Obras
Performative Acts and Gender Constitution (1988)
Gender Trouble (1990)
Imitation and Gender Insubordination (1991)
Bodies That Matter (1993)
Excitable Speech (1997)
Precarious Life (2004)
Undoing Gender (2004)
Giving an Account of Oneself (2005)
Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly (2015)
The Force of Nonviolence (2020)

Bodies That Matter (1993)

Introduction
PART I
1 Bodies that Matter
2 The Lesbian Phallus and the Morphological Imaginary
3 Phantasmatic Identification and the Assumption of Sex
4 Gender is Burning: Questions of Appropriation and Subversion
PART II
5 “Dangerous Crossing”: Willa Cather’s Masculine Names
6 Passing, Queering: Nella Larsen’s Psychoanalytic Challenge
7 Arguing with the Real
8 Critically Queer
Notes

Undoing Gender (2004)

Introduction: Acting in Concert
Chapter 1. Beside Oneself: On the Limits of Sexual Autonomy
Chapter 2. Gender Regulations
Chapter 3. Doing Justice to Someone: Sex Reassignment and Allegories of Transsexuality
Chapter 4. Undiagnosing Gender
Chapter 5. Is Kinship Always Already Heterosexual?
Chapter 6. Longing for Recognition
Chapter 7. Quandaries of the Incest Taboo
Chapter 8. Bodily Confessions
Chapter 9. The End of Sexual Difference?
Chapter 10. The Question of Social Transformation
Chapter 11. Can the “Other” of Philosophy Speak?

Gender Trouble (1990)

Preface (1999)
Preface (1990)

Subjects of Sex/Gender/Desire
I. “Women” as the Subject of Feminism
II. The Compulsory Order of Sex/Gender/Desire
III. Gender: The Circular Ruins of Contemporary Debate
IV. Theorizing the Binary, the Unitary, and Beyond
V. Identity, Sex, and the Metaphysics of Substance
VI. Language, Power, and the Strategies of Displacement
Prohibition, Psychoanalysis, and the Production of the Heterosexual Matrix
I. Structuralism’s Critical Exchange
II. Lacan, Riviere, and the Strategies of Masquerade
III. Freud and the Melancholia of Gender
IV. Gender Complexity and the Limits of Identification
V. Reformulating Prohibition as Power
Subversive Bodily Acts
I. The Body Politics of Julia Kristeva
II. Foucault, Herculine, and the Politics of Sexual Discontinuity
III. Monique Wittig: Bodily Disintegration and Fictive Sex
IV. Bodily Inscriptions, Performative Subversions
Conclusion: From Parody To Politics

Precarious Life (2004)

The powers of mourning and justice

Explanation and Exoneration, or What We Can Hear
Violence, Mourning, Politics
Indefinite Detention
The Charge of Anti-Semitism: Jews, Israel, and the Risks of Public Critique
Precarious Life

Interrogating the Real (2020)

Undoing Gender - Judith Butler (Highlight: 169; Note: 0.

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Introduction: Acting in Concert

If gender is a kind of a doing, an incessant activity performed, in part, without one’s knowing and without one’s willing, it is not for that reason automatic or mechanical. On the contrary, it is a practice of improvisation within a scene of constraint. Moreover, one does not “do” one’s gender alone. One is always “doing” with or for another, even if the other is only imaginary. What I call my “own” gender appears perhaps at times as something that I author or, indeed, own.
But the terms that make up one’s own gender are, from the start, outside oneself, beyond oneself in a sociality that has no single author (and that radically contests the notion of authorship itself).

If I am someone who cannot be without doing, then the conditions of my doing are, in part, the conditions of my existence. If my doing is dependent on what is done to me or, rather, the ways in which I am done by norms, then the possibility of my persistence as an “I” depends upon my being able to do something with what is done with me. This does not mean that I can remake the world so that I become its maker. That fantasy of godlike power only refuses the ways we are constituted, invariably and from the start, by what is before us and outside of us. My agency does not consist in denying this condition of my constitution. If I have any agency, it is opened up by the fact that I am constituted by a social world I never chose. That my agency is riven with paradox does not mean it is impossible. It means only that paradox is the condition of its possibility.

A concurrent operation of gender norms can be seen in the DSM IV’s Gender Identity Disorder diagnosis. This diagnosis that has, for the most part, taken over the role of monitoring signs of incipient homosexuality in children assumes that “gender dysphoria” is a psychological disorder simply because someone of a given gender manifests attributes of another gender or a desire to live as another gender. This imposes a model of coherent gendered life that demeans the complex ways in which gendered lives are crafted and lived. The diagnosis, however, is crucial for many individuals who seek insurance support for sex reassignment surgery or treatment, or who seek a legal change in status. As a result, the diagnostic means by which transsexuality is attributed implies a pathologization, but undergoing that pathologizing process constitutes one of the important ways in which the desire to change one’s sex might be satisfied. The critical question thus becomes, how might the world be reorganized so that this conflict can be ameliorated?

how does one oppose the homophobia without embracing the marriage norm as the exclusive or most highly valued social arrangement for queer sexual lives?

Among transsexuals and transgendered persons, there are those who identify as men (if female to male) or women (if male to female), and yet others who, with or without surgery, with or without hormones, identify as trans, as transmen or transwomen; each of these social practices carries distinct social burdens and promises.

What precisely autonomy means, however, is complicated for both movements, since it turns out that choosing one’s own body invariably means navigating among norms that are laid out in advance and prior to one’s choice or are being articulated in concert by other minority agencies.

Indeed, individuals rely on institutions of social support in order to exercise self-determination with respect to what body and what gender to have and maintain, so that self-determination becomes a plausible concept only in the context of a social world that supports and enables that exercise of agency. Conversely (and as a consequence), it turns out that changing the institutions by which humanly viable choice is established and maintained is a prerequisite for the exercise of self-determination. In this sense, individual agency is bound up with social critique and social transformation. One only determines “one’s own” sense of gender to the extent that social norms exist that support and enable that act of claiming gender for oneself. One is dependent on this “outside” to lay claim to what is one’s own. The self must, in this way, be dispossessed in sociality in order to take possession of itself.

What is most important is to cease legislating for all lives what is livable only for some, and similarly, to refrain from proscribing for all lives what is unlivable for some. The differences in position and desire set the limits to universalizability as an ethical reflex. The critique of gender norms must be situated within the context of lives as they are lived and must be guided by the question of what maximizes the possibilities for a livable life, what minimizes the possibility of unbearable life or, indeed, social or literal death.

Terms such as “masculine” and “feminine” are notoriously changeable; there are social histories for each term; their meanings change radically depending upon geopolitical boundaries and cultural constraints on who is imagining whom, and for what purpose.

Even if in some sense or under certain circumstances they are, do they not put the category into crisis for those who would assume that children without discernible fathers at their origin are subject to psychosis?

It is important to remember that psychoanalysis can also serve as a critique of cultural adaptation as well as a theory for understanding the ways in which sexuality fails to conform to the social norms by which it is regulated. Moreover, there is no better theory for grasping the workings of fantasy construed not as a set of projections on an internal screen but as part of human relationality itself. It is on the basis of this insight that we can come to understand how fantasy is essential to an experience of one’s own body, or that of another, as gendered.
Finally, psychoanalysis can work in the service of a conception of humans as bearing an irreversible humility in their relations to others and to themselves. There is always a dimension of ourselves and our relation to others that we cannot know, and this not-knowing persists with us as a condition of existence and, indeed, of survivability. We are, to an extent, driven by what we do not know, and cannot know, and this “drive” ( Trieb) is precisely what is neither exclusively biological nor cultural, but always the site of their dense convergence.6 If I am always constituted by norms that are not of my making, then I have to understand the ways that constitution takes place. The staging and structuring of affect and desire is clearly one way in which norms work their way into what feels most properly to belong to me.

The fact that I am other to myself precisely at the place where I expect to be myself follows from the fact that the sociality of norms exceeds my inception and my demise, sustaining a temporal and spatial field of operation that exceeds my self-understanding. Norms do not exercise a final or fatalistic control, at least, not always. The fact that desire is not fully determined corresponds with the psychoanalytic understanding that sexuality is never fully captured by any regulation

The fact that I am other to myself

it emerges precisely as an improvisational possibility within a field of constraints. Sexuality, though, is not found to be “in” those constraints as something might be “in” a container: it is extinguished by constraints, but also mobilized and incited by constraints, even sometimes requiring them to be produced again and again.

Sexuality does not follow from gender in the sense that what gender you “are” determines what kind of sexuality you will “have.” We try to speak in ordinary ways about these matters, stating our gender, disclosing our sexuality, but we are, quite inadvertently, caught up in ontological thickets and epistemological quandaries. Am I a gender after all? And do I “have” a sexuality?

Beside Oneself: On the Limits of Sexual Autonomy

It becomes a question for ethics, I think, not only when we ask the personal question, what makes my own life bearable, but when we ask, from a position of power, and from the point of view of distributive justice, what makes, or ought to make, the lives of others bearable?

And if we’ve lost, then it seems to follow that we have had, that we have desired and loved, and struggled to find the conditions for our desire. We have all lost someone in recent decades from AIDS, but there are other losses that inflict us, other diseases; moreover, we are, as a community, subjected to violence, even if some of us individually have not been. And this means that we are constituted politically in part by virtue of the social vulnerability of our bodies; we are constituted as fields of desire and physical vulnerability, at once publicly assertive and vulnerable.

One finds oneself fallen. One is exhausted but does not know why.

Something is larger than one’s own deliberate plan or project, larger than one’s own knowing. Something takes hold, but is this something coming from the self, from the outside, or from some region where the difference between the two is indeterminable? What is it that claims us at such moments, such that we are not the masters of ourselves? To what are we tied? And by what are we seized?

Let’s face it. We’re undone by each other. And if we’re not, we’re missing something. If this seems so clearly the case with grief, it is only because it was already the case with desire. One does not always stay intact. It may be that one wants to, or does, but it may also be that despite one’s best efforts, one is undone, in the face of the other, by the touch, by the scent, by the feel, by the prospect of the touch, by the memory of the feel. And so when we speak about my sexuality or my gender, as we do (and as we must) we mean something complicated by it. Neither of these is precisely a possession, but both are to be understood as modes of being dispossessed, ways of being for another or, indeed, by virtue of another.

The body implies mortality, vulnerability, agency: the skin and the flesh expose us to the gaze of others but also to touch and to violence.

The body can be the agency and instrument of all these as well, or the site where “doing” and “being done to” become equivocal. Although we struggle for rights over our own bodies, the very bodies for which we struggle are not quite ever only our own. The body has its invariably public dimension; constituted as a social phenomenon in the public sphere, my body is and is not mine. Given over from the start to the world of others, bearing their imprint, formed within the crucible of social life, the body is only later, and with some uncertainty, that to which I lay claim as my own. Indeed, if I seek to deny the fact that my body relates me—against my will and from the start—to others I do not choose to have in proximity to myself (the subway or the tube are excellent examples of this dimension of sociality), and if I build a notion of “autonomy” on the basis of the denial of this sphere or a primary and unwilled physical proximity with others, then do I precisely deny the social and political conditions of my embodiment in the name of autonomy? If I am struggling for autonomy, do I not need to be struggling for something else as well, a conception of myself as invariably in community, impressed upon by others, impressing them as well, and in ways that are not always clearly delineable, in forms that are not fully predictable?

tarrying

abrogation

And other lives will not find such fast and furious support and will not even qualify as “grievable.”

sundering

I make the argument in “Is Kinship Always Already Heterosexual” in this volume that kinship ties that bind persons to one another may well be no more or less than the intensification of community ties, may or may not be based on enduring or exclusive sexual relations, may well consist of ex-lovers, non-lovers, friends, and community members. The relations of kinship cross the boundaries between community and family and sometimes redefine the meaning of friendship as well. When these modes of intimate association produce sustaining webs of relationships, they constitute a “breakdown” of traditional kinship that displaces the presumption that biological and sexual relations structure kinship centrally. In addition, the incest taboo that governs kinship ties, producing a necessary exogamy, does not necessarily operate among friends in the same way or, for that matter, in networks of communities.

On the contrary, sexuality outside the field of monogamy well may open us to a different sense of community, intensifying the question of where one finds enduring ties, and so become the condition for an attunement to losses that exceed a discretely private realm.

Estou aqui

Possibility is not a luxury; it is as crucial as bread

The thought of a possible life is only an indulgence for those who already know themselves to be possible. For those who are still looking to become possible, possibility is a necessity.

It was Spinoza who claimed that every human being seeks to persist in his own being, and he made this principle of self-persistence, the conatus, into the basis of his ethics and, indeed, his politics. When Hegel made the claim that desire is always a desire for recognition, he was, in a way, extrapolating upon this Spinozistic point, telling us, effectively, that to persist in one’s own being is only possible on the condition that we are engaged in receiving and offering recognition. If we are not recognizable, if there are no norms of recognition by which we are recognizable, then it is not possible to persist in one’s own being, and we are not possible beings; we have been foreclosed from possibility.

As Adriana Cavarero points out, paraphrasing Arendt, the question we pose to the Other is simple and unanswerable: “who are you?”8 The violent response is the one that does not ask, and does not seek to know. It wants to shore up what it knows, to expunge what threatens it with not-knowing, what forces it to reconsider the presuppositions of its world, their contingency, their malleability. The nonviolent response lives with its unknowingness about the Other in the face of the Other, since sustaining the bond that the question opens is finally more valuable than knowing in advance what holds us in common, as if we already have all the resources we need to know what defines the human, what its future life might be.

Indeed, I think we are compelled to speak of the human, and of the international

Cultural translation

collective future

Gender Regulations

Indeed, much of the most important work with feminist and lesbian/gay studies has concentrated on actual regulations: legal, military, psychiatric, and a host of others. The kinds of questions posed within such scholarship tend to ask how gender is regulated, how such regulations are imposed, and how they become incorporated and lived by the subjects on whom they are imposed. But for gender to be regulated is not simply for gender to come under the exterior force of a regulation.1 If gender were to exist prior to its regulation, we could then take gender as our theme and proceed to enumerate the various kinds of regulations to which it is subjected and the ways in which that subjection takes place. The problem, however, for us is more acute. After all, is there a gender that preexists its regulation, or is it the case that, in being subject to regulation, the gendered subject emerges, produced in and through that particular form of subjection? Is subjection not the process by which regulations produce gender?

Norms may or may not be explicit, and when they operate as the normalizing principle in social practice, they usually remain implicit, difficult to read, discernible most clearly and dramatically in the effects that they produce.

To claim that gender is a norm is not quite the same as saying that there are normative views of femininity and masculinity, even though there clearly are such normative views. Gender is not exactly what one “is” nor is it precisely what one “has.” Gender is the apparatus by which the production and normalization of masculine and feminine take place along with the interstitial forms of hormonal, chromosomal, psychic, and performative that gender assumes. To assume that gender always and exclusively means the matrix of the “masculine” and “feminine” is precisely to miss the critical point that the production of that coherent binary is contingent, that it comes at a cost, and that those permutations of gender which do not fit the binary are as much a part of gender as its most normative instance.

Lastly, I hope to show that the distinction between symbolic and social law cannot finally hold, that the symbolic itself is the sedimentation of social practices, and that radical alterations in kinship demand a rearticulation of the structuralist presuppositions of psychoanalysis, moving us, as it were, toward a queer poststructuralism of the psyche.

In Lacan, the symbolic becomes defined in terms of a conception of linguistic structures that are irreducible to the social forms that language takes

Although there are, as Lacanians will remind us, only and always contestations of the symbolic, they fail to exercise any final force to undermine the symbolic itself or to force a radical reconfiguration of its terms.

Mary Poovey in Making a Social Body

Indeed, at this point in our analysis, it appears that moving from a Lacanian notion of symbolic position to a more Foucaultian conception of “social norm” does not augment the chances for an effective displacement or resignification of the norm itself.

work of Pierre Macheray

For MacKinnon, the hierarchical structure of heterosexuality in which men are understood to subordinate women is what produces gender: “Stopped as an attribute of a person, sex inequality takes the form of gender; moving as a relation between people, it takes the form of sexuality. Gender emerges as the congealed form of the sexualization of inequality between men and women” ( Feminism Unmodified 6–7).

(“What’s Wrong With Sexual Harassment?” 761–62) The social punishments that follow upon transgressions of gender include the surgical correction of intersexed persons, the medical and psychiatric pathologization and criminalization in several countries including the United States of “gender dysphoric” people, the harassment of gender-troubled persons on the street or in the workplace, employment discrimination, and violence. The prohibition of sexual harassment of women by men that is based on a rationale that assumes heterosexual subordination as the exclusive scene of sexuality and gender thus itself becomes a regulatory means for the production and maintenance of gender norms within heterosexuality.

Doing Justice to Someone: Sex Reassignment and Allegories of Transsexuality

Then one evening, about a year after this event, they were watching television, and there they encountered John Money, talking about transsexual and intersexual surgery, offering the view that if a child underwent surgery and started socialization as a gender different from the one originally assigned at birth, the child could develop normally, adapt perfectly well to the new gender, and live a happy life. The parents wrote to Money and he invited them to Baltimore, and so David was subsequently seen at Johns Hopkins University, at which point the strong recommendation was made by Dr. John Money that David be raised as a girl. The parents agreed, and the doctors removed the testicles, made some preliminary preparation for surgery to create a vagina, but decided to wait until Brenda, the newly named child, was older to complete the task.

Such efforts at “correction” not only violate the child but lend support to the idea that gender has to be borne out in singular and normative ways at the level of anatomy. Gender is a different sort of identity

Most astonishing, in a way, is the mutilated state that these bodies are left in, mutilations performed and then paradoxically rationalized in the name of “looking normal,” the rationale used by medical practitioners to justify these surgeries. They often say to parents that the child will not look normal, that the child will be ashamed in the locker room, the locker room, that site of prepubescent anxiety about impending gender developments, and that it would be better for the child to look normal, even when such surgery may deprive the person permanently of sexual function and pleasure.

Thus, in the one case, how anatomy looks, how it appears to others, and to myself, as I see others looking at me—this is the basis of a social identity as woman or man

He is, in his view, a man born a man, castrated by the medical establishment, feminized by the psychiatric world, and then enabled to return to who he is

Malleability is, as it were, violently imposed. And naturalness is artificially induced.

Is this person feminine enough? Has this person made it to femininity? Is femininity being properly embodied here? Is the embodiment working?

What evidence can be marshaled in order to know? And surely we must have knowledge here. We must be able to say that we know, and to communicate that in the professional journals, and justify our decision, our act. In other words, these exercises interrogate whether the gender norm that establishes coherent personhood has been successfully accomplished. The inquiries and inspections can be understood, along these lines, as the violent attempt to implement the norm, and the institutionalization of that power of implementation.

So what and who is speaking here

When Brenda looks in the mirror and sees something nameless, freakish, something between the norms, is she not at that moment in question as a human, is she not the specter of the freak against which and through which the norm installs itself? What is the problem with Brenda such that people are always asking to see her naked, asking her questions about what she is, how she feels, whether this is or is not the same as what is normatively true? Is that self-seeing distinct from the way s/he is seen? He seems clear that the norms are external to him, but what if the norms have become the means by which he sees, the frame for his own seeing, his way of seeing himself? What if the action of the norm is to be found not merely in the ideal that it posits, but in the sense of aberration and of freakishness that it conveys? Consider where precisely the norm operates when David claims, “I looked at myself and said I don’t like this type of clothing.” To whom is David speaking? And in what world, under what conditions, does not liking that type of clothing provide evidence for being the wrong gender? For whom would that be true? And under what conditions?

it’s gonna be tough, you’re gonna be picked on, you’re gonna be very alone, you’re not gonna find anybody (unless you have vaginal surgery and live as a female)

He will be and he is, he tells us, loved for some other reason, a reason they do not understand, and it is not a reason we are given. It is clearly a reason that is beyond the regime of reason established by the norms of sexology itself.

Undiagnosing Gender

To be diagnosed with gender identity disorder (GID) is to be found, in some way, to be ill, sick, wrong, out of order, abnormal, and to suffer a certain stigmatization as a consequence of the diagnosis being given at al

trans people ought to be understood as engaged in a practice of self-determination, an exercise of autonomy

One can see from the above sketch that there is a tension in this debate between those who are, for the purposes of the debate, trying to gain entitlement and financial assistance, and those who seek to ground the practice of transsexuality in a notion of autonomy. We might well hesitate at once and ask whether these two views are actually in opposition to one another. After all, one might argue, and people surely have, that the way that the diagnosis facilitates certain entitlements to insurance benefits,1 to medical treatment, and to legal status, actually works in the service of what we might call transautonomy.

It assumes that there is delusion or dysphoria in such people. It assumes that certain gender norms have not been properly embodied, and that an error and a failure have taken place. It makes assumptions about fathers and mothers, and what normal family life is, and should have been. It assumes the language of correction, adaptation, and normalization.

American Psychiatric Association’s (APA)

GID became an indirect way of diagnosing homosexuality as a gender identity problem

I gather that men who want penile augmentation or women who want breast augmentation and reduction are not sent to psychiatrists for certification. It is, of course, interesting to consider in light of current gender norms why a woman who wants breast reduction requires no psychological certification, but a man who wants penile reduction may well.

A conflict has to be established; there has to be enormous suffering; there has to be persistent ideation of oneself in the other gender; there has to be a trial period of cross-dressing throughout the day to see if adaptation can be predicted; and there have to be therapy sessions and letters attesting to the balanced state of the person’s mind. In other words, one must be subjected to a regulatory apparatus, as Foucault would have called it, in order to get to the point where something like an exercise in freedom becomes possible. One has to submit to labels and names, to incursions, to invasions; one has to be gauged against measures of normalcy; and one has to pass the test. Sometimes what this means is that one needs to become very savvy about these standards, and know how to present oneself in such a way that one comes across as a plausible candidate. Sometimes therapists find themselves in a bind, being asked to supply a letter for someone they want to help but abhorring the very fact that they have to write this letter, in the language of diagnosis, in order to help produce the life that their client wants to have.

In other words, it may not be a matter of whether you can conform to the norms that govern life as another gender, but whether you can conform to the psychological discourse that stipulates what these norms are.

If sex is experienced by us within a cultural matrix of meanings, if it comes to have its significance and meaning in reference to a wider social world, then can we separate the experience of “sex” from its social meanings, including the way in which power functions throughout those meanings? “Sex” is a term that applies to people across the board, so that it is difficult to refer to my “sex” as if it were radically singular

The diagnosis presumes that one feels distress and discomfort and inappropriateness because one is in the wrong gender, and that conforming to a different gender norm, if viable for the person in question, will make one feel much better.

Rather she is noting that the very means by which sex comes to be, through assignment, open up possibilities for reassignment that excite her sense of agency, play, and possibility. Just as the boys who are playing with scarves as if they were something else are already versing themselves in the world of props and improvisation, so the girls, seizing upon the possibility of being called by another name, are exploring the possibilities of naming themselves in the context of that social world.

And when there is isolation, is it, therefore, a sign of a pathology?
Or is it, for some, the cost of expressing certain kinds of desires in public?

What is most worrisome, however, is how the diagnosis works as its own social pressure, causing distress, establishing wishes as pathological, intensifying the regulation and control of those who express them in institutional settings. Indeed, one has to ask whether the diagnosis of transgendered youth does not act precisely as peer pressure, as an elevated form of teasing, as a euphemized form of social violence.

The movement for trans people to become the therapists and diagnosticians has and will surely help matters. These are all ways around the bind, until the bind goes away. But if the bind is to go away for the long run, the norms that govern the way in which we understand the relation between gender identity and mental health would have to change radically, so that economic and legal institutions would recognize how essential becoming a gender is to one’s very sense of personhood, one’s sense of well-being, one’s possibility to flourish as a bodily being. Not only does one need the social world to be a certain way in order to lay claim to what is one’s own, but it turns out that what is one’s own is always from the start dependent upon what is not one’s own, the social conditions by which autonomy is, strangely, dispossessed and undone.

Is Kinship Always Already Heterosexual?

This crisis of legitimation can be considered from a number of perspectives, but let us consider for the moment the ambivalent gift that legitimation can become. To be legitimated by the state is to enter into the terms of legitimation offered there, and to find that one’s public and recognizable sense of personhood is fundamentally dependent on the lexicon of that legitimation. It follows that the delimitation of legitimation will take place only through an exclusion of a certain sort, though not a patently dialectical one. The sphere of legitimate intimate alliance is established through the producing and intensifying regions of illegitimacy. There is, however, a more fundamental occlusion at work here. We misunderstand the sexual field if we consider that the legitimate and the illegitimate appear to exhaust its immanent possibilities. There is outside the struggle between the legitimate and the illegitimate—which has as its goal the conversion of the illegitimate into the legitimate—a field that is less thinkable, one not figured in light of its ultimate convertibility into legitimacy. This is a field outside the disjunction of illegitimate and legitimate; it is not yet thought as a domain, a sphere, a field; it is not yet either legitimate or illegitimate, has not yet been thought through in the explicit discourse of legitimacy.

This dynamic of force is rendered all the more forceful because it grounds the contemporary field of the political, grounds it through the forcible exclusion of that sexual field from the political. And yet, the operation of this force of exclusion is set outside of the domain of contest, as if it were not part of power, as if it were not an item for political reflection. Thus, to become political, to act and speak in ways that are recognizably political, is to rely on a foreclosure of the very political field that is not subject to political scrutiny. Without the critical perspective, politics relies fundamentally on an unknowingness—and depoliticization—of the very relations of force by which its own field of operation is instituted.

These are nonplaces in which one finds oneself in spite of oneself; indeed, these are nonplaces where recognition, including self-recognition, proves precarious if not elusive, in spite of one’s best efforts to be a subject in some recognizable sense. They are not sites of enunciation, but shifts in the topography from which a questionably audible claim emerges: the claim of the not-yet-subject and the nearly recognizable.

foreclosures

Why should it be that marriage or legal contracts become the basis on which health care benefits, for instance, are allocated?
Why shouldn’t there be ways of organizing health care entitlements such that everyone, regardless of marital status, has access to them? If one argues for marriage as a way of securing those entitlements, then does one not also affirm that entitlements as important as health care ought to remain allocated on the basis of marital status? What does this do to the community of the nonmarried, the single, the divorced, the uninterested, the non-monogamous, and how does the sexual field become reduced, in its very legibility, once we extend marriage as a norm?

What happens to the child, the child, the poor child, the martyred figure of an ostensibly selfish or dogged social progressivism? Indeed, the debates on gay marriage and gay kinship, two issues that are often conflated, have become sites of intense displacement for other political fears, fears about technology, about new demographics, and also about the very unity and transmissability of the nation, and fears that feminism, in the insistence on childcare, has effectively opened up kinship outside the family, opened it to strangers.

Indeed, one can see a conversion between the arguments in France that rail against the threat to “culture” posed by the prospect of legally allied gay people having children—and I will suspend for the purposes of this discussion the question of what it means to “have” in this instance—and those arguments concerning issues of immigration, of what Europe is. This last concern raises the question, implicitly and explicitly, of what is truly French, the basis of its culture, which becomes, through an imperial logic, the basis of culture itself, its universal and invariable conditions. The debates center not only on the questions of what culture is and who should be admitted but also on how the subjects of culture should be reproduced.

What is this desire to keep the state from offering recognition to non-heterosexual partners, and what is the desire to compel the state to offer such recognition? For both sides of the debate, the question is not only which relations of desire ought to be legitimated by the state but also who may desire the state, who may desire the state’s desire.

But more than that, marriage compels, at least logically, universal recognition: everyone must let you into the door of the hospital; everyone must honor your claim to grief; everyone will assume your natural rights to a child; everyone will regard your relationship as elevated into eternity. In this way, the desire for universal recognition is a desire to become universal, to become interchangeable in one’s universality, to vacate the lonely particularity of the non-ratified relation, and, perhaps above all, to gain both place and sanctification in that imagined relation to the state. Place and sanctification: these are surely powerful fantasies, and they take on particular phantasmatic form when we consider the bid for gay marriage.

Because if one does not want to recognize certain human relations as part of the humanly recognizable, then one has already recognized them, and one seeks to deny what it is one has already, in one way or another, understood. “Recognition” becomes an effort to deny what exists and, hence, becomes the instrument for the refusal of recognition. In this way, it becomes a way of shoring up a normative fantasy of the human over and against dissonant versions of itself. To defend the limits of what is recognizable against that which challenges it is to understand that the norms that govern recognizability have already been challenged.

fear-mongering

quandary

Of course, there are consequences to this kind of derealization that go beyond hurting someone’s feelings or causing offense to a group of people. It means that when you arrive at the hospital to see your lover, you may not. It means that when your lover falls into a coma, you may not assume certain executorial rights. It means that when your lover dies, you may not be permitted to receive the body.

It means that when your child is left with you, the nonbiological parent, you may not be able to counter the claims of biological relatives in court and may lose custody, and even access. It means you may not be able to provide health care benefits for one another.

And if you’ve actually lost the lover who was never recognized to be your lover, did you really lose that person? Is this a loss, and can it be publicly grieved? Surely this is something that has become a pervasive problem in the queer community, given the losses from AIDS, the losses of lives and loves who are always in struggle to be recognized as such.

Are there not other ways of feeling possible, intelligible, even real, apart from the sphere of state recognition?

Should there not be other ways? It makes sense that the lesbian and gay movement would turn to the state, given the movement’s history: the current drive for gay marriage is in some ways a response to AIDS and, in particular, a shamed response, one in which a gay community seeks to disavow its so-called promiscuity, one in which we appear as healthy and normal and capable of sustaining monogamous relations over time. This, of course, brings me back to the question, a question posed poignantly by Michael Warner, of whether the drive to become recognizable within the existing norms of legitimacy requires that we subscribe to a practice that delegitimates those sexual lives structured outside of the bonds of marriage and the presumptions of monogamy.

One can see the terrain of the dilemma here: on the one hand, living without norms of recognition results in significant suffering and forms of disenfranchisement that confound the very distinctions among psychic, cultural, and material consequences. On the other hand, the demand to be recognized, which is a very powerful political demand, can lead to new and invidious forms of social hierarchy, to a precipitous foreclosure of the sexual field, and to new ways of supporting and extending state power, if it does not institute a critical challenge to the very norms of recognition supplied and required by state legitimation.

Of course, certain propositions remain highly controversial: interracial adoption, adoption by single men, by gay male couples, by parties who are unmarried, by kinship structures in which there are more than two adults.

garner

Immigration and gay parenting were figured as challenging the fundamentals of a culture that had already been transformed, but that sought to deny the transformation it had already undergone

Now, psychoanalysis will explain that the father and the mother do not have to actually exist; they can be positions or imaginary figures, but that they have to figure structurally in some way.

Indeed, the failure of structuralism to take into account kinship systems that do not conform to its model was made clear by anthropologists such David Schneider, Sylvia Yanagisako, Sarah Franklin, Clifford Geertz, and Marilyn Strathern

We see something of this link prefigured in Lévi-Strauss, which explains in part why we see the resurrection of his theory in the context of the present debate. When Lévi-Strauss makes the argument that the incest taboo is the basis of culture and that it mandates exogamy, or marriage outside the clan, is “the clan” being read in terms of race or, more specifically, in terms of a racial presupposition of culture that maintains its purity through regulating its transmissibility? Marriage must take place outside the clan. There must be exogamy. But there must also be a limit to exogamy; that is, marriage must be outside the clan, but not outside a certain racial self-understanding or racial commonality. So the incest taboo mandates exogamy, but the taboo against miscegenation limits the exogamy that the incest taboo mandates. Cornered then between a compulsory heterosexuality and a prohibited miscegenation, something called culture, saturated with the anxiety and identity of dominant European whiteness, reproduces itself in and as universality itself

fraught

If Oedipus is not the sine qua non of culture, that does not mean there is no place for Oedipus. It simply means that the complex that goes by that name may take a variety of cultural forms, and that it will no longer be able to function as a normative condition of culture itself. Oedipus may or may not function universally, but even those who claim that it does would have to find out in what ways it figures and would not be able to maintain that it always figures in the same way. For it to be a universal—and I confess to being an agnostic on this point—in no way confirms the thesis that it is the condition of culture. Such a thesis purports to know that Oedipus always functions in the same way, namely, as a condition of culture itself. But if Oedipus is interpreted broadly, as a name for the triangularity of desire, then the salient questions become: What forms does that triangularity take? Must it presume heterosexuality?

It seems clear that when psychoanalytic practitioners make public claims about the psychotic or dangerous status of gay families, they are wielding public discourse in ways that need to be strongly countered. The Lacanians do not have a monopoly on such claims. In an interview with Jacqueline Rose, the well-known Kleinian practitioner Hanna Segal reiterates her view that “homosexuality is an attack on the parental couple,” and “a developmental arrest.”

Longing for Recognition

the notion of recognition itself, a key concept that was developed in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (111–19)

Of utmost importance for Benjamin, following Habermas in some ways, is the notion that communication itself becomes both the vehicle and example of recognition. Recognition is neither an act that one performs nor is it literalized as the event in which we each “see” one another and are “seen.” It takes place through communication, primarily but not exclusively verbal, in which subjects are transformed by virtue of the communicative practice in which they are engaged.

There are problematic ways of handling the fact of negation, and these are, of course, explained in part through Freud’s conception of aggression and Kleinian conceptions of destruction. For Benjamin, humans form psychic relations with Others on the basis of a necessary negation, but not all of those relations must be destructive. Whereas the psychic response that seeks to master and dispel that negation is destructive, that destruction is precisely what needs to be worked through in the process of recognition. Because human psychic life is characterized by desires both for omnipotence and for contact, it vacillates between “relating to the object and recognizing the outside .O.ther.”

Aggression forms a break in the process of recognition, and we should expect such “break-downs,” to use her words, but the task will be to work against them and to strive for the triumph of recognition over aggression. Even in this hopeful formulation, however, we get the sense that recognition is something other than aggression or that, minimally, recognition can do without aggression.

at, minimally, recognition can do without aggression.
What this means is that there will be times when the relation to the Other relapses into the relation to the object, but that the relation to the Other can and must be restored. It also means that misrecognition is occasional, but not a constitutive or insurpassable feature of psychic reality, as Lacan has argued, and that recognition, conceived as free of misrecognition, not only ought to triumph, but can

I’m no great fan of the phallus, and have made my own views known on this subject before,5 so I do not propose a return to a notion of the phallus as the third term in any and all relations of desire.
Nor do I accept the view that would posit the phallus as the primary or originary moment of desire, such that all desire either extends through identification or mimetic reflection of the paternal signifier. I understand that progressive Lacanians are quick to distinguish between the phallus and the penis and claim that the “paternal” is a metaphor only. What they do not explain is the way the very distinction that is said to make “phallus” and “paternal” safe for use continues to rely upon and reinstitute the correspondences, penis/phallus and paternal/maternal that the distinctions are said to overcome. I believe in the power of subversive resignification to an extent and applaud efforts to disseminate the phallus and to cultivate, for instance, dyke dads and the like. But it would be a mistake, I believe, to privilege either the penis or paternity as the terms to be most widely and radically resignified. Why those terms rather than some others? The “other” to these terms is, of course, the question interrogated here, and Benjamin has helped us to imagine, theoretically, a psychic landscape in which the phallus does not control the circuit of psychic effects. But are we equipped to rethink the problem of triangulation now that we understand the risks of phallic reduction?

She shows as well how the oedipal framework cannot account for the apparent paradox of a feminine man loving a woman, a masculine man loving a man. To the extent that gender identification is always considered to be at the expense of desire, coherent genders might be said to correspond without fail to heterosexual orientations.

Shadow of the Other

I believe that Benjamin is working toward a nonheterosexist psychoanalysis in this book

Let us first consider the possibilities of postoedipal triangulation. I suggest we take as a point of departure the Lacanian formulation that suggests that desire is never merely dyadic in its structure. I would like to see not only whether this formulation can be read apart from any reference to the phallus, but whether it might also lead in directions that would exceed the Lacanian purview. When Jean Hyppolite introduces the notion of “the desire of desire” in his commentary on Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, he means to suggest not only that desire seeks its own renewal (a Spinozistic claim), but that it also seeks to be the object of desire for the Other.8 When Lacan rephrases this formulation of Hyppolite, he enters the genitive in order to produce an equivocation: “desire is the desire of the Other” (my emphasis).9 What does desire desire? It clearly still continues to desire itself; indeed, it is not clear that the desire which desires is different from the desire that is desired. They are homonymically linked, at a minimum, but what this means is that desire redoubles itself; it seeks its own renewal, but in order to achieve its own renewal, it must reduplicate itself and so become something other to what it has been. It does not stay in place as a single desire, but becomes other to itself, taking a form that is outside of itself. Moreover, what desire wants is the Other, where the Other is understood as its generalized object. What desire also wants is the Other’s desire, where the Other is conceived as a subject of desire. This last formulation involves the grammar of the genitive, and it suggests that the Other’s desire becomes the model for the subject’s desire.10 It is not that I want the Other to want me, but I want to the extent that I have taken on the desire of the Other and modeled my desire after the Other’s desire.

Queer theorist Eve Sedgwick came along in Between Men

Her point was to show that what first appears to be a relation of a man who desires a woman turns out to be implicitly a homosocial bond between two men

homosocial

homosocial bond

The point is not that the phallus is had by one and not by another, but that it is circulated along a heterosexual and homosexual circuit at once, thus confounding the identificatory positions for every “actor” in the scene

in order more fully to identify as a man

So let’s complicate the scene again by rethinking it from the woman’s point of view. Let’s imagine that she is bisexual and has sought to have a relationship with “man number 1,” putting off for a while her desires for women, which tend to be desires to be a bottom. But instead of finding a woman as the “third,” she finds a man (man number 2), and “tops” him. Let’s say, for argument’s sake, that man number 1 would rather die than be “topped” by his girlfriend, since that would be too “queer” for him. So he knows that she is topping another man, possibly penetrating him anally, and he is furious for several reasons. But what is she after? If she is bisexual, she is a bisexual who happens to be “doing” a few men right now. But perhaps she is also staging a scene in which the outbreak of jealousy puts the relation at risk. Perhaps she does this in order to break from the relationship in order to be free to pursue “none of the above.”
Would it be possible to see her intensification of heterosexual activity at this moment as a way of (a) seeing her first lover’s jealousy and goading him toward greater possessiveness; (b) topping her second lover and gratifying the desire that is off limits to her with the first; and (c) setting the two men against one another in order to make room for the possibility of a lesbian relationship in which she is not a top at all; and (d) intensifying her heterosexuality in order to ward off the psychic dangers she associates with being a lesbian bottom? Note that it may be that the one desire is not in the service of another, such that we might be able to say which one is the real and authentic one, and which is simply a camouflage or deflection. Indeed, it may be that this particular character can’t find a “real” desire that supersedes the sequence that she undergoes, and that what is real is the sequence itself. But it may be that the affair with man number 2 becomes, indirectly, the venue for the convergence of these passions, their momentary constellation, and that to understand her one must accept something of their simultaneous and dissonant claims on truth. Surely, the pattern in which a man and woman heterosexually involved both amicably break their relationship in order to pursue homosexual desires is not uncommon in urban centers. I don’t claim to know what happens here, or what happens when a gay male and a lesbian who are friends start to sleep with one another. But it seems fair to assume that a certain crossing of homosexual and heterosexual passions takes place such that these are not two distinct strands of a braid, but simultaneous vehicles for one another.

Negation is destruction that is survived.

When Hegel introduces the notion of recognition in the section on lordship and bondage in The Phenomenology of Spirit, he narrates the primary encounter with the Other in terms of self-loss. “Self-consciousness… has come out of itself…. it has lost itself, for it finds itself as an other being” (111). One might understand Hegel to be describing merely a pathological state in which a fantasy of absorption by the Other constitutes an early or primitive experience. But he is saying something more. He is suggesting that whatever consciousness is, whatever the self is, will find itself only though a reflection of itself in another. To be itself, it must pass through self-loss, and when it passes through, it will never be “returned” to what it was. To be reflected in or as another will have a double significance for consciousness, however, since consciousness will, through the reflection, regain itself in some way. But it will, by virtue of the external status of the reflection, regain itself as external to itself and, hence, continue to lose itself.

Thus, the relationship to the Other will be, invariably, ambivalent. The price of self-knowledge will be self-loss, and the Other poses the possibility of both securing and undermining self-knowledge. What becomes clear, though, is that the self never returns to itself free of the Other, that its “relationality” becomes constitutive of who the self is.

Quandaries of the Incest Taboo

incest and normative kinship

These matters are complicated all the more now that trauma studies has emerged (Caruth, Felman, Laub) in which the argument prevails that trauma is, by definition, not capturable through representation or, indeed, recollection; it is precisely that which renders all memory false, we might say, and which is known through the gap that disrupts all efforts at narrative reconstruction.

With regard to incest, the question thus turns on the relations among memory, event, and desire: is it an event that precedes a memory? is it a memory that retroactively posits an event? is it a wish that takes the form of a memory? Those who want to underscore the prevalence of incest as an abusive family practice tend to insist that it is an event, and that insofar as it is a memory, it is a memory of an event. And sometimes this takes the form of a dogmatic premise: for it to be traumatic and real, incest must be understood as an event. This view is confounded, however, precisely by the trauma studies position mentioned above in which the sign of the trauma and its proof is precisely its resistance to the narrative structure of the event.

Incestuous trauma, then, is variously figured as a brute imposition on the child’s body, as the exploitative incitation of the child’s desire, as the radically unrepresentable in the child’s experience or in the adult’s memory whose childhood is at issue. Moreover, to the extent that psychoanalysis attributes incestuous fantasy and its prohibition to the process by which gendered differentiation takes place (as well as the sexual ordering of gender), it remains difficult to distinguish between incest as a traumatic fantasy essential to sexual differentiation in the psyche, and incest as a trauma that ought clearly to be marked as abusive practice and in no sense essential to psychic and sexual development.

What constitutes the limit of the thinkable, the narratable, the intelligible? What constitutes the limit of what can be thought as true?
These are, I believe, questions that psychoanalysis has always interrogated precisely because it relies on a form of analytic listening and a form or “reading” which takes for granted that what is constituted as the thinkable realm is predicated on the exclusion (repression or foreclosure) of what remains difficult or impossible to think.

What remains crucial is a form of reading that does not try to find the truth of what happened, but, rather, asks, what has this non-happening done to the question of truth? For part of the effect of that violation, when it is one, is precisely to make the knowing of truth into an infinitely remote prospect; this is its epistemic violence. To insist, then, on verifying the truth is precisely to miss the effect of the violation in question, which is to put the knowability of truth into enduring crisis.

When the incest taboo works in this sense to foreclose a love that is not incestuous, what is produced is a shadowy realm of love, a love that persists in spite of its foreclosure in an ontologically suspended mode. What emerges is a melancholia that attends living and loving outside the livable and outside the field of love.

The End of Sexual Difference?

Theory is an activity that does not remain restricted to the academy. It takes place every time a possibility is imagined, a collective self-reflection takes place, a dispute over values, priorities, and language emerges.

Irigaray then would not argue for or against sexual difference but, rather, offer a way to think about the question that sexual difference poses, or the question that sexual difference is, a question whose irresolution forms a certain historical trajectory for us, those who find ourselves asking this question, those of whom this question is posed. The arguments in favor and against would be so many indications of the persistence of this question, a persistence whose status is not eternal, but one, she claims, that belongs to these times. It is a question that Irigaray poses of modernity, a question that marks modernity for her.

This is one reason that asking certain questions is considered dangerous. Imagine the situation of reading a book and thinking, I cannot ask the questions that are posed here because to ask them is to introduce doubt into my political convictions, and to introduce doubt into my political convictions could lead to the dissolution of those convictions. At such a moment, the fear of thinking, indeed, the fear of the question, becomes moralized as the defense of politics. And politics becomes that which requires a certain anti-intellectualism. To remain unwilling to rethink one’s politics on the basis of questions posed is to opt for a dogmatic stand at the cost of both life and thought.

homosexuality implies the proliferation of genders

This view of homosexuality as proliferating gender seems to be based on the notions that homosexuals have in some sense departed from their sex, that in becoming homosexuals, they cease to be men or women, and that gender as we know it is radically incompatible with homosexuality; indeed, it is so incompatible that homosexuality must become its own gender, thus displacing the binary opposition between masculine and feminine altogether.

The human rights of women include their right to have control over and decide freely and responsibly on matters related to their sexuality, including sexual and reproductive health, free of coercion, discrimination, and violence. Equal relationships between women and men in matters of sexual relations and reproduction, including full respect for the integrity of the person, require mutual respect, consent and shared responsibility for sexual behavior and its consequences.

Response to Rosi Braidotti’s Metamorphoses Metamorphoses is Braidotti’s third large book in feminist theory, following Patterns of Dissonance and Nomadic Subjects. It is the first of two volumes, the second of which is forthcoming from Polity Press.

Poststructuralism is not a monolith; it is not a unitary event or set of texts, but a wide range of works that emerged in the aftermath of Ferdinand de Saussure, the French Hegel, existentialism, phenomenology, and various forms of linguistic formalism.

My sense is that it would be right to say, as Braidotti does, that I sometimes stay within the theology of lack, that I sometimes focus on the labor of the negative in the Hegelian sense, and that this involves me in considerations of melancholy, mourning, conscience, guilt, terror, and the like.

Every time I try to write about the body, the writing ends up being about language. This is not because I think that the body is reducible to language; it is not. Language emerges from the body, constituting an emission of sorts. The body is that upon which language falters, and the body carries its own signs, its own signifiers, in ways that remain largely unconscious. Although Deleuze opposed psychoanalysis, Braidotti does not. Psychoanalysis seems centered on the problem of the lack for Deleuze, but I tend to center on the problem of negativity. One reason I have opposed Deleuze is that I find no registration of the negative in his work, and I feared that he was proposing a manic defense against negativity. Braidotti relinks Deleuze with psychoanalysis in a new way and thus makes him readable in a new way. But how does she reconcile the Deleuze who rejects the unconscious with a psychoanalysis that insists, rightly, upon it?

The Question of Social Transformation

And I also understood French feminism, with the exception of Monique Wittig, to understand cultural intelligibility not only to assume the fundamental difference between masculine and feminine, but to reproduce it. The theory was derived from Lévi-Strauss, from Lacan, from Saussure, and there were various breaks with those masters that one could trace.

So this is one way of answering me, and it comes from the formalist Lacanians: Joan Copjec and Charles Shepherdson, but also Slavoj Zˇizˇek.

the only way to describe me in my younger years was as a bar dyke who spent her days reading Hegel and her evenings, well, at the gay bar, which occasionally became a drag bar. And I had some relatives who were, as it were, in the life, and there was some important identification with those “boys.” So I was there, undergoing a cultural moment in the midst of a social and political struggle. But I also experienced in that moment a certain implicit theorization of gender: it quickly dawned on me that some of these so-called men could do femininity much better than I ever could, ever wanted to, ever would.

And so I was confronted by what can only be called the transferability of the attribute. Femininity, which I understood never to have belonged to me anyway, was clearing belonging elsewhere, and I was happier to be the audience to it, have always been very happier to be its audience than I ever was or would be being the embodiment of it.

Knowledge and power are not finally separable but work together to establish a set of subtle and explicit criteria for thinking the world: “It is therefore not a matter of describing what knowledge is and what power is and how one would repress the other or how the other would abuse the one, but rather, a nexus of knowledge-power has to be described so that we can grasp what constitutes the acceptability of a system”

The turn to drag performance was, in part, a way to think not only about how gender is performed, but how it is resignified through collective terms. Drag performers, for instance, tend to live in communities, and there are strong ritual bonds, such as those we see in the film Paris is Burning,7 which make us aware of the resignification of social bonds that gender minorities within communities of color can and do forge. Thus, we are talking about a cultural life of fantasy that not only organizes the material conditions of life, but which also produces sustaining bonds of community where recognition becomes possible, and which works as well to ward off violence, racism, homophobia, and transphobia. This threat of violence tells us something about what is fundamental to the culture in which they live, a culture that is not radically distinct from what many of us live, even as it is not the same as what any of us probably live. But there is a reason we understand it, if we do; this film travels, because of its beauty, its tragedy, its pathos, and its bravery.

It is the inhuman, the beyond the human, the less than human, the border that secures the human in its ostensible reality. To be called a copy, to be called unreal, is thus one way in which one can be oppressed.

The point about drag is not simply to produce a pleasurable and subversive spectacle but to allegorize the spectacular and consequential ways in which reality is both reproduced and contested.

Resignification as Politics
Does “resignification” constitute a political practice, or does it constitute one part of political transformation? One might well say that politicians on the Right and the Left can use these strategies. We can surely see how “multiculturalism” has its right-wing and left-wing variants, how “globalization” has its right-wing and left-wing variants.

This does not mean that a social engineer plots at a distance how best to include everyone in his or her category. It means that the category itself must be subjected to a reworking from myriad directions, that it must emerge anew as a result of the cultural translations it undergoes.

My argument against this conclusion has to do with the very use of “life” as if we know what it means, what it requires, what it demands. When we ask what makes a life livable, we are asking about certain normative conditions that must be fulfilled for life to become life

But this is only because to live is to live a life politically, in relation to power, in relation to others, in the act of assuming responsibility for a collective future. But to assume responsibility for a future is not to know its direction fully in advance, since the future, especially the future with and for others, requires a certain openness and unknowingness. It also implies that a certain agonism and contestation will and must be in play. They must be in play for politics to become democratic

She struggles with the complex mix of cultural traditions and formations that constitute her for what she is: Chicana, Mexican, lesbian, American, academic, poor, writer, activist. Do all of these strands come together in a unified way, or does she live their incommensurability and simultaneity as the very meaning of her identity, an identity culturally staged and produced by the very complex historical circumstances of her life?

There is the possibility of appearing impermeable, of repudiating vulnerability itself. There is the possibility of becoming violent. But perhaps there is some other way to live in such a way that one is neither fearing death, becoming socially dead from fear of being killed, or becoming violent, and killing others, or subjecting them to live a life of social death predicated upon the fear of literal death. Perhaps this other way to live requires a world in which collective means are found to protect bodily vulnerability without precisely eradicating it. Surely, some norms will be useful for the building of such a world, but they will be norms that no one will own, norms that will have to work not through normalization or racial and ethnic assimilation, but through becoming collective sites of continuous political labor.

Can the “Other” of Philosophy Speak?

I write this essay as someone who was once trained in the history of philosophy, and yet I write now more often in interdisciplinary contexts in which that training, such as it was, appears only in refracted form.

So for this and surely for other reasons as well what you will receive from me is not a “philosophy paper” or, indeed, a paper in philosophy, though it may be “on” philosophy but from a perspective that may or may not be recognizable as philosophical.

I understand that this question is one that troubles those who work within that institution, especially doctoral candidates and junior faculty.
We might pause to note that this is a perfectly reasonable worry, especially if one is trying to get a job within a department of philosophy, and needs to establish that the work one does is, indeed, properly philosophical. Philosophers in the profession must, in fact, make such judgments, and those of us outside philosophy departments hear those judgments from time to time. The judgment usually takes one of these forms: “I cannot understand this or I do not see the argument here, all very interesting… but certainly ‘not’ philosophy.” These are all voiced by an authority who adjudicates what will and will not count as legitimate knowledge. These are voiced by one who seems to know, who acts with the full assurance of knowledge. It is surely impressive to be in such a situation and to be able to know, with clarity, what counts and what does not. Indeed, some might even say that it is one of the responsibilities of philosophers to make such decisions and abide by them.

Surely, those who pay their dues to the American Philosophical Association and enter into that committee structure at various levels of power have been struck, surprised, perhaps even scandalized by the use of the word “philosophy” to designate kinds of scholarship that in no recognizable sense mirror the academic practice that they perform and which they understand as their duty and privilege to define and protect. Philosophy has, scandalously, doubled itself. It has, in Hegel’s terms, found itself outside itself, has lost itself in the “Other,” and wonders whether and how it might retrieve itself from the scandalous reflection of itself that it finds traveling under its own name. Philosophy, in its proper sense, if it has a proper sense, wonders whether it will ever return to itself from this scandalous appearance as the Other. It wonders, if not publicly, then surely in the hallways and bars of Hilton Hotels at every annual meeting, whether it is not besieged, expropriated, ruined by the improper use of its proper name, haunted by a spectral doubling of itself.

When I was twelve, I was interviewed by a doctoral candidate in education and asked what I wanted to be when I grew up. I said that I wanted either to be a philosopher or a clown, and I understood then, I think, that much depended on whether or not I found the world worth philosophizing about, and what the price of seriousness might be. I was not sure I wanted to be a philosopher, and I confess that I have never quite overcome that doubt. Now it may be that having doubt about the value of a philosophical career is a sure sign that one should not be a philosopher. Indeed, if you have a student who contemplates that bleak job market and says as well that he or she is not sure of the value of a philosophical career or, put differently, of being a philosopher, then you would, as a faculty member, no doubt be very quick to direct this person to another corner of the market. If one is not absolutely sure about the value of being a philosopher, then one should surely go elsewhere. Unless, of course, we discern some value in not being sure about the value of becoming a philosopher, unless a resistance to its institutionalization has another kind of value, one that is not always marketable, but which nevertheless emerges, we might say, as a counterpoint to the current market values of philosophy.

No one can desire to be blessed, to act rightly and to live rightly, without at the same time wishing to be, to act, and to live—in other words, to actually exist

desire is always the desire for recognition, and that recognition is the condition for a continuing and viable life

one of my first confrontations with a philosophical text posed the question of reading, and drew attention to its rhetorical structure as a text.

there was no way to extricate the philosophical point, a point that has to do with the insuperability of silence when it comes to matters of faith, without being brought through the language to the moment of its own foundering, where language shows its own limitation, and where this “showing” is not the same as a simple declaration of its limits. For Kierkegaard, the direct declaration of the limits of language is not to be believed; nothing less than the undoing of the declarative mode itself will do.

And then I was scandalized again when I heard the story about Max Scheler, pressed by his audience on how he could have led such an unethical life at the same time that he pursued the study of ethics, who responded by saying that the sign that points the way to Berlin does not need to go there to offer the right direction

That philosophy might be divorced from life, that life might not be fully ordered by philosophy, struck me as a perilous possibility. And it wasn’t until several years later that I came to understand that philosophical conceptualization cannot fully relieve a life of its difficulty, and it was with some sadness and loss that I came to reconcile myself to this post-idealist insight.

In The Phenomenology, desire (paragraph 168. is essential to self-reflection, and there is no self-reflection except through the drama of reciprocal recognition. Thus the desire for recognition is one in which desire seeks its reflection in the Other. This is at once a desire that seeks to negate the alterity of the Other (it is, after all, by virtue of its structural similarity to me, in my place, threatening my unitary existence) and a desire that finds itself in the bind of requiring that very Other whom one fears to be and to be captured by; indeed, without this constituting passionate bind, there can be no recognition. One’s consciousness finds that it is lost, lost in the Other, that it has come outside itself, that it finds itself as the other or, indeed, in the Other. Thus, recognition begins with the insight that one is lost in the other, appropriated in and by an alterity that is and is not oneself.

when standards of clarity become part of a hermetic discipline, they no longer become communicable, and what one gets as a result is, paradoxically, a noncommunicable clarity.

It is now with some surprise that I pick up the catalogs of various publishers and see under the name “philosophy” several writers whose work is not taught in philosophy departments. This not only includes large numbers of continental philosophers and essayists, but literary theorists and scholars of art and media studies, scholars in ethnic and feminist studies. I note with some interest the number of dissertations on Hegel and Kant that emerge from the Humanities Center at Johns Hopkins or the Department of English at Cornell or German Studies at Northwestern; the number of young scholars in humanities departments who have traveled to France in the last ten years to work with Derrida, Levinas, Agamben, Balibar, Kofman, Irigaray, Cixous, or those who continue to travel to Germany to learn the tradition of German Idealism and the Frankfurt School

And now this is true of Elizabeth Grosz as well, perhaps the most important Australian feminist philosopher of our time, who has moved through comparative literature and women’s studies departments in recent years

Indeed, I would suggest that as philosophy has lost its purity, it has accordingly gained its vitality throughout the humanities.

This is but one way that philosophy enters the humanities, redoubling itself there, making the very notion of philosophy strange to itself. We should, I suppose, be very thankful to live in this rich region that the institutional foreclosures of the philosophic have produced: such good company and better wine, and so many more unexpected conversations across disciplines, such extraordinary movements of thought that surpass the barriers of departmentalization, posing a vital problem for those who remain behind. The bondsman scandalizes the lord, you will remember, by looking back at him, evincing a consciousness he or she is not supposed to have had, and so showing the lord that he has become Other to himself. The lord is perhaps out of his own control, but for Hegel this self-loss is the beginning of community, and it may be that our current predicament threatens to do no more than to bring philosophy closer to its place as one strand among many in the fabric of culture.