Alright, this is a very very complicated and sensitive issue which I think about a lot but haven’t talked about too much on this blog precisely because I’m unsure how to articulate it properly. The reason for this is that the current dialogue on LGBT issues tends to be shaped by a Butlerian-Foucauldian paradigm whose assumptions directly conflict with the assumptions of the Lacanian approach to sexual difference; and as a cis male, I do not want to fall into mansplaining, cissplaining or any other sort of condescending “lecture mode”.
Having said that: since I have been asked my opinion on this issue by several people, I’ll give it. The Butlerian-Foucauldian problematic within which queer studies and gender studies tends to operate has some major issues if you try to reconcile it with a dialectical materialist perspective; I will get into these issues shortly. I feel that the Lacanian take on sexual difference works better here: however, in what way such a perspective could avoid taking a reactionary stance on certain issues is somewhat unclear. I have commitment to Lacanian theory as a great tool for socio-political analysis, which (I think) it proves itself to be in other cases; I also have a commitment to fighting cissexism and transphobia. I am unwilling to abandon either of these commitments. I think this is precisely where we need something like philosophy though; I agree with Deleuze that philosophy is about creating and formulating problems rather than finding solutions, and that the correct formulation of a problem is its solution. A lot of the difficulties that arise from the interaction between feminism and the transgender community comes precisely from improper formulation of the problems involved.
Having said this, what is my problem with Butler’s understanding of gender? Well, let me back up for a minute. What constitutes oppression from a Marxist perspective? We can’t reduce all oppression to class oppression; however, it’s equally clear that certain forms of supposed “oppression” would not be considered as such from a Marxist perspective. So, the poor, PoC, women, and the LGBT community are all oppressed; bronies, furries, and other subcultures or “lifestyle choices” are not (as long as we’re not including sexuality under “lifestyle choices”, which — despite common usage — I wouldn’t).
What is the difference? What constitutes genuine oppression from a Marxist perspective? Well, here’s where the “materialist” part of “dialectical materialism” becomes relevant: oppression must be “material” on some level for it to be real. In other words, oppression is related to the material conditions of existence and embodied by material/symbolic structures. As such, it has very little to do with a subject’s feelings or will, at least directly. People can “choose” to be bronies; they cannot “choose” to be poor, or black; they are structurally inscribed in their roles, whether they like it or not. (This is why the idea of being “transethnic” — the way one would be transsexual — strikes us as being so ridiculous.)
Now, this logic applies quite well to almost every other form of oppression outside of the field of sexuality; when we enter this field, it seems to break down. Being gay isn’t a choice, but some degree of agency seems to be involved; and transgenderism, unlike transethnicism, is not only a category we can accept but one we should defend. This is why I think that any thoroughgoing Marxism that wishes not to fall into brocialism needs some sort of supplementary theory to take into account the field of sexuality.
Now, very often Marxists tend to default to the Foucauldian-Butlerian paradigm, which is the most common way of thinking about these issues in left-liberal and non-Marxist-leftist circles — its assumptions have more or less been completely absorbed by the non-academic end of left-activism, for example. The problem with such a paradigm — which emphasizes the “fluidity” and “constructedness” of gender, as well as the potential multiplicity of gender roles — is that, despite Butler’s best efforts (and Gender Trouble is a brilliant book, granted), such a perspective ultimately falls into a kind of voluntarist idealism — we can actively choose to blur the gender binary, because it is in some way “unreal” — i.e. non-material. (More than anything else, I would say that materialism more or less involves the proposition that the conditions for our existence are to a certain extent unavoidable and create certain structures of impossibility; to say that there are no impossibilities is to be an idealist.) Such a view also would tend to lead to some problematic conclusions: making gender a performative “choice” essentially reduces it to the level of a consumer product.
Against this, I would say that the Lacanian view of sexual difference as materially-structurally determined (though not in a biological or essentialist way) avoids some of the bourgeois ideological presuppositions that I’d say underlie the Butlerian approach, and is thus more reconcilable with Marxism — I’d go as far as to say that psychoanalysis is dialectical materialism applied to sexuality. Sex is constructed, just as race and class are, but that doesn’t mean that we can destroy sex, class, and race antagonisms by blurring the lines that separate each side, or by emphasizing that such categories are “fake”. And certainly, most transgender individuals don’t go through the pain and oppression that they experience because they want to “fuck” with the gender binary — rather, they genuinely feel that their experience, as subjects, does not reflect the role they were forced into by society.
Anyway, this still leaves a number of questions open, the biggest one being where, if at all, people who identify socially/structurally as intersex (biology doesn’t matter) fit into this paradigm — honestly, I am not sure. At any rate, as I said, despite the fact that all the implications of the Lacanian position haven’t been elaborated in satisfactory way, I still think it’s worth sticking to and thinking through.
(I should note, by the way, that throughout this post I’ve been using the term “transgender”, whereas — given Copjec’s criticism of gender as a political category, mentioned in the previous post — the more appropriate designation, in terms of the conceptual approach I’m using, would probably be “transsexual”. However, given that the more currently acceptable term among the groups I’m referring to is “transgender” I will use the latter term, as it is not my place to tell oppressed groups what to call themselves.)
Jacques Lacan reminds us, that in sex, each individual is to a large extent on their own, if I can put it that way. Naturally, the other’s body has to be mediated, but at the end of the day, the pleasure will be always your pleasure. Sex separates, doesn’t unite. The fact you are naked and pressing against the other is an image, an imaginary representation. What is real is that pleasure takes you a long way away, very far from the other. What is real is narcissistic, what binds is imaginary. So there is no such thing as a sexual relationship, concludes Lacan. His proposition shocked people since at the time everybody was talking about nothing else but “sexual relationships”. If there is no sexual relationship in sexuality, love is what fills the absence of a sexual relationship.
Lacan doesn’t say that love is a disguise for sexual relationships; he says that sexual relationships don’t exist, that love is what comes to replace that non-relationship. That’s much more interesting. This idea leads him to say that in love the other tries to approach “the being of the other”. In love the individual goes beyond himself, beyond the narcissistic. In sex, you are really in a relationship with yourself via the mediation of the other. The other helps you to discover the reality of pleasure. In love, on the contrary the mediation of the other is enough in itself. Such is the nature of the amorous encounter: you go to take on the other, to make him or her exist with you, as he or she is. It is a much more profound conception of love than the entirely banal view that love is no more than an imaginary canvas painted over the reality of sex.
— Alain Badiou, In Praise of Love (via young-earth-lysenkoist)
A child is thus born into a preestablished place in its parents’ linguistic universe, a space often prepared many months, if not years, before the child see the light of day. And most children are bound to learn the language spoken by their parents, which is to say that, in order to express their wishes, they are virtually obliged to go beyond the crying stage—a stage in which their parents must try to guess what it is their children want or need—and try to say what they want in so many words, that is, in a way that is comprehensible to their primary caretakers. Their wants are, however, molded in that very process, for the words they are obliged to use are not their own and do not necessarily correspond to their own particular demands: their very desires are cast in the mold of the language or languages they learn.
— Bruce Fink, The Lacanian Subject (via carefulwiththatoxygen)
Psychology magazine has retrieved the only known recording of Sigmund Freud, a statement in English taken by a BBC crew in December 1938 and deposited at the Library of Congress. (via Unearthed: the authentic sound of Sigmund Freud)
A defense of the Lacanian understanding of sexual difference
One criticism of [Sigmund] Freud still sometimes heard on the political Left is that his thinking is individualist — that he substitutes ‘private’ psychological causes and explanations for social and historical ones. This accusation reflects a radical misunderstanding of Freudian theory. There is indeed a real problem about how social and historical factors are related to the unconscious; but one point of Freud’s work is that it makes it possible for us to think of the development of the human individual in social and historical terms. What Freud produces, indeed, is nothing less than a materialist theory of the making of the human subject. We come to be what we are by an interrelation of bodies — by the complex transactions which take place during infancy between our bodies and those which surround us. This is not a biological reductionism: Freud does not of course believe that we are nothing but our bodies, or that our minds are mere reflexes of them. Nor is it an asocial model of life, since the bodies which surround us, and our relations with them, are always socially specific.
— Terry Eagleton on Sigmund Freud (via heteroglossia)
I found this today folks who are psychoanalysis-related
http://www.valas.fr/IMG/pdf/Freud_Complete_Works.pdf
It is huge and 5000 pages-ish but I compared a couple of them with other pdfs I found and it seems to be the standard James Strachey edition? So if you want it all in one place go for it.
anyone who wants all 24 volumes of The Standard Edition (everyone should want all 24 volumes btw) download this now u will not regret it (crappy formatting aside)
(Source: astringentcontingent)
‘Terror’ means accepting the fact of the utter groundlessness of our existence: there is no firm foundation, place of retreat, on which one can safely count. It means fully accepting that ‘nature does not exist’ in other words, fully consummating the gap that seperates the life-world notion of nature and the scientific notion of natural reality: ‘nature’ qua the domain of balanced reproduction, of organic deployment into which humanity intervenes with its hubris, brutally throwing its circular motion off the rails, is man’s fantasy; nature is already in itself ‘second nature,’ its balance is always secondary, an attempt to bring into existence a ‘habit’ that would restore some order after catastrophic interruptions… while one cannot be sure what the ultimate result of humanity’s interventions in the geosphere will be, one thing is sure: if humanity were to abruptly stop its immense industrial activity and let nature on Earth take a balanced course, the result would be a total breakdown, an unimaginable catastrophe. ‘Nature’ on Earth is already so ‘adapted’ to human interventions, human ‘pollution’ is already so completely included in the shaky and fragile balance of ‘natural’ reproduction on Earth, that its cessation would cause a catastrophic imbalance. This is what it means to say that humanity has nowhere to retreat to: not only is there no ‘big Other’ (self-contained symbolic order as the ultimate guarantee of Meaning); there is also no Nature qua balanced order of self-reproduction whose homeostasis is disturbed, nudged off course, by unbalanced human interventions. Not only is the big Other ‘barred,’ but Nature too is barred.
— Slavoj Žižek, In Defense of Lost Causes (via sublimehysteric)
“This form would have to be called the Ideal-I. But the important point is that this form situates the agency of the ego, before its social determination, in a fictional direction, which will always remain irreducible for the individual alone, or rather, which will only rejoin the coming-into-being of the subject asymptotically, whatever the success of the dialectical syntheses by which he must resolve as I his discordance with his own reality.”
(Source: effington)
Michael Foucault, A Guide to Live Non-Fascist Life (preface to Anti-Oedipus)
oh holy fuck this is wild :O
“Are you anybody else’s missing piece?”
“Not that I know of.”
“Well, maybe you want to be your own piece?”
“I can be someone’s and still my own.”— Shel Silverstein, The Missing Piece
(Source: leslieleslie)
