Becoming: Degrees of Infinity

I am not at all going to try to summarize this chapter. It is better, I think, to discuss it in class. These are a couple things that I perhaps wrongly think are related. And I'd say post on whatever you want on that's related.


Language map of the world by color, ca. 1900. Languages are political entities, and the color demarcation of language territories do not represent borders of comprehension, or even flexible areas of change. There are several identical languages that are separated for nationalistic reasons, just as there are those that are mutually unintellgible but "dialects" of the same language.


Hypothetical dialectal areas engaging with one another (the groups can be seen as distnict to the extent that they share more meanings than beyond some political or geographic or whatever obstacle) entails becomings-other which do not yield any thing that is perceptible, since it is not truly faithful to anything like political distinctions. All the doctors in the world (for example, since they have jargons (a technical term, incidentally)) may be able to relate on certain topics, in certain vocabularies, but the intermittent occurence of the compatibilities make them impossible to map. They are constantly shifting, yielding words which are phonetically identical in two languages that mean different things. To map or anticipate these connections would be impossible, since "becoming does not yield anything other than itself".

Intelligibility of language behaves in a continuum. To describe these interactions in terms of their political titles (English, German, etc) only gets at a small part of the smooth shift experienced over the territory (geographical and historical) that connect them. Intelligibility is not even possible to observe through the demarcation of a single body, since we constantly use words to reproduce behaviors for non-linguistic goals. We are not especially intelligible to ourselves, and the words we use often confuse people. There is a multiplicitous becoming-intelligible consisting in the con-incidence of approximate shared usage. Private understandings (never private languages) proliferate.

"The plane of consistency" seems to me to be about levelling the importance of nodes of connection. To talk about intelligibility in terms of the political title of a language is to leave this plain, elevating certain properties that do not have anything to do with the function of intelligibility. We are perfectly allowed to take a look at the structure of intelligibility in terms of hierarchy and privelaged nodes -points of connection that serve to make more things intelligible, and to do this is to examine the machine of the transfer of intelligibility. This is what I think they are getting at by saying, "At n dimensions, it is called the Hypersphere, the Mechanosphere." (252). Any product of the intelligibility machine is local to the points that connected it, so that even geographically, the slang (for example) of one town does not behave as a degree of the town next to it. Each point in a shift of two langauges becoming one another is a particularity. The intersection of multiple lines of change yields unique entities, not degrees ("Norwegian omelette" is not the same as any other omellete, and is not readable in the terms of any other omelette, though each factor can be described as a degree of a certain force).

Another Thing
Integers (1,2,3,4...) are infinite. Between integers there are various other types of numberings, which are more densely packed in the number system. Transcendental numbers (non-terminating, non-repeating numbers like pi) are infinitely dense within the infinite system. On pg 254, they write, "there are smaller and larger inifinities, not by virtue of their number, but by virtue of the composition of the relation into which their parts enter." The becoming of a thing into another, the multiplicitous proliferation of connections of that process, do not create a higher count of connections, but a formational utility specific to the forces involved. In other words, becoming entails a higher degree of infinity, an expanding of dimensions in the Mechanosphere, rather than a filiation of progress.

An analogy, and analogic thought, intends to make a movement based on compelling a correlation of qualities, which then implies that an unconnected by similar formation will behave in a similar manner. This movement reminds me of learning to drive. When I began to drive by myself, I realized that I had up until that point only ever learned a series of vectors to move me between two places, and had a lot of trouble recombining directions to figure out how to get somewhere from a novel starting point. But there were several moments when I drove over an overpass and saw the highway below me and recognized it as part of the trip to somewhere I was not then going (I was heading into town, and I realized that if I had been on the highway beneath me, I would have gone over the river). Suddenly I was travelling on a map, completely open to improvisation. I began to imagine what the place would look like from overhead, and what fields stood between points that I would never have considered traversing.

Braidotti, The Ethics of Sexual Difference: The case of Foucault and Irigaray

In this chapter, Grosz addresses the relationship between images, metaphorical representations of the feminine and feminist discourse and practice in the terms of power and strategy. Using the concept of ethics in contemporary philosophy specifically its importance in post modern philosophy and the theorizing of the subjective, Grosz juxtaposes Foucault and Irigaray’s basic concepts of alterity and otherness. Alterity is a major theme of post modern philosophy because of the problematization of structures of subjectivity. Grosz sees the women’s movement as one of the primary sources for the dislocation of the rational subject. This echoes our class discussion and previous readings on the invisibility of woman, the void ascribed to the feminine and the purpose of feminist theorizing to speak woman, redefine subjectivity into non-patriarchal, plural terms that include woman.
The most important difference between Foucault and Irigaray is how they theorize sexual difference. Clearly Irigaray has theorized an ontology based on the concept of fundamental sexual difference that is constitutive of the human experience, it’s the starting point. Foucault, as a male philosopher speaking within the patriarchal masculine ontology discusses the constitution of the subject within the confines of sexual sameness. This fundamental disconnect between theories weights the feminist argument of sexual difference by highlighting Foucault’s perspective of society not including invisible women and leaning toward the dominance of masculinity.
Foucault’s work takes place in three phases. First, the analysis of the type of discourse that claims the status of science which leads him to the critique of the role that the “knowing subject” plays in the history of western philosophy. Secondly, the constitution of the subject through “dividing practices” like exclusion, separation and domination within oneself as well as towards others. Lastly, he takes on the question, what is sexuality and by what means do we all become sexual subjects? Overall his work brings out the highly sexed rules that govern philosophical discourse and how phallogocentric discourse is a specific political and libidinal economy that assigns the sexes to precise roles, poles and function to the detriment of the feminine.
We all know the quick on Irigaray. What I found most important about the difference of the presentation of Foucault and Irigaray was that Foucault is a theory and Irigaray is an action. Grosz presents Foucault as problematizing and deconstructing society but Irigaray is adding to the feminist project, in other words her work is useful, active, and consequential.
This was a breaking moment for me on sexual difference. Up until this point, I’ve been able to understand the idea of fundamental sexual difference as lived. While reading this chapter I connected the importance, the meaning behind sexual difference and its usefulness politically and ontologically.

Questions:
Why Foucault and Irigaray?
What do you think the most important difference/similarity is between these two prominent, might I say royal, theorist?

Sexual Difference As a Nomadic Project

Braidotti starts by describing the nomadic condition (of sexual difference) as a "new figuration of subjectivity in a multidifferentiatied non hierachichal way" (62). Before talking about the "new difference," she first focuses on the "old difference" in European history that was/is "predicated on relations of domination and exclusion," which led/leads to "entire categories of beings [being identifiable as] disposable" (63). This patriarchal mode is monolithic and not subject (excuse the puns) to subtle manipulations by marginal groups.

Briadotti explores three categories, or "phases," of nomaic subjectivity, which are not dialectical or hierachical nature. Acting as conceptual operators of difference between (men and women), among and within (women), these "phases...can coexist chronologically and each and every one continutes to be available as an option for political and theoretical practice" (73). Here Briadotti is insistant that this concept be thought of as spacial-temporal map of the becoming-subject that can be "entered at any level and at any moment" (73). This still sounds fractal to me...

Difference between men and women

Phallocentric symbolic order.

Men = rational self

Women = irrational other

yada yada

Difference among women

"...this recognition of a common condition of sister hood in oppresion cannot be the final aim; women may have common situations and experiences, but they are not, in any way, the same. In this respect, the idea of the politicas of location is very important" (77). Here Briadotti is calling for a "theory of recognition of the multiple differences that exist among women" (77). Using such a theory can allow for a multiplicity of female identities to situated differently, coexist and still communitcate within a common condition of sisterhood.

Difference within each woman

Each female subject is a "multiplicity within herself...in an imaginary relationship to variable like class, race, age, sexual choice" (79). The female subject is fractured within herself. Because of this internal splintering, she is always in flux (Heraclitus style), always in a state of becoming. This phase is linked to Kristeva's notion of the "inner, discontinuous time of genealogy" (81).

"The nomadic subject I am proposing is a figuration that emphasizes the need for action both at the level of identity, of subjectivity, and of differences among women. These different requirements correspond to different moments, that is to say, different locations in space, that is to say, different practices. This multiplicity is contained in a multilayed temporal sequence, whereby discontintuities and even contradictions can find a place" (84).

Nomadism calls for "multiple female feminst emodied voices," located in transient, shifting spaces and times to use complex forms of action that respect contradiction and complexity without drowning in them....

Q: How does the transient becoming multiple female feminist, become solid and visible enough to participate in collective action?...and for how long? Does that "crystalization" then negate the nomadic-ness of the identity in question?

(Inhuman) Forces

Unfortunately, pages 192 and 193 were missing from the reading. I dont give an account of those pages.

Grosz begins by tracing out the relation of non-subjective forces to principles of pleasure and desire. Here she takes a very much molecular approach to both ideas, introducing a notion of forces which is composed of particles and which is pure movement without direction. This initial distinction is made in alignment with Nietzsche, employing the notion that it is forces which continually constitute and destroy subjects and not the other way round. From there Grosz goes on to ask how forces can be read in relation to pleasure and desire. Her answer is that both pleasure and desire are the registrations of the movement of forces. These are the sensory receptors of something which is operative outside of them. Thus by the time the subject can feel a desire or pleasure, already those forces have had their impact upon that subject.
Grosz points out that for Foucault, there is an intersection of force in the form of power with pleasure as that which both induces participation in channelings of pleasure and that which produces resistances to the power which has consolidated technologies of pleasure.
She goes on to discuss a Deleuzian conception of pleasure. Unfortunately these are the pages which are missing.
Grosz's conclusion based on these two views is that the goal of feminists should not be to consolidate a politics surrounding the use of pleasure or concerning desire. Rather, the attempt should be to all ow the human to "liberate from its own orbit" the imperceptible forces which together compose pleasure and desire. Thus the engagement of groups in alternative sexualities should not be read as itself directly or necessarily political but instead as creative. The participation in an outlawed sexuality can then viewed as productive of a new assemblage which will itself reconfigure the subject. These new formations of subjectivity will then continuously realign with new formations of pleasure and desire, ever- reconfiguring, ever reconstituting a subject who remains always changing and thus always elusive of the grasping clutch of power systems.

The Force of Sexual Difference

This text aims at disturbing and displacing the politics of identity through theorizing sexual difference as an ontological force. Grosz suggests a theoretical move in order to develop and ask new kinds of questions concerning:

not the body – but messy biology, matter, materiality
not ideology – but force, energy, affect
not gender – but sexual difference

To provide alternative approaches and forgo a reduction of ontology to epistemology (which she believes structuralism and poststructuralism is guilty of) she turns to Deleuze’s work on “the outside” and Irigaray’s project of sexual difference.

Grosz Interpreting Irigaray’s Notion of Ontology and Sexual Difference:

* A transformation of ontology entails a transformation of our conceptions of epistemology, and vice versa. How we understand space and time transform our conceptions of matter, subjectivity, and politics. A reconfiguration of subjectivity will dramatically change our understanding of space and time.
* Sexual difference should be seen as a constituting difference preexisting entities, rather than a difference between entities.
* Irigaray does not seek the “real” woman beyond patriarchy – she wants to counter male domination, challenge conceptual systems, and allow for ways to think, read, and write otherwise. She wants to open up the position of knowing subject to the occupation of women.
* Sexual difference exists in virtuality, as a future anteriority, because it is impossible to specify in advance what will come out of the installment of sexual difference.
* Sexual difference entails an ontology that cannot be understood as self-identical but must be composed of difference and engaged in becoming.
* This difference comes out of the central ontological difference between time and space.
* The challenge facing feminism is to articulate a future in which futurity itself has a feminine form. This may render the feminine obsolete or the object of profound or inhuman becomings.
* This defines an ontology of becoming where time is privileged as a repressed or feminized condition of the world, conceived of in terms of the preeminence of an undeterminable, incalculable future. A subject is never what it is; it is always in the process of becoming something else.

Grosz notion of time as a force of differing leads her to consider the works of Darwin, Nietzsche, Bergson and, most importantly, Deleuze. Through them she gives a schematic characterization of time as 1) an active force forward 2) the underlying, inherent principle of the transformation of objects/space 3) the never changing force of variation 4) a singularity underlying the multiplicity of changing things 5) the outside in which other forces impinge on each other 6) an enduring past which can be illuminated again and again through the active work of the present.

Such an understanding of time is important to feminist theory, writes Grosz, since it supersedes the past and the present and enables us to access the untimely. It allows us to envision a future unlike the present without being able to specify in advance what it entails. It is the investment in the power of the leap that makes feminism a project without end. Feminism as processes and becomings will ensure that difference continues to be made.

QUESTIONS: How are ontology (of becoming) and epistemology linked in Grosz way of thinking? In what ways does theorizing sexual difference as an ontolgical force avoid reducing ontology to epistemology? How come sexual difference is said not to exist at the same time as it is said to be consitutive? Why is sexual difference, as an ontological force (beyond the realm of subjectivity and identity politics), in need of theorizing feminist subjects in order to come forth?

The Future of Female Sexuality

Kinsey, who sought what Grosz calls a taxonomic (to me a word which recalls the similar ‘taxidermic’) view of human sexuality, is the target and subject of this essay.
His mission affirmed “it was only science, in its disinterested search for truth, that could rid of us our prejudices and assumptions” concerning human sexual behavior (pg. 198). This selection awakens the contemporary philosophical audience to suspicion.

Each of the theses of the essay are accompanied by a destruction via paralepsis of Kinsey’s works.

We are told: “my goal is not a philosophical critique”, “I am not really interested in undertaking an epistemological analyses”, nor “psychobiography”, nor “ [Kinsey’s] scientific contributions to knowledge”, nor his connection to “the tradition of the science of sexuality”.

These brief expenditures of breath are plenty to knock down the straw discourses of an easy target, and we become free to examine the impulse that created them.

Grosz IS interested in “what [Kinsey’s work’s] implications for an understanding of the radical future of female sexuality”, an “ontological approach: the desire to know everything about a mysterious and unknown object”, to “detach [his work] from their assumed context in sexology”.
To make Kinsey “an event”.

The second section heading’s tone of colloquial whimsy brings our suspicions to a climax:
“Five Great Things About Kinsey”.

What are they?

1. First person reports are important, and statistical empirics are problematic, and just plain hard besides.
2. He did not seek a “generic mode of sexuality”; “he sought difference”.
3. He did not limit his subjects selection on religious or moral grounds; he sought a full range of sexual activities.
4. He understood that sexuality is “a cohesive series of disparate responses to various external triggers”. Or, that conceptual banner beloved by the postmodern crowd, “a complex confluence of forces”.
5. He did not oppose the two sexes or see them as a couple (he did not explicitly binarize).

The wacky thing about him, Grosz points out, is that despite his recognition of the chaotic factors involved, he saw sexuality as something essentially knowable.

Here’s pointless side-note (those who are in a hurry are referred to the next line break):
I’m coining my own rhetorical term. I’ll call it ‘polynomy’ until I can talk to a classics scholar. Grosz practices it with exuberance and subtlety. Polynomy:
Repetition of a name (in this case, Kinsey) in situations where a pronoun, its antecedent not yet violated, would grammatically suffice, in order to create a kind of tacit nya-nya-ny’-nya-nya effect (his name seems to occur at least 4 times per page throughout).


“The Science of Sex”

Kinsey contributed to what Foucault called “the specific pleasure of the true discourse on pleasure”.

His method, with its fondness for large numbers, made sex extensive rather than intensive. His (or more properly I should say ‘its’, as Kinsey is taken as the ‘Kinsey-event’) statistical “cover of objectivity” (pg. 205) itself runs up against a variety of problems, where the tangible record of who-does-what-to-whom-and-how-and-how-much intersects with the phenomena of lived experience.

Grosz elaborates this point. Sex is messy, and it’s hard to tell when it’s really going on, and KE relied on the orgasm as a punctuating event to count when it has been accomplished. Kinsey admits a certain distrust of the female orgasm in statistical matters, but decides, “there seems no better unit for measuring.. sexual activity.” (pg. 206).

Interviews, though invaluable for some reason, often potentially involved the projection of fantasy (anticipating Foucault’s observation).

The reintegration of the psychology/physiology dualism proved highly problematic.

A crucial articulation of the problem this causes occurs on pg. 207:
“The point of numerical analysis is that anything can be calculated, but the calculation is not a neutral activity: IT TRANSFORMS WHAT IS A CONTINUITY INTO COMPARABLE UNITS, IT IMPOSES THE FORM OF THE UNIT ONTO ALL PARTICULARS, it is transformational of quality into quantity.”

Grosz seems to be problematizing the numbering of anything, as numbering involves collapsing individual units into masses with which they must be in some way identical. Numericity, as it seeks to unit groups through shared qualities (and, I would add, this is only possible by opposing, making corollary those qualities that differentiate them from some quality shared by a different group) entails the destruction of individual difference.

“In the process he lost what is sexual about sexual behavior,” and retained an accountancy of his own constructions- the orgasm as marker of a sex act.

We should seek an ars erotica rather than a scientia sexualis (echoes of Susan Sontag).

It is likely that female sexuality is inherently uncountable, and possibly male sexuality as well (reconfigured). The current configuration of female sexuality, being wholly intensive to the point of merger with all other activity (“the impossibility to distinguish between the sexual and nonsexual” pg. 210), makes the extensive discourses incomprehensibly irrelevant.

Grosz asks, “can it be that male sexuality.. is the origin of the number itself?” The tangibility of male sexuality actually causing the virtual identification of objects, not the other way around? Not that female sexuality is indescribable, but that it does not correspond to a masculinist schema of knowledge.

The moment of first-person collection in KE project was the opportunity for ars erotica, a recognized experimentation (engagement with the discourse in the first place being a sexual event).

So, “what is the radical future of female sexuality?” (213). In understanding the fundamental indeterminacy of sexuality. And it may consist in part in a certain distrust of identity politics, as they involve tabulation of past events and intelligibility relying on those events.

It is not the elusiveness of female sexuality, but its openness to any examination that makes it radical.

“This is its radical quality: not that it is unknowable, but that it is unknowable through any particular discourse or method.” (213).

The future of female sexuality is “the acknowledgment and celebration of [its] openness.”

Elizabeth Grosz, “The Time of Thought”

Part I: Introduction
In the introductory remarks to this chapter, Grosz asserts her interest in political and intellectual practices. She asks, “How can new models of thought, new intellectual practices come into being?” (155) Specifically, she asks questions about how to think the future, how to transform both philosophical and feminist theory, which Grosz argues intersect in their interests in ontology and epistemology. Although philosophy has traditionally excluded women, Grosz declares the need of feminist theory to investigate and use philosophy to its advantage, especially where philosophy/theory is brave, risky, and innovative. Grosz describes the theories of Deleuze and Irigaray as such theories.

Part II: Deleuzian concepts
For Deleuze, theory is not a unified system composed of arguments. Rather, theory/knowledge is made up of concepts which themselves are not “unitary or singular” (158), but always multiple. Concepts attempt to answer questions, which are occasioned by historically locatable, singular events (which can be natural, cultural, or political). The question/problem cannot necessarily be solved, but “enacted, lived through, negotiated” (160). Concepts/solutions arise at the same time questions are determined, and thus contribute to ideas and thought. Thus theory and practice flow into each other, “each [as] a mode of the other’s proliferation” (162). [for a summary of the concepts, see 1-4 on pages 161-162]

Part III: Irigaray and sexual difference
Grosz distinguishes two kinds of feminist theory: the first kind is that in which feminism is temporary, the second in which feminism is eternal. Feminism is temporary when it aims to overcome the oppression of women. In other words, once women have gained equality with men in economic, political, and legal realms, feminist goals will be fulfilled. Thus in this view, feminism is a temporary project.
Feminism is eternal when it posits sexual difference, such as the work of Irigaray. This kind of feminism seeks “the entire restructuring of the symbolic order, of the social apparatuses, including language, forms of knowledge, and modes of representation” (163). In other words, since everything up till now has been phallocentric, only one part of sexual difference has been represented. Irigaray argues that the other perspective (that of woman) has yet to be articulate and advocates for a “revolution in thought” that would reconsider and transform everything (all fields and disciplines) (165).
Deleuze and Irigaray “meet” in that their concept/solution will transform and continue to transform theory/action in unknown ways, but in ways that will be multiple (at least two) and continual.

Part IV: Solutions?
Grosz concludes with four suggestions/solutions (?) for feminist theory and politics:
1) Feminism should not necessarily be centered around struggles for the recognition of women in various groups. Instead, “it may be understood as the struggle around the right to act and to make according to one’s own interests and perspectives, the mobilization and opening up of identity to an uncontained and unpredictable future” (167).
2) Feminism should seek actions which generate transformations that are not necessarily linked to individuals, groups, or organizations.
3) Sexual difference should be recognized as a factor in all human affairs.
4) Feminism should produce concepts that “welcome and generate political, conceptual, and artistic experimentation” (168).

Questions: What do you make of Grosz’s shift in emphasis in feminist theory from a project-based, temporary entity to an eternal process of transformation? What dis/advantages do you think this entails for feminist projects?

Anderson's Post on Derrida's Politics of Sexual Difference

Derrida's Politics of Sexual Difference: Ontology and Equivocation-A matured political or theoretical commitment must be capable not only ofdefending itself from the external, but also from its own internal paradoxes.-Feminism must be aware of itself in this light; it necessarily involves limits: "To present a position, to provide a strategy, to make specific claims, is always to exclude, to deny and to problematize other, competing positions." (60)
-Derridean deconstruction (and postmodern theory generally) poses difficultchallenges to feminism: challenges to status of subversion, position ofsubordination, and possibility of transgression.
-In response to the reconceptualizations that these challenges demand many feminists have clung to humanist and enlightenment values or naturalist and essentialist commitments.
-Grosz suggests that in the light of deconstruction feminism should recognizethat the desire for clear-cut positions, answers, and unequivocal boundariesand certainties may no longer be tenable.
-Crucially, "deconstruction provides a way of rethinking our common conceptionof politics and struggle, power and resistance by insisting that no system,method, or discourse can be as all-encompassing, singular, and monolithic as itrepresents itself." (61)
-the implication of this being that not only must feminism realize its own internal conflicts and disagreement, but it must also realize that patriarchy is not an abslutely homogenized thing, and not without its own fissures, paradoxes and flexibilities.
-Deconstruction involves a double affirmation in which by affirming the worth of feminism, there is an implicit affirmation of the system it pushes itself away from, patriarchy.
-Grosz notes this involvment despite opposition with examples such as feminist discourse's dependence on male dominated institutions, feminist self help programs that must negotiate with patriarchal institutions for funding, and implications of Western feminism in neocolonialism.
*Importantly, Grosz will be careful to say that Derrida is not addressing anerror in feminism that can be corrected, and that therefore he is not voicing acritique of feminism. Rather, he is articulating a challenge that is inherent toits very existence. It is always already implicated in the Law that it aims tosubvert. This challenge speaks to the core of feminism.
-"This assertions of complicity, while it is not a claim of conscious collusion, nonetheless refuses the idea of a space beyond or outside, the fantasy of a position insulated from what it criticizes and disdains." (62)
-Grosz then begins a review of feminist critiques of Derrida's work.
-Rosi Braidotti claims that Derrida is part of a trend in contemporary theory to use woman as a metaphor to challenge the validity of truth, knowledge and subjectivity, and that this comes at a price for women's concrete social struggles.
-Grosz response is to question the implicit distinction between metaphorical or figurative woman or women from 'real' women. She states that real women are indeed the product of systems of representation and inscription, and that assertions of 'real' women somewhere before or beyond representation will slide into essentialism.
-Alice Jardine's critique is that the danger in deconstruction is that it attempts to occupy all specific positions while committing to none; it speaks as both man and woman without making real allegiances.
-Margaret Whitford on the other hand critiques Derrida for not speaking in his voice, for hiding his real position by occupying other texts and in so doing masters feminist discourse.
-Grosz responds by contesting the fixity of position implied in these critiques. She states that "his position only emerges as such within the structure of citationality or iteration, as one provisional destination of the cited text." (66)The point here is that his aim is not to occupy all fixed positions or to hide his own under blankets or reference; rather it is the mobile, citational character of his reading and his writing that lend flexibility to all the positions he considers.
*Part of Grosz's response is to question the stability and know-ability ofpositions at all. She seems to identify a certain reactivity in feminist callsfor a pure and uncontestable position for either the woman or the man. Thisresponse gets articulated in language, as she affirms that "language itself isthe endless possibility of speaking otherwise." (68)
-Following her treatment of various Feminist critiques of Derrida she moves onto consider what he actually has to say on the matter of sexual difference. Shedoes this in the way Derrida's writing facilitates, through an engagement withhis reading of other thinkers.
-The first engagement is with Heidegger and Dasein (the existential Beingparticular to human beings). Dasein is construed in Heidegger's thought as apriori and primordial, thus outside or beyond the reach of sexual difference.This gives it a neutrality through negation. It is untethered, made impartialthrough stripping away the a posteriori, the experiences of life. Derrida wantsto assert that this neutrality is in fact a potency, one in which Dasein is notasexual and negatively stripped of differentiation, but the predifferentialfont of both sexes.
*This section on Heidegger and particularly these thoughts of Dasein as carrying sexual difference from a negation or undifferentiation into a potent originary position which becomes the positive source of differentiation is, in my own opinion, the most philosophically important point in this essay.
-Grosz goes on to engage Derrida's treatment of both Levinas and Neitzsche. Themethod employed by Derrida is the same as it was in the case of Heidegger.Grosz asks a question that merits repeating: "Can there be an ethics between menand women that does not rely upon or presume a common or neutral ground that thesexes (or races) share, a ground that ethics fills?" (75)
What do you make of the implications that this essay involves for feministtheory and feminist struggle?Are the deconstructive conceptions of complicity with the system being assaileduseful? Do they help us refigure our engagements? Or do they constrain thoughtand action? What is the use of deconstruction beyond its own intellectualintegrity?

Zoe's Post on Sexual Difference and the Problem of Essentialism

In terms of questions, also consider how this piece illuminates or organizes the different approaches we’ve seen in terms of their confinement or commitment to revisiting patriarchal disciplines (psychoanalysis, physics etc)
Grosz identifies “an untheorized locus” in feminism’s “self-formation”. She identifies two major critiques of feminist theory: 1.) That feminist theory simply confirms pre-given commitments rather than objectively demonstrating them, and 2.) that feminist theory subversively re-inscribes the male dominant structures it seeks to interrogate. Both of these critiques, she says, are defined by desire for what she calls a “purity of position” (intellectual purity and social purity respectively). She uses the debate between the “so called” feminists of equality and feminists of difference to discuss the possibility of a self-reflexive critique of feminism. Does the notion of sexual difference liberate women from male categories or does it recontain women within essentialist patriarchal frameworks? She discusses four “touchstones of assesmnet within feminist theory which are taken to be “ self-evident” guidelines for analysis: essentialism, biologism, naturalism, and universalism. These ways of critiquing must themselves be interrogated
Equality feminists locate the potential for women’s liberation in the disruption of an expressive model of gender which they see as limiting the possibility of women to a fixed, biological destiny.
This second wave of feminism was characterized by a “logic of identification” which involved the disavowal of characteristics typically seen as feminine or maternal (and thus in conflict with participation the work-force). Equality feminists wanted to eliminate sexual difference, but this means:
• taking patriarchal values as something to which women should also aspire- this leaves the system itself unquestioned
• achieving equality between sexes would mean minimizing what distinguishes women from men( she cites the common disavowal of maternity in egalitarian feminists)
• the notion of equality reduces all specificities such that the oppressed and the oppressor become indistinguishable, struggles for women’s equality get reduced to a more generalized struggle for social justice- this allows men to claim that they too are oppressed by patriarchy
• even if equality between sexes could be gaurenteed, it would only be enforceable in the public and civic spheres
• Even if both sexes do the same jobs, perform the same duties etc, the social and symbolic meanings of the activities remain the same, unchallenged
In the 1980’s a feminism based in difference emerged. This notion of sexual difference is different than that which is espoused by repressive patriarchal notions in that it advocates for pure difference as opposed to difference from a pre-given norm. Patriarchal notions of gender difference are characterized by a binary structure in which one term is defined only by the negation of the other, while pure difference “refuses to privelege either term”. Difference feminism, unlike equality feminism, does not pre-supposes an acceptance of masculine values. It leaves open the possibility to reject the terms of evaluation and to “define oneself on different terms”. *The idea of difference suggests a change to the patriarchal social and symbolic orders – but this difference is easily reincorporated *Difference feminism resists the reduction of feminism to a broader humanitarian project* difference feminism safeguards women’s struggles for autonomy from being conflated with those of men*A politics of difference involves the right to define oneself on ones own terms- thereby necessitating a critique/reorganization of the structures of representation, meaning and knowledge which produce identitiesAfter laying out these two camps, the equality feminists and the difference feminists, Grosz expresses frustration: “are these the only choices available to feminist theory- an adherence to essentialist doctrines, or the dissolution of feminist struggles” she asks. Drawing on Spivak, she advocates for the notion that all politics is always already bound up in whatever it is contesting; feminism will never be pure, and she says it shouldn’t want to be. Just by orienting ourselves towards that which we seek to contest, we loose theoretical purity: she cites Spivak “You pick up the universal that will give you the power to fight against the other side, and what you are throwing away by doing this is your theoretical purity. Grosz says we need to acknowledge, not disavow feminism’s implication in patriarchal structures of power. The focus should not be on weather the politics or theory is pure, but on what it enables, how useful it is. She seems to say that the feminist movement actually draws its strength from its emersion in the system which it contests- “the ability to use patriarchy and phallocentrism against themselves” is the most powerful feminist theoretical weapon”p57. Do you agree with Grosz that the greatest power is to be able to turn the tools of a system against itself? What is to be gained by recognizing feminisms immersion in the system it aims to contest?

Grosz, "Reconfiguring Lesbian Desire"

In “Reconfiguring Lesbian Desire”, Grosz begins by stating her problems with the way desire has been articulated. She critiques the ontology of lack as necessitating binarism. Grosz argues that the ontology of lack sexualizes desire in terms of the characteristics attributed to masculine/feminine opposition: presence and absence (177). She holds that “such a model…performs an act of violence: for any consideration of the autonomy of the two sexes, particularly the autonomy of women, is rendered impossible. It feminizes, heterosexualizes, and binarizes desire at an ontological and epistemological level. Its activity is merely a reaction to its perceived shortcomings, its own failure to sustain itself” (177).

Grosz explains that the psychoanalytic account of desire configure it as inherently masculine, as there is only the masculine libido: desire only exists as an activity, which is associated with the masculine, whereas the feminine is associated with passivity. Therefore, according to a Freudian model of desire, woman can only love and desire as a man (via female inversion); a woman cannot desire as a woman, as woman is characterized by a lack of desire. She thus reasons that women’s desire is inconceivable according formulations of desire as activity: women function within that system as objects of male desire (179). Such a model of desire makes it impossible to understand lesbian desire (180).

As a solution, Grosz calls for a reconfiguration of desire as, instead of a lack, an intensity, enervation, positivity, or force (179). She draws upon Spinoza’s model of desire “as the force of positive production, the action that creates things, makes alliances, and forges interactions” (179) and Deleuze and Guattari’s model of desire as experimental, creative, and fundamentally inventive (180). She then draws further upon Deleuze and Guattari to read lesbian sexuality and desire in terms of bodies, pleasures, surfaces, intensities (180). Grosz insists that sexual relations are, and should be formulated as, “contiguous with and a part of other relations" (181). She states that “the bedroom is no more the privileged site of sexuality than any other space; sexuality and desire are part of the intensity and passion of life itself” (181). She expounds that sites most invested in desire always occur at a conjunction or point of machinic connection between one thing and another (182). In order to understand this notion, she calls for the necessity of focusing on parts and elements outside of the context of their integration or organization (182). She holds that focus should thus not be limited to pre-designated erogenous zones, and should instead by concerned with “the coming together of two surfaces for their own sake and not for the benefit of the entity or organism as a whole” (182).

Grosz notes that “to use the machinic connections a body-part forms with another, whether it be organic or inorganic, to form an intensity, a investment of libido is to see desire, sexuality as productive…but in no way reproductive” (183). She postulates further that focus on intensities and surfaces instead of relations between an impulse and its absent other allows a conception of others, human subjects, and women as “not simply the privileged objects of desire”. She then draws upon Mary Fallon’s illustration of desire as “one ‘thing’ transmut[ing] into another; becom[ing] something else through its connections with something or someone outside” (184). She parallels this with the Deleuzian notion of becoming, which “entails…entry into an arrangement, an assemblage of other fragments, other things, becoming bound up in some other production, forming part of a machine” (184). Grosz states that it is not a question of being a certain entity (such as animal, woman, or lesbian), or of attaining a conclusive status, but of “moving, changing, being swept beyond one singular position into a multiplicity of flows, or what Deleuze and Guattari have described as ‘a thousand tiny sexes’: to liberate the myriad of flows, to proliferate connections, to intensify” (184). She elaborates that “the question is not am I…a lesbian, but rather, what kinds of lesbian connections, what kinds of lesbian-machine, we invest our time, energy, and bodies in, what other kinds of bodies, and to what effects?” (184). She continues to posit that this question is “what it is that together, in parts and bits, and interconnections, we can make that is new, exploratory, opens up further spaces, induces further intensities, speeds up, enervates, and proliferates production” (184).

Discussion Questions:
What do you think of Grosz’s model of desire, or of her critiques of the ways that (gay and lesbian) desire has been formulated? Do you think it’s an optimal solution to the problems posed by psychoanalysis and the ontology of lack?

Grosz, "Animal Sex"

In “Animal Sex” Grosz deconstructs the connection between pleasure and death through analyzing the work of two theorist, Roger Caillois and Alphonso Lingis. Grosz is clearly aware of the work of the theorists we have studied up to this point. She addresses the importance of acknowledging the implications of erotic pleasure for understanding sexual difference, that male and female sexualities are not necessarily distinct different species, nor should they only be understood in relation to each other (p. 188). The point of this chapter is to addresses what seems entirely other to women’s pleasure and desire – at men, at insects. Grosz aims to at least say what female pleasure is not and to dispel accounts that connect women and women’s sexuality too closely with mens’ or animals’ sexualities (p. 189). The author chose Caillois and Lingis because of the huge gap between their precise studies and the subsequently vast area they cover.

Caillios work focuses on the connection between pleasure and death as a simple reality through studying the praying mantis, specifically the female praying mantis’ affinity for eating her partner before, after or during sex. A key concept for Caillois is the inherently excessive expenditure of structural, anatomical or behavior traits that go above and beyond the survival needs of an organism; for example, peacocks feathers or the camouflage of a caterpillar, or the libido of human sexuality and desire (p. 190). Praying mantises are particularly interesting to study because of their close association with femininity and female sexuality through myth and humans through appearance. In anthropomorphizing the insects behaviors, praying mantises become linked with fundamentally paranoid projections, the femme fatale, the mother who castrates her son, the reverse of the prominent masculine founded psychoanalysis; for the praying mantis is the female lover who threatens the phallus not the other way around (p.191). Pleasure and death are linked together by the praying mantis (and black widow spider) by making sex something to die for (for the praying mantis, something it can do while technically dead). This places woman in the category of non-human, or “the living threat of death” (p.194).

Lingis separates bodily needs with bodily desires, specifically lust or erotic desire. Body image created through corporeal gratification, a need, supplies the subject with an experience of its own body and the ways in which its body is perceived by others (p.194). The libido or erotic desire is a troubling of the body image. In Caillois’s world, it is the erotic desire that is the excess; it surpasses what is necessary for survival. Lingis describes desire as an ever increasing hunger that likes to maintain itself at the level of craving (p.195), insatiable equaling excess.

Lingis refers to carnal desire as horizontal-lateral contamination of one erotogenic zone to another (p. 197). The relations (of two or more interacting zones or regions on one or more people/things) can not be understood in the terms of complementary, unifying or the merger of the two because each remains in its site and functions in its own ways (p. 197). With the coming together of two or more surfaces (and there is be a coming together of some sort) results in an intensification of both surfaces. It is through this conjunction the body is given up to the intensities that overtake it, seeking the otherness to bring these intensities into play (p. 198). It is not about only giving the other pleasure, but always giving itself pleasure (p. 198).

Moving into sadomasochism specifically as pain being brought into the realm of erotic desire for the intense sensuality it produces, the processes of pleasurable intensities produced can not be differentiated by those by which painful intensity is produced (p. 199). The role of the other in erotic desire is nontrivial; it is not a passive object. The other “solicits, beckons, implores, provokes and demands. The other lures, oscillates, presenting everything it has to offer” (p. 199). Life/pleasure and death/un-pleasure are complementary in opposition. Organisms that split cells are reproducing asexually can be seen as immortal. Therefore sex necessitates the death experience, or death brings sex as the alternative (p. 201). Lingis understands the link between horror and lust; the transformative effects of erotic attachments are echoed in the seeping out beyond boundaries and the dissolution of lines of bodily organization prompted by orgasmic dissolution (p. 202). Grosz makes the connection of the abject through, “something about the compulsive incitements of sexuality that may bring one to the brink of disgust and to the abject, no only accepting but seeking out activities, objects and bodily regions one might in other contexts disdain” (p. 202). It is important to acknowledge and theorize how understanding subjectivity and desire goes beyond the opposition of pleasure and death (p. 203).

The Question of Social Transformation

In “The Question of Social Transformation”, Butler discusses the place of gender trouble in feminist theory. She invokes various questions related to recognizability and survival for those outside the norm, and asserts, “we need norms in order to live…we are also constrained by norms in ways that do violence to us”. Norms, perhaps necessary points of reference, are defined by exclusion.
Feminist sociolinguistics/semiotics, though revolutionary, were predicated on the existence of sexual difference, and were therefore inherently heterosexist. Binary distinctions displaced from heteronormative circumstances articulated the question of the parentage of these roles: were they located in the primordial heterosexual couple? Butler argues that their displacement itself proved the alocality of originals and the performativity of gender in general.
She summarizes several positions critiquing hers: the idea of a difference between the cultural symptoms of sexual difference and the sociological concept of gender; that sexual difference is necessary to expose patriarchy and to provide constraints in which gender is permuted; that heterosexism is inherent to the human psyche.
Where can sociality intervene in the symbolic order? Homologous to her discussion of butch/femme categories, she brings up the transferability of the attribute, the displacement of gender in drag that exposes it as not having a firm locus. The assumed ontology of gender is constantly displaced at a material level.
The arbiter in power decides recognizable behavior by a rubric of attributes, and the coherence of this rubric makes it visible. Drag enacts a resignification intelligible in the public signs of a gender. How does this cooption enter the political? The existence of acts of gender in a coherent field also means the restructuring of that field. Symbolic violence defines the border of humanness in the name of real and unreal. A livable life for all consists in “a new legitimating lexicon” of gender.
She considers Habermas’ point that norms are necessary for masses to orient themselves in order to participate. These norms create normalizing drives. She asks how these norms could exist without constantly producing the non-normative, the excluded. In the discourse of what is human, she concludes, participation is universally involuntary.
Resignification as politics entails performing acts that demand new recognition within the coherent field. She incidentally disclaims that creating livable life does not mean that we should all have to be anti-choice; democracy is not a unified field, anyhow; restructuring occurs productively at sites of difference and suffering, but we shouldn’t be paternalistic; love is a good solution; violence is bad.

The End of Sexual Difference

Productive Conflicts

Disputes are intrinsic to all democratic enterprises. Instead of trying to settle them once and for all, one should understand how crucial they are to a forward momentum. Behind this view lies the idea that human beings are irreversibly complex and can never truly be united under any one paradigm.

What Is Sexual Difference?

The idea of productive conflicts plays into Irigaray’s saying that sexual difference is the question of our time. Sexual difference is not a given or a premise; it is a question that prompts feminist inquiry, "...[it is] that which is not yet or not ever formulated in terms of an assertion.” (p.177)

Importantly, Butler does not argue for the end of sexual difference or give reasons for why we shouldn't pursue this framework/reality. For Butler, it isn’t productive to wish away or argue against such a fundamental structuring principle as sexual difference. Sexual difference is a “...necessary background to the possibility of thinking, of language, of being a body in the world.” (p.176)

This brings her to reflect on how sexual difference registers ontologically. She finds that sexual difference is both given and constructed. It resists a clear sense of partition. Sexual difference operates as a chiasm "...but the terms that overlap and blur are perhaps less importantly masculine and feminine than the problematic of construction itself;...” (p.186) Here, sexual difference becomes absorbed in a general problematic of construction. It is that which troubles the constructed, which makes it problematic. “Perhaps… sexual difference registers ontologically in a way that is permanently difficult to determine.” (p.185-6)

Ontologically, sexual difference is not a facticity, nor an effect of facticity but rather a site of contestation in a certain time. (p.185)

Border Phenomena

The problematic of construction evokes a notion of sexual difference as a vacillating border phenomenon demanding re-articulation. The psychic, the somatic and the social dimensions of sexual difference never fully collapse into one and other, nor are they completely distinct. The same goes for “the human” and “the universal”. The admittance of the lesbian into the realm of the universal might indeed undo the human in its present form. But, she argues, this will also be the first step in order to imagine the human beyond its conventional limits. In this way “universality” becomes an antifoundationalism. It both destroys a concept of the universal as eternal and admits what has been its “constitutive outside”.

The Question as a Historical Trajectory

For Butler (and for Irigaray), it isn't desirable to come up with the “correct” answer to the question of sexual difference, but rather to explore the historical trajectory it forms. This is true for the definitions of gender, sex, sexuality, as well. In this way, the question of sexual difference inaugurates a problematic of time. The problematic of time ties into Butler’s belief in language’s progressive possibilities.

Revitalization of Modernity and its Terminology

She looks at the term “universal” as used in a UN platform for NGO meetings. There the term is considered dependent on a consensus, which at first seems to undo the whole idea of universality, in that it comes to mean universal to some people. But perhaps not, she says. Maybe the meaning of “the universal” can never be all-inclusive and maybe it varies culturally? If so, then a field of progressive possibilities opens up between the articulation and the demand for re-articulation of the term.

Can We Use the Term We Question?

Just because we call a term into question doesn’t mean we can’t use it. But why is it that we sometimes feel that way? “Why is it that… [when] a term is dislodged from its foundational place, we will no longer be able to live, to survive, to use language, to speak for ourselves?” (p.181)

Typically Butlerian style she answers her own questions with other rhetorically posed questions; is this because the sense in which terms are assumed is a moral one? Which takes the form of an imperative? A defense against what terrifies us most?? (Yes, yes, yes!)

According to Butler, the human “…must become strange to itself, even monstrous, to reachieve the human on another plane.” This human will not have one, fixed form but continue to change, to vacillate, as gender, sex and sexual difference continue to be negotiated. (p.191-2)

In Response to Rosi Braidotti

⁃ Braidotti thinks that femininity today is associated with a pejorative understanding of its meaning, but that it should be “released into a different future”.
⁃ Butler: But is it fair to say that those who oppose this framework therefore demean femininity, or believe that it can only have a debased meaning?

⁃ They agree that femininity will have multiple possibilities in a future symbolic.
⁃ Butler: Must the framework for thinking about sexual difference be binary for this feminine multiplicity to emerge?

⁃ Is butch desire a permutation of feminine desire (Braidotti) or is it a way in which masculinity emerges in women (Butler)?

⁃ Butler: Why is it that Braidotti holds on to the binary frame when it comes to the construction of desire, whereas, on other occasions, she accepts the play of multiple forces? In the case of butch desire, why shouldn’t we be at an edge of sexual difference, for which the language of sexual difference might not suffice?

My questions:

• How does Butler’s notion of sexual difference as vacillating border phenomenon relate to Irigaray’s critique of the ontology of the solid? Does Butler’s notion of an indeterminate status of sexual difference originate from an ontology of the solid or does it fundamentally challenge it? Is this a failure to deal with the question of sexual difference ontologically, or, is this a way to overcome a compulsion to master/appropriate/make known what is real?

Butler's Beside Oneself

Butler makes the claim that the problem with violence is twofold; it is a violence which devastates the lives of humans, and it is a violence which is often not recognized as such because of pre-existing conceptions of who is a human. Her solution is thus also twofold; we need to recognize more bodies as human and we need to redefine the norm, ie we need to redefine 'human' to be inclusive of more permutations of it.
Butler's systematic operates under an assumption of ethics which she defines as the question of not, 'what makes my own life more 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 (27)."
The reason we should be concerned with this kind of ethics is that we are each already constituted by being socially situated. "...we are from the start, and by virtue of being a bodily being, already given over, beyond ourselves, implicated in lives that are not our own (21)." So we are each concerned with one another because we must be, because our body places us in relation to one another so that we become partially an expression of that relation.
It is the body that both makes it necessary to be in contact with one another and makes us vulnerable to one another. "In a sense, to be a body is to be given over to others even as a body is emphatically 'one's own", that over which we must claim rights of autonomy (20)"
This essential tension between myself and others is echoed in the discourses of power and truth which define relations of self and other through conceptions of humanness which are centered on the body. These discourses make violence either inaccessible to change by creating invisibility of bodies or create the visibility of a subject who can be depicted as oppressed. 'To be oppressed you must first become intelligible (30)." furthermore, "if there are no norms of recognition by which we are recognizable, then it is not possible to persist in one's own being (31)."
Therefore, we need to reconceive the standards of measurement for who counts so that the wrongs done against all can be redressed. 'if we consider that human bodies are not experienced without recourse to some ideality some frame of experience itself...and if we accept that that ideality and frame are socially articulated, we can see how it is that embodiment is not thinkable without a relation to a norm, or a set of norms (28)."
Butler then posits her strategy by continuing, saying "possibilities beyond the norm or, indeed, a different future for the norm itself." thus, "The embodied relation to the norm exercises a transformative potential." Here's how we can actualize that potential:
1) embodiment- 'where the body is not understood as a static...fact but as...a mode of becoming that, in becoming otherwise, exceeds the norm, reworks the norm (29)"
2) establishing non-nromative sexualities as already present and constituting of sociality which in turn constitutes each of us, as a “defining feature of the social world in its very intelligibility (29).”
3) “Expand notions of kinship beyond heterosexual frame (26)”
4) "to make grief a resource for politics...to allow oneself to extrapolate from this experience of vulnerability to the vulnerability that others suffer (23)."

One other element of this article is a pre-emptive defense against "reductive relativism" which argues that "generalizations themselves do violence to the specificity of the meanings in question (37)." Th defense calls for a "critical democratic project (37)." In other words, Butler reiterates classic liberal arguments for using rights discourse as a liberatory strategy.

1) I cannot exist or survive outside of society- 'I cannot be who I am without drawing upon the sociality of norms that precede and exceed me. in this sense, I am outside myself from the outset, and must be in order to survive, and in order to enter into the realm of the possible (32).'
2) I must constitute myself to be legible within society, "to be conceived as persons (32)."
3) I must appeal to society because "we are also dependent on the protection of public and private spaces, on legal sanctions that protect us from violence, on safeguards o various institutional kinds (33)."
4) "to live suggests that life itself requires a set of sheltering norms, and that to be outside it, to live outside it, is to court death (34)."


The essential question then-
How can an advocation for the re-articulation of normativity within a paradigm of universalistic legibility of individuals as parts of the total of humanity be compatible with a conception of singularity and difference?

Or in a less biased and more affirmative manner-
How can the notion of recognition, of subjectivity as partially constituted by relationality, be conceived as fluid?
and
How important is recognition to an ontology of change?

Gender Regulations - Judith Butler

Intro to Gender Regulations:
Butler’s intro to Gender Regulations broadly outlines the finer points to be further enunciated and begins by posing the question of gender’s origin: whether it precedes or follows the formation of regulation and at what point subjection is engendered. She early on invokes Foucaultian concepts of regulatory power’s ability to legislate and produce subjects. She begins to speak to the phrase “gender is a norm” and continues to define a norm as distinct from a law and a rule and that it lends an individual social intelligibility. Though norms demarcate that which is un/acceptable within social bounds, one can never escape these classifications and exist outside of the norm since individuals are defined by its terms. Butler determines that “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” (42). Restrictive notions of gender that create a binary system of masculine/feminine endeavor to naturalize such distinctions and to eradicate any sort of disruptions to the system as transgender and gender blending. She concludes that this attempt to undermine the binary system has been met with resolutions that provide for a multitudinous array of gender as well as the Irigarayian (sp?) notion of gender escaping quantitative description

Symbolic positions and social norms :
Butler defines the symbolic according to Levi-Strauss and Lacan as the:
-model for kinship relations and prohibitions (Oedipal)
-wants to establish itself as universal primordial law
-inalterable
-irreducible to varying social/biological forms
-linguistic (elementary structures that allow one to enter into language and thus intelligibility within kinship relations)
-impossible to contest in its tautology
Butler argues against the ways in which Lacanian psychoanalysis’ staid rules don’t allow for a transformation of gender and further ignore the “radical alterations of kinship”, thus denying a rewriting of psychoanalysis. She also locates the symbolic system’s prohibitions, namely incest taboo, as the self-inscribed foil to psychoanalysis. In contrast the social, like the norm, is subject to self-scrutiny and revision though it is heavily embedded and disguised within the instantiation of each act. Taking up a discourse between Foucault and Ewald, Butler elaborates on the extent to which norms operate within juridical (implementation) and legislative (laws) instances. Though laws define norms, it is their implementation that allows for their normalization and transformation.

Norms and the Problem of Abstraction:
Here Butler questions what exactly shapes the disciplinary discourse and outlines how the quantitative commonality through comparisons within the relation and context of others constitutes a norm. The norm thus cannot be realized as an abstraction preceding the norm but constituted within the action in reality. The abstraction of which Butler speaks is the tacit underlying power of norms that determine the bounds of acceptability.

Gender Norms:
Butler explains further how gender is normalized through regulation by institutionalization, surgical “correction”, and law. Following from seemingly protective laws pertaining to sexual harassment [male/agressors female/victims] MacKinnon concludes that the stance taken within such laws solidifies a “hierarchical structure of heterosexuality and for butler the mechanism that produces gender. This rationale equates gender with sexuality within a heterosexual world and produces the model feminine woman and masculine male. However, Butler holds that sexual practice and the presence of transgender breakdown the causal link btwn gender and sexuality.

Butler contests MacKinnon’s heterosexual hegemonic system that inadvertently institutes a gender norm, and too escapes essentialism by qualifying individuals according to sexuality (sexual relations) beyond male and female coupling. However, if one can never escape the norm and must always be defined by its terms, is Butler really just broadening the scope of normalization to be more all-inclusive?

Response to Kristeva's "From Filth to Defilement"

In Approaching Abjection Kristeva reimagined the abject as an element of subjective formation and reformation and as a discursive device within psychoanalytic and other theories of subjectivity. In From Filth to Defilement it seems that this project is extended into another perspective, that of the social function of abjection. The determination of what is filth will be immediately connected to the determination of what is sacred and this epistemology will facilitate the rituals of defilement, such as sacrifice, that society establishes for its maintenance. The essay treats this topic within the domains of psychoanalysis and anthropology.

Kristeva begins with Freud's thoughts on the totem and taboo, indicating the two primary taboos are incest (presumably with the mother) and murder (of the father). Kristeva suggests that this incest dread is a mother phobia.
-What does Kristeva mean by this connection? What is the fear that motivates this prohibition?
The Sacred is a two-sided formation. One side is a defensive and socializing aspect, murder and guilt. The other side demonstrates fear and undifferentiation, an identity that is more primordial than the separation of subject from object.

Kristeva does make clear that she is not interested in the social production of the incest taboo, but in what subjective alterations it suggests in the confrontation with the feminine, and with "the way in which societies code themselves in order to accompany as far as possible the speaking subject on that journey"(250) .

So what is the feminine that is being confronted? Kristeva states that the feminine is not a timeless essence but rather a nameless other. The confrontation with this other will take place from the foundation of the paternal function.

Kristeva uses Freud to characterize the taboo as not merely sacred and consecrated but also dangerous and forbidden; and, as a prohibition it concerns in large part matters that are enjoyable. Kristeva will seek explanation for the imperative of the taboo in the condition of primary narcissism which is hostile and unlimited.

This primary narcissism makes the distinction between inside and outside unclear, this nondistinction is unnamable thus aligned with the feminine. It is here that the question of pleasure and pain takes importance. The distinction between these two will introduce language and found the separation between inside and outside.

In the following sentence Kristeva makes a compelling and complicated claim. "If the murder of the father is that historical event constituting the social code as such, that is, symbolic exchange and the exchange of women, its equivalent on the level of the subjective history of each individual is therefore the advent of language"(252).
-What is Kristeva suggesting here? What is the parallel between the establishment of a social code that facilitates the exchange of symbols and women and the establishment of language in the individual subject?

Kristeva, again reading through Freud, will recall his proposition that the beginning of libidinal drives in childhood are not directed towards an object. Autoerotism is the stage at which object-choice is fixed. The condition of narcissism is said to require an ego, but not an outside object.
Kristeva will find two consequences to this narcissistic structure: first, the ego will be unstable without differentiating itself from an other; and second, the topology of this narcissism will affirm the generative position of the mother-child dyad.
-How does Kristeva arrive at these consequences?
-What kind of valuation does Kristeva offer for this primary narcissism? Is it a good option?

Kristeva, now reading Levi-Strauss makes a crucial claim on page 254: "If it be true, as Claude Levi-Strauss has demonstated, that the prohibition of incest has the logical import of founding, by means of that very prohibition, the discreteness of interchangeable units, this establishing social order and the symbolic, I shall maintain that such a logical operation is carried out owing to a subjective benefit derived from it on the level of libidinal economy".
-An excellent question to pose is what is this libidinal economic benefit that is so instrumental to social order?

Kristeva will suggest that rituals of defilement effectively address a threat that is implicit in the sacred epistemology they operate within. She will engage this epistemology in regard to the place of the maternal and the threats that are invested in it.

From Levi-Strauss to Bataille, Kristeva will here grab another effective consideration on this topic. Bataille linked abjection to the lack of capacity to exclude. Thus we may understand that societies codes threats they cannot abolish as abject and establish practices of defilement to confront these apparent threats. Again, it is the mother that Kristeva wishes to consider in relation to these ideas.

Kristeva next takes up the work of Mary Douglas in anthropology to explicate the process by which filth becomes defilement and founds the sacred.
-Kristeva will here call upon the domain of language to indicate the manner in which anthropologists have connected the symbolic to the universal. (257)
-what are the conequences of this linkage?

By page 258, Kristeva's investigation has led her to suggest of abjection that it "...is coextensive with social and symbolic order, on the individual as well as on the collective level". And later, "But abjection assumes specific shapes and different codings according to the various 'symbolic system'".
-What is the logic of prohibition that Kristeva describes on this page?

How is filth defined on pages 258 and 259 and what are dangers that filth presents to the subject?

How does Kristeva locate maternal authority in the two coded abjections, excrement and menstrual blood? (260-1). Further, how does locating maternal presence in these abjections lead to the repression of maternal authority for the establishment of the social order?

Finally, in the last section, what is the relationship between defilement and borderings?

-Anderson

Cixous: Excerpts

NEWLY BORN WOMAN
(Sorties –First Passage) In this passage, Cixous writes about the dual oppositions that exist within philosophical and literary traditions. She points to the marriage between the father and the son, and that in this symbolic, the mother disappears. The connection between logocentrism and phallocentrism subordinate the woman/feminine to the “masculine structure that passed itself off as eternal-neutral” (39). However, if the story could be re-told in a different way, the foundations of this structure might begin to crumble.
(Sorties –Second Passage) Cixous describes two forms of bisexuality: 1) bisexuality as a fantasy of unity (in order to avoid castration) and 2) a bisexuality in which every subject “sets up his or her erotic universe” (41). Whereas the first kind depicts a certain “monosexuality”, the second kind opens up the possibility for multiplication. Cixous moves on the question of writing, and that “writing is woman’s” (42). It is a process during which the other comes through the body, an exchange with the other, and that women can do this because they can access the other within. Men, on the other hand, cannot so easily do this because their other is the feminine, something they must not allow to come forward because of the fear of homosexuality. Cixous also associates the masculine with a (selfish) giving that wants something in return, whereas women give without wanting anything in return (altruism).
LA – THE (FEMININE)
(First Passage) As dreamer, linguist, artist of love, the woman writer sings, crosses boundaries, lives in the abysses, laughs, shows, connects –writes in ways male writers don’t.
(Second Passage) A woman fears being alone –she needs a source to sustain herself. The journey to a source exhausts woman, and she finds herself at the end, when a god appears just as she is about to encounter herself and distracts her soul.
(Third Passage) This passage describes a woman giving birth and raises issues about the inside and outside, and nakedness. She almost wants to rid herself of the (necrophiliac) son, and commands him, “outside!” “Above all we must rid ourselves of the dead, gods and men who play the mother.” (66) Thus birthing becomes a metaphor for purging.
EXTREME FIDELITY
Here, Cixous makes the distinction between biological sex and gender. She insists that gender is not necessarily linked to anatomy, “one can find these economies in no matter which individual” (132). Cixous uses two monumental stories (The Original Sin and The Quest for the Holy Grail) to make connections between the (indefinable) law and the (prohibited) inside, and how women are closer (or have more access) to the inside/receptivity because of cultural schemas.
THREE STEPS
(First Passage) “These complexities are not yet audible.” (199) In this passage, Cixous argues both that sexual difference is complex, and that only through writing will we be able to get through the “cutting each other’s throats” part of sexual difference.
(Second Passage) The need to break the “construction we are” (201). Also, again, the importance of writing: but writing while walking. The process is important, “Walking through the self toward the dark.” (203)
(Third Passage) Again, going to the deep part of oneself, “It is deep in my body, further down, behind thought.” (204) Fear prevents us from going there in the writing process.

Questions:
1) How do these excerpts relate to an overall project of Cixous? Is there an overall argument you think she makes, and if so, what it is?
2) Why does Cixous choose to write in the ways she does? For example, in “La”, she writes in a different style than in the second passage from “Sorties”. How does this affect her argument?
3) Does Cixous make a good argument for the separation of sex and gender?
4) Why is writing, and the process of writing, so important for the feminist project?

Women's Time

On “New maladies of the Soul”
Women’s Time

I wasn't sure how best to relay a summery and questions of Kristeva's essay. What I am presenting here is a mix of notes, ideas, introjections, and questions. I hope that any part of this is helpful.

Kristeva in this essay seems to be trying to understand woman’s history as the history of women involved in feminism for the past century. Through inquiry into time. Find a middle ground with which to talk to people-
How the feminist movement has inherited a notion of time but how it is in the process of being altered.
In this essay, Kristeva attempts to distinguish three types of feminism in regards to time. The first “wave” of feminism attempted to localize women within a kind of linear time or history previously available only to masculine subjects. While this kind of feminism made several important moves ( suffrage, professional equality, etc), she disagrees with its attempts to universalize or essentialize what women’s time actually means. She sees it’s disregard for motherhood as particularly problematic. Rather, she sees its rejection of cyclical (maternal) time as a kind of ignorance to the particularities of women in their singularities.

Grounds her argument in Baudrillard-in the end of the gold standard, and so the dominance of the role of the symbolic order to maintain cohesion and exclude change from the unity; it is a type of public sphere in which difference amounts to dystopia. Unlike the territorial demarcations that once defined a nation giving its cohesion a definite inside and outside, the type of universalism that Kristeva is arguing from universalizes through language displacing the demarcation, making it a problem of subjectivity.

Universalism was limited by the universalism of the nation.

Second phase- It went through its modernism in that it concentrated less on the symptoms of a system of representation that seems bent on exclusion and more effects of subjectivity, primarily the way in woman come into their subjectivities through language and psychology. Kristeva mimics the second generations style by confounding the movement of feminism with the change in individual woman (255).

The next section of the essay seeks to draw out the ground on which the phase for a third type of feminism of involving the popular multiplicity which emerges in juxtaposition to the concentration of a trans-movement. At this point in the essay, she teeters dangerously close to asserting a structuralist notion of the movement and the they of superstructure.

Now that we are dealing with the symbolic, we travel through Lacan and then Freud to understand our position as subjects invested in/with language to the symbolic.
-She argues that the phallic is the complete/”full meaning” of the symbolic. That it is the central referent seems to reinstate us before the end of the gold standard. Perhaps she is referencing Derrida’s phallogocentrism in which all meaning is derived from a masculine notion of an origin that proliferates all other meaning.

She asks, “what is our place in the social contract” given membership through castration or sex sacrifice?

What she seems to be getting at is the problem of the limits of the symbolic. The points at which the imaginary is not only a compromise but a sacrifice.

More subjective women/women who express themselves through terms which re more subjective? The new group then is countering the symbolic contract which asks us to sacrifice the realness of the paticularity of encounters in the world with our bodies.

In contesting this social order, Kristeva fears that a new division emerges dividing the sexes. Here by sexes it seems she means both women who derive their womanhood from the phallus and woman who are trying to articulate woman on different terms. She asks, “what occurs when they reject power but create an analogous society?
There is the vapid illusion of change when a woman is installed in a position of the same power filling it with the right parts.
There is the possibility that a movement might emerge in which power is conserved but the terms used in describe it-man-woman are revered.
“Like all societies, the counter society bases itself upon the expulsion of an already excluded element. The scapegoat deemed responsible for evil thus keeps it away from the established community which is therefore exonerated of any responsibility for it.”

She works out that in light of this possible division between what it seems she wants to term radicalism and the rest, she writes, “Although we can only offer a partial adherence o Freud’s belief that the desire to have a child is the desire to have a penis, and is thus a placement for phallic and symbolic power, we still must pay close attention to what today’s women have to say about this experience.” This seems to allow a continuation to the sacrificial order and an opening up to the elements of maternity utilized in the sacrificial to be commuted to a radical politics. She goes on to say that the possibility of exonerating the figure of the maternal comes in affirming the creative act of learning how to love differently. It seems this, “on the other hand” that Kristeva retains the symbolic order that she tried to parse in the making of the distinction of types of motherhood. Learning to love as mother, is this not the only type of love relegated to women through the realm of the symbolic?


-dan

Summary of "Approaching Abjection" by Kristeva

There is a great deal going on in this essay, so I will attempt to describe the general project and some of its most compelling points. It must be emphasized that this essay is presented in a 'mobile' fashion, it passes through a number of conceptual view points briefly though incisively. That said, there seems to be a consistent project taking place. Kristeva's essay appears to simultaneously interrogate and re-figure the concept of the abject within the realm of psychoanalysis and its philosophical underpinnings. As mentioned, the abject is the pivotal concept, and Kristeva offers a number of perspectives on it. In attempting to understand this concept for myself, I made a rough sketch of its characteristics:
-the abject is a violent revolt of being that repulses desire.
-the abject is neither object nor subject. This seems like a crucial point. Later Kristeva suggests that the object puts one in search of meaning and the abject collapses meaning. This statement is also posed in psychoanalytic terms: "to each ego its object, to each superego its abject" (230).
-the abject can not be the thing that an ego makes its end, it involves the subject psychically.
-Kristeva goes on to consider the protection that comes with repugnance; she indicates retching, vomiting, loathing, gagging, spasm as modes of being that impel one away from what she describes as defilement, sewage.
-She affirms this sense of movement by suggesting that these modes may be instances of becoming other by expelling myself; a movement that means death. The pieces of the self that are wasted in its very movement suffer a kind of death.
-This places the I at the border of its conditions of living. And these conditions of living are not merely the bodily processes but also the psychological. As Kristeva states: "It is thus not lack of cleanliness or health that causes abjection but what disturbs identity, system, order, what does not respect borders, positions, rules" (232).
-In this way she identifies crimes as an example for exposing the fragility of the law.
-Here Kristeva makes a major point: The subjective experience culminates in the abjection of its own self as it understands that all its objects are founded on a constitutive loss.
-therefore, all abjection recognizes foundational want.
-this experience precedes the being/object dichotomy; before there is the field of signifying objects that constitute the territory of the subject, there is abjection.
-Kristeva then introduces the concept of the deject: the deject is the one by whom the abject exists. Kristeva describes this figure as a kind of transient.
-The deject's space is not homogenous or totalizable but rather divisible.
-its movement is described spatially as alternately straying and situating, and temporally as alternately veiled infinity and bursting revelation.
-Kristeva is trying to describe a subjectivity for which experience is heterogeneous. This brings the abject again into focus as part of this subject's being is constituted of the Other who has dwelt within as an alter ego. This Other as alter exists within the subject, it is identified as other through loathing, through repulsion, through a pushing away.
-Kristeva will again assert the primacy of this concept by locating it in the primal repression, one that is constitutive of subjectivities and therefore precedes any later forms of repression.
-In the later phases of the essay Kristeva will locate the place of the abject in a variety of other disciplines and thinkers. It is from this perspective that she identifies a formative capacity to the abject in the domain of religion and continues her critique of psychoanalysis, extending it to its philosophical roots in Plato. Kant and Hegel are also indicated, particularly in their displacement of the abject as defilement into marriage and from there sadness.
-In concluding, it seems that Kristeva is suggesting a libidinal, poetic, and unsettling approach and cohabitation with the abject, with that foundational loss and want that mobilizes in that it repulses.

-Anderson

Post for "The Wedding Between the Body and Language"

“The Wedding Between the Body and Language”

Luce Irigaray, Key Writings. London: Continuum, 2004

Irigaray begins this chapter by outlining three distinctions between masculine and feminine uses of language. Women privilege the relationship between subjects, the relationship with the other gender and the relationship between two. Almost direct opposites; men focus on the relationship between subject and object, the relationship with the object is realized through the use of an instrument and the man prefers the relationship between I-masculine subject and others, in other words, subject in singularity and objects in multiple. (See p.13) Irigaray goes through a series of defining boundaries including the body as “facticity”, desire, transcendence, perception and the philosophy of the “caress” to describe the existence and intricacies of inter-subjectivity in body and language.

Male philosophers, specifically Satre, see the body as ‘facticity’, that is as a present objective reality. It is tangible and one can point to it. Irigaray evokes her logic that we have discussed in class, that the other, including the body of the other, is not solid fact/facticity but rather consciousness of-itself, for-itself and of the world. In the logic of the body as facticity there is a need to own, possess or appropriate the other body that exclusively pertains to subject/object relationships. Contrarily, in the new world of inter-subjectivity it is imperative to understand the other in the language of transcendence.

Realizing inter-subjectivity demands that we understand the relationship, bodily or otherwise, between I-me and I-you in privileged space time. There is the “you who are not and will never be me or mine,” (p.14) interacting with “the love that I share with you, my body is animated by the wanting to be with you or to you,” (p.22) and the transcendence, the understanding that there is the I-you that lies beyond what I can understand in terms of knowing. In other words, transcendence means that I-me can never appropriate, possess or “have” the other, you. (See p. 14) In language, adding ‘to’ in the phrase “I love to you” creates a space of alliance, a common ground of mutually understood transcendence. It allows the other to not be an object, irreducible to a factual thing; the object of my love.

In critiquing Merleau-Ponty who considers sexuality as ambiguity and indeterminacy, Irigaray raises a crucial omission to his theory, perception. The metaphor of Buddha looking at the flower illustrates that we can learn to perceive and understanding perception is the path to realizing inter-subjectivity. I can see myself as I-me and you as I-you and the link between exterior and interior of interactions in the world and with the other.

Irigaray’s critique on the culture of dichotomous logic leads into the new philosophy of the caress. In seeing sensation was divided between pleasure/pain, hot/cold, active/passive we exile the body from its organization as a whole. This starts the tradition of marking the feminine as passive and the masculine as active. Jetting from this, sensibility is lost in the culture lacking both subjectivity and objectivity. Irigaray’s caress is an awakening to intersubjectivity, to a touching between us which is neither passive nor active, it is an awakening of gestures. The caress is a type of touch experiencing other based in specific mutual understandings and motivations of I-me and I-you and “I love to you.” On a last note, caress allows us to re-imagine virginity as the state of being grounded and whole within oneself verses after the act of being sexed by a phallus the feminine is forever incomplete as herself without the phallus.

Questions:

Referring to page 14, Irigaray states that, “in so far as you are an incarnation that cannot be appropriates by me, lest I should suffer the alienation of my freedom,” is she implying that if I-me fives up my freedom it can know the I-you?

What is the expanded meaning, in masculine/feminine Irigaray terms behind the quick mention that violence is specifically a subject/object relationship? (p. 20 it’s a short little line, but very interesting.)

Welcome!

Hello Class,

This blog is super easy to use. If you get a little confused on how to access it or post, email me at rmgavaga@mtholyoke.edu.

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Beck