is, genital\u2014sexuality; in this way, perversion comes to represent a sort of \u201cparadise lost\u201d that \u201cnormal sexuality\u201d will try, but never completely manage, to supplant (235). <\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In rehearsing Freud\u2019s decision to classify perversion in terms not of content but rather of \u201cexclusiveness and fixation\u201d (236),<\/p>\n

Dean will go so far as to suggest that \u201cthe process of normalization itself is what\u2019s pathological, <\/strong>since normalization \u2018fixes\u2019 desire and generates the exclusiveness of sexual orientation [heterosexual or homosexual] as its symptom\u201d (237).<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

However, what is not of interest to Dean, at least in this text, is Lacan\u2019s assertion that masculine and feminine subjects relate differently to object a<\/strong>. According to Lacan, it is the masculine subject that is principally occupied with object a<\/strong>. Queer as it is, could Dean\u2019s account of desire be lacking the feminine?<\/p>\n

Lacan writes that \u201cthe object\u2014from at least one pole of sexual identification, the male pole\u2014the object [. . .] puts itself in the place of what cannot be glimpsed of the Other\u201d (Encore 63). By contrast, for the feminine subject, \u201csomething other than object a <\/strong>is at stake in what comes to make up for the sexual relationship that does not exist\u201d (63). Here again, we see Lacan specifying that via sexual difference, something tries to make up for the absence of the sexual relation. However, there is a fundamental asymmetry at play in the making up for lost\/fantasized complementarity, for feminine and masculine subjects make up for the loss, in part, with recourse to different types of others.<\/strong><\/p>\n

In both Bodies That Matter<\/em> and Antigone\u2019s Claim<\/em>, Butler performs readings of the subject\u2019s entry into the symbolic via sexual differentiation, and two of her principal charges are that Lacan\u2019s symbolic is normative and that the assumption of a sexed position enjoins compulsory heterosexuality. In Antigone\u2019s Claim, Butler turns from matters of discourse and materiality to the scene of kinship in order to explore how psychoanalysis might both\/either compel and\/or inhibit the forging of new kinds of community ties, ties that Butler subsumes under the promising header \u201cradical kinship.\u201d<\/p>\n

Butler\u2019s investment in the possibility of imagining new forms of kinship ties has a strong affective and political attraction, which she wields to good end, for example, in her listing of the ways that \u201ckinship
\nhas become fragile, porous, and expansive\u201d (Antigone\u2019s 22). Butler cites the mobility of children who, because of migration, exile, refugee status, or situations of divorce or remarriage, \u201cmove from one family to another, move from a family to no family, move from no family to a family, or live, psychically, at the crossroads of the family, or in multiply layered family situations<\/strong>\u201d (22). She points to the blending of straight and gay families, to gay nuclear families, and to straight or gay families where a child may have no mother or no father, or two mothers or two fathers, or half-brothers as friends (22\u201323), asking: \u201cWhat has Oedipus engendered? [. . .] What will the legacy of Oedipus be for those who are formed in these situations, where positions are hardly clear, where the place of the father is dispersed, where the place of the mother is multiply occupied or displaced, where the symbolic in its stasis no longer holds?\u201d (22\u201323). No doubt this is a time of potentially unprecedented familial mobility. Some would evaluate these realities as the sign of a crisis in \u201cfamily values\u201d; others would celebrate the more positive effects of the new types of ties and encounters. In this text, though, Butler is also taking aim at a particular strain of psychoanalysis that would seem unexpectedly to ally itself on some levels with defenders of the heterosexual nuclear family<\/strong>. Butler\u00a0 references such positions as she has encountered them, including psychoanalysts opposed to or at least worried about gay adoption as a possible source of psychosis for the adopted children, Jacques-Alain Miller\u2019s alleged opposition to male homosexual marriage on account of its likely infidelity, and others\u2019 suggestion that autism can be traceable to lesbian parenting (70). Butler concludes,\u201cThese views commonly maintain that alternative kinship arrangements attempt to revise psychic structures in ways that lead to tragedy again, figured incessantly as the tragedy of and for the child.\u201d<\/p>\n

I would like to join Butler in imagining sexuation otherwise than as a scene of compulsory heterosexuality. However, I do not think that doing so requires locating a loophole in the Oedipal narrative, as Butler does in her interpretation of the Antigone story.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

For while Butler is quite right to lament and fear the compulsory heterosexuality that provides a potent backdrop to many societal norms and ideals, no one knew better than Lacan that, as he put it, \u201c[i]deals are
\nsociety\u2019s slaves\u201d (qtd. in Dean, Beyond 229).<\/p>\n

In her argument, Butler seems to cast the Oedipal scene as the only available solution within psychoanalysis to the failure of the sexual relation, as in her observation that, for Lacan, the symbolic is \u201cthe realm of the Law that regulates desire in the Oedipus complex\u201d (Antigone\u2019s 18).<\/p>\n

… the Oedipal drama is a principally \u201cmasculine\u201d<\/strong> (and indeed a principally \u201cobsessional,\u201d if not a principally heterosexual) solution to the failure of the sexual relation, one that hallucinates an object as prohibited. But as we have seen, there is not only one solution to the failure of the sexual relation: there are two! In this way, Butler is quite right to turn to Antigone as an alternative to the Oedipal solution<\/strong>. 60
\n<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Carlson, Shanna T. “Transgender Subjectivity and the Logic of Sexual Difference” Volume 21, Number 2, 2010 d i f f e r e n c e s: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies Footnote 7:\u00a0 Dean goes on to explain, however, that \u201c[a]ll desire entails the presence of the symbolic Other, but since this Other … Continue reading “carlson pt 2 on tim dean”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[78,111,86,24,72,96,94,114,15],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5998","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-butler","category-desire","category-gender","category-lacan","category-objet-a","category-phallus-butler","category-sexual-difference","category-sexuation","category-subjectivity"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5998","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5998"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5998\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6022,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5998\/revisions\/6022"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5998"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5998"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5998"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}