differences recent issues

Demanding the Impossible: Desire and Social Change

McNulty, T. — 2009-03-09

The question at the core of this essay is whether the subjective stance of one person can initiate broad change or inspire collective action by means other than the group psychology, not by appealing to a particular set of values or ideals or by cementing the group through identification or libidinal cathexes but by foregrounding the experience of the desiring subject. It takes as its point of departure Jacques Lacan's definition of anxiety as "the affect that responds to the desire of the Other." If love is about the strategies of seduction that sustain the imaginary coherence of the ego, desire is linked to the anxiety induced by the loss of the ego ideals and the encounter with castration. The corollary is that the practice of psychoanalysis is founded on the confrontation with the anxiety provoked by the desire of the Other and the assumption that only this can result in real change.

This article examines three examples of social tie that are structured around the desire of the founder and the anxiety it induces: the interdiction of sacrifice and the worship of an absent God in the religion of Moses, the role of the transference in Freud's invention of psychoanalysis, and the "love of the enemy" in the discourse of Jesus. The author argues that the clinical context sheds light on the violent resistance and repression that greeted the founding acts of Moses and Jesus and offers insight into the structural antagonism between the founder's desire and the possibility of a collective movement. The examples of Moses and Jesus in turn develop a dimension of the analytic experience that is not always given sufficient weight: that desire must find expression in an act or in the production of a new object that intervenes in the world so as to transform it.

Derrida and Lacan: An Impossible Friendship?

Shepherdson, C. — 2009-03-09

This article explores the relation between the work of Lacan and Derrida, focusing on the use of modal logic in both writers (the categories of necessity, impossibility, contingency, and possibility). The author explores the structure of the aporia in Derrida as a peculiar conjunction of necessity and impossibility, distinct from previous forms of contradiction (antinomies in Kant and dialectical contradiction in Hegel) and therefore historically situated in relation to the tradition of metaphysics. He argues that the other two modal categories, possibility and contingency, are largely absorbed by the aporia of necessity and impossibility. In Lacan, by contrast, modal categories are introduced in Encore, his notorious seminar on sexual difference, to develop the distinction between masculinity and femininity. The author argues that the sexuation graph of Encore, which is written in symbolic logic, is later redescribed by Lacan in modal terms, and this later description alters Lacan's initial presentation, allowing for greater flexibility among these categories. The essay shows that Lacan eventually presents a model of discursive transformation in which each modal category is capable of being shifted into another. This produces a model of discursive transformation that brings Lacan closer to Foucault than most commentators have acknowledged. The broader horizon of the argument concerns psychoanalysis and historical change, and the author argues that Foucault, Lacan, and Derrida all address the problem of history and that the relations among these thinkers deserve more attention than their polemical reception has allowed, particularly with regard to attacks on psychoanalysis as ahistorical.

Psychoanalysis without Symptoms

Cheng, A. A. — 2009-03-09

This article meditates on the possibility of thinking about both psychoanalysis and contemporary critical analysis without the drive toward symptomatic reading. It argues that the instrumental expectation placed on the diagnosis of symptoms (of illness and of ideology alike) and the subsequent promise of transformative change have led to a series of critical impasses in liberal criticism. This essay contends that the failures of psychoanalysis (failures to produce stable meaning, to procure cure, to exorcize the past, to segregate health from illness, and so forth) may be precisely all the places that render psychoanalysis not only interesting but ethically vital to social critique and political consideration.

"What Does Death Represent to the Individual?" Psychoanalysis and Wartime

Stonebridge, L. — 2009-03-09

Why is it that we respond to the deaths of others in wartime with an apparent indifference? What is it about our desire that so readily accommodates the representation of the death of others? This article addresses these questions through a reading of Freud's 1915 essay on war and Klein's 1940s writing on mourning and the fear of death. Between them, Freud and Klein produce a compelling narrative about what it means to live in fear not only of death, which is where Freud begins his critique of the normalizing pathologies of war at the beginning of the century, but also of one's own violence, which is where Klein takes that critique fifteen years later. What starts as a question for Freud about how it is that war legitimizes a murderous representation of the other becomes, in Klein, a question about the morality of mourning. In wartime, this morality becomes political, as Klein's pressing therapeutic question—how might one mourn without violence?—is yoked to a more immediately historical imperative: how is it possible to live in terror without reproducing an annihilating denial of the other?

A Wider Social Stage

Stewart-Steinberg, S. — 2009-03-09

This article investigates the problematic relationship between psychoanalysis and politics. Specifically, it wonders if an inherent conflict exists between these two domains. If psychoanalysis has as its central object the unconscious, and politics the construction of a relatively stable ego, then how can psychoanalysis productively contribute to the analysis of the democratic political sphere? This article treats this question through an analysis not only of Sigmund Freud's incursions into what he called "a wider social stage" but also of his daughter's particular contributions to the topic. Anna Freud was the official inheritor of the psychoanalytic movement, and it was her task to transform the movement into a stable (political) organization with rules of conduct and of the transmission of knowledge. The author traces this transformation through the debates that surrounded professional psychoanalytic training, in particular through the problem of the so-called training analysis. The institutionalization of psychoanalysis has much to tell us, she argues, about the problems inherent in the institutionalization of politics.

Society of Choice

Salecl, R. — 2009-03-09

Postindustrial society thrives on the idea of choice. The individual is not only perceived as able to choose among various consumer objects; he or she is also taken as someone who can choose his or her identity, sexual orientation, body shape, and so on. In the ideology of postindustrial capitalism, one's life is perceived as a work of art and as a particular kind of enterprise. The overemphasis of choice, however, does not seem to bring contentment to the individual, but rather increases feelings of anxiety and insecurity. In order to appease feelings of anxiety, people often resort to following random advice on how to fashion their lives.

Psychoanalysis questions how the malaise of civilization affects the malaise of the individual and vice versa. A pessimistic conclusion about the changes in today's society holds that the increase of psychosis and of anxiety are related in a particular way to the ideology of choice. Psychoanalysis, however, has always understood choice in a complex way. Instead of perceiving the act of choosing as a purely rational gesture, psychoanalysis understands choice as linked to the unconscious. Since choice always involves a loss, it is per se anxiety provoking. Today's society has problems precisely with the idea of loss, which is why we see the emergence of options promising to impose control on what is often uncontrollable.

Disposability

Khanna, R. — 2009-03-09

This article discusses disposability in light of what psychoanalysis can offer to an analysis of that term, understood as a contemporary characteristic of the human and its liminal condition. The essay questions why a program of social change is demanded of psychoanalysis but also shows that psychoanalysis offers an account of social change that is nondeterministic. It shows how psychoanalysis can be a useful analytic frame through which to understand the pleasures and pains of disposability or the waste that one might associate with it, and thus brings psychoanalysis into conversation with its historical allies, Western Marxism and feminism. The author engages with the work of Giorgio Agamben, Françoise Vergès, and Bertrand Ogilvie through a psychoanalytic framework shaped by her understanding of contemporary disposability. She associates disposability with melancholia and an impoverishment of ego that, she maintains, ultimately provides a critical agency.

Right to Vote or Right to Revolt? Arendt and the British Suffrage Militancy

Ziarek, E. P. — 2008-10-16

Building on studies that recover suffrage as an important political, historical, and cultural phenomenon, this article considers the political implications of the British suffragettes' redefinition of the right to vote as the right to revolt. Such a definition means that the suffragettes' contribution to political modernity is not limited to the enfranchisement of women, although this was an enormous victory. Equally significant is the suffragettes' discourse of revolution, which, as Hannah Arendt argues, reveals the inextricable connection between freedom, the emergence of female political and artistic subjectivities, and the creation of new forms of political life. This study focuses primarily on the militant stage of the British suffrage campaign (1903–1914) because it was the experience and justification of female militancy that propelled suffragettes to redefine the right to vote as a more fundamental women's right to revolt.

"Where' your people from, girl?": Belonging to Race, Gender, and Place Beneath Clouds

Diprose, R. — 2008-10-16

This article explores the impossibility and necessity of belonging to gender, race, and place. It does so against the background of Ivan Sen's Australian film Beneath Clouds (2001), with the specificities of Australian landscape and the rural/urban divide that it captures, and of race politics in contemporary Australia. In the context of the film, the question "Where' your people from, girl?" implies the recognition of the addressee's indigenous heritage at a time when she has been passing as white. Such a question could be viewed as sexist or racist, as a call to identify oneself in terms of fixed, hierarchical, and discriminatory categories of gender, race, and family. But given who asks the question and where, this article argues that the question is an offer of community, though not community understood as shared group identity based on mutual recognition and understanding. Rather, the idea of community developed in this article is of an open sense of belonging together to race, gender, and place, a sensibility of belonging that expresses one's indeterminate difference, that opens one toward a future and a past, that must be continually renewed through relations with others, and that is essential to one's life. The paper also argues that this belonging is corporeal, lived, and that it engenders and transforms sociopolitical meaning. On the basis of this model of community, the harm of racism and sexism lies not in the effects of categorization and objectification, but in the impact of any political denial of the uniqueness and openness of belonging and in the disabling of the capacity for community that accompanies this denial. These ideas are explored with reference to the philosophies of Merleau-Ponty and Nancy and contemporary theorists of race and gender including Alcoff, Haslanger, Langton, and Ziarek.

Drifting Decision and the Decision to Drift: The Question of Spirit in Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping

Mattessich, S. — 2008-10-16

This essay builds on previous criticism highlighting the semiotic dimensions of Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping to identify in its metaphors of spirit and spiritual haunting a performative logic of social implication. This logic appears within a metaphysics of subjectivity that the essay draws out in the novel with the help of Derrida's meditations on religion and Nancy's revision of dialectical reason. The "house" of identity, the essay argues, is for Robinson less an enclosure than "a way of going outside" that reveals the negative ground of every determined or external difference. "Keeping" house, then, is figured in leaving it, at a formal level of indistinction between inside and outside. At this level, the novel suggests a model for thinking agency, or decision, predicated on the uncertainty of identification and the need for self-critical reflection on the thetic foreclosure (or forgetting) of the negative ground. Housekeeping is only incidentally about outsiders who escape the conventional world and insiders who do not. In the first instance it concerns the space of unknowing, where we always are, or live, however normative our actions or emphatic our positions (or oppositions) might be. "Drifting Decision" seeks to open up this space in the novel, with an eye to its ethical significance for readers and writers alike.

Nietzsche/Pentheus: The Last Disciple of Dionysus and Queer Fear of the Feminine

Schotten, C. H. — 2008-10-16

This article examines the scholarly preoccupation with the hypothesis that Nietzsche was gay by offering a reading of Nietzsche's texts as autobiographical that puts them in conversation with Euripides's drama The Bacchae. Drawing a number of parallels between Nietzsche, self-avowed disciple of Dionysus, and Pentheus, the main character of The Bacchae and demonstrated antidisciple of Dionysus, I argue that both men experience their sexual attraction to women as somehow intolerable, and they negotiate this discomfort—which is simultaneously an unjustified paranoia and fear of the feminine—through the appropriation of feminine capacities and qualities for themselves. This appropriation ultimately expresses these men's fear of the erosion of male power and the coherence of distinct gender categories that I call a "queer fear of the feminine." However, this is neither a sign of incipient homosexuality nor a feminist move; rather, it is good old-fashioned patriarchy dressed up in drag. I conclude by offering a symptomatic reading of the popularity of the thesis that Nietzsche was gay, arguing that this reflects our own twenty-first-century tendency to read gender deviance as only ever a sign of sexual "orientation," which is always already presumed to be homosexuality.

Somatic Ontology: Comments on Alison Stone's Luce Irigaray and the Philosophy of Sexual Difference

Mader, M. B. — 2008-10-16

This commentary opens with an exposition of Alison Stone's novel reading of Irigaray's philosophy of sexual difference. This reading proposes that Irigaray's philosophy of sexual difference is a realist essentialism that reposes upon a general ontology of natural rhythm whose philosophical source is the nature philosophy of Schelling. Distinguishing between two accounts, a rhythmic account of natural, human sex difference and a relational account of cultivatable human, sexual difference, Stone's book unites these accounts to provide a comprehensive reading of Irigaray's philosophy of sexual difference. This article raises questions about the content of this new reading. The commentary asks whether and to what extent the rhythmic account of sex difference is established independently of a prior nonrhythmic or more conventional, biological notion of sex difference. It questions the classification of rhythmic processes that are purportedly differentiated by sex and offers a note of skepticism about the comparative classifications of reproductive and sexual impulses by sex. Finally, it treats the work's metaphysics of expression and tendency, inspired by Schelling's metaphysics, so as to inquire into its utility. The suggestion is that the value of this metaphysics may be undermined by the epistemological difficulty of distinguishing between a suppressed tendency and an absent one. The conclusion identifies this metaphysics of expression as a serious point of divergence between Stone's thought on sexuality and that of one of her interlocutors in the text, Judith Butler.

Recastings: On Alison Stone's Luce Irigaray and the Philosophy of Sexual Difference

Deutscher, P. — 2008-10-16

Following criticisms of Alison Stone's treatment of Judith Butler on nature and embodiment, this article argues that Stone has reconfigured Butler so as to accommodate Stone's interpretation of Irigaray. The project can be used to draw attention to forms of prior reconfiguration that may occur when differing theoretical frameworks are brought into dialogue with each other. The need for such forms of implicit, prior reconfiguration helps draw attention to the differences and relationships between different frameworks and the only apparently similar terms and concepts embedded in them. In the light of a staged encounter between Butler and Irigaray, Stone widens the conceptual space within Butler's project, into which she drops an alternative, reconfiguring understanding of Butler's work as requiring an absent concept: original, multiple, self-differentiating nature. She argues that the concept has the potential to serve as a useful intervention into the work of Butler and, among others, Schelling. Although this potential is not directly addressed by Stone, the reading serves as an occasion to reflect on a number of interpretative questions concerning not only the tacit work that occurs in one author's reconfiguration of another but also the varied methodologies that may be appropriate to the interpretation of Luce Irigaray's work in particular.

Unthought Nature: Reply to Penelope Deutscher and Mary Beth Mader

Stone, A. — 2008-10-16

In response to Mader's and Deutscher's questions, the author defends her approach to reading Irigaray and Butler, which entails extending the ideas of these thinkers into areas of thought with which they do not engage directly themselves. This involves relating Irigaray's ideas to the tradition of the philosophy of nature and interpreting Butler as offering, in spite of her focus on the genealogy of claims about sex, also a theory of sex itself, a theory of sex as an effect entirely of gender. This approach to reading differs from Irigaray's own reading method of expanding and transforming philosophies in light of their constitutive exclusions. An example of this, explored here, is Irigaray's expansion and transformation of Merleau-Ponty's late ontology of flesh in light of its constitutive exclusion, the "maternal sojourn." This article also asks whether rhythmic sexual difference, which the author has attempted to differentiate from biological sex difference, ultimately remains tied to biological sex difference. This commentary suggests that it does but that reference to biological sex difference need not be politically problematic. Finally, the author asks whether the metaphysics of potentials and tendencies that she attributes to Irigaray impedes social change by inevitably reinstalling the actual as the horizon of possibility. Irigaray's strategy of reading texts and cultures for their constitutive exclusions offers a solution to this problem.

In the Event: An Introduction

Pratt, L. — 2008-07-25

The Historical Event

White, H. — 2008-07-25

World History according to Katrina

Dimock, W. C. — 2008-07-25

Babo's Razor; or, Discerning the Event in an Age of Differences

Elmer, J. — 2008-07-25

Bourdieu, Ambiguity, and the Significance of Events

Aisenberg, A. — 2008-07-25

The Era of Lost (White) Girls: On Body and Event

Wanzo, R. — 2008-07-25

Aftereffects of the End of the World ("I {heartsuit} NY")

Lippit, A. M. — 2008-07-25

Rethinking Working-Class Literature: Feminism, Globalization, and Socialist Ethics

Perera, S. — 2008-03-21

According to a corpus of representative texts and standard minimal Marxist definitions, the "proletariat" of proletarian literature is, by definition, revolutionary, and by implication, male; this is the specific subset of the working class entrusted with the historic mission of abolishing the class system. Women's texts of nonrevolutionary socialism from across the global North-South divide, however, confront us with new figures and concepts for thinking unorganized resistance, everyday exigencies, and the shape of the ethical within globalization. This essay studies the conventions and notations of such proletarian internationalist feminist texts from the global South, focusing specifically on the figure of a dispersed collective subject. It brings together contemporary protest literature published by Dabindu--a collective comprised of garment factory worker-activists and feminists from the free trade zone regions of Sri Lanka--with Tillie Olsen's classic field-defining literature from the proletarian moment in the U.S. Can we speak of a collective subject of feminism within economic globalization? Whose interest does staking a claim for such a heterogeneous class subject--one that figures "unity in dispersal"--serve? What are the conditions and constraints for conceptualizing historical agency and class struggle according to these terms, given that we occupy a conjuncture that has been described by some in epochal terms as the "feminization of the proletariat," by others as the "NGO-ization of feminism"? Toward answering these questions, "Rethinking Working-Class Literature" turns to the methodological resources of Marxism and comparative literature. This essay ultimately seeks to articulate the terms of a feminist class politics in the shadow of economisms like "comparative advantage" and "outsourcing."

Turn the Beat Around: Sadomasochism, Temporality, History

Freeman, E. — 2008-03-21

Through a close analysis of Isaac Julien's short film The Attendant, this essay argues that sadomasochistic sex practice ought to be understood in temporal terms, as a play of pause against surprise, suspension against shock. In The Attendant, Freeman contends, Julien rethinks S/M precisely this way, thereby linking it with the possibilities of film as a particularly indexical, intercorporeal medium for shocking and reorganizing the senses. This rethinking of screen as a kind of skin in turn enables Julien to confront sadomasochistic role playing, in which players take up the signs and tools of historically specific injustices such as the Inquisition, the Holocaust, and especially the transatlantic slave trade. Rather than condemning this kind of role playing--especially as it takes place between black and white men--Julien offers sadomasochism as an embodied way to feel historical or to engage viscerally with the past. He thereby opens up new registers for taking in and taking account of the historical, registers that refuse to concede pleasure in the name of trauma, which has been treated as the more properly political affect by most criticism.

The In-tensions of Extensions: Compagnie Marie Chouinard's bODY rEMIX/ gOLDBERG vARIATIONS

Thain, A. — 2008-03-21

This essay explores the affective intensity of movement in a recent choreography by noted French Canadian choreographer Marie Chouinard. In bODY rEMIX/ gOLDBERG vARIATIONS, dancers perform with all manners of prosthetics and bodily extensions--crutches, ski poles, coat racks, pointe shoes worn by men and women, on one or two feet or on hands--to a score that remixes Glenn Gould's recordings of the Goldberg Variations with his recorded interviews. Drawing on Gilles Deleuze, José Gil, and André Lepecki, I argue that despite its engagement with forms of extension, the use of prosthetics in Chouinard's bODY rEMIX fundamentally explores the intensive movement of affect, particularly through its engagement with suspense (as the generation of an ambiguous image in the tension between extensive and intensive movement) and the sound image. This exploration of the in-tensions of extensions, when, rather than simply extending into the world, movement develops a centrifugal force, likewise argues that the movement of affective intensity is the way in which the body activates its inherent capacity for change. Extension is a fundamental attitude of the dancing body; dancing "projects lines into the invisible" in a movement of outward intentionality. Yet that movement is always doubled and deviated by a responsive (not simply reactive) intensity of movement, a dynamic activation of the body's potential charged by the encounter that pushes against and reworks the constitution of the very bodies that compose it, a movement of a different quality whose effects cannot simply be determined by a reverse calculation from extension.

Descartes, Individualism, and the Fetal Subject

Wilkin, R. — 2008-03-21

The fetus was able to think and was conscious of doing so, Descartes claimed in his Response to Antoine Arnauld's Objection to the Meditationes de prima philosophia (1641). This essay traces the fortunes of the cogitating fetus in Descartes's published works and correspondence, showing that he eventually came to use the example of the fetus to exemplify what he meant by the "union" of mind and body. Although Descartes is usually considered a dualist, particularly in feminist criticism, he took for granted that we experience ourselves as mind/body composites. The fetus presented an extreme version of the experiences devolving from mind/body union. Far from suggesting that fetuses, like born human beings, were individuals (as they are portrayed in pro-life rhetoric), Descartes invited his readers to consider that born human beings, like fetuses, comprised embodied minds, connected to and in varying degrees dependent on other people. This investigation of the "fetal subject" in Cartesian metaphysics reveals a relational side to the Cartesian "cogito," a surprising revelation insofar as Descartes often takes the blame (or credit--depending on one's adherence to liberal ideals) for providing the foundations of an individualistic conception of personhood.

Beyond Ontology and Sexual Difference: An Interview with the Italian Feminist Philosopher Adriana Cavarero

Cavarero, A., Bertolino, E. — 2008-03-21

This interview with the Italian feminist philosopher Adriana Cavarero situates Cavarero's thought among the philosophical positions of such thinkers as Jacques Derrida, Giorgio Agamben, Jean-Luc Nancy, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Emmanuel Levinas, and Hannah Arendt, as well as engaging the feminist theory of Judith Butler. While addressing such topics as globalization, terrorism, violence, and vulnerability, the question of ontology is central to the interview. Cavarero refines Arendt's perspective and emphasizes an ontology of singularity characterized by the materiality of human uniqueness together with its necessary relationality and vulnerability. Sceptical of postmodern, poststructuralist, and deconstructive theories that share a refusal of ontology and an avoidance of metaphysical closure, Cavarero points out that such a refusal tends to think ontology as something necessarily metaphysical. In contrast, for Cavarero ontology, must be reconsidered and treated with cattive intenzioni, bad intentions, because if it is simply questioned or deconstructed, and thus avoided, then ontology itself is not transformed. By focusing on the uniqueness of the individual as an ontological category, Cavarero disrupts the sacrificial economy of traditional ontology.