K wrote:
>Alec Cat wrote:
>
>>K (if you don't mind me calling you K) wrote:
>
>No, as long as I can call you Alec Cat. People have a
>difficult time with SnitgrrRl. Don't have a klew as
>to why. But really Alec, as a fan of Butler and what's
>that other babe's n ame you mention every so often?,
>I'd a thunk you'd appreciate a little identity
>politics -- identity performance if you will.
I like Alec Cat. It's very jazzy. I just noticed the shift to Snit, and the d-c-m on your e-address, that's why I made the joke.
>
>Ahhh yes. Butler. You should read her early stuff on
>Hegel, if you haven't already. She inspired me to
>come up with "The ability of a mirror to reflect is
>conditioned by its opacity" (which is essentially
>what she's saying in too many words in your quote)
>After I read Subversion of Identity (was that the
>title, can't remember) I thought to myself. Well
>sheee-it! What is a working class chic supposed to do
>with this identity politics/performance stuff. I mean
>I could think of ways to perform other aspects of my
>identity, but this one, this one, working classness,
>*how* do you perform this? And everyone around me was
>hailing Butler's politics as where it was at, at the
>time anyway. And
>then I figured it out. I went to the next conference
>wearing polyester, snapping bubble gum, rollers in my
>hair, and oh yeah I popped open a can of Genny
>Screamers (Genessee Cream Ale, gold and green can,
>only upstate NYers can appreciate this). And boy oh
>boy did that do wonders for the state of class
>struggle, let me tell you.
Hmm. But I don't think performativity is reducible to performance art,
some of which works, some of which doesn't. I love Genny Cream Ale. We
drank it alot back in college. Most people I meet can't stand the stuff
though. But hey K, how many working class folks were at the conference?
What kind of conference was it? I'm just curious.
>
>>I'm interested in the ontological/epistemological
>>stuff. I just started
>>Judith Butler's Psychic Life of Power and in the
>
>
>Well I have not read Psychic Life. Not sure if I want
>to. But I see that Butler's prose continues to leave
>much to be desired. And, indeed, that one line there
>made me pause:
>
>"The formula "I have never
>loved" someone of similar gender and "I have never
>lost" any such person
>predicates the "I" on the "never-never" of that love
>and loss"
>
>Butler is working *much* too hard at the playing
>around with language thang. Gad, it's embarassing.
There's a specific context to the line. Earlier, p. 8, she writes:
Let us consider that a subject is not only formed in subordination, but that this subordination provides the subject's continuing condition of possibility. A child's love is prior to judgment and decision; a child tended and nourished in a "good enough" way will love, and only later stand a chance of discriminating among those he or she loves. This is to say, not that the child loves blindly (since from early on there is discernment and "knowingness" of an important kind), but only that if the child is to persist in a psychic and social sense, there must be dependency and the formation of attachment: there is no possibility of not loving, where love is bound up with the requirements for life. The child does not know to what he/she attaches; yet the infant as well as the child must attach in order to persist in and as itself. No subject can emerge without this attachment, formed in dependency, but no subject, in the course of its formation, can ever afford fully to "see" it. This attachment in its primary forms must both *come to be* and *be denied*, its coming to be must consist in its partial denial, for the subject to emerge.
That accounts in part for the adult sense of humiliation when confronted with the earliest objects of love--parents, guardians, siblings, and so on--the sense of belated indignation in which one claims, "I couldn't possibly love such a person." The utterance concedes the possibility it denies, establishing the "I" as predicated upon that foreclosure, grounded in and by that firmly imagined possibility. The "I" is thus fundamentally threatened by the specter of this (impossible) love's reappearance and remains condemned to reenact that love unconsciously, repeatedly reliving and displacing that scandal, that impossibility, orchestrating that threat to one's sense of "I." "'I' could not be who I am if I were to love in the way that I apparently did, which I must, to persist as myself, continue to deny and yet unconsciously reenact in contemporary life with the most terrible suffering as its consequence."
(end excerpt)
I read this all in the overarching movement from foreclosure to melancholia. That movement as the site of vanquishing, primarily the Hegelian "loss of the loss". P. 24:
Is this what Hegel called "the loss of the loss," a foreclosure that constitutes an unknowability without which the subject cannot endure, an ignorance and melancholia that makes possible all claims of knowledge as one's own?
(end excerpt)
>
>And what about us bisexual queers, ey?
Yes dammit! What about us?
This really
>annoys me, this either/or. Well, I know she doesn't
>mean it this way, but what WHAT am I supposed to think
>of myself without a never never to call my own cause
>it's both/and for me?!!!
Butler is bringing divergent traditions into dialogue (Foucault, Freud, Nietzsche, etc.). I don't hear much either/or going on, she's trying more to break that open. Butler's more interested in getting past, or pulling apart impasses of the subject's agency it seems to me.
Oh heck, here's a little more, about going from the subject to politics, p. 29 (by the way, I'm not too far along in the book, just in the first chapter on Hegel):
A critical analysis of subjection involves: (1) an account of the way regulatory power maintains subjects in subordination by producing and exploiting the demand for continuity, visibility, and place; (2) recognition that the subject produced as continuous, visible, and located is nevertheless haunted by an inassimilable remainder, a melancholia that marks the limits of subjectivation; (3) an account of the iterability of the subject that shows how agency may well consist in opposing and transforming the social terms by which it is spawned.
Although such a formulation can hardly be the basis for an optimistic view of the subject or of a subject-centered politics, it may stand as a provocation and as a caution against two forms of theoretical desire: one in which assuming and stating a "subject-position" [us bisexual queers? - Alec] is the consummate moment of politics; and another in which the dismissal of the subject as a philosophical trope underestimates the linguistic requirements for entering sociality at all.
(end excerpt)
Overall, at this point, I like the book the way I like Adam Phillips' _Terrors and Experts_. Both are good and accessible. AP really likes aphorisms. I like that one from Kafka about the leopards in the temple. I digress . . .
>.
>But seriously, would you and anyone else be interested
>in having
>a go at reading through this on List? They're doing
>that on another list, but they're reading Dostoevsky
>and I want to read some academic must read or
>something along those lines.
>
>
>>I'm really interested in this. Tell us more!
>
>
>Well if your into the poMos, ain't epistemology and
>ontology dead?
Or were you interested in the nuke
>dump? That one deals with Laclau and Mouffe,
Haven't been able to find Hegemony and SS. The SF public library doesn't have any listings for Laclau. I did pick up Mouffe's Return of the Political the other day. But hey, I've got to finish the German Ideology first! There's some interesting stuff in Althusser's _For Marx_ also.
-Alec (Cat)
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