Download Umbr(a): Sameness

U M B R (a)
U M B R (a)
EDITOR:
Mikko Tuhkanen
MANAGING EDITOR:
Theresa Giron
EDITORIAL COMMITTEE:
Trisha Brady
Marina de Carneri
Erica DeSanto
Alexei DiOrio
Sue Feldman
Theresa Giron
Lindsey Hair
Li-Chun Hsiao
Alissa Lea Jones
Sooyoung Kang
Sean Kelly
Cristina Laurita
Anthony Siu
Mikko Tuhkanen
COVER DESIGN:
Sam Gillespie
IMAGES EDITORS:
Theresa Giron
Alissa Lea Jones
Anthony Siu
A JOURNAL OF THE UNCONSCIOUS
2002
ISSN 1087-0830 ISBN 0-9666452-5-1
UMBR(a) is published with the help of grants from the following
organizations and individuals at the
State University of New York at Buffalo:
The Graduate Student Association
The Center for the Study of Psychoanalysis and Culture
The Group for the Discussion of the Freudian Field
The English Department
The English Graduate Student Association
The Julian Park Chair (Elizabeth Grosz)
The Samuel Clemens Chair (Leslie Fiedler)
The James H. McNulty Chair (Dennis Tedlock)
Address for Editorial and Subscription Enquiries:
UMBR(a)
Center for the Study of Psychoanalysis and Culture
SUNY-Buffalo
409 Clemens Hall
Buffalo, NY 14260-4610
http://wings.buffalo.edu/student-life/graduate/gsa/lacan/lacan.html
DISTRIBUTION:
Alissa Lea Jones
FACULTY ADVISOR:
Joan Copjec
CONTENTS
4
CLONES AND BREEDERS: AN INTRODUCTION TO QUEER SAMENESS
mikko tuhkanen
9
SOCIABILITY AND CRUISING
leo bersani
25
SAMENESS WITHOUT IDENTITY
tim dean
43
THE SAMENESS OF SEXUAL DIFFERENCE
AND THE DIFFERENCE OF SAME-SEX DESIRE
james penney
65
THE SAME: REFLECTIONS ON ANDY WARHOL AND RONALD REAGAN
peggy phelan
71
ARE WE BEING HOMOSEXUAL YET?
graham l. hammill
87
SEXUAL ANAPHORA: A METHODOLOGICAL DAYDREAM...
adrian rifkin
97
INDIFFERENCE
judith roof
115
SIMILITUDE, OR WHY SAMENESS IS NOT A SYNONYM FOR GAYNESS
christopher lane
131
BECOMING SAME: BERSANI AND DELEUZE
mikko tuhkanen
146
REVIEWS
CLONES AND
BREEDERS:
An Introduction to
Queer Sameness
mikko tuhkanen
For the past decades, much of academia’s critical and political energies has been invested in
analyses of differences. While, institutionally,
feminism has had the most profound impact in
inducing the reflex of difference in our critical
projects, differences have to an equal extent
attracted those of us working in the fields of
lesbian and gay, queer, critical race, and postcolonial studies. We have hoped that this
insistence on differences would enable us to
read privileged positions’ passing as universals,
to insert minoritarian voices into hegemony’s
monologue, and to induce the potentially endless, uncontainable production of otherness.
Yet, as we have begun to realize, such an
intellectual and political project is not without its dangers. One may not easily be able to
distinguish the proliferation of differences from
the kind of disciplinary productivity that Michel
Foucault points to as one of the most ingenious,
and inherent, strategies by which resistance
from its very inception is neutralized by — in
fact synonymous with — power. We can see this
danger of absorption when, in our politics, differences begin to coalesce as monadic entities,
as participants in seemingly neutral dialogues.
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think of what difference has been trying to get
at but what has often been reduced to a kind
of careless consumerism of otherness. Specifically in psychoanalysis, it may necessitate a
rethinking of certain homophobic claims that,
as James Penney shows, the emphasis on difference has allowed.
It seems that queer theory is a breeding
ground for such an investigation. In its gravitation to the most abjected areas of culture —
an aspect that horrifies its critics, gay and
straight alike — queer theory is particularly
welcoming to such a concept. Queer forces a
break with tradition by grounding itself in the
most negatively valued realms of philosophy
and politics. Within this logic, sameness
emerges as an almost obvious concept for queer
theory to address, for homosexuality has often
figured as excessive sameness, as the compulsive, unproductive repetitions of narcissism.
Sameness here points to the appeal of a communication without the differentiating third
term (in psychoanalytic terms, the Name of
the Father) — a lack that gives such communication the destructive trajectory of the Nirvana
principle. As Judith Roof notes, the lack of a
mediating term in queer sexuality seemingly
allows the lethal appeal of infusion and
sameness — that is, the death drive — to
proceed unfettered.
With my reference to Nirwanaprinzip (or
what in the early “Project for a Scientific
Psychology” Freud calls the principle of inertia
[Trägheitsprinzip]), rather than to the more
familiar principle of constancy (Konstanzprinzip), I wish to allude to the well-known
contradictions in psychoanalytic thinking of the
death drive. To summarize, with the principle
of constancy Freud tries to rescue drives from
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As an example of such anodyne, domesticated
difference, we can point to multiculturalism,
which, arguably, merely bolsters the very categories whose symptoms it seeks to alleviate.
Even though to subsume all critical thinking
of difference under this scenario would be in
bad faith, there may be good reasons at this
historical point to be suspicious about difference. By now our insistence on it may have
congealed into a habitual response to the difficulty of thinking that prevents the emergence
of new productive possibilities. It is with this
in mind that we propose to address the issue
of sameness, welcoming what Adrian Rifkin
calls its “conceptual absurdity.” At this inaugural point one must ask: what distinguishes
sameness from any number of previous objects
of academic consumption, which feeds on an
ever-expanding field of difference? Peggy
Phelan, in her contribution to our issue,
articulates a suspicion that inevitably adheres
to our project: How can one approach sameness
except as the cutting-edge, trendiest version
of difference? What makes sameness different
from difference? What, in the end, prevents it
from being a new, appropriable term whose
emergence marks at worst merely a stage in
the epistemological mapping of otherness?
The difficulty of these questions is such that
we may want to suspend the interrogation and
be content, for now, to merely open the question of sameness as, precisely, a question. On
the strength of our contributors’ work, it seems
that sameness may be less a move away from
difference than a productive return to it — that
is, a return to (but without necessarily supposing a previous encounter with) something
Gilles Deleuze calls “difference in itself.”
Sameness, we maintain, names an effort to
6
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being absorbed to the death drive — an absorption to which the Nirvana principle or the
principle of inertia logically leads. Following
Leo Bersani’s work, at least up until Homos,
we can suggest that homosexuality lays bare
the death drive that is domesticated, or bound,
in heterosexuality’s narrative trajectory. (Indeed, in Bersani’s texts — including the essay
herein — one finds an evolving interrogation
of the concept of sameness, albeit mostly in
an implicit form and under such various names
as impersonal narcissism, radical passivity, inaccurate replication, and homo-ness.) Analogically, we can suggest that, through its focus
on sameness, queer theory aims at an unbinding (Entbindung) of the prophylactic narrative
of difference. In Lacanese, queer thinking’s
constitutive drive leads beyond the pleasure
principle, beyond the symbolized realm. Given
Lacan’s observation that “all drives are death
drives,” we can continue the analogy by suggesting that queer as an intellectual and
political project merely makes explicit what is
constitutive of, but simultaneously most unsustainable about, thinking itself.
Of course, the specter of sameness has been
raised not only against queers: as an appellation for straight folk, the fag slang term
breeders denotes the brainless, mechanical,
and (in Foucault’s term) docile reproduction
of the same whose dystopic extreme one can
see in sci-fi films from The Stepford Wives to
The Matrix.1 Thus, if sameness confronts us as
a strangely threatening and coercive concept
with eugenic overtones, in this issue we propose a queer (re)turn to these toxic areas of
cultural production, as opposed to the by-now
anodyne remedies of difference. One can
suggest, with Tim Dean, that the phobogenic
aspects of gay culture may best be exemplified
by the clones of the 1970s, whose
hypermasculine uniformity disturbingly advertises the contagiousness of homosexual
sameness. Clones, who “prized the surface of
desirable sameness over the depths of humanist
subjectivity,” 2 represent what Guy Hocquenghem observes of homophobic anxieties:
“Homosexual desire is the ungeneratingungenerated terror of the family, because it
produces itself without reproducing. Every homosexual must thus see himself as the end of
the species, the termination of a process for
which he is not responsible and which must
stop at himself....The homosexual can only be
a degenerate, for he does not generate.” Yet,
three paragraphs later, he writes that
“[h]omosexual production takes place according to a mode of non-limitative horizontal
relations, heterosexual reproduction according to one of hierarchical succession.”3 Within
the space of these passages, Hocquenghem
points to a strange contradiction at the heart
of homophobia: homosexuality is at once com-
1. This suggests that homosexuality or queerness
has no inherent claim to sameness but materializes it at this historical moment. If queer is not
endowed with a transhistorically subversive
potential — as Graham L. Hammill notes, criticizing Judith Butler’s work — neither should one
posit sameness any ontological value. Christopher Lane’s questioning of the productivity of
sameness for queer thought usefully underlines
the ongoing problems in locating the political in
queer politics.
3. Guy Hocquenghem, Homosexual Desire, trans.
Daniella Dangoor (Durham: Duke University Press,
1993), 107, 109.
2. Richard Meyer, “Warhol’s Clones,” in Negotiating Lesbian and Gay Subjects, ed. Monica
Dorenkamp and Richard Henke (New York:
Routledge, 1995), 110.
4. Michel Foucault, “Friendship as a Way of Life,”
trans. John Johnston, in Essential Works of Foucault 1954-1984, Vol. 1: Ethics: Subjectivity and
Truth, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: New Press,
1997), 137.
5. Foucault, “Sex, Power, and the Politics of Identity,” in Essential Works, vol. 1, 163; Foucault,
“History and Homosexuality,” trans. John
Johnston, in Foucault Live: Collected Interviews,
1961-1984, ed. Sylvère Lotringer (New York:
Semiotext[e], 1996), 370.
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becoming in his most recent work.
According to this paradoxical dynamic,
sameness emerges as the unforeseen. We hope
that this question — ultimately, a political question of the new — is opened by the focus on
sameness, as much as gay askesis offered for
Foucault a techne with “a possibility for creative life,” “a state of becoming.”5
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pletely barren and intensely fecund; it signals
the dying out of the race and a generation of
unforeseen hybridities. Foucault followed
Hocquenghem in the early 1980s in connecting
homosexuality to such production of new, “still
improbable” possibilities.4 As I suggest in my
contribution to this issue, Bersani continues this
trajectory in positing sameness as a form of
leo bersani
SOCIABILITY AND CRUISING
Sociability is a form of relationality uncontaminated by desire.
I reformulate in this way — in this admittedly tendentious way — the
argument made by Georg Simmel in his 1910 essay “The Sociology of
Sociability.” From Simmel’s description, we could view sociability as a
paradoxical effect of our socializing impulses. “[T]he higher unity which
one calls ‘society,’” he writes, is motivated by “interests”: “economic and
ideal interests, warlike and erotic, religious and charitable.” Such interests define the content of groups. “But above and beyond their special
content, all...associations are accompanied by a feeling for, by a satisfaction in, the very fact that one is associated with others and that the
solitariness of the individual is resolved into togetherness, a union with
others.” Indeed, “a feeling for the worth of association as such” is involved in the very motives for association, and the “objective content
which carries the particular association along” may, Simmel suggests,
only later be called forth. The “special needs and interests” that account
for the “special content” of groups may, then, provide an inadequate
account of the very origin of groups. An initiating motive of social formations would be the impulse to develop the “special sociological
structure” of sociability — which is to say, a structure without motive, a
structure, Simmel argues, “corresponding to those of art and play, which
draw their form from these realities [those of our life interests] but
nevertheless leave their reality behind them.” Like art and play, sociability “takes its substance from numerous fundamental forms of serious
relationships like among men,” but it is precisely that substance which
art, play, and sociability leave behind, presenting only “the pure, ab1
stract play of form,” “a symbolically playing fulness of life.”
A pervasive theme in Simmel’s writing is the sacrifice of individuality
required by membership in groups. “The great problems placed before
[the ethical forces of concrete society] are that the individual has to fit
himself into a whole system and live for it: that, however, out of this
system values and enhancement must flow back to him, that the life of
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the individual is but a means for the ends of the whole, the life of the whole but an instrument for
the purposes of the individual.” Because of “the seriousness, indeed the frequent tragedy of
these requirements,” sociability is all the more impressive in that, having carried these requirements “over into its shadow world, in which there is no friction,” they can be replayed — in, for
example, “the manner in which groups form and break up at parties,” conversations get started
and then break off without tragedy, allowing us to experience what Simmel strikingly calls “the
freedom of bondage” (137-138). Thus sociability solves “the great problem of association”: “that
of the measure of significance and accent which belongs to the individual as such in and as
against the social milieu” (130). The problematic nature of groups that must at once curb and
serve individuality is resolved in sociability thanks to the particular pleasure gained from the
restriction of the personal: the pleasure of the associative process itself, of a pure relationality
which, beyond or before the satisfaction of particular needs or interests, may be at once the
ground, the motive, and the goal of all relations.
Simmel’s essay more or less takes for granted the satisfaction inherent in the abstraction of
the relational from concrete relations. But why, exactly, is pure relationality pleasurable? When
Simmel speaks of “the pure, abstract play of form” characteristic of sociability (129), he seems to
mean a certain kind of rhythmical play. Rhythm is what remains when content is stripped away.
Both the “objective qualities which gather about the personality” (“riches and social position,
learning and fame, exceptional capacities and merits of the individual”) and “the most personal
things — character, mood, and fate” (130-131) — have no place in sociability, although the latter
does keep what Simmel calls a symbolic relation to all this content. Without content, sociability
nonetheless imitates the rhythms of “real life.” In conversation, for example, it is the movement
of arguments rather than their substance that excites us — such as “binding and loosening,
conquering and being vanquished, giving and taking” (136). Similarly, coquetry “plays out the
forms of eroticism”; it moves between “hinted consent and hinted denial,” “swings between yes
and no,” stopping at neither pole, divesting sexuality of consequential decisions (134-135). As
these examples suggest, the fundamental rhythm of sociability is “association and separation”
(138). The particular modes of sociable conduct — such as group formation, conversation, coquetry — imitate the movement of individuals toward and away from social systems, which is for
Simmel the principal object of sociological study.
Because the movement never stops, nothing essential is lost in sociability: neither the
individual’s selfhood nor the advantage of living in groups. But this very preservation is nonetheless predicated on sacrifice. We live rhythmically only if we renounce possession. We do not
expect economic advantages from entering into a group at a party; the “free moving play” (135)
of coquetry depends on the suspension of sexual demand; sociable conversation does not definitively settle arguments. We can escape “the solitariness of the individual” and enjoy “the pure
11
Most profoundly, the pleasure of sociability is the pleasure of existing, of concretely existing,
at the abstract level of pure being. There is no other explanation for that pleasure. It does not
satisfy conscious or unconscious desires; instead, it testifies to the seductiveness of the ceaseless
movement toward and away from things without which there would be no particular desires for
any thing, a seductiveness that is the ontological ground of the desirability of all things. Simmel
ends his essay by proposing the ubiquity of phenomena that, like sociability, represent what he
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essence of association” (128) only if we renounce, at least momentarily, the acquisitive impulses
that draw us into groups. In this account, the pleasure of sociability cannot help but refer —
negatively, as it were — to the conflicts and pressures generated by those socializing impulses.
Sociability gives us the pleasure of relief from “the frictional relations of real life” (129). But
there are hints in Simmel’s essay of a more radical view of the relation between pleasure and
negativity. The pleasure of sociability would not be merely that of a restful interlude in social
life. Instead, it would be the consequence of our being less than what we really are. Simmel
speaks of a lady who, while avoiding “extreme décolletage in a really personal, intimate situation with one or two men,” feels comfortable with it “in a large company.” “For she is,” he adds,
“in the larger company, herself, to be sure, but not quite completely herself, since she is only an
element in a formally constituted gathering” (131). It is as if there were a happiness inherent in
not being entirely ourselves, in being “reduced” to an impersonal rhythm. Here such rational
explanations as an escape from the solitariness of individual life, or the relief from conflicts with
others, are no longer relevant. Neither, it seems to me, is any psychoanalytic account that would
trace the pleasure of sociability either to intersubjective desires or to a lost (if fantasmatic)
jouissance. Perhaps because as a sociologist Simmel is less interested in the genealogy of pleasure than in its social nature and function, his account of the satisfaction sociability gives is at
once somewhat unsatisfying and free of the assumptions governing most psychoanalytic thought.
Simmel calls the pleasure of sociability an “excitement” (136), and he seems to be positing a
non-sexual excitement, one that would be a function of a subject without personality, of a partially dismantled subject. Considering all the interests and passions we lay aside in order to
enjoy sociability, we might speak of sociability as an ascetic conduct. It is a self-disciplining that
yields pleasure, or excitement. It is not the disciplining itself that is felt as pleasure, so it would
be a mistake to speak of sociability as a form of masochism. Indeed, if there is a pleasure accompanying the shedding of our interests, it is the non-masochistic one of escaping from the frictions,
the pain, even the tragedy endemic to social life. Once stripped of those interests, we discover a
new type of being, as well as a new type of pleasure. The pleasure does not serve an interest,
satisfy a passion, or fulfill a desire. It is an intransitive pleasure intrinsic to a certain mode of
existence, to self-subtracted being. A willingness to be less — a certain kind of ascetic disposition — introduces us (perhaps re-introduces us) to the pleasure of rhythmed being.
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calls the fundamental reality of being. The play, the movement, the rhythm of that fundamental
reality inaccurately replicates itself in the multiple spectacles and conducts of the phenomenal
world. From the awe-inspiring edding and flowing of the ocean’s waves to the superficial chatter
of the salon, being ceaselessly unveils and plays itself in creation. That a phenomenon as
commonplace as sociability should be one of the bearers of this metaphysical weight perhaps
suggests the lightness of the burden itself, the kind of playful, impersonal narcissism circulating
within the proliferations of being. Sociability, as the great sociologist discovered, is the one social
structure that owes nothing, in its essence, to the sociology of groups.
“It seems certain,” Freud writes in Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, “that homosexual love is far more compatible [than heterosexual love] with group ties, even when it takes
the shape of uninhibited sexual impulsions — a remarkable fact, the explanation of which might
carry us far.” 2
How far? And in what direction?
Freud never fully answers these questions, although Group Psychology is not the only place
in his work where he proposes a marked compatibility between sociality and homosexuality.
Ten years earlier, in his account of Dr. Schreber’s paranoia, he had spoken of the persistence of
homosexual tendencies “after the stage of heterosexual object-choice has been reached.” “Merely
deflected from their sexual aim..., they now combine with portions of the ego-instincts and...help
to constitute the social instincts, thus contributing an erotic factor to friendship and comradeship, to esprit de corps and to the love of mankind in general.”3 Not only that: the “social instincts”
are even more finely developed in those who have failed to reach the stage of heterosexual objectchoice: “It is not irrelevant to note,” Freud concludes, “that it is precisely manifest homosexuals,
and among them again precisely those that struggle against an indulgence in sensual acts [the
passage quoted from Group Psychology modifies this by suggesting the compatibility of “uninhibited” homosexual impulses with a special aptitude for group ties], who distinguish themselves
by taking a particularly active share in the general interests of humanity — interests which have
themselves sprung from a sublimation of erotic interests.” 4 Finally, in the short paper “Some
Neurotic Mechanisms in Jealousy, Paranoia and Homosexuality,” written in early 1921, just
before he began the final version of Group Psychology, Freud writes: “It is well known that a
good number of homosexuals are characterized by a special development of their social instinctual impulses and by their devotion to the interests of the community.” 5
What Freud means by social feeling is more general than sociability. It includes all those
“interests” — the play of frequently conflicting passions and ambitions — that are, for Simmel,
suspended, at least ideally, during the sociable gathering. The value of Simmel’s analysis
nonetheless seems to me to lie in the possibility of sociability, as he defines it, pointing,
13
This is by no means the same thing as saying that gay and lesbian communities, as they are
currently constituted, offer persuasive evidence for the speculative argument I will be making.
Indeed, they rather confirm the Foucauldian injunction to which I have already appealed: we
must learn to be gay. Psychoanalysis was not a place Foucault would have turned to in order to
find new relational modes, and I myself have recently specified what seem to me the constitutive
6
limitations of psychoanalytic thinking for any such enterprise. That thought nonetheless remains indispensable not only because it reminds us, as I have argued elsewhere, of the dangers
attached to the pastoralizing of any form of sexual relation, but also because it points — hesitatingly, even unwillingly — to a sociality no longer governed by the unavoidable aggressiveness
accompanying what Lacan has analyzed as the subject’s impossible and intractable demand for
a sexual relation. Already in Freud, however, a certain reflection on the sexual opens the way to
a dissolving of the sexual in that impossible relation, and in so doing it encourages reconfigurations of the social far more radical than those contemporary queer attempts to present as
revolutionary, as seriously threatening to the dominant social order, such reformist, harmless,
and familiar “innovations” as gay marriage, public sex, or the corporate charities that have arisen
in response to the AIDS epidemic. Nothing we have imagined so far sufficiently betrays the
relational orders under which much of humanity continues to be oppressed. While it has certainly
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paradoxically, to something beyond itself. That possibility has frequently been examined in literary texts — in, for example, texts as different from one another as Stendhal’s The Charterhouse
of Parma and Molière’s The Misanthrope. Stendhal proposes the salon as a social, even a political
model, thus suggesting the relevance of sociability to sociality itself. In maintaining the special
aptitude of homosexuals for social feeling, Freud appears to be arguing — fleetingly to be sure —
that a “devotion to the interests of the community” might be inherent in a particular mode of
sexual desire. It is as if Freud were reserving a certain area of sexuality for a successfully civilized
relationality — a prospect absent (forgotten?) in the fierce antagonism spelled out in Civilization and Its Discontents between individual happiness and the interests of society. Nothing
would be more surprising than to find psychoanalysis granting this privilege to homosexuals. In
contemporary adventures — both straight and gay — of re-imagining sociality and community,
psychoanalysis is notably absent, as a helpful source or reference, from efforts to conceptualize
a sociality no longer imprisoned within identitarian ideologies. Not only that: for most queer
theorists, psychoanalysis, even if it were to be seen as welcoming such efforts, would necessarily
exclude from them what it considers as the “perversion” of homosexual desire. Can a regression,
even when it is no longer labeled a neurosis, have a place within a utopic imagination? It will
therefore be exceedingly strange to discover, at the very origin of psychoanalysis, the outline of
a conceptualizing of queer desire as somehow exempt from the destructive sociality of straight
desire.
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served those orders in its emphasis on normative sexuality, psychoanalysis has from the beginning been subversive of the dogmas thanks to which it became, in a relatively short period of
time, a respectable social institution. Specifically, Freud’s theoretical flirtation with the idea of
homosexuality as conducive to a “special development” of social impulses can, so to speak, itself
be speculatively flirted with to the point, as we will now see, of yielding an astonishing yet plausible argument for a truly sociable sexuality.
It is true that the “particularly active share in the general interests of humanity” that presumably characterizes homosexuals is, for Freud, simply a more visible manifestation of the role of
homosexuality in all social feelings. In heterosexuals (as well, we might presume, as in those
homosexuals who “struggle against an indulgence in sexual acts”), homosexual tendencies are
sublimated into friendship and esprit de corps. Freud succinctly summarizes this view in “Some
Neurotic Mechanisms”: “In the light of psycho-analysis we are accustomed to regard social feeling as a sublimation of homosexual attitudes towards objects.” 7 Furthermore, diverted from their
original aims and no longer capable of “really complete satisfaction,” these tendencies, Freud
notes in Group Psychology, are more likely “to create permanent ties” than if they had remained
uninhibited (and subject to the loss of energy consequent upon the satisfaction of a directly
sexual desire).8 And yet: Freud suggests that the compatibility of homosexual tendencies with
social feelings does not depend on the mere availability of sexual energy from a stage of desire
that has, in the majority of cases, been left behind. Remember that, according to Group Psychology, sociality is especially pronounced even when homosexual impulses have not been left behind,
remain uninhibited. There must be a specificity to the desire itself that accounts for its socializing
aptitude, even when the desire can no longer be recognized in the cohesion and activities of
groups.
“Some Neurotic Mechanisms” ends with the apparently casual observation that “in the homosexuals with marked social interests, it would seem that the detachment of social feeling from
object-choice has not been fully carried through.” 9 This thunderously obvious fact would have
been an unnecessary (and flat) conclusion to the preceding speculations of this essay if it did not
resonate — in ways Freud leaves unexamined — with both one of Freud’s earlier etiologies of
homosexual desire and the conceptually troubled distinction put forward in Group Psychology
between object-choice and identification. As his title indicates, in order to explain “group
psychology” — and, more specifically, “the libidinal constitution of groups” 10 — Freud finds it
necessary to go back to “the analysis of the ego” with which readers of his earlier papers “On
Narcissism: An Introduction” and “Mourning and Melancholia” would be familiar. The study of
melancholia in particular, Freud recalls, had revealed “an ego divided, fallen apart into two
pieces, one of which rages against the second.” Here is Freud’s description of the first ego-piece,
a description most fully and famously elaborated a few years later in the discussion of the superego
in The Ego and the Id: “It [the part of the ego that “rages against the second”] comprises the
conscience, a critical agency within the ego, which even in normal times takes up a critical attitude towards the ego, though never so relentlessly and so unjustifiably.” 11
15
It is the invention of the ego ideal, of a “differentiating grade in the ego” (as Freud calls it in
the title of Group Psychology’s final chapter), that has allowed Freud to allude to the possibility
of (a non-pathological) object-love as self-love. Identification in the official Freudian scheme is
either the most primitive of emotional ties to an object, or, regressively, a substitute for a lost
object-tie. It can, Freud maintains in Group Psychology, involve recognition of “a common quality
shared with some other person” only if that person “is not an object of the sexual instinct.” 14
What is inconceivable in the Freudian scheme is identification as libidinal recognition. But this
is not quite accurate; it is conceived of within the Freudian scheme, but only as a perversion.
And it is of course the perversion of homosexuality. In his study of Leonardo da Vinci, Freud
proposes an account of male homosexual desire which he refers to in both “Some Neurotic
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As it has frequently been observed in the literature devoted to the Freudian notion of the ego
ideal, the latter is at once loved as a source of narcissistic satisfaction (it possesses “the perfections which we have striven to reach for our own ego”)12 and feared as a source of rageful moral
(and frequently moralistic) demands made upon the ego. Most interestingly, the ego ideal allows
Freud to make a somewhat tortuous distinction between object-love and identification. In an
extraordinary paragraph in which Freud abandons and reinvents his analytical arguments and
terms as he goes along, that distinction is at once affirmed and questioned. In attempting “to
define the difference between identification and such extreme developments of being in love as
may be described as ‘fascination’ or ‘bondage,’” Freud finally settles on a distinction between an
object that has been lost with which the ego then identifies and, in the “bondage” of love, a
hypercathexis of the retained object at the expense of the ego. But then he brings up yet another
difficulty: “Is it quite certain that identification presupposes that object-cathexis has been given
up? Can there be no identification while the object is retained?” The question, Freud notes, is a
“delicate” one, although he fails to embark upon a discussion of it. Instead, he concludes with
another alternative that, happily, “embraces the real essence of the matter, namely, whether the
object is put in the place of the ego or of the ego ideal.” 13 It is as if the question of whether the
object must be lost or given up before identification can take place — in other words, the question of whether identification and object-cathexis can co-exist — no longer needs to be answered
if a “place” in the mind is invented where the loved object can exist without being identified
with. The ego ideal comes to the rescue here: it is both an internalized otherness and an alienated interiority, the loved object at an uncrossable distance from the ego within the ego as well
as the originally self-sufficient ego of primary narcissism torn away from the ego and assimilated to a foreign body inhabiting an ego it observes and judges.
16
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Mechanisms” and Group Psychology. After a long and intense fixation upon his mother, the
budding homosexual does not abandon her at the end of puberty but rather “identifies himself
with her; he transforms himself into her, and now looks about for objects which can replace his
ego for him, and on which he can bestow such love and care as he has experienced from his
mother.” 15 The renunciation of women as love-objects means that “all rivalry with [the father]
(or with all men who may take his place) is avoided.” Freud adds that “the retiring in favour of
the father...may be ascribed to the castration complex.” 16 This is of course a very familiar psychoanalytic “reduction” of homosexuality, and it is one that most self-respecting queers find
both obsolete and offensive. There is, however, as we say today, a gay-friendly way of reading
this account, one that in fact turns it against itself. First of all, the relevance of that reference to
the castration complex is by no means certain. Freud’s hypothetical homosexual has after all
really not abandoned his mother, but neither has he fantasmatically struggled with his father
in order to have her. The Oedipal rivalry — which “should” end with the boy giving up his
passionate attachment to his mother to avoid castration at the hands of the father — has simply been by-passed by an identification that is neither a loss nor object-love in the usual sense.
Lacan would say that perversion denies castration — but even the Lacanian promotion of
castration from an Oedipal fantasy to the meta-genital status of a lost plenitude of being does
not prove the necessity of any type of “deniable” castration for a theory of desire. Castration
from a retroactively fantasized fullness of being from which our entry into language severed us
is perhaps itself the fantasy of a fantasy. This conceptual meta-fantasy may be dictated by a
heterosexual inability to think desire other than as lack or loss. It is the final step in a generalizing of privation consequent upon the dependence of male heterosexual desire on a rivalry
that one has not exactly overcome but which has more simply and more catastrophically ended
in defeat. All heterosexual desire, according to the terms of that very discipline that has argued
for the psychic (not to mention moral) superiority of heterosexual desire, cannot help but be to
some degree conditioned by the memory, or the fantasy, of that defeat. The heterosexual male’s
rageful resentment at the victorious father must, in what are hardly negligible after-effects,
find expression not only in the antagonism toward other men that, according to Freud himself,
makes heterosexual social feeling less developed than homosexual social feeling, but also in a
misogynous aggressiveness toward all those women who, to some degree, cannot help but be
seen as mere substitutes for an abandoned, irreplaceable, supreme object of love. It would,
then, hardly be surprising if, far from being a secondary manifestation of a fall from Being,
Oedipal castration were the source and the motivation for elaborations — satisfying to the
psychanalytic ego — of an ontological cut or castration.
The psychoanalytically defined homosexual, on the other hand, in spite of psychoanalysis’s
best — or worst — intentions, is (at least insofar as he is exclusively homosexual, which of
course he never is) a stranger to these murderous passions — perhaps, most fundamentally
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17
and beneficently, to passion itself. He wanders in the world — cruises the world, we might almost say — in search of objects that will give him back to himself as a loved and cared for subject.
Homosexual desire for others is, in this account, motivated by the wish to treat oneself lovingly.
It gives an affirmative answer to the question Freud asks but finds unnecessary to answer in
Group Psychology: Can there be identification when the object of love is retained? The man
Freud describes a few pages before asking this question chooses love-objects because he identifies with them. He has, it is true, lost himself when he identifies with his mother, and so he
“looks about for objects which can replace his ego for him,” but he will identify with those objects
without introjecting them.17 Contrary to the usual Freudian sequence of a loss compensated for
by fantasy-identification with the lost object, in the scenario of homosexual desire the subject
has himself managed the loss (presumably by placing his mother in the position of his ego) and,
most importantly, the loss is made up for not by another introjection but by new relations with
new love-objects.
I am not anxious to defend the clinical truth of what might be called the Leonardo-factor in
Freud’s account of homosexual desire. Instead, let us consider that account as a myth analogous
to (if poetically less satisfying than) Aristophanes’ myth in the Symposium. Both stories emphasize what I have called in my discussion of Plato’s dialogue our at-homeness in the world. 18
Every subject re-occurs differently everywhere. “Differently” is crucial: it is the recognizing and
longing for sameness that allows us to relate lovingly to difference. A certain homosexualizing of
heterosexual love can make this privilege universal. Just as homosexual desire can never be
entirely free of “paternal” Law having rendered otherness unknowable, prohibited, and intrinsically hostile, so heterosexual desire must contain — however much it seeks to occlude — the
recognition that difference can be loved as the non-threatening supplement of sameness. I would
even go so far as to say that the homosexual way into this recognition is a pis aller, something
like a second-best solution. Without in any way denying the immense range of differences that
can be accommodated by homosexual love, we might also acknowledge the even rarer opportunity in heterosexual love for a non-murderous wonder at difference. While, as it has been
vehemently argued in recent years, sexual difference has been prejudicially sanctified in our
psychoanalytically oriented culture as the ground of all difference, it perhaps does have a unique
epistemological function in human growth as an early and crucial model for structuring difference. The ego ideal is the psychoanalytic myth that reifies the traumatic component of sexual
difference. It refers to the mental resource that allows the subject permanently to judge others
as resistant to an identification based on recognition — and, correlatively, to stigmatize the
external world as constitutively alien and hostile to the self. Hatred of the world, as Freud writes
in “Instincts and Their Vicissitudes,” “always remains in an intimate relation with the selfpreservative instincts.”19 The impossible demand upon a world in which I am nowhere to be
found, where self-recognition would always be a mistake, is that the world provide exact
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18
replications of myself, that in fact it be erased and replaced by the specular mirage of a universalized selfhood. But since those hated alien objects also elicit desire, since no human subject
can survive walled in by a wholly narcissistic love, the subject loves and hates, desires and fears,
the same object — a situation duplicated in Freud’s description of the ego’s relation to the ego
ideal (or the super-ego). The latter eroticizes interdiction (which is perhaps itself merely the
escape route from otherness, the subject’s willed flight from traumatically different objects — a
flight transformed into a command from the outside), and interdiction, the Law, becomes a
privileged source of the very jouissance it forbids.
The ability to identify with the loved object — that which Freud sees as one of the sources of
the “problem” of homosexuality — allows for a very different relation to the world. The subject’s
productive illusion of becoming one with a loved parental caregiver is the useful pretext for the
subject to go searching for him- or herself in the world. The self-preservative hatred of objects,
never entirely eradicated, can at least become secondary to an object-love identical to self-love.
A self-love hospitable to difference: misrecognition here is not the fateful error of imaginary
specularization, but rather describes the accommodating of difference by sameness and becomes
the motive for continuing the search. As in Aristophanes’ myth, we can never find our “original
nature,” or, in Freud’s terms, the ego we need to replace. Finally, however, both myths are somewhat diverting misrepresentations of our presence in the world. They divert us — I mean they
turn us away from our presence already there. Plato and Freud narrativize that presence as a
being we once had but have lost or given up. Thus the subject is — touchingly but erroneously —
made the agent of its re-occurences outside itself. If, as I have been proposing here and elsewhere,
we are in the world before we are born into it, this is not because we once — historically or mythically — possessed ourselves, but rather because it is impossible to take on a form — a being — to
which the world does not have a response, with which it is not already in correspondence.
Cruising is sexual sociability. The danger associated with cruising is not that it reduces relations
to promiscuous sex, but rather that the promiscuity may stop. Few things are more difficult than
to block our interest in others, to prevent our connection to them from degenerating into a
“relationship.” In the model of cruising implicitly proposed by both the Freudian account of
homosexual desire and Aristophanes’ fable in the Symposium, the search for the self out there
can only be beneficently fruitless. The boys Leonardo may love as his mother loved him are of
course not exactly Leonardo, and Aristophanes notes, in what I take to be a tone of ironic
resignation, “the nearest approach to [our exactly identical other half] is best in present
circumstances.…Love does the best that can be done for the time being.”20 This erotic best is
faithful to an ontological truth: the replications of being are always, however minutely, inaccurate replications.
19
“[W]hat makes homosexuality ‘disturbing,’” Foucault remarked in a 1981 interview, is “the
homosexual mode of life, much more than the sexual act itself.” He spoke of “a homosexual
ascesis that would make us work on ourselves and invent — I do not say discover — a manner of
being that is still improbable.” 23 Ascesis — a central concept in Foucault’s study of ancient Greek
and Roman “practices of the self” in the second and third volumes of The History of Sexuality —
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In an imperceptible but momentous shift of psychic registers, however, the object of desire
can evoke not the loving mother but, instead, the impenetrable mother, the mother whose
terrifying unintelligibility we domesticated by assimilating it into a narrative of paternal interdiction. The object of desire is now an object of fascination; he or she re-activates a world in
which the subject is nowhere to be found, one of pure otherness. The world has become, again,
what Jean Laplanche calls the enigmatic signifier that sent us, and that appears to be sending us
once again, messages we cannot process, or “metabolize.” 21 The sign and consequence of this
resurrection of the enigmatic signifier in an object of desire is sexual passion. In an extraordinary passage of Swann’s Way, Proust exactly dates the shift I am speaking of in Swann’s relation
to Odette. It occurs when, having failed to appear at a party where Swann had expected her,
Odette is metamorphosed from an object of non-insistent sensual interest into an être de fuite,
a creature whose inaccessibility has become her very essence. Searching for her throughout the
night in the restaurants and on the streets of Paris, Swann brushes past the dim forms of other
women, “as though among the phantoms of the dead, in the realms of darkness, he had been
searching for a lost Eurydice.” 22 He has indeed changed realms, or worlds — or, more exactly, it
is Odette who has moved into a world that can be “known” only as a place where Swann is not.
Thus his love becomes the constantly renewed epistemological defeat of, to adopt Lacan’s term,
the desire of/for her desire. Swann’s sexual fascination, bizarrely yet logically, has little to do
with Odette’s body. Odette as enigmatic signifier can be “metabolized” not if she lets herself, to
use a phrase Proust mocks, be possessed by him, but only if she allows her desire to be inhabited
by Swann’s consciousness. Constitutively, this is what she cannot allow, for in the crisis of his
nocturnal search for Odette, Swann himself disappears, and Odette has become nothing more —
and, more portentously, nothing less — than the place where he may be hidden as unimaginable
otherness. And it is in defining erotic desire as epistemological catastrophe that Proust himself
becomes a novelist of heterosexual — or, at least, heteroized — love. The note of condescending
acceptance towards Proust’s homosexuality that enters into many admiring critical commentaries on Remembrance of Things Past is wholly unnecessary. In his somber glamorizing of a desire
grounded in the irreducible opposition between an empty subject and objects of desire that
might but will not reveal and return the subject to himself, Proust masochistically celebrates
difference as the very condition of desire, thus renouncing the privilege his homosexuality might
have afforded him of recognizing, and loving, himself in an hospitably familiar otherness.
20
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would be perhaps the principal strategy in any attempt “to become gay,” which Foucault understood as radically different from merely “being homosexual.” In another interview, Foucault
specified that he was taking ascesis “in a very general sense — in other words, not in the sense of
a morality of renunciation but as an exercise of the self on the self by which one attempts to
develop and transform oneself, and to attain to a certain mode of being.” 24 While appearing to
dismiss “the sexual act itself” as irrelevant to the elaboration of a new “mode of life” (as well as to
the fear and hostility with which much of straight society responds to gays), Foucault also asked
the interesting question: “How can a relational system be reached through sexual practices?”25
Rather than think of sexuality as “the secret of the creative cultural life,” he encouraged us “to
create a new cultural life underneath the ground of our sexual choices.”26 “The desexualization
of pleasure” (we should perhaps specify: the de-genitalizing of pleasure) Foucault found in gay
S&M had, he seemed to think, important cultural or relational implications. S&M would help to
undermine more general systems of domination modeled on a sexual ideology in which sexual
passivity has been, as Foucault put it, “isomorphic” with social inferiority. S&M, Foucault claimed,
has helped to “alleviate [the] problem” of men thinking of themselves as natural masters because and only if they are never on the bottom, always on top.27
In Homos, I expressed my skepticism about the viability of S&M — a practice constitutively
committed, it seems to me, to the idolatry of power — for such major relational shifts. In cruising I am proposing another sexual model — one in which a deliberate avoidance of relationships
might be crucial in initiating, or at least clearing the ground for, a new relationality. Having
criticized queer theorists for proposing such things as public sex or the non-monogamous gay
couple as examples of the new relational modes Foucault urged us to invent, I certainly do not
mean to offer the centuries-old practice of cruising as a more authentic relational invention.
Since we are not going to reinvent relationality ex nihilo, the point is to see how certain familiar
practices — such as S&M, public sex, sexually unstable intimacies — have or do not have the
potential for tracing what Foucault also called “new alliances and...unforseen lines of force.”28
The fact that the practices just referred to are generally condemned outside the circles that engage in them can hardly be said to certify their relational inventiveness. An understandable but
unfortunate queer response to this condemnation has been, on the one hand, the untenable
suggestion that these practices are something new and, on the other, the claim that, contrary to
what most people think, they are perfectly consistent with human decency, integrity, and dignity.
This second argument defeats the first; it brings us right back to values embraced (if obviously
not invented) by homophobic “morality.” In short, these defensive arguments insufficiently betray
the relational modes sanctified by the dominant culture. Does cruising make us feel as worthy
as, or perhaps even more worthy than, a comfortably monogamous straight couple — in which
case cruising becomes even less interesting than marriage — or does it help us to at least glimpse
the possibility of dismissing moral worthiness itself, of constructing human subjects whom such
moral categories would fail to “cover”? In other words, it is not a question of demonstrating that
certain outrageous practices are really taking place within the parameters of a traditional ethics,
but rather of specifying the ways in which those practices may or may not require us to elaborate
new ethical vocabularies.
For me, this illuminates the connection I have previously made, and which has always remained
somewhat mysterious to me, between jouissance and ascesis. The jouissance of otherness has as
21
Most important, the intimacy of bodies no longer embellished or impoverished, protected or
exposed, by the “clothing” of both dress and character offers an exceptional experience of the
infinite distance that separates us from all otherness. Psychological and social difference forecloses this naked (in more than one sense) perception of otherness. Differences traumatize and
fascinate us; they inspire our aggressiveness but also our tolerance; they are never totally nonnegotiable. It seems to me useful to distinguish between these differences and the more than
physical distance — the metaphysical distance — that always, and irremediably, separates the
subject from otherness. The otherness I refer to is one that cannot be erased or even reduced by
the inaccurate replications that, by inviting multiple and diverse self-recognitions, make of the
world a hospitable space in which the subject ceaselessly, and always partially, re-occurs. Outside, even where I am again, is, simply by virtue of its being outside, infinitely distant. The
intimacy with an unknown body is the revelation of that distance at the very moment we appear
to be crossing an uncrossable interval. Otherness, unlocatable within differences that can be
known and enumerated, is made concrete in the eroticized touching of a body without attributes.
A non-masochistic jouissance (one that owes nothing to the death drive) is the sign of that nameless, identity-free contact — contact with an object I do not know and certainly do not love and
which has, unknowingly, agreed to be momentarily the incarnated shock of otherness. In that
moment we relate to that which transcends all relations.
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Cruising, like sociability, can be a training in impersonal intimacy. The particularity that distinguishes it from sociability is, of course, that it brings bodies together. It is as if the game of
coquetry described by Simmel moved into a sexual relation — but one to which Simmel’s
description of a non-sexual coquetry would still apply. Simmel, we remember, speaks of the
coquette not being quite herself. She is, as we all are when we are sociable according to Simmel,
somewhat less than herself; the game goes on only if her passions and practical interests stay
out of the game. Similarly, in cruising — at least in ideal cruising — we leave our selves behind.
The gay bathhouse is especially favorable to ideal cruising because, in addition to the opportunity
anonymous sex offers its practitioners of shedding much of the personality that individuates
them psychologically, the common bathhouse uniform — a towel — communicates very little
(although there are of course ways of wearing a towel...) about our social personality (economic
privilege, class status, taste, and so on).
22
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its pre-condition the stripping away of the self, a loss of all that gives us pleasure and pain in our
negotiable exchanges with the world. In the jouissance of otherness, an entire category of exchange is erased: the category of intersubjectivity. This erasure is an ascetic (not a masochistic)
practice — a “practice of the self,” to use Foucault’s term, but not in his sense of “an intensification of subjectivity,” nor for the sake of self-domination or the domination of others. In ascetic
erotic contact, we lose much that is presumed to be “good” in sex (especially, it is said, the
heightened awareness of another person), but the non-attributable intensity I am attempting to
evoke also makes impossible that envy of the other’s different jouissance that nourishes
homophobia and misogyny. In “Is the Rectum a Grave?” I speculated on the fantasy, in
heterosexual men, of an intolerably alien ecstasy inherent in female sexuality and in gay male
sexuality. 29 I now think that the hateful envy of that ecstasy is the envy of a certain kind of death.
The association of sex with death is familiar; I suggest that this association is made when we feel
that we cannot profit from it. More specifically, it is the association of sex not with death but
with dying. The envied sexuality is the lived jouissance of dying, as if we thought we might
“consent” to death if we could enter it orgasmically.
The sexual sociability of cruising facilitates the move into what can only be referred to by the
oxymoron of metaphysical sociability. The inadequate subjectivity that sociability requires —
the self-subtraction — is, by definition, the absence of those psychic, sexual, and social differences
in which sex becomes secondary to the anguished dream of plotting our own dying. Our task
now might be to see how viable the relationality we have uncovered in activities apparently so
removed from — even antagonistic to — each other as sociability and cruising might be for other
types of connectedness. Foucault wrote that “[a]fter Descartes, we have a nonascetic subject of
knowledge.” 30 Might the diffusion of certain ascetic practices threaten the security of that “subject of knowledge” — and in particular the hyperbolic ego’s destructive illusion of power over the
objects of knowledge? In attempting to answer these questions, we would of course be elaborating a new ethics. Let us call this an ecological ethics, one in which the subject, having willed its
own lessness, can live less invasively in the world. If our psychic center can finally seem less
seductive than our innumerable and imperfect reappearances outside, it should then seem not
only imperative but natural to treat the outside as we would a home.
1.
Reprinted as Georg Simmel, “Sociability,” in On Individuality and Social Forms, ed. Donald N. Levine, trans. Everett
C. Hughes (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971), 127129. Subsequent references will appear parenthetically
within the text.
2. Sigmund Freud, Group Psychology and The Analysis of the
Ego, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. and trans. James Strachey
et al. (London: Hogarth Press, 1953-1974), 18:141.
3. Freud, “Psychoanalytic Notes upon an Autobiographical
Account of a Case of Paranoia (Dementia Paranoides),” in
SE 12:61.
4. Ibid.
5. Freud, “Some Neurotic Mechanisms in Jealousy, Paranoia
and Homosexuality,” in SE 18:232.
18. See Bersani, “Sociality and Sexuality,” Critical Inquiry 26:1
(2000): 641-656.
19. Freud, “Instincts and Their Vicissitudes,” in SE 14:139.
20. Plato, Symposium, trans. Alexander Nehemas and Paul
Woodruff, in Complete Works, ed. John M. Cooper (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997), 476.
21. See Jean Laplanche, “The Drive and Its Object-Source: Its
Fate in the Transference,” in Jean Laplanche: Seduction,
Translation, and the Drives, ed. John Fletcher and Martin
Stanton, trans. Martin Stanton (London: Institute of Contemporary Arts, l992), 188.
22. Marcel Proust, Swann’s Way/Remembrance of Things
Past, trans. C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin
(New York: Vintage/Random House, 1989), 252.
7. Freud, “Some Neurotic Mechanisms,” in SE 18:232.
24. Foucault, “The Ethics of the Concern of the Self as a Practice
of Freedom,” trans. P. Aranov and D. McGrawth, in Essential Works, vol. 1, 282.
8. Freud, Group Psychology, in SE 18:139.
25. Foucault, “Friendship as a Way of Life,” 137.
9. Freud, “Some Neurotic Mechanisms,” in SE 18:232.
26. Foucault, “Sex, Power, and the Politics of Identity,” in Essential Works, vol. 1, 164.
10. Freud, Group Psychology, in SE 18:115.
11. Ibid., 109.
27. Foucault, “Sexual Choice, Sexual Act,” trans. James
O’Higgins, in Essential Works, vol. 1, 152.
12. Ibid., 112-113.
28. Foucault, “Friendship as a Way of Life,” 136.
13. Ibid., 113-114.
29. Bersani, “Is the Rectum a Grave?,” in AIDS: Cultural Analysis/Cultural Activism, ed. Douglas Crimp (Cambridge: MIT
Press, 1988), 197-222.
14. Ibid., 108.
15. Ibid.
16. Freud, “Some Neurotic Mechanisms,” in SE 18:231.
30. Foucault, “On the Genealogy of Ethics: An Overview of Work
in Progress,” in Essential Works, vol. 1, 279.
23
23. Michel Foucault, “Friendship as a Way of Life,” trans. John
Johnston, in Essential Works of Foucault 1954-1984, Vol.
1: Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, ed. Paul Rabinow (New
York: New Press, 1997), 136-137.
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6. See Leo Bersani, “Genital Chastity,” in Homosexuality and
Psychoanalysis, ed. Tim Dean and Christopher Lane (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 351-366; and
“Against Monogamy,” in Beyond Redemption: The Work
of Leo Bersani, ed. Timothy Clark and Nicholas Royle, a
special issue of Oxford Literary Review 20:1-2 (1998): 321.
17. Freud, Group Psychology, in SE 18:108.
tim dean
SAMENESS WITHOUT IDENTITY
There are times in life when the question of knowing if one can think differently than one thinks,
and perceive differently than one sees, is absolutely necessary if one is to go on looking and
reflecting at all….[W]hat is philosophy today —
philosophical activity, I mean — if it is not the
critical work that thought brings to bear on itself?
In what does it consist, if not in the endeavor to
know how and to what extent it might be possible to think differently, instead of legitimating
what is already known?
— Michel Foucault 1
THINKING DIFFERENTLY
This passage, from Foucault’s introduction to the second volume of The
History of Sexuality, captures exactly what contemporary criticism values about difference. To think differently is to think beyond or against
the status quo; the political significance of philosophy consists in its
thinking otherwise, its refusing to authorize the “already known,” and
thus its functioning as something other than a discourse of legitimation
or conservation. According to this logic, critical thinking cannot hope to
solve the crises of legitimation that characterize modernity, but instead
must intensify them by persistently questioning that which is “already
known.” Philosophical activity assumes its political dimension by functioning at certain historical moments, certain “times in life,” as an avant
garde. At such moments the challenge lies in resisting the lures of selfauthorization and self-consolidation; it is a question not of developing
but of changing, of “dispers[ing] one toward a strange and new relation
with himself,” as Foucault puts it in his original preface to The Use of
Pleasure.2 With the practice of thinking differently comes the promise
— or, depending on one’s point of view, the threat — of change.
In the passage above Foucault is explaining why the second and third
volumes of his History of Sexuality appear so discontinuous with the
first. During the course of establishing how individuals recognize
themselves as subjects of something called sexuality, Foucault found it
necessary to return to the more basic question of how individuals come
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25
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26
to recognize themselves as subjects in the first place; hence his decision to “reorganize the whole
study around the slow formation, in antiquity, of a hermeneutics of the self.” 3 What draws Foucault to the period of antiquity is the disjunction between its techniques of the self and our
hermeneutics of desire — the fact that for the Greeks one exercises an elaborate relation to
himself without concern for deciphering one’s own truth, much less tending to locate that truth
specifically in desire. Another way of putting this would be to say that while in his introductory
volume of The History of Sexuality Foucault attempts to think sexuality outside the framework
of psychoanalysis (which he tacitly identifies with the repressive hypothesis), in subsequent
volumes he commits himself to the more basic project of trying to think subjectivity nonpsychoanalytically. Or, more accurately yet, The Use of Pleasure and The Care of the Self represent
Foucault’s most sustained attempts to think subjectivity apart from psychology; and in so doing
he refused to countenance psychoanalytic antipsychologism as a viable method for this project.
Thus in “thinking differently” Foucault is doing two things at once. First, he is measuring his
distance from conceptualizations of subjectivity and sexuality that, at the time of his writing the
preface, had dominated the Parisian intellectual landscape since the 1950s. Lacan remains central to the status quo against which Foucault is thinking, because from the latter’s perspective
psychoanalysis represents the “already known,” the taken-for-granted paradigm of subjectification. No doubt this positioning of psychoanalysis involves misrecognizing what Lacan was
doing, as suggested by Foucault’s reductive critique of the concept of repression. More significantly, however, in “thinking differently” Foucault is measuring the distance from his own
conceptualizations of subjectivity and sexuality too. The “already known” that the second and
third volumes of The History of Sexuality refuse to legitimate should be understood as encompassing the first volume. Thinking differently entails being deliberately discontinuous with
oneself. And this discontinuity involves more than simply changing one’s mind or backtracking;
it is a matter not of self-contradiction but of becoming other than what one was.
The species of self-transformation that Foucault describes in the course of rationalizing his
attempt to “think differently” in the second and third volumes also constitutes his object of
analysis in those works. According to his account, Greek “arts of existence” consist not in
discovering or realizing one’s subjective identity, but in departing from it. Thus in taking the
occasion to anatomize ancient techniques of the self that exhibit little preoccupation with identity, Foucault departs from his own intellectual identity and its itinerary, to such an extent that
publishing conventions necessitate some explanation of the evident discontinuity. Yet in this
resistance to identity we can discern a larger continuity structuring Foucault’s entire oeuvre,
namely, his ongoing commitment to the critique of identity as a classificatory mechanism
indispensable to regimes of normalization. Since for Foucault identities represent forms of imprisonment, it makes sense that he would resist those classifications through which we identify
and position intellectuals and their work too. The most basic way of thinking differently is thus
to think against identity, particularly one’s own.
It is not only psychological presuppositions that are challenged by this basic psychoanalytic
move, but also philosophical and sociological conceptions of identity. We should not forget that
philosophy, psychology, and sociology all employ different senses of the term: while for psychology identity designates a self-conscious sense of selfhood, for philosophy the term refers to a
non-psychological principle of unity or indiscernibility; sociologically identity betokens social
categories of classification — for instance, those of gender, race, and sexuality — that variably
inform an individual’s psychological identity while remaining irreducible to it. I note these extremely schematic distinctions merely to observe that critiques of identitarianism often draw
27
In making this argument, I do not wish to assimilate Foucault to Lacan, or to nullify the former’s
critique of psychoanalysis. Rather, I am interested in how, for both Foucault and Lacan, thinking seems antithetical to identity — how, that is, “thinking differently” may be considered a
redundancy, insofar as thinking entails introducing a difference to what otherwise appears
seamlessly self-identical. As Lacan put it in one of his many revisions of the Cartesian formula,
“I think where I am not, therefore I am where I do not think.” 5 For both Lacan and Foucault
(albeit differently), thinking ruptures identity. Within a psychoanalytic framework, thinking
ruptures identity because there can be no thinking, no movement of consciousness, that is not
divided by the unconscious. When we regard the unconscious as an effect of language, we grasp
how the linguistic sign’s division between signifier and signified renders impossible any psychical identity that would remain untroubled by slippage. Lacan thus establishes psychoanalysis
on an antipsychologistic basis, rejecting psychology as a science of identities.
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Thinking differently counts as political activity because it promises a kind of freedom: “The
object was to learn to what extent the effort to think one’s own history can free thought from
what it silently thinks, and so enable it to think differently.” 4 Here the phrase “one’s own history”
refers to both the history of one’s epoch and one’s own specific trajectory within that context.
The possibility of liberating thought “from what it silently thinks” suggests achieving some distance from unspoken assumptions — one’s own as well as those of others. But the idea of a form
of thinking that operates silently within thought itself conjures the specter of something akin to
the unconscious; indeed, it is not difficult to read Foucault’s sentence as an allegory of psychoanalysis: the object is to learn to what extent the effort to think one’s own history can free
thought from what it silently thinks, and so enable it to think differently. Psychoanalysis, too,
represents a practice of self-transformation, of becoming other to oneself by doing substantially
more than merely switching self-identifications. From this vantage point, to think differently
would be to think psychoanalytically, even if in certain contexts that entailed thinking against
psychoanalytic orthodoxy or counter psychoanalytic institutionalization.
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inconsistently on discourses of identity (for example, by using a philosophical sense of nonidentity to try to undermine oppressive social identities), and that Lacan’s account of subjective
division, while it carries far-reaching implications for all these discourses, rarely employs the
term identity. 6
If thinking ruptures identity, then we must entertain the possibility that in this formula the
term thinking might be substituted with deconstruction — deconstruction ruptures identity —
insofar as the latter has shown how every identity is fissured from within by differences that are
not merely contingent upon, but rather constitutive of, identity. Jacques Derrida’s early neologism
différance articulates this principle, suggesting how writing ceaselessly betrays the semantic
identities that it is supposed to secure.7 While attributing disruptions of identity specifically to
writing, Derrida also aligns the differential and deferring properties of inscription with the Freudian unconscious, arguing famously that “writing is unthinkable without repression.”8 Drawing
on Freud’s model of the psychical apparatus as a “mystic writing-pad,” Derrida contends that
writing cannot be conceptualized apart from a self-division or internal difference that is identifiable with the unconscious. In pursuing this line of thought he is, of course, mounting a tacit
critique of Lacan’s account of the unconscious as an effect of spoken discourse. My purpose in
recalling these old debates, however, is not to negotiate Derrida’s complex and ongoing engagement with psychoanalysis, but rather to emphasize how for several decades the critical avant
garde has been inseparable from a multivalent critique of identitarianism, whose implications
we still are in the midst of assessing. Whether in psychoanalytic, deconstructive, or historicist
guise, critiques of identity politics have found in the concept of difference a powerfully unsettling
critical tool.
If poststructuralism may be distinguished by its focus on the disruptive effects of internal
difference, then the political consequences of such disruption have been exploited most avidly
by various minoritarian schools of thought, in which attention to internal differences fruitfully
complicates analyses of gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, and postcoloniality. As a critique of
sexual identitarianism, queer theory emerges from this nexus, based philosophically on Foucault’s
genealogy of sexual classifications in the first volume of The History of Sexuality. Unlike Foucault,
however, queer theorists have expressed considerable ambivalence about “the loss of specificity” attendant upon a rigorous dismantling of sexual identity categories. The danger is that
demonstrating the historical contingency of identity categories and thereby evacuating their
contents will cancel the hard-won recognition of differences and reinstate a universal norm,
with disastrous political consequences for those whose identities are defined by their distance
from the norm.
Anxiety over “specificity” in queer theory thus takes the following form. Foucault has shown
how the category of homosexuality emerged toward the end of the nineteenth century as an
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instrument of regulatory power that was designed to identify, isolate, and control those whose
erotic behavior failed to conform to a certain reproductive ideal associated with capitalism.
Homosexuality’s becoming an identity, a new kind of pathological selfhood, forms part of the
larger process of differentiation that constrains human life by binding us to any number of
psychological classifications. As a result sexual identities — no matter how ostensibly liberatory — come to be understood as problems rather than solutions. Or, rather, liberatory sexual
identities, such as the categories lesbian and gay, become necessary only in response to severely
pathologizing identitarian classifications. The process of differentiation that enabled homosexuality to emerge as a quasi-permanent difference from heterosexuality — and thus ultimately to
challenge the latter’s normative universality — remains contaminated by the regulatory intentions
that inspired differentiation in the first place.
Once seen from this perspective, the political potential of proliferating erotic identities appears distinctly limited. Yet the counter-response to these problems of differentiation — for
which the term queer has come to stand in the field of erotic politics — risks returning sexual
minorities to the invisibility they suffered before sex and gender universals were challenged. In
short, critiques of identitarianism provoke the fear, for both individuals and groups, that too
much will be lost if identity is lost. Minoritarianism cannot survive a full-scale assault on identity politics, a fact that helps explain the ambivalence surrounding anti-identitarianism. There
are limits to how far a complete dismantling of identity categories can be sustained, in part
because the structures of imaginary recognition through which we make sense of ourselves depend on these categories. Without some baseline minimum of identity, the ego dissolves. And
hence too much internal difference tends to be experienced as intolerable.
We thus encounter two related problems: first, that the introduction of differences can undermine identity categories to the point of disabling incoherence; but second, and conversely, that
difference always threatens to re-establish itself as identity and thereby to generate a new status
quo, which inhibits recognition of further differences. Bisexuality provides a good example of
this Janus-faced conundrum, in that most lesbian and gay thinking tends to regard full acknowledgment of bisexuality as dangerously compromising to gay politics, whereas most bisexual
thinking feels marginalized by the hegemony that lesbian and gay identities assume beyond the
ambit of normative heterosexuality. If one is bisexual, gayness or lesbianism can seem like the
9
status quo that one is struggling against, quite as much as heteronormativity. When difference
coalesces into identity — when it becomes reified or essentialized — one is no longer “thinking
differently” in the way that Foucault describes. Instead, once difference congeals into identity,
one ends up thinking against the other rather than against oneself — and this is infinitely easier
to do. Thus difference rapidly appears as an external problem, a question of the boundary between oneself and others, rather than figuring an internal inconsistency that renders one other
to him- or herself.
30
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Another way of framing this problem would involve pointing out that the relation between
identity and difference tends to be conceived in imaginary or binary terms, such that difference
effectively denotes merely a different identity. To forestall this recentering of difference as identity, a third term that remains inassimilable to either pole of the binary, while also refusing to
function as a compromise between them, is needed. Elsewhere I have argued that Lacan’s distinguishing among registers of alterity offers one way of thinking the identity-difference relation
in non-imaginary terms, since the otherness of language remains irreducible to social differentials. That is to say, Lacan’s theory of the symbolic order maintains a distinction between otherness
and difference that is both conceptually and ethically beneficial.10 Linguistic alterity functions as
a third term mediating different identities or subject positions in such a way that no identity can
claim to be unfractured; no subject position can achieve complete self-identity once language is
taken into account. Derridean différance functions in approximately this way too, as an
unregulatable force of differentiation that perpetually prevents the recentering of difference as
identity. It is by employing versions of this logic that poststructuralist queer theorists, such as
Judith Butler and Lee Edelman, critique the assumption of sexed and gendered identities.11
The poststructuralist emphasis on difference has often led to a collapsing of otherness with
difference, and thus to a neglect of the specificity not so much of social differentials as of linguistic alterity. But even when the specificity of representational mediation is observed scrupulously,
the doubleness of this mediating alterity tends to go overlooked. By this I mean that identity is
troubled not only by the fissuring of linguistic alterity, but also by what language misses. To put
this in explicitly Lacanian terms: subjective identities are compromised by both symbolic and
real axes of mediation. The language through which we express and thereby create ourselves
fractures selfhood doubly, since it not only proliferates signification beyond our control, but
also fails to signify completely in spite of its generativity. Lacan calls linguistic excess the unconscious; linguistic deficiency he calls the real. The pertinence of the Lacanian real lies less in its
undermining of identity than in its sabotaging of difference. That is to say, the real represents a
zone of undifferentiation — a place where difference cannot exist — because it is devoid of
signifiers; the real is defined negatively as nothing other than this void. If it betokens a logical
space that is equally inhospitable to difference and identity, then perhaps the Lacanian real
could be conceived in terms of sameness — a sameness that is distinct from, indeed resistant to,
identity.
Generally conceived in terms of its resistance to meaning, the real has been aligned most
commonly with trauma and hence with what hurts. This emphasis was necessary in part as a
corrective to facile appropriations of French psychoanalysis that perceived in the category of
jouissance a liberatory pleasure conveniently separable from the difficulties attendant upon
psychic negativity. Yet as an instance of the failure of imaginary and symbolic differentiations,
the real may be aligned hypothetically with ontological sameness — and thus thought apart
from the primarily negative dimension of trauma, impossibility, and pain. To “think differently”
at this juncture in the history of psychoanalysis may be, paradoxically, to think more about
sameness than about difference, to become temporarily indifferent to difference, and to resist
assimilating sameness too readily to the imaginary register. While I do not wish to attribute to
psychoanalytic discourses of sexual difference all the problems of identitarianism, thinking
sameness may entail bracketing or demoting sexual difference as an explanatory category. Thus
it would be less a question of supplementing the analytic paradigm of sexual difference with
consideration of racial difference or postcolonial difference (to invoke two of the directions pursued recently in psychoanalytic studies) than of thinking in an entirely different register — that
of undifferentiation. Rather than multiplying differences and discriminating ever finer particularities, we might suspend temporarily the differentiation machine in order to consider forms of
existence for which the distinction between identity and difference is largely irrelevant.
31
But perhaps it is misleading to speak in terms of sexual sameness, as if the category of sexuality — or, indeed, any category — could still signify meaningfully at the level of ontological
undifferentiation that concerns us here. It may be more accurate to hypothesize instead that the
sexual grants access to states or relations that dissolve the already troubled distinction between
sexual and non-sexual. Certainly it is the case phenomenologically that relations of apparent
sameness in homosexuality adumbrate some possibilities for the de-differentiating imagination.
For example, Leo Bersani’s recent work suggests that the sameness of gender in homosexuality
points toward an ontological solidarity of being that makes the ostensible failure of difference
ethically exemplary. Rather than betraying a disavowal of difference or a narcissistic immaturity
(as some psychoanalytically inspired homophobes have claimed), homosexuality would lay bare,
as it were, the relational potential of dissolving the boundaries between oneself and others, or of
apprehending those boundaries as illusory. From this perspective the gay clone appears less as
a model of stifling conformism than as an allegorical figure of what Bersani calls “inaccurate
self-replication.” The idea is not that we should start trying to look alike after all, or should
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While queer theory emerged as part of the ongoing pluralist project of “difference studies,” it
has a stake in resisting the sexual differentiations of modernity. Critical emphasis on sexual
difference, valuable though it has been, tends to reinforce heteronormativity by tying erotic
relationality too closely to differences between the sexes. As I have argued elsewhere, the
psychoanalytic preoccupation with sexual difference often leads to an elision of otherness with
difference, such that one’s subjective relations to alterity get figured primarily in terms of relations with “the Other sex.”12 Consequently queer theory stands to gain from investigating how
non-imaginary sexual sameness — a sameness irreducible to identity — may represent more
than merely the mythic prehistory or default of sexual difference.
aspire to a single gendered ideal, but rather that the critique of queer culture’s manifestations of
sameness may be missing something that a notion of the erotic “clone” makes visible. The critique of the clone — that it perpetuates an exclusionary ideal of masculinity — comes from the
gay left as well as the antigay right: whereas the latter sees in sameness a narcissistic disavowal
of difference, the former often regards the clone’s idealization of butch, self-sufficient masculinity as a racist, misogynist, and ultimately homophobic formation. Apart from the arousal he
stimulates in many gay men, surely there is nothing good to be said for this figure?
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CLONES
In order to distinguish cultural manifestations of sameness from the ontological de-differentiation
that interests Bersani, it may be helpful to meditate further on the gay clone. The term refers to
a post-Stonewall norm of masculinity, a particular “look” adopted in the 1970s primarily by
American gay men, at a historical moment when it seemed newly possible to embrace gay and
masculine identities simultaneously.13 Before Stonewall, being openly gay usually meant being
flamboyant (conforming to the model of gender inversion), whereas sexual liberation ostensibly
disentangled gender from sexuality, such that one could conform to normative gender
expectations while nevertheless acknowledging one’s non-normative sexual identity. To put it
in vernacular terms, after Stonewall the macho gay man and the lesbian femme came to
supplement the nelly queen and the butch dyke as more readily available identities for nonheterosexual men and women. In this context the gay clone appropriated the insignia of American
westernism — faded denim, flannel shirts, leather boots, often a bandanna, and the de rigueur
mustache — to affect a look of rugged masculine individualism: think the Marlboro Man or, in
its campier version, the Village People. It seemed ironically fitting that the model photographed
in the 1970s as the Marlboro Man, that icon of American masculinity, happened to be gay.
Gay men adopted with such alacrity the visual styles of normative masculinity — and, increasingly, hypermasculinity — that it made perfect sense to speak of the clone look. While the term
connotes a critique of gender homogenization — we endured the struggles of sexual liberation so
that all gay men could try to look alike? — more often than not the clone functioned as an index
of desirability, even for those who employed the term disparagingly. When discussing the clone’s
commitment to masculinity, Foucault connected his recent cultural emergence to the significance of “monosexual relations,” remarking on the lack of precedence for sexual intimacy between
two adult men (rather than between an older man and a youth) outside the context of single-sex
institutions such as prisons and the military.14 Here I am not interested in either praising the gay
clone as subversive of sex-gender hierarchies or blaming him as conformist; neither am I especially concerned with what made this image so potent an erotic stimulant in the first place.
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Rather, I’m interested in how the clone has mutated in gay culture — how he has replicated
inaccurately, we might say — and, ultimately, how the desire for sameness, or what Foucault
speaks of in terms of monosexuality, may represent more than a stubborn refusal to move beyond the securities of the imaginary into the grown-up world of difference.
Of course, the term clone was always hyperbolic in gay culture, since no two persons can be
visually identical unless they happen to be twins (and in that case the appearance of identity
must be carefully cultivated if visual indistinguishability is to be sustained into adulthood). Rather
than signaling visual identity, then, the clone signified a shared erotic ideal — albeit one that
was subject to endlessly proliferating differentiations as gay men discovered they were each
looking for something quite specific in bed. When we get down to the nitty gritty, a collective
erotic ideal rapidly disintegrates into divergent preferences that vastly exceed any binary system yet devised. It is not just that desire divides along hetero- and homo- lines, but also that
within each category numerous subcategories proliferate, in a manner that spurs the taxonomic
imagination to redouble its classificatory efforts.
Perhaps as a result of experiencing the negative effects of erotic classification, gay men have
become particularly adept at elaborating complex sexual typologies — a project in which the
clone’s sartorial accessories were enlisted without hesitation. I refer here to the gay “hanky code,”
a signifying system whereby differently colored bandannas signal the specific erotic activity one
is pursuing. The hanky code is sufficiently complicated to warrant some explaining — even to
rather experienced gay men. Worn on the left-hand side, a bandanna generally indicates that
the wearer wishes to assume a dominant position during sex; worn on the right, it indicates the
wearer’s desire to be dominated. However, even if one were content to remain positionally consistent and therefore in some sense non-promiscuous during a given erotic encounter, the array
of bandanna hues is so variegated as to induce vertigo. A card I carry in my wallet lists no less
than 59 different bandanna colors, each of which subdivides into two meanings depending on
whether it is worn left or right. To ensure that one is getting what one is looking for, he must be
able to distinguish, often under dim lighting, light blue from robin’s egg blue from medium blue
from navy blue from teal blue — and be able to tell left from right consistently, a faculty not
closely correlated with the gay gene.15 And naturally one needs to be sure of what one is looking
for in the first place. Needless to say, gay folklore is as replete with tales of erotic misrecognition
as is Shakespearean comedy; despite their carefully choreographed signals, gay men often end
up with a surprise once they make it into the bedroom. Paying attention to the gay clone, we thus
discover a bewildering multiplicity of erotic differentiation associated with this icon of erstwhile
sameness. The taxonomic imagination frequently risks defeat at the hands of its own classificatory
zeal. This would be one way of understanding what Foucault meant by his thesis that there is no
power without resistance — that obstructions to power come not from some outside force but
rather from inside power itself.
34
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While the gay hanky code promotes differentiation based on the kind of erotic activity desired,
it also militates against the clone’s monopoly on desirability by subdividing potential partners
into any number of types. That is to say, the hanky code differentiates not only according to
behavior (do you like to fist or to get fisted?), but also according to identity (are you looking for
a black lover or a Latino? a cop or a cowboy or a Daddy?). By differentiating along the axis of
identity and appearance, as well as along that of activity, gay semiotic systems permit virtually
anybody to become a type. You might have considered yourself too nondescript to qualify as a
clone (or a cowboy or a leatherman); so much the better for perfecting that “boy next door” look.
Haven’t set foot inside a gym since high school? All the more likely that you’ll qualify as a chubby,
drawing the ardent devotion of “chubby chasers,” men who prefer their sex partners very overweight (wear an apricot bandanna). Whatever your race, age, or body-type — and whether you’re
hirsute or smooth, circumcised or not, tattooed or not, bald or not — you will qualify as some
stranger’s erotic ideal. Increasingly HIV-seropositivity qualifies as an erotic type too.16 Even the
condition of being without observable distinction carries its own distinction: it is considered
sexy to be generic, since the generic counts as yet one more erotic type. In the gay world, being
unmarked is itself remarkable. Thus while Bersani is right to insist — against those who idealize
queer desire as utopianly democratic — on “the ruthlessly exclusionary nature of sexual desire,”17
nevertheless queer culture offsets desire’s exclusionary commitments by its paradoxical diversification of exclusivity.
From a psychoanalytic perspective we could say that if virtually anybody can be seen as a type
and therefore as sexually attractive to someone, then this is because practically anything can be
fetishized. Just as conventionally unappealing acts — defecating, urinating, spitting, hitting —
can come to be regarded as erotically stimulating, so too can conventionally unappealing physical
traits.18 Doubtless this fetishistic aptitude compensates for the impossibly demanding ideals of
physical beauty that circulate so intensively in gay male culture: once slotted into type, even
strikingly unprepossessing men can get as much sex as the most handsome Adonis. We might
say that gay men represent the most resolute fetishists, capable of transforming any physical
attribute or activity into an object of desire. But when we consider Lacan’s claim that desire is
structurally fetishistic (insofar as its cause is the shape-shifting, multiform objet petit a), we see
that the gay aptitude for fetishism represents nothing more than an intuitive grasp of the workings of desire tout court. In practice if not in theory, North American gay men are mostly
Lacanians.
One of the more unlikely hanky codes is the grey flannel bandanna: worn on the right, it
signifies “likes men in suits”; worn on the left, “actually owns a suit.” This example suggests
some kinship between the aptitude for making anything into a sexual fetish and the capacity for
regarding any identity as a form of drag — a capacity represented most famously in Paris Is
Burning, Jennie Livingston’s documentary about Harlem drag balls, and theorized most
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35
persistently by Judith Butler. Multiplying fetishistic “types” undermines normative objects of
desire in the same way that expanding drag beyond female impersonation undermines
essentialized identities. Thus what seems politically appealing about gay fetishism is its potential anti-identitarianism: fixating on one particular trait dissolves the culture’s fixations on
normative objects of desire by proliferating the possible activities and sites of eros. Further, in
highlighting the partiality of desire’s objects, fetishism throws into relief how human desire
originates not in heterosexuality — nor even in the attractiveness of other persons — but in the
impersonal operations of language on corporeality. Lacan’s theory of the objet a offers an account of how symbolic existence disintegrates human bodies, leaving intangible objects of desire
in its wake.
When we characterize objet a as Lacan’s principal contribution to the study of fetishism, we
see that the psychoanalytic account of objects forms part of what I have designated the differentiating imagination. Perhaps originally psychoanalysis participated in the insidious project of
differentiation that I termed taxonomic, namely, the attempt to classify sexual perversions with
the aim of curing or at least regulating them. But, as I have suggested, Lacan’s account of the
object differentiates and proliferates causes of desire to a point that confounds heteronormativity.
As with the psychoanalytic account of the unconscious, the theory of objet a counters sexual
identitarianism and therefore provides queer critique with potent conceptual ammunition. However, as with Butler’s appropriation of drag for counteridentitarian purposes, difficulties arise as
soon as one endeavors to harness these psychically implicated concepts to political agendas.
Too often the capacity for differentiation that undermines identity is understood in voluntarist
terms, as if it were a matter simply of choosing one’s identities, fetishes, or objects of desire.
Besides the issue of voluntarism, which has sparked such critical animus, there is a further
problem here. This problem stems from the assumption that the only viable response to
identitarianism or essentialism originates in the differentiating imagination — that, for example,
the ostensibly homogenizing figure of the gay clone must be demystified to reveal an agent of
diversification. To phrase this problem at its most basic, I would suggest that criticism has been
misled in its conviction that difference, rather than sameness, represents the best weapon against
identitarian regimes. Instead of deconstructing sameness to reveal the differentiations that constitute and thereby internally fracture it, we might distinguish between registers of sameness in
the manner that (following Lacan) I previously argued for distinguishing between registers of
otherness. Doubtless there is something paradoxical in attempting to distinguish likenesses,
just as there is in Bersani’s call for “an emphasis on the specifics of sameness,” which also conjures
19
the perverse prospect of differentiating sameness. Yet the example of the gay clone remains
useful in helping us to distinguish imaginary sameness from the ontological de-differentiation
that Bersani has been investigating under the rubrics of “homoness” and “inaccurate selfreplication.”
36
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Ultimately the clone represents an image of sameness, as well as of desirability, and thus a
figure for imaginary identity. He makes the image of what one might have and the image of what
one might be the same image. The clone is a figure for imaginary identity because, in narrowing
the distance between self and other, his appeal is fundamentally narcissistic. Whereas Lacan’s
account of narcissism emphasizes the subject’s alienation in a specular image, the clone seems
to promise that one may embrace rather than remain alienated from oneself. From a psychoanalytic perspective, this sounds like claiming that somehow imaginary alienation — and the
aggressivity that accompanies it — could be overcome. What a transparent fantasy, that one
would surmount one’s psychic difficulties through the body of the sexual partner!
Yet what does Lacan’s notion of imaginary alienation mean, other than that the subject
misrecognizes him- or herself through the intermediary of the image of another? The point is
that imaginary individuation is a giant mistake, and that we are not separately bounded monads
struggling to find our way in the world, but rather profoundly connected beings whose
interdependence we repeatedly fail to grasp. Lacan’s account of the symbolic order indicates
this interdependence, though in a differentiating register. The symbolic cuts through imaginary
illusions, dividing us against ourselves and undermining our identities. But the real cuts through
the differentiating illusions of the symbolic, reminding us that language cannot totalize the effects
it aspires to master. Beyond the symbolic lies a realm about which we can say very little without
denaturing it. Thus our accounts of what Lacan calls the real are always necessarily fictions of
one sort or another. It is a new set of fictions about the real that Bersani has been generating in
his recent work, suggesting ways of thinking about relational being beyond our comparatively
familiar imaginary and symbolic coordinates.
In books such as The Freudian Body, Bersani offered a powerful account of how imaginary
identities are disrupted and yet survive — even take a kind of pleasure in — that disruption.
Developing Laplanche’s notion of ébranlement, he described the erotic in terms of “selfshattering” and anatomized the paradoxes of trying to erect a politics on that which defeats the
20
coherent self. Albeit from a non-Lacanian vantage point, Bersani was charting the illusoriness
of the human ego, and he therefore could be regarded as a fellow traveler with respect to a
certain Lacanian project. More recently, however, the focus of his work has shifted from selfshattering to self-extension, or what we might call subjective mobility beyond the confines of the
ego. I see a parallel here with Lacan’s shift from investigating symbolic disruptions of the
imaginary to his later emphasis on real disruptions of the symbolic. Once the illusory carapace
of the individuated self is broken, it is only a particular brand of face-to-face intersubjectivity
that falters. Without the myth of imaginary differentiation, relationality might not be quite so
terrifyingly difficult as intersubjective problems suggest. Bersani’s contention is that a happier,
less antagonistic relationality is perpetually in process at an ontological level that mostly eludes
us. Far from representing a merely occasional occurrence, however, this communication of
being — where the term communication is understood more in Bataille’s sense than in Lacan’s
— happens all the time, and it is only our jealously guarded imaginary selves that prevent us
from registering it more clearly.
In his effort to account for what draws us to this ontological register, Bersani has developed
an oxymoronic model of non-imaginary narcissism, locating in the lures of sameness a rationale
for our participation in the communication of being. Reading the psychoanalytic critique of
homosexuality against itself, he has argued that gay narcissism — or homoness — represents not
a troubling disavowal of difference but an enlightening demonstration of how the distinction
between difference and identity dissolves in another ontological register. Thus he hypothesizes
how imaginary sameness, as exemplified by the figure of the gay clone, might give way to a nonimaginary world of contact that is so drained of antagonism as to qualify as a space of true
37
Certainly the term misrecognition implies the possibility that, perhaps in a register beyond
the ego, a less delusional kind of subjective contact might occur, one in which preoccupations
with mastery and possession — of oneself and others — would seem less urgent. If this kind of
contact occurs without the rivalry that structures imaginary relations, it must be because boundaries demarcating self from other have dissolved. In this zone of ontological de-differentiation
or sameness, it no longer makes any sense to speak of the self. After a certain point, a deindividuated self is no self at all, and I think it promotes misprisions of Bersani’s project to
retain vocabularies of selfhood when describing the communication of being. Thus it is less a
question of ascertaining how inexact are the “inaccurate self-replications” that Bersani and Dutoit
identify, than it is of grasping how selfhood figures only a corner of being — how being comprehends while vastly exceeding the ego, and how therefore our selves are but aberrations within
the world’s impersonal ontology.23
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Bersani argues that ontological relationality becomes visible in certain artworks and certain
manifestations of homosexuality; the question of Caravaggio’s sexuality brings these two
dimensions together.21 When considering Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit’s analyses of painting and
film, we should bear in mind that — unlike most art critics — they are discussing images in a
non-imaginary way and focusing on how images corrode rather than secure identity. In this
respect, their art criticism shares something fundamental with the work of more explicitly
Lacanian critics such as Parveen Adams, Joan Copjec, and Graham Hammill, all of whom in
varying ways analyze images not for their thematization of the real (as Slavoj Žižek does) but for
their formal dislocations of imaginary recognition.22 The issue of recognition — how we recognize ourselves as dispersed in the world, and thereby recognize the communication of being as
always already having begun — poses a central problem here. What does “recognition” without
imaginary identification mean? Is there a non-imaginary form of recognition that would not be
susceptible to the vicissitudes of misrecognition?
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solidarity. Given that the communication of being involves contact without barriers, it is perhaps inevitable that we think about it through metaphors of bodily intimacy. The ontological
relatedness of which Bersani speaks offers an unlimited intimacy that most people seek (if they
do seek it) through sex. But the problem with sex is that it tends to limit intimacy to other
persons, when what is at stake in the communication of being is impersonal relationality — or
what Bersani elsewhere calls “our already established at-homeness in the world.” 24
The metaphor of worldly at-homeness differs from the more overtly erotic figures through
which we might explain the attractions of ontological de-differentiation. Despite its interest in
narcissism, psychoanalysis has not been especially helpful in rationalizing this attraction,
primarily because it pictures de-differentiation as almost exclusively terrifying or traumatic. Yet
there is something tautological in the insistence that what threatens the ego is felt to be threatening; what about those aspects of subjectivity that exceed the ego? Why not view the cultural
phenomenon of creating a shared “look” and the related phenomenon of a sexuality based on
sameness of gender as but superficial instances of a more profound sameness that de-individuates
subjectivity less threateningly than the loss of boundaries usually is understood to imply? Without such an over-developed psychology of selfhood, we might be slower to cast de-differentiation
in negative terms. In this respect, both Foucault’s and Lacan’s antipsychologism remains to be
exploited.
Doubtless the prospect of treating Foucault and Lacan as companion ethicists of the impersonal
raises potential methodological problems concerning the loss of distinctions between significantly different thinkers. Bersani recently has suggested, however, that “distinctions between
ideas are perhaps grounded in assumptions of a difference of being between the self and the
world.” 25 There is always a danger that our carefully elaborated distinctions among thinkers and
ideas might be based on — or at least fueled by — imaginary identifications that misrecognize
deeper interdependencies. Our commitments to individuation make the identifiability and ownership of ideas a high priority, as if thought respected the imaginary boundaries that we place
around persons. Yet if, as I hypothesized earlier, thinking ruptures identity, perhaps thinking
ultimately corrodes distinctions in favor of analogies that correspond to analogies among worldly
forms. From this perspective, “thinking differently” would conduce to sameness (though not to
identity), and thus to an ontological realm at least partly independent of epistemological anxieties — a realm, that is to say, in which thinking would be coterminous with being. Faced with
such a prospect we might well ask: What have we got to lose but our selves?
1.
Michel Foucault, The Use of Pleasure, trans. Robert Hurley
(New York: Random House, 1985), 8-9.
2. Foucault, “Preface to The History of Sexuality, Volume
Two,” trans. William Smock, in Essential Works of Foucault 1954-1984, Vol. 1: Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, ed.
Paul Rabinow (New York: New Press, 1997), 205.
3. Foucault, The Use of Pleasure, 6.
4. Ibid., 9.
7. See Jacques Derrida, “Différance,” in Speech and Phenomena, and Other Essays on Husserl’s Theory of Signs, trans.
David B. Allison (Evanston: Northwestern University Press,
1973), 129-160.
10. See Tim Dean, “Two Kinds of Otherness and Their Consequences,” Critical Inquiry 23:4 (Summer 1997): 910-920.
11. See Lee Edelman, Homographesis: Essays in Gay Literary and Cultural Theory (New York: Routledge, 1994) and
the work of Judith Butler, who stages confrontations with
the impasses of anti-identitarianism in book after book.
12. Dean, “Homosexuality and the Problem of Otherness,” in
Homosexuality and Psychoanalysis, ed. Tim Dean and
Christopher Lane (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
2001), 120-143.
39
6. Strictly speaking identity is not a psychoanalytic concept,
although identification is, of course, central to psychoanalytic theory. Devoting his seminar of 1961-62 explicitly to
the topic of identification, Lacan is particularly keen to discriminate registers of identification — imaginary, symbolic,
and real — and the relations among them. A decade later,
in seminars XIX and XX, he approaches this issue through
the idea of “the One,” meditating on the gnomic formula “Y
a d’ l’Un” — “There’s something of the One” — to advance
his ongoing critique of identitarianism, in this case with
respect to sexual identification, narcissism, and love. See
Lacan, Seminar XX: On Feminine Sexuality: The Limits of
Love and Knowledge: Encore, 1972-1973, ed. Jacques-Alain
Miller, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: Norton, 1998).
9. A representative gay political reservation about bisexuality
is encapsulated in David M. Halperin’s claim that the
category of queerness “invites the kind of hostile political
manipulation that already is all too familiar to lesbians and
gay men from the deployment of the label ‘bisexual’: it provides a means of de-gaying gayness. Like ‘bisexual,’ though
for different reasons, ‘queer’ would seem to provide a readymade instrument of homophobic disavowal: inasmuch as
it reconstitutes sexual identity under the sign of the political, it has the capacity to despecify the realities of lesbian
and gay oppression, obscuring what is irreducibly sexual
about those practices and persons most exposed to the effects of sexual racism” (Halperin, Saint Foucault: Towards
a Gay Hagiography [New York: Oxford University Press,
1995], 65). Coming from a spokesperson for queer theory,
this critique of bisexuality necessarily qualifies the widespread assumption that queer betokens an expanded rubric
of inclusivity for sexual minorities. Substantial counterarguments to this negative view of bisexuality may be found
in Marjorie Garber, Vice Versa: Bisexuality and the Eroticism of Everyday Life (New York: Simon and Schuster,
1995); and Jonathan Dollimore, Sex, Literature and Censorship (Cambridge: Polity, 2001).
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5. Jacques Lacan, “The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious or Reason since Freud,” in Écrits: A Selection, trans.
Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1977), 166. A couple sentences later, Lacan immediately rewrites this formulation:
“I am not wherever I am the plaything of my thought; I think
of what I am where I do not think to think.” On Lacan’s
rewriting of Cartesianism, see Mladen Dolar, “Cogito as the
Subject of the Unconscious,” in Cogito and the Unconscious,
ed. Slavoj Žižek (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998),
11-40.
8. Derrida, “Freud and the Scene of Writing,” in Writing and
Difference, trans. Alan Bass, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 226. See also Derrida, “Différance,” 149150.
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13. The term clone does not appear in a comprehensive lexicon
of gay slang originally published in 1972, an omission
suggesting that its earliest argot usage must have been the
mid-1970s. See Bruce Rodgers, The Queens’ Vernacular
(San Francisco: Straight Arrow Books, 1972); reprinted as
Gay Talk: A (Sometimes Outrageous) Dictionary of Gay
Slang (New York: Paragon, 1979).
14. Foucault writes: “We were right to condemn institutional
monosexuality that was constricting, but the promise that
we would love women as soon as we were no longer
condemned for being gay was utopian. And a utopia in the
dangerous sense, not because it promised good relations
with women but because it was at the expense of monosexual relations. In the often-negative response some
French people have toward certain types of American behavior, there is still that disapproval of monosexuality. So
occasionally we hear: ‘What? How can you approve of those
macho models? You’re always with men, you have mustaches and leather jackets, you wear boots, what kind of
masculine image is that?’ Maybe in ten years we’ll laugh
about it all. But I think in the schema of a man affirming
himself as a man, there is a movement toward redefining
the monosexual relation. It consists of saying, ‘Yes, we spend
our time with men, we have mustaches, and we kiss each
other,’ without one of the partners having to play the nelly
[éphèbe] or the effeminate, fragile boy....We have to admit
this is all something very new and practically unknown in
Western societies. The Greeks never admitted love between
two adult men” (Foucault, “The Social Triumph of the
Sexual Will,” trans. Brendan Lemon, in Essential Works,
vol. 1, 161-162, brackets in original).
15. Blue bandannas break down like this:
Worn on LEFT
Wants Head
Sixty-Niner
Cop
Fucker
Cock and Ball
Torturer
Worn on RIGHT
Light Blue
Robin’s Egg Blue
Medium Blue
Navy Blue
Teal Blue
Expert Cocksucker
Sixty-Nine
Cop-Sucker
Fuckee
Cock and Ball
Torturee
Clearly the implications of failing to distinguish, say, light
blue from teal blue can be quite dramatic. Today, however,
the hanky code has fallen into desuetude, supplanted by
the greater convenience and explicitness of online cruising,
in which participants spell out directly what they desire.
Nevertheless, as in newspaper personals, a form of shorthand has developed in online cruise ads that is sufficiently
complex to warrant the kind of translations offered by my
hanky code card. For instance, Barebackcity.com, a website
for gay men who want sex without protection, offers a handy
glossary covering the 60 or so abbreviations and acronymic
terms that one is likely to encounter while cruising its site
(see http://misc.barebackcity.com/abbreviations.asp).
What fascinates me is how — whether with the hanky code
or in online cruise ads — the semiotic system tends to
outstrip the competence of its users, thereby verging on a
specifically symbolic order in which, as Lacan says, “man
is always cultivating a great many more signs than he
thinks” (Lacan, Seminar II: The Ego in Freud’s Theory and
in the Technique of Psychoanalysis, 1954-1955, ed.
Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Sylvana Tomaselli [Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1988], 122). That is to say, in
these subcultural semiotic worlds there is an unconscious.
16. See Dean, “Unlimited Intimacy: Barebacking, Bugchasing,
Giftgiving” (unpublished paper).
17. Bersani, Homos (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
1995), 107.
18. For scat, piss, spit, or “heavy S&M,” wear brown, yellow,
pale yellow, or black bandannas, respectively.
19. “Only an emphasis on the specifics of sameness can help
us to avoid collaborating in the disciplinary tactics that
would make us invisible” (Bersani, Homos, 42).
20. Bersani, The Freudian Body: Psychoanalysis and Art (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1986); see also Bersani,
“Is the Rectum a Grave?,” in AIDS: Cultural Analysis/Cultural Activism, ed. Douglas Crimp (Cambridge: MIT Press,
1988), 197-222.
21. Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit, Caravaggio’s Secrets (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1998).
22. See Parveen Adams, The Emptiness of the Image: Psychoanalysis and Sexual Differences (London: Routledge, 1996);
Graham L. Hammill, Sexuality and Form: Caravaggio,
Marlowe, and Bacon (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
2000); and Joan Copjec, Imagine There’s No Woman: Ethics and Sublimation (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002).
25. Bersani, “Against Monogamy,” in Beyond Redemption: The
Work of Leo Bersani, ed. Timothy Clark and Nicholas Royle,
a special issue of Oxford Literary Review, 20:1-2 (1998):
19.
41
24. Bersani, “Genital Chastity,” in Dean and Lane (eds.), 366.
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23. In a brilliant meditation on Ralph Waldo Emerson’s impersonality, Sharon Cameron claims that “there cannot help
but be resistance to the idea of the impersonal since the
consequences of the impersonal destroy being the only way
we think we know it” (Cameron, “The Way of Life by Abandonment: Emerson’s Impersonal,” Critical Inquiry 25:1
[Autumn 1998]: 31). I would argue instead that the impersonal shows the extent to which the way we think we know
being is mistaken. What the impersonal destroys is not being but selfhood. Having suggested how Bersani could be
read as Lacanian, I am not about to suggest that we now
read him as Emersonian, but rather that his work could be
considered within a genealogy of impersonality that would
include Emersonian philosophy.
james penney
THE SAMENESS OF SEXUAL DIFFERENCE
AND THE DIFFERENCE OF SAME-SEX DESIRE
PSYCHOANALYSIS AND QUEER THEORY — SAME DIFFERENCE?
Amidst the numerous recent efforts of Anglo-American queer theorists
to grapple psychoanalytically with the phenomenon of homosexuality,
an antinomy has arisen around the tropes of sameness and difference.
The most influential queer theorists, including Judith Butler, have argued
against the fundamental psychoanalytic concept of sexual difference,
which, according to Lacanian theory, belongs to an order other than the
cultural and the biological. They view Lacanian sexual difference as an
imposture that imprisons the complex manifestations of sexuality within
a normative socio-symbolic problematic. 1 Implicit in a number of such
discourses is the idea that if a difference qualified as sexual invariably
pathologizes homosexuality, then it is by means of the notion of sameness — hence the appellation “same-sex desire” — that homosexuality
should be illuminated within the discourse on sexuality.
Two observations can be made at this inaugural point. First, within
the horizon of postmodern or poststructuralist cultural theory within
which queer discourse has almost without exception articulated itself,
with its characteristic emphasis on the unlimited proliferation of
differences as in itself of political value, the recourse to an idea of a
sameness in desire claimed as a difference might appear ironic, if not
outright contradictory. That the difference with respect to which the
sameness of sex-desire is contrasted is itself formulated as a concept
implicating difference, namely the sexual one, only adds a further layer
of fog to an already clouded theoretical landscape. Second, the queer
theoretical protest against sexual difference targets itself most directly
against the psychoanalytic assumption that sexual difference stubbornly
remains the same, in the precise sense that it does not vary — in itself,
as it were — according to the vicissitudes and specificities of historical
and cultural discourses. Furthermore, queer theory has generally been
hostile to the psychoanalytic premise that this same sexual difference
remains psychically operative for all subjects regardless of what Freud
called their “small differences,” and therefore constitutes a difference
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different from, so to speak, the other brands of difference. There is thus quite fundamentally a
logic of contradiction at work in the discourse on sexuality that cries out for “deconstruction”:
the queer-theoretical notion of the sameness of sex-desire is premised on an idea of a difference
with respect to a more primordial sexual difference it tries to denounce; and the primordial
quality of this latter difference on which psychoanalysis insists presupposes a fundamental
sameness immune to historical change as well as to the manifold predicative differences to which
one has recourse to distinguish qualitatively between subjects.
The difficulties surrounding the relation between sexual difference and homosexuality in the
theory of sexuality extend, however, well beyond this logic of contradiction, which, incidentally,
as I will try to show, may not be as problematic as it might originally seem. More specifically, it
is not at all clear that the various voices to be heard in the debate all refer to the same thing when
the notions of “sex” and “sexuality” are invoked. Further, as is all too rarely pointed out, the
dominant discourses of Anglo-American feminist theory, which have had a decisive impact on
queer theory, whether psychoanalytically informed or not, have inherited the social-scientific
category of “gender,” a category featuring a primarily sociological meaning whose importation
into psychoanalysis has had, in my view, devastating effects of confusion. The concept of gender
presupposes a subject fully expressed by social codes and scripts, however heterogeneous,
contradictory, ideal, or incomplete, and therefore a subject that does not square with the
psychoanalytic concept of a subject of unconscious desire, a subject defined precisely by its nonappearance within the forms of recognized sociality. One of the consequences of the hegemony
of the sociological framework in contemporary feminist and queer work is that it becomes difficult to find a place for sex, considered in the properly psychoanalytic sense, within the realm of
the “gendered subject.” To the extent that one conceives of the subject as the sum produced by
the addition of the multiple positions in discourse through which it is presented, one can do
little in the way of answering the question of how and why this subject desires either same- or
other-sex objects, or both. In the Lacanian view, sex has a fundamentally hostile relation not
only to gender — the set of means available to the subject regarding its performative representation — but also to the bio-physiological sphere — the amalgam of primary and secondary bodily
sex-traits to which culture attempts to attribute meaning. 2 For psychoanalysis, sex is expressed
in neither of these conceptual fields. Consequently, sex bears no relation to voluntarist conceptions of agency, including most consequentially those premised on notions of performativity.
Moreover, sex may be represented within the domain of the signifier — the socio-symbolic order,
in other words — only by means of tropes of negation: failure, impossibility, and compulsive or
unmasterable repetition.
Unfortunately, however, the current level of discourse on homosexuality within the confines
of Lacanian theory remains, generally speaking, poor, limited on the one hand by books like
45
It is helpful to examine in some detail Dean’s account of how the object of jouissance supersedes sexual difference by specifying the roles of Lacan’s three registers in his theory of the
subject of desire. Dean’s argument about sexuality, put in the most basic terms, is that fecal
matter works psychically as a prototype for the phallus. “The phallus is less a figure for the penis
than, more fundamentally,” he writes, “a figure for the turd.”5 With this contention Dean implies,
or at least comes perilously close to implying, that the subject’s relation to its libidinal object
occurs entirely within the real, in other words, outside a transferential socio-symbolic and imaginary situation in which the traumatic substance of jouissance is veiled by a consoling image of
amorous knowledge that lures the subject’s desire. Dean effectively suggests that the real eclipses
the symbolic medium for intersubjectivity when he appropriates Lacan’s distinction between
the phallus qua signifier and objet a qua real object of jouissance. “The logic of [the] concept [of]
object a,” he avers, “demotes or relativizes that of the phallus: whereas the phallus implies a
univocal model of desire (insofar as all desiring positions are mapped in relation to a singular
term), object a implies multiple, heterogeneous possibilities for desire, especially since object a
bears no discernible relation to gender.” 6 Given his reservations about Gilles Deleuze and Félix
Guattari’s anti-Oedipal theory of the deterritorialization of desire, it is unclear how Dean’s own
non-dialectical model of a queer brand of sexuality “beyond” sexual difference would differ in its
fundamentals from the one he opposes.7 Additionally, given that the anatomical reference for
the phallus, even in Freud’s passages on the “phallic stage,” was originally both the penis and
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Renata Salecl’s otherwise excellent Sexuation anthology, which assumes by omission that all
sexuation occurs in conformity with the subject’s biological sex, and on the other hand, by the
clinical work of such figures as Joël Dor and Jean Clavreul, which ultimately subsumes all forms
of homosexuality under what both authors refer to as the “perverse structure.” 3 By contrast, Tim
Dean’s path-breaking Beyond Sexuality has decisively shown that sexuality — “in the defiles of
the signifier,” as Lacan said — or more precisely the desire upon which it depends, is caused by
a real object of jouissance that bears no direct relation to sexual difference, although it is not
perfectly clear in Dean’s work what relation this object has to what Lacan called sexuation. What
Dean calls the object’s “impersonal” character and what Freud referred to as its necessarily “partial” quality decisively sever the psychoanalytic account of sexuality from heterosexual
normativity, a severance, it is sadly still necessary to say, far from universally acknowledged
within psychoanalytic discourse itself.4 In spite of its tremendous theoretical value, however,
Dean’s work is in my view marred somewhat by a conflation of the traumatic, real object that
causes desire with the object to which desire necessarily addresses itself within the irreducibly
transferential context of “intersubjectivity.” It is this latter object that Lacan designates as the
phallus in its symbolic dimension, and it acquires crucial significance in the best clinical writing
on same-sex desire.
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46
the clitoris, it should be remarked that a degree of ambivalence with respect to biological sex is
already at work in the concept “phallus” itself; this observation uncovers the overhasty quality of
the queer-theoretical cliché that denounces the allegedly privileged relation psychoanalysis upholds between the phallus and “masculinity” or biological men. Moreover, Lacan eliminated the
remaining Freudian ambiguity by stating that “clinical facts” demonstrate that there exists “a
relation of the subject to the phallus that is established without regard to the anatomical difference
of the sexes.” 8 These observations render problematic Dean’s assumption that the elimination of
the agency of the phallus in sexuation is a necessary condition of the elaboration of a genuinely
anti-homophobic psychoanalytic account of sexuality.
Indeed, in my own view, the properly psychoanalytic position is that the homosexual subject
is not immune to the effects of the fantasmatic comedy of being and having the phallus, and
consequently must attempt to situate itself within the terms of the Oedipus, that is to say, within
the existing socio-symbolic grid into which this subject is born. To state, as one should, that all
non-psychotic forms of subjectivity bear some relation to the phallic function is not tantamount
to the imposition of an allegedly “univocal” model of desire. In the comedy of sexuality the subject stages an interpretation of the enigma of sexual difference by “placing” the phallus at some
point among the terms of the psychical representation of the members of its familial network
and by imbuing this point with an identificatory investment that puts in place its fundamental
fantasy. It is not a question, then, of objet a eclipsing the phallic function, but rather of the real
disrupting the security of the subject’s symbolic identification by means of the agency of
jouissance. Put differently, the real does not get rid of the subject’s dependence on the symbolic
order, of the requirement that this subject establish a more or less functional — but necessarily
failed — place for itself within the terms of language.
Furthermore, the agency of objet a does not prevent the subject from associating its separation from jouissance to a phallic “third party” who serves to represent the impossibility of the
subject’s fusion with its object. The imaginary phallic object and the real object of enjoyment are
therefore mediated for the subject by some form of the Oedipus, in other words an elementary,
familial or quasi-familial socio-symbolic grid that, for Lacan, is necessarily anchored by a phallic
reference, by an instance of authority to which the mother’s or mother figure’s desire normatively addresses itself. Above and beyond any sociological or political consequences of this
premise, it is necessary to point out that, for Lacan, there is no form of sexuation devoid of a
relation to the phallic function and therefore to the position of the father — the metaphor for
paternity, in other words — which every subject requires to escape from the lethal maternal
enjoyment. Crucial to underline here with respect to the concerns of queer theory, or more generally in the context of today’s complex sociological realities, is that the paternal function is
precisely a function for Lacan, and therefore will be linked within any given subject’s psychic
structure with a representation that may or may not correspond to the biological father or even
to the concrete subject who performs the paternal role within a given familial unit. It is likely no
great secret that the discourse of the male homosexual — and it is predominantly the male form
of homosexuality that will preoccupy me in what follows — is profoundly marked by an interrogation, often charged with intense quantities of affect, and often more or less classically
hysterical, of that instance of paternal symbolic virility, and it is precisely this problem of the
relation between male homosexual desire and the phallic function that, in my view, Dean fails to
interrogate and that, in consequence, most urgently needs to be addressed in Lacanian analytic
discourse.
47
DANY, OR THE PARADOX OF HETERO-TRANSSEXUALISM
Dany is a young male analysand who for some years has anxiously asked himself if he is a transsexual. Though the idea of a sex-change operation horrifies him, he testifies to having felt more
like a girl than a boy for most of his life. At the time of his entry into analysis at the age of twenty,
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For these reasons I undertake in what follows an interrogation of the inter-implication of
sameness and difference in the theory of sexuality through the lens of the Lacanian clinical
discourse on male homosexuality, more specifically with reference to Serge André’s important
clinico-theoretical work, which is in my view the most consequential to have appeared thus far
to the interrogation of male same-sex desire within the Lacanian field. In the process I will
revisit a number of classic problems in the history of psychoanalytic thinking about homosexuality, including the relation of the perverse “structure,” often referred to as “fetishism,” to male
homosexual object-choice, not to mention the deeply vexed, often outright censored, problem of
the psychogenesis of homosexual desire.9 I will pose two fundamental questions. First, what
distinguishes the male homosexual from the male, predominantly heterosexual, fetishist? Second,
if male homosexuals are not necessarily perverts, in the Lacanian clinical sense, what distinguishes the neurotic from the perverse homosexual? Nearly a century of analytic discourse has
prevaricated, often in a patently and obscenely phobic manner, on these two questions, but in
what follows I will suggest an answer to both. In reply to the first question, I will aver that the
only theoretically consistent way of distinguishing the neurotic male homosexual from the
fetishistic pervert is to insist that the former, unlike the latter, “agrees” to assume what Lacan
describes as feminine castration. And in answer to the second, I will suggest that only the neurotic homosexual is, properly speaking, a subject. I hope that the reader will encounter in what
follows not only something of the stubborn insistence of sameness which distinguishes sexual
difference from other differences — ethnic, cultural, racial, economic, and so on — but also a
perhaps surprising indication of a distinctly sexual difference at work in what we call same-sex
desire.
48
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Dany had been taking female hormonal supplements that had provided him with what his analyst Serge André calls “a few curves.” 10 A low-level white collar worker, Dany married a female
colleague at age nineteen but, even after the wedding and up to the time of his analysis, he
continues to spend on average one night a week at the home of his father, a widower whose wife
died when Dany was sixteen. Dany unselfconsciously describes to his analyst some key details of
the unusual domestic relationship he entertains with his father. The day after the mother’s death,
Dany’s father invites his son to sleep with him in his bed every night, rationalizing this invitation
with reference to his desire to convert Dany’s room into a memorial for the deceased. According
to André’s narration of his patient’s discourse, the father subsequently adopts the role of “housewife” in this unconventional domestic arrangement, insisting on dressing his sixteen-year-old
son every morning before leaving for work. For his part, Dany takes advantage of his mother’s
death to increase the frequency of his transvestite practices, which began at age six and were
silently tolerated by his mother until her demise. Dany says he knows his mother passionately
wished for a girl during her pregnancy with him; he explains that after the delivery, she refused
to touch her baby for two days and, though she eventually, on the surface at least, accepted her
newborn’s sex, she nonetheless insisted on dressing him in girls’ clothing and buying him girls’
toys. Moreover, she gave her son the diminutive form of the name she had chosen for a girl. As
André informs his reader, the name “Dany” (not the patient’s real name) is used to designate
both boys and girls in the patient’s cultural context (André’s practice is in Brussels and his patients are, one presumes, francophone). Further, Dany reluctantly undergoes surgery at age
twelve to lower the testicles that, as he says, had “remained inside” his body (34).
These are the basic facts of Dany’s case history as André presents them. What is most crucial
for my purposes in this essay, however, is to examine not only how André interprets these facts,
but also how his interpretation informs his theorization of the relation between the idea of the
perverse structure in Lacanian theory and the phenomenon of male homosexuality. During his
childhood Dany’s mother would knowingly allow her son to wear a pair of her pantyhose after
school before the father’s return from work, and André suggests that this fact evinces that “a
complicity, never explicitly formulated, was established between Dany and his mother,” and
that the father, though “not invisible [pas inexistant],” was “systematically deceived, cuckolded
by the couple formed by the mother and her son.” And, as if the feminine position of the father
and the mother’s phallic attributes were not by now sufficiently apparent, André adds, in perhaps too flippant a tone, that not only did the mother “wear the pants” in the household, but she
would also, when the father’s back was turned, “share them with her son” (35).
Those familiar with the grandes lignes of psychoanalytic writing on male homosexuality will
immediately recognize this “classic” aetiological scenario: the retiring, absent, or feminine father symbolically castrated by the mother; the latter a permissive, almost obscene figure who
Though not explicitly noted in André’s interpretation of Dany’s discourse, it is important for
my purposes to observe that the self-instrumentalization with respect to the Other’s enjoyment
in Dany’s fantasy occurs in tandem with the physical manipulation of his own body, a manipulation designed to blur the clarity of his bio-physiological sex characteristics. Not only does Dany’s
49
In addition to his worry over his ambivalent sex identity, Dany provides evidence for the agency
of sado-masochistic fantasies in his unconscious life. He tells his analyst, for example, that he is
in the practice of hiring female prostitutes, who enable him to stage a particular fantasy scenario. During its mise-en-scène Dany dresses in tight-fitting women’s clothing and pretends to
do housework while his paid female partner aggressively insults him. The fantasy-scene reaches
its climax when the prostitute ties Dany up and flogs him to orgasm. Dany gradually introduces
his wife to his masochistic fantasy world and, though complying with his less extreme requests,
she refuses to engage in any activity that would cause her husband direct physical harm. Central
to Dany’s fantasy is the requirement that his partner enjoy her involvement in its enactment;
only in this way can he present his ecstasy to the Other as the fulfillment of its desire. Eclipsing
himself as a divided subject of the unconscious, Dany shifts subjective division to his partner
and offers himself as the object that accomplishes its re-unification. Here we encounter a version of Lacan’s definition of the perverse structure: the subject offers him- or herself as the
object-cause and realization of the Other’s enjoyment, which requires not only that the subject
actively manipulate the object in order to experience masochistic jouissance “passively,” but
also that the subject receive unambiguous proof that the Other is not simply “pretending” to be
a sadist, but actually derives obscene satisfaction from causing pain.
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lends herself with gusto to clandestine enjoyments with her son, enjoyments that undermine
the triangulation of desire in the Oedipal symbolico-familial situation. André implies in his analysis of the case that the sex-specificity of the mother’s desire for a child virtually guarantees the
feminine quality of Dany’s future symbolic identifications. Given that the patently odd particularities of Dany’s familial circumstances appear from all angles to ensure a “perverse” outcome
of one sort or another, it is striking that this case, though hitting all the right notes in the melody
of dominant analytic thinking about the psychogenesis of male homosexuality, ends up having
very little to do, according to André himself, with homosexuality properly speaking. Things, in
other words, are not quite right. First, according to the details André provides about the case,
Dany never claims to be a homosexual, never speaks of desiring another man, never reports
sexual contact of any kind with men, and marries, after all, a woman. Second, Dany’s primary
concern in his discourse appears to lie not with the sex-attributes of his object, but rather with
his own sexual identity, with what André calls “the enigma of his sex” (34). The question Dany
formulates in response to the enigma of the Other’s desire is not “Am I homo- or heterosexual?”
but rather “Am I a man or a woman?”
50
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fantasy phallicize his female partner by attributing to her the superegoic voice whose command
must be obeyed, but it also serves to assuage his anxiety regarding his own sexual identity by
“performing” the lack of coincidence between the biological manifestation of sexual difference
and its representation in domestic social roles. The sado-masochistic sequence makes irrelevant
Dany’s question about his position with respect to sexual difference, and it may no longer be
answered one way or the other. Or, perhaps more precisely, the fantasy functions to “answer”
the question of sexual difference before it can be asked: if Dany, a man, can adopt a ”passive,”
“feminine” role, and if his female partner can voice the perverse paternal command, then sexual
difference ceases to be a function of subjectivity proper — of the subject’s attempt and failure to
find a symbolic “home” in the discourse of the Other — and becomes instead a matter of selfobjectification, of “solving” the enigma of sexual difference by impeding its traumatic emergence
as a question. Where the neurotic “worries” about the sex of its object, and therefore about the
“meaning” of sexual difference with respect to desire, the pervert presents himself as the object
that inhibits the manifestation of sexual difference in the first instance, quite literally “blocks,”
in other words, the emergence of the problem of its symbolic representation.
In my view, André correctly “diagnoses” Dany not as a “repressed” homosexual but as a
heterosexual pervert. And crucially, he underlines that Dany’s perverse structure functions psychically as a defense against homosexuality. Dany becomes a pervert in order to avoid becoming
homosexual. In so doing Dany saves himself from the difficulty of acknowledging the possibility
that a biologically male subject is capable of desiring “like a woman.” According to André, the
“complicity” between Dany and his mother allows Dany to feign submission to the symbolic law
of paternal authority. But when his mother dies and the father adopts his “feminine” position
within the familial structure, Dany is directly placed for the first time in a relation of passivity
with respect to his father, the erotic seductiveness of which, André contends, the masochistic
fantasy of the dominatrix-like phallic mother is designed to shield. Dany resists the form of
symbolic castration that would lead to homosexual desire in at least two ways. First, the sadomasochistic fantasy scenario supports Dany’s desire to fuse into a kind of unified or self-sufficient
phallic object with his partner — to embody, in other words, the imaginary phallus the mother
lacks on the level of anatomical actuality. And second, as if to defer the structural instability that
the difficulty of finding an authentically sadistic partner brings about, Dany hormonally feminizes his own body, effectively protesting to the Other that in any case his desire cannot possibly
be of the male homosexual variety because he is not really a man. Indeed, the psychodynamic
significance of Dany’s fantasy constructions finds clear expression in his response of absolute
conformity with respect to his mother’s desire for a female baby. In spite of the mother’s acceptance at the level of her statement that her infant is in fact a boy, it is nonetheless clear that the
young Dany was traumatized by his mother’s unconscious desire, made manifest at the level of
her enunciation, for a child of the other sex. Dany’s entire unconscious life appears to structure
itself around a dynamic of self-instrumentalization with respect to this desire articulated “between the lines” of his mother’s discourse. Ultimately, André explains Dany’s perversion with
reference to his passionate quest for perfect fusion with what he interprets as the Other’s desire,
to the extreme point that he willingly submits to torture and humiliation and undertakes the
sexual transformation of his own body.
Male homosexuality organizes itself, according to André’s pleasingly historicized psychoanalytic
account, around what he calls an “initiation” to virility in which the accession to sexualized
masculinity is non-normatively aligned with the maternal genealogical line. In André’s view,
51
PHILIPPE, OR THE “IMAGINARIZATION” OF CASTRATION
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Dany’s analysis lasts for only a year and a half, culminating in what André calls an “affirmation” of the patient’s masochism. Though he does not, according to his analyst, experience the
subjective destitution which would allow him to traverse his fantasy and disengage from its
dynamic, Dany does nonetheless manage to undertake a sublimating writing practice that grants
him some protection from the drive. Writing also allows Dany to gain access to a form of labor
(in both senses of the word) that provides the satisfaction of realizing the Other’s desire without
requiring the acting out of his masochistic fantasy and the suffering to which it gives rise. The
significance of Dany’s case history as regards my concerns lies in the way it presents a concrete
instance of the relation of the fetish structure to a defence against homosexuality, a relation
Freud himself intuits, without spelling it out in detail, in his own work on perversion. “The
fetish,” Freud writes, “saves the fetishist from becoming a homosexual, by endowing women
with the characteristic which makes them tolerable as sexual objects.”11 If the “successful” male
quasi- or pseudo-heterosexual pervert is in some sense a “failed” passive homosexual (at least
on the level of the passive fantasy vis-à-vis the imaginary father), then what does the clinical
picture of the “successful male homosexual” look like? If a certain kind of male homosexual
desire is in fact not related to the phallicization of the mother and the “denial of sexual difference” implicated in fetishism proper, but rather is situated around a “feminine” position of
passivity with respect to the imaginary or symbolic father, then what does this imply in terms of
this presumably neurotic subject’s castration? To put it in simpler terms, from where does the
neurotic male homosexual desire? It is not clear, I would suggest, if André’s book provides any
unambiguous answers to these questions, but it is certainly worth the effort to look at another
example from his casework to initiate this inquiry. In so doing, the field will be cleared for the
presentation of my own views concerning both the relation of perversion to male homosexuality
and the agency of sexual difference in male same-sex desire.
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such a psychical orientation evinces what he calls a “difficulty with respect to castration,” a
difficulty which plays a role in the formation of the male erotic subcultures he describes as “more
or less codified and cloistered” (159). The question is open, it seems to me, as to whether such an
image of the gay world as a kind of parallel universe outside the dominant social law and narcissistically enclosed in its own collective enjoyment either bespeaks a traumatic unconscious fantasy
of a kind of homosexual primal father — a gay version of Lacan’s père-version — common to
numerous heterosexual male analysts or, alternatively, betrays authentically perverse vectors of
the gay libidinal economy in utter subservience to the dictates of a consumerist, apolitical,
superegoic Other. It appears to me that both alternatives are, to varying degrees, valid.12 But it
will doubtless prove more theoretically productive to focus on the details of André’s theory of
male homosexuality and the facts of the case of Philippe.
Despite its often patently phobic limitations, André’s concern with homosexual virility has
the tremendous merit of re-inscribing the vectors of male homosexual desire within a phallic
orbit, emphasizing in the process the agency of a symbolic phallus in the discourse of the male
homosexual, and rectifying the tendency in recent queer-inflected Lacanian criticism (pace Dean)
to theorize homosexuality strictly in relation to the real object-cause of enjoyment. André’s account usefully underscores how the male homosexual psychic structure features a determinate
link to the symbolico-imaginary nexus connected to the narcissistic dynamic of identification
and the interrogation of the paternal metaphor. Indeed, one could say that the universal queerness of sexuality, psychically operative in both homo- and heterosexually-oriented subjects, does
not do away with the need for a (necessarily failed) process of oedipalization. I would in fact
suggest that one should read Lacan’s famous formulas of sexuation as the formalization of precisely this tension between the means by which the subject is inscribed within the symbolic
order and the queer “residue” of the real that fails to appear within the terms of the phallic
function. To return to André’s concern with the male homosexual’s virility, however, it appears
to me that the crux of the matter lies in the way the theorist chooses to frame the question of the
“location” of the symbolic phallus in the psychical economy of male homosexuality. How does
the male homosexual orient himself with respect to the Oedipal figuration of masculinity and
femininity? Or, in Lacanian terms, how are we to theorize the male homosexual’s sexuation?
In André’s view, the elaboration of Oedipal identifications and the installation of the phallic
signifier as the emblem of castration are susceptible to two modes of “failure [ratage]” associated with the forms of male homosexual desire, one causing the formation of a perverse structure,
the other creating a neurotic brand of subjectivity. Perverse “homosexuality,” as became apparent in the Dany case history (I again underline that the term “homosexuality” is problematic in
this context), bespeaks “a failure to realize castration [un ratage par défaut de réalisation de la
castration]”; and neurotic homosexuality predicates itself on what André calls an “excessive
53
Philippe is a young, university-educated man who interrupts his post-secondary studies to
become a fashion model for industry magazines and couture houses in Milan and elsewhere.
Though he enjoys tremendous professional success, a state of paralyzing anxiety brings him to
the analytic chamber, causing him to formulate the following question: “Am I or am I not homosexual, and must I live in this manner?” (180). Though left without comment by André, Philippe’s
formulation of the question concerning the nature of his desire betrays the extent of his
interiorization of dominant value judgments about what is called sexual orientation. Nonetheless, Philippe speaks of frequenting what André calls “hard” homosexual establishments, and
the patient states that he regularly engages in oral sex with a number of his male acquaintances
in the fashion world. Though he considers such acts of fellatio and mutual masturbation with
male friends a “normal” component of life in his professional environment, Philippe experiences sharp intuitions of guilt in response to his desires with respect to other men. He also
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imaginarization of castration [un ratage par excès d’imaginarisation de la castration].” Tellingly,
however, Marc, whose case history André uses to illustrate the neurotic variation of male samesex desire, never ceases to bear witness during his analysis to a “nostalgia, which grows in intensity
over the years, for a real relationship with a woman” (171). Indeed, it appears to me that very few
self-identified gay readers would likely consider André’s allegedly neurotic analysand homosexual — I certainly do not.13 And further, the only case material André presents in his book
featuring a patient who speaks of being anally penetrated by another man is Philippe, who not
only serves to represent within André’s typology the perverse version of the two possible homosexually-inclined psychic structures, but also dies after only five sessions with his analyst in a
car accident with a likely suicidal intent, however conscious or unconscious. I would risk
suggesting, in fact, that André gets his diagnoses mixed up, and it is Marc, with his sexual
ambivalence but overarching heterosexual orientation, who most closely fits the model of perversion André elaborates, and Philippe who exemplifies the neurotic profile. On my reading of
the admittedly scant case material, Philippe’s tragic death — his car crashes into a median at the
fork of a freeway, one route leading to one of his male partners, the second to his girlfriend —
likely has more to do with his failure to extricate himself from his capture by a socio-imaginary
constellation that caustically abjects male sexual receptivity than with an inability to resolve the
effects of a perverse or fetishistic psychic structure. But such an assertion no doubt requires a
closer look at the case of Philippe. I will try to show that cases like Philippe’s are often mistaken
for instances of perversion because of both an ambient (even patriarchal) analytic phobia of
male anal eroticism and the irrational resistance within the Lacanian clinical environment to
the notion that many subjects of both bio-physiological sexes are cross-sexuated, in other words
confront the impasse of jouissance within linguistic structure in a manner associated with the
opposite sex.
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provides evidence suggesting that his sexual life is characterized by a significant degree of compulsiveness. André relates that throughout this period of homosexual activity Philippe maintains
a “more or less stable” relationship with a woman; successful sexual relations with his female
partner often require, however, the conjuring of a fantasy of a man in briefs (180). A crisis of
anxiety and confusion strikes Philippe when he receives an invitation from the male partner of a
female friend to participate in an evening of fist-fucking; the invitation both fascinates and repulses him. He responds noncommittally, proceeding to wander through the streets of Milan in
a state of acute disorientation, impulsively giving the entire contents of his wallet to a woman
who asks him for money. Philippe manages to direct his ambulation toward Milan’s Duomo
cathedral where he finds himself thrown into an even more acute attack of panic while gazing
upwards at a statue in the cathedral’s dome of the Lord placing a crown on Jesus’ head.
André’s interpretation of this sequence of events provides crucial evidence of the clinical criteria to which the Lacanian clinician will allude in diagnosing a patient as perverse. Moreover,
as I have already intimated, this interpretation bears witness to a widespread theoretical resistance in the Lacanian field that mars the analyst’s ability to come to terms with the logic of
sexuation of some subjects who think they might be, or explicitly identify as, homosexual. As
André explains, if Philippe had accepted his friend’s sexual invitation, he would have definitively placed himself, in his own view, “among the homosexuals.” For Philippe, in other words,
the prospect of anal penetration implies “an acceptance of castration, here understood on the
most real level.” It should here be noted that André does not state at this point what form of
castration — masculine or feminine — such an acceptance would imply. Concerning the impulsive monetary offer Philippe makes to the woman on the street, André avers that his patient here
“behaves as a man” because he “gives the gift of what he has (the phallus) to the one who lacks it”
(182). As for the final segment of Philippe’s tripartite narrative, namely the patient’s panicked
viewing of the coronation statue, André suggests that this event calls into question a second
time Philippe’s masculine identification. Though God’s crowning of his son allegorizes on one
level the generational transmission of paternal symbolic authority, this transmission occurs in
the context of the bodily sacrifice of the passion, and therefore suggests on another level both a
refusal of God’s phallic gift and the adoption of a passive stance with respect to the father.
Significantly, since the episode in the Milan cathedral, Philippe is subject to recurring panic
attacks, engages in compulsive and anonymous sexual encounters, and testifies to fantasies of
anal penetration that incite violent self-accusations. According to André, the emphasis Philippe
places on sensations of anal excitation during his attacks of anxiety provides evidence suggesting “an identification with the hole, on the model of the female genitalia (or a cesspool [cloaque]).”
Like Dany, Philippe entertained during his childhood what André refers to as a relation of
“complicity” with his mother. Additionally, André qualifies his analysand’s choice of profession
55
On my reading of this case history, however, it is not at all clear why André chooses to qualify
Philippe’s enthusiasm for images of men in briefs as perverse in the clinical sense, namely as a
“denial” of sexual difference and the form of castration that would lead to its recognition. André
describes Philippe’s anxious ambivalence during his desperate ambulation through the streets
of Milan as a consequence of the “literal” castration the prospect of fist-fucking presents to his
patient. Philippe’s marked discomfort at the moment he receives the invitation evokes a deeply
traumatic fantasy structure involving anal receptivity. Surely the psychical agency of such a
fantasy logically presupposes an experience of castration and, given the later development of
Philippe’s underwear “fetish,” it is necessary to ask whether or not the latter fantasy scenario
should be linked with a “feminine” sexuation, which would then imply that the phallic object of
fantasy veiled by the briefs is not a “perverse” manifestation of the maternal phallus, but rather
the imaginary “paternal” phallus supporting a desire for the one who “has it.” To assert unequivocally that André misdiagnoses his patient is less important than to notice that the logic of
the analyst’s interpretation not only fails to acknowledge the possibility that Philippe has indeed
undergone feminine castration — in other words, does not “have,” on the level of unconscious
fantasy, the phallus and experiences a form of jouissance “beyond” it — but also effectively renders
unthinkable the existence of what we might want to call an “actually existing” form of neurotic
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as a response to the lavish attention Philippe’s mother accorded to her son’s boyhood body: his
mother insisted on bathing him well into his adolescence, taking care, André underlines, not to
call attention through her soapy touch to his penis. In this manner Philippe’s mother treats her
son like an incarnation of the imaginary phallus — a self-enclosed, asexual unity embodying an
impossible and obscene enjoyment. Further marginalizing the agency of the father’s word in the
familial symbolic environment, Philippe’s mother confesses to her son that her marriage was a
forced and desperate attempt at self-preservation in the face of a difficult material situation
stemming from her mother’s death. At this crucial point of the case history, André begins to
explore the dynamic of what he calls Philippe’s “fetishism,” insisting that the patient’s homosexuality is structurally tied to a denial of “the anatomical difference between the sexes” and
“the castration that revealed to him the female sex organs [le sexe féminin].” Philippe relates to
his analyst that he experienced his first orgasm while inhaling the odor of a pair of briefs his
father had left on the bathroom floor. André then adds, in a searching if not desperate tone, that
a few moments earlier his analysand had been viewing the female genitalia in a book of sexual
education his parents had given him. In André’s view, this first orgasm is the instigating moment of a “central perverse fantasy” involving an acute “desire to see men in briefs.” André
rationalizes the perverse or fetishistic quality of this fantasy with the idea that men’s briefs,
“more surely than a woman’s bikini,” reassure Philippe that there is “something behind the
veil,” even if this something remains hidden from sight (186).
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male homosexuality. As I have already underlined, the patient André refers to as the homosexual neurotic — Marc — not only never has sexual relations of any variety with another man
during the period of his analysis, but also never gives evidence of a consistent desire to do so,
framing his erotic ambitions, as if to dispel all doubt, around an explicitly heterosexual telos.
And in this instance, with Philippe, André qualifies a male subject’s adoption as his object of
fantasy a veiled image of the male member as, by definition, a fetishistic phallicization linked to
a denial of a sexual difference framed in anatomical, as opposed to enunciative-linguistic, terms.
Indeed, at the crucial moment when he diagnoses Philippe as a pervert, André rather conveniently forgets Lacan’s fundamental lesson about sexual difference, namely that it is “situated”
on a level other than that of anatomical reality.
Consequently, the classic post-Freudian qualification of perversion as a “denial of sexual difference” — upheld by even the most open-minded of clinicians with respect to homosexuality,
such as Joyce McDougall 14 — must be nuanced in such a way as to take account of the possibility
of what I have called cross-sexuation. If, in other words, sexual difference psychoanalytically
conceived is indeed not of the same order as anatomical sexual difference — a point which André,
as an “official” Lacanian, would surely be forced to concede — then it must be said that he is
simply incorrect to presuppose that any male subject’s libidinal investment in the male body is a
displaced manifestation of the perverse denial of the mother’s castration. Homosexual desire
under the conceptual horizon of cross-sexuation would then potentially be fully inscribed within
sexual difference, in the precise sense that, insofar as, psychically, the male homosexual is or
can be “feminine,” what he seeks in his partner is indeed the “other sex.” Paradoxically, perhaps,
this critical comment with respect to André’s interpretation of the case of Philippe lends support
to his figuration of male homosexual subcultures as cults of virility. It was after all Lacan who
said that the phenomenon of the virile parade appears as a manifestation of “femininity.”15
Additionally, it is not clear why gay cultures would be so concerned with the acquisition of the
accoutrements of an idealized masculine embodiment if masculinity were not precisely an object of desire, rather than something already “acquired” through sexuation itself. Moreover, the
hypercathexis of embodiment in male homosexual subcultures gains further in psychoanalytic
significance when one considers that, in imaginary terms, the idealized object of desire and the
narcissistic ego are not sexually differentiated in corporeal terms for gay men, which means that
the pursuit of virility acquires a plastic, mobile quality that distributes its aims between the body
of the desired object and the subject’s own body-image. On the level of the imaginary, in other
words, the sexy body the male homosexual desires “out there” (at the disco) and the one he
“wants for himself” (by working out at the gym) are one and the same.
FROM “I” TO “a”: THE BEYOND OF (SEXUAL) IDENTIFICATION
57
Undoubtedly, the Proustian discourse on femininity in male homosexuality is burdened by the
psychological rhetoric of inversion that the modernist ideologies of sexuality inherited from
mid- to late nineteenth-century German sexology.17 Indeed, the idea of a “female soul in a male
body” to which “inversion” gives expression is in conceptual terms linked more closely, in the
field of contemporary sexuality theories, with the notion of “gender” than with the psychoanalytic concept of “sex.” Inversion, in other words, takes for granted socially determined meanings
for “masculinity” and “femininity” and then defines the male invert along behavioural lines as
the subject who “expresses” a feminine soul. The Lacanian concept of sexuation, in contrast,
situates itself in another realm, at the “impossible” intersection of speech and the real — in other
words, at the level of desire — which by definition remains inexpressible within the terms of the
socio-symbolic contract. Whereas the discourse of inversion defines the manifestation of desire
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In anticipation of a couple of the more obvious objections to what I have suggested here concerning the implication of (one type of) male homosexuality in feminine sexuation, a number of
remarks should be made. First, it is crucial to point out that my hypothesis does not equate male
homosexuality with transsexualism. The male homosexual, though clearly vexed in childhood
and adolescence by intuitions of difference with respect to other subjects who share his bodily
sexual traits, does not question his biological sex. Philippe does not ask himself, as does Dany, if
he is a man or a woman; his question of the Other is framed, rather, within the terms of today’s
post-sexological discourse of “sexual orientation.” Furthermore, the notion of cross-sexuation I
here propose is indifferent to “gender.” This means that a subject’s being cross-sexuated carries
no necessary consequences for this subject’s “behavior,” for the manner, in other words, in which
he or she appears to others with respect to socially dominant ideologies of masculinity and
femininity. The difference of the cross-sexuated subject is therefore to be located on the level of
his or her speech, more specifically with respect to the way this speech stumbles upon the real of
sex — the “rock” of sexual difference — and not in terms of the positive qualities (attributes or
predicates) of this subject. Provided we divest the notion of “inversion” — which Marcel Proust,
for one, deemed a moniker more desirable than that of “homosexuality” — of its personalist
reference to a soulful essence and take the reference to woman not as confirmation that every
gay man is at some deep-psychological level a closet drag performer but as a signifier for the
mode in which some male homosexuals desire, we may agree with Leo Bersani when he writes à
propos that prolific, hypochondriacal French novelist that “‘homosexuality’ can’t describe the
attraction of one male to another male if, according to the popular notion that Proust appears to
accept, such men have a woman’s soul. As others have noted, this rules out the same-sex desire
it claims to account for. Homosexuality is just an illusion; what looks like a man desiring an16
other man is actually a woman longing for sex with a man.”
58
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it wants to describe with reference to the positive qualities of the subject expressed through
behaviour, speech, and other concrete attributes of the “personality,” psychoanalysis insists that
sex is what remains after all such expressions of the subject’s attributes have been exhausted.
Nevertheless, Bersani’s comments on the Proustian understanding of inversion make tangible
the paradox that though, indeed, the male homosexual loves “the other as the same,” and therefore bears witness to a desire inscribed “in homo-ness,”18 this desire is subject to the real of
sexual difference if one considers that what is “inverted” is this subject’s sexuation, and not his
soul, personality, or other such metaphysical construct. If it is supposed that the psychodynamic trajectory of the male subject who will come to experience homosexual desire is marked
by the immediate and actualized experience of castration Freud discusses in relation to the young
girl’s unconscious life,19 then in speaking of the gay man’s sexuation, André must qualify castration as imaginary only because he has made this erroneous assumption: since the male subject
bears a penis, he must necessarily enter the symbolic order in a fashion that positions him as
“having” the phallus.
Thus, under the hypothesis that some male subjects experience a properly symbolic castration of the feminine kind, what is “imaginarized” is not the maternal phallus, but rather the
paternal one. Consequently, male homosexual desire in the terms of this scenario would feature
no relation whatsoever to the fantasmatic logic of the phallic mother. Hence, this male subject
would consequently situate jouissance in the male body, not only in that of his idealized object
of desire, but also in his “own” alienated, imaginary one. And here the fully paradoxical quality
of male homosexuality most clearly emerges. Insofar as there is an imaginary convergence between the gay man’s fantasized object of desire and the body he wants to “be,” he is in essence
seeking himself in his sexual partner, that is, the “same” in the “other.” However, this desire for
the (hyper)phallicized male body that captures his desire emerges from the “feminine” space of
lack, thereby ensuring that the gay male subject will never actually “find himself” in his Other,
will never successfully breach the distance between the point where his desire takes root and the
point of the object’s incarnation. That there can be no relation between the gay man and his
partner becomes clear when one acknowledges that this non-coincidence of desire and object
occurs not only “in” the subject but also in his partner, such that the non-relation of homosexuality might be figured in logical terms as a set of two similar non-complementarities, a formula
that distinguishes the impasse of homosexuality somewhat from the one which occurs in the
heterosexual non-relation. Where heterosexuality reaches an impasse by virtue of the mutually
exclusive terrains of the different masculine and feminine fantasies, homosexuality hits the rock
of the real in consequence of the paradoxical antipathy of two subjects harbouring the same
fantasy.
This observation goes some way toward explaining not only the persistence within gay
fantasmatics of the inaccessible “straight” object who never returns the gay subject’s desire, but
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also the mystique of the authentic “top” who would “supplement” the non-relation of two subjects whose erotic economies organize themselves in psychoanalytic terms around primarily
passive objectives. Moreover, we are confronted at this point with the prospect that the ideal,
pathological coupling of the hysteric and the pervert within the heterosexual fantasmatic universe
might find its correlative within the economy of male homosexuality. Is the heterosexually- or
bisexually-identified male subject who advertises his sexual appetites in terms of his identity as
a homosexual “top” to be configured along the lines of the classic Freudian fetishist, one who
nonetheless does not adopt the resistance to desire’s homosexualization the fetish structure
makes possible? Does this subject seek to short-circuit the trauma of castration by finding an
object that in some manner “combines” the attributes of the masculine and the feminine, attributes that cannot be “synthesized” outside the structure of perversion? Would these
observations further imply that the neurotic male homosexual carries a certain vulnerability
with respect to male subjects experiencing difficulties vis-à-vis masculine sexuation, a vulnerability that only increases in intensity in a male social universe designed precisely to police the
castration of male subjects, a universe that by definition must impose the strictest of taboos
against boys’ and men’s anal and oral receptivity?
It would be comparatively uncontroversial, I would imagine, to state that the more politically
radical wings of the various gay and lesbian movements have faded into relative obscurity during the past two decades or so largely because of broader global political trends resulting from
the reaction, beginning in the 1970s, against the achievements of the postwar welfare state as
well as the devastating ideological consequences of the collapse of the Eastern bloc and the end
of the Cold War. Psychoanalytically, however, it is possible to say, concerning the paradoxical
inter-implication of sameness and difference in the psycho-libidinal economy of male homosexuality, that gay men, during the period just evoked, may have succumbed, in response to
increased social permissiveness and wider public recognition, to a confusion of the two psychical agencies Lacan called “I” and “a,” namely the idealized symbolic point of identification (what
20
Freud called the ego ideal) and the traumatic, real object-cause of desire. If it is indeed the
case, as I have suggested, that one of the specificities of male homosexuality is a kind of supplementary narcissistic cathexis of the object, such that gay men might more readily than their
heterosexual counterparts try to solder together the point of their symbolic identification (ego
ideal) with their imaginary bodily ego (ideal ego) in a manner designed to foreclose in advance
on the possibility of the emergence of the object in its traumatic, real dimension, then it might
be even more crucial for homosexually-inclined men to work toward the separation to which
Lacan refers, namely the disentanglement of the idealized, libidinally invested symbolicoimaginary narcissistic object and the real, traumatic object-cause of jouissance — the object
which, very precisely, impedes the subject’s self-relation and its ability to feel “at home” within
the terms of its own subjectivity.
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This would require recognizing that the object that causes desire is not the beautiful, selfcontained, gym-trained, hypermasculine body of, say, Tom of Finland’s men, but rather another
object: partial, decorporealized, unsettling, formless, uncanny — more akin to Dean’s trope of
the “turd.” Such an acknowledgment might have the benefit not only of knocking the postmodern
queer subject off the treadmill of consumerism, integration, conformity, and complusive sexual
activity that continues to fuel the energies of mainstream male homosexual cultures in the (postindustrial) West, but it might also train his eye to see those invisible subjects in the gay world
who, for reasons of race, socio-economic status, and — here the word is indeed acceptable —
gender, will never make it into the pages of Genre and Out. These are the “turds” of the gay
social world, turds whose staunch existence under the collective radar of the sublime gay lifestyle’s
enthusiasts betrays the illusory, deeply ideological truth of the post-Stonewall construct of the
brotherhood of men — white; upper-middle-class; Will and Grace-watching; Chelsea, Castro,
West Hollywood, or Church and Wellesley-residing — which my imagination conjures up when
I hear the term “gay community.”
1.
See especially Judith Butler, “Arguing with the Real,” in Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (New
York: Routledge, 1993), 187-222; and Antigone’s Claim:
Kinship Between Life and Death (New York: Columbia
University Press, 2000).
2. Joan Copjec’s “Sex and the Euthanasia of Reason,” in Read
My Desire: Lacan against the Historicists (Cambridge: MIT
Press, 1994), 201-236, remains the most sophisticated attempt at distinguishing the psychoanalytic concept of sexual
difference from cultural and historical approaches to sex
qua gender. Concerning the evolution of the inquiry into
homosexuality within psychoanalytic discourse, the crucial
next step is quite clearly to interrogate the relation of
sexuality qua object choice to sexual difference, and it is
precisely this inquiry that I will inaugurate in this essay.
5. Ibid., 267.
6. Ibid., 250.
7. Although he ultimately reproaches Deleuze and Guattari for
promulgating a “naive utopianism” of the Marcusean
“liberationist” variety, Dean writes that the anti-Oedipalists
“aim to depersonify desire. And apart from the vocabulary
of desiring-machines,” Dean continues, “their contentions...seem...wholly compatible with Lacan’s theory of
desire as unconscious and originating in the object a, which
is itself ‘both irreducible and prior to anything that may be
9. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick is one influential critic closely
associated with the emergence of queer theory who has
voiced deep political scepticism regarding any
consideration, psychoanalytic or not, of the genesis of homosexuality (see her Epistemology of the Closet [Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1990], 40-41). However,
when the politicization of sexuality reaches the point where
it explicitly discourages intellectual interrogation for fear
of phobic appropriation, it has, in my view, gone too far.
Such a prioritization of political self-interest above intellectual inquiry is characteristic of stances in young
oppositional cultural and political movements the logic of
which may be traced, for example, to early civil rights
discourse and the emergence of Third-World critiques of
61
4. “One’s partner is the impersonal, abstract Other,” writes
Dean, “as much as it is the individualized, personal other
who ostensibly is loved or desired” (Beyond Sexuality [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000], 85).
8. Jacques Lacan, “The Signification of the Phallus,” in Écrits:
A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1977),
282.
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3. See Renata Salecl (ed.), Sexuation (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000); Joël Dor, Structure et perversions (Paris:
Denoël, 1987); and Jean Clavreul, Le désir et la loi:
Approches psychanalytiques (Paris: Denoël, 1987). For a
brief consideration of the problematic status of homosexuality within the Lacanian discourse on sexual difference, see
my review of Salecl’s edited volume in the Journal for the
Psychoanalysis of Culture and Society 6.1 (Spring 2001):
151-154.
made to conform to the Oedipal figure’” (ibid., 242). As I
have suggested, this comment points toward one of the weak
spots of Dean’s book: since desire, according to Lacan, is
an effect of the speaking subject’s “imprisonment” within
the structures of language, any assertion about the real’s
eclipsing the (necessarily failed) representation of sexual
difference remains difficult to distinguish from a DeleuzoGuattarian attack against the symbolic order as such. It is
much more theoretically consistent, it seems to me, to state
that the “beyond” of Oedipus — and hence the “beyond” of
sexuality to which Dean wants access — is internal to the
process of oedipalization itself. One could additionally point
out that Dean’s scepticism about the value of Marcuse’s
work for queer theory betrays the rather under-nuanced
fashion in which Dean’s perspective dismisses a priori any
brand of political utopianism, and therefore the potential
investment of queer theory in programs for radically transformational social change. A further contrast between my
approach and Dean’s occurs on the level of the question of
perversion. I do not consider it wise for queer theory to
eliminate outright the concept of perversion in psychoanalysis as it relates to clinical and political practice.
colonialism. I would like to think that anti-homophobic
criticism has by now reached a state of maturity at which
resistance to such facile political posturing is no longer subject to accusations of “internalized homophobia” and
heterosexist complicity.
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62
10. Serge André, L’Imposture perverse (Paris: Seuil, 1993), 33.
Subsequent references will appear parenthetically within
the text. All translations are mine; the original French is
provided in brackets when necessary. An English translation is forthcoming in 2002 from The Other Press, New
York.
11. Sigmund Freud, “Fetishism,” in The Standard Edition of
the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed.
and trans. James Strachey et al. (London: Hogarth Press,
1953-1974), 21:154.
12. Parenthetically, it strikes me that psychoanalytic inquiries
into homosexuality, particularly when work as rich as
André’s is involved, would do well both to show a sensitivity to the transferential prejudices that have clouded the
clinical tradition on homosexuality and to resist the politically correct temptation to present a clinical picture of
homosexuality that conforms to the defensively benevolent
self-image (and quickly to dismiss all criticism of the “gay
community” as homophobic) that mainstream gay and lesbian discourses like to present of those subjects whom it
addresses.
13. Though space does not permit a full interrogation of Marc’s
case history in this essay, it is worthwhile underlining the
importance of a few of its details, given especially that it
serves to represent the neurotic homosexual structure
against which Philippe’s allegedly perverse structure is contrasted, and given also that, as I will shortly argue, André’s
diagnoses of the two analysands make more sense put the
other way round. Qualifying his erotic orientation as
“bisexual,” Marc nonetheless desires to get married and
have children. Despite a number of homosexual liaisons
during his university years, liaisons characterized most con-
sequentially by oral-penile contact, mutual masturbation,
and an atmosphere of affective warmth, Marc “has no desire
to become a homosexual,” seeking analysis in order to overcome his impotence with women, a condition he associates
with a horror of the female genitals (171). Though Marc’s
father showed tenderness toward Marc and his brothers in
their childhood, his attitude toward them became severe
and tempestuous during their adolescence, forcing Marc to
seek shelter in the orbit of his mother, with whom he develops the dreaded “complicitous intimacy.” According to
André, Marc’s Oedipal conflict is “classic”: “he desires his
mother (thanks to the fact that he was initially separated
from her through the father’s intervention) and is therefore forced to confront his father as a rival” (173-174).
Though the father’s early, caring relation with his son prevents Marc from identifying symbolically with his mother,
Marc’s “virility” is marred by his fearfulness before the later,
more “primal” version of the father. Though I agree that
the form of Marc’s castration complex is of the phallic or
masculine variety, I would suggest that André goes wrong
when he posits that this castration is “overly successful”
(177). In his inability to assume the consequences of masculine sexuation, the resulting abjection of the female sex
organs, and the associated fear of “becoming homosexual,”
Marc’s psychical economy, it appears to me, clearly instantiates the logic of the fetishistic structure.
14. See, for example, Joyce McDougall, The Many Faces of
Eros: A Psychoanalytic Exploration of Human Sexuality
(New York: Norton, 1995). In my view McDougall’s suggestive work is greatly under-appreciated in anti-homophobic
psychoanalytic theory.
15. “The fact that femininity finds its refuge in this mask [which
“dominates the identifications in which refusals of demand
are resolved”], by virtue of the fact of the Verdrängung
inherent in the phallic mark of desire, has the curious
consequence of making virile display in the human being
itself seem feminine” (Lacan, “The Signification of the
Phallus,” 291).
16. Leo Bersani, Homos (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
1996), 131.
17. Though not cast in the terms of Lacan’s concept of
sexuation, Kaja Silverman’s suggestive, but virtually ignored, work on femininity in male homosexuality in the
Freudian texts should be consulted in this respect. See “A
Woman’s Soul Enclosed in a Man’s Body: Femininity in
Male Homosexuality,” in Male Subjectivity at the Margins
(New York: Routledge, 1992), 339-388.
18. Bersani, 128, italics added.
63
20. Lacan distinguishes between these two agencies of psychic
life in the context of a gloss on Freud’s schema of the forms
of the ego in Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego.
“There is an essential difference,” he says, “between the
object defined as narcissistic, the i(a), and the function of
the a” (Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of PsychoAnalysis, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Alan Sheridan
[New York: Norton, 1977], 272). He underscores in this
manner the importance of Freud’s thesis that the dynamic
at work in both hypnosis and the phenomenon of “collective fascination” associated with the rise of Hitler involves
the psychical superimposition of the ego ideal — the place
in the symbolic order from which the subject views itself in
a positive light — and the object of fantasy, which vacillates
between its consoling but aggression-producing imaginary
version and its traumatic, uncanny real one. Lacan will later
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19. “The girl,” Freud writes, “accepts castration as an accomplished fact, whereas the boy fears the possibility of its
occurrence” (“Dissolution of the Oedipus Complex,” in SE
19:178). Similarly, in “Some Psychical Consequences of the
Anatomical Distinction Between the Sexes,” he writes: “A
little girl behaves differently [from the boy who, upon
glimpsing the girl’s genitals, “begins by showing irresolution and lack of interest; sees nothing or disavows what he
has seen”]. She makes her judgement and her decision in a
flash. She has seen it and knows that she is without it and
wants to have it” (SE 19:252).
say that “the fundamental mainspring [ressort
fondamental] of the analytic operation is the maintenance
of the distance between the I — identification — and the a”
(ibid., 273; Lacan, Le séminaire, livre XI: Les quatre concepts fondamentaux de la psychanalyse, ed. Jacques-Alain
Miller [Paris: Seuil, 1973], 304). I would suggest that the
problem of Lacan’s use of both the lower-case and capital
letter should be resolved by understanding i(a) as a reference to the imaginary object of identification (Idealich or
ideal ego), and I as the symbolic object (Ichideal or ego
ideal). The mechanism of separation or distanciation to
which Lacan refers as integral to the analytic process and to
the dissolution of group fascination implies therefore the
extrication of the real object of jouissance from both forms
of the ego — symbolic and imaginary. In terms of the working-through of the transference that occurs in the clinical
context, this implies for Lacan that the direction of the dynamic of hypnosis be reversed in such a fashion that the
analysand be forced to encounter the analyst as a stupid,
inert, “hypnotized” automaton devoid of concrete knowledge about its desire. For Freud’s own discussion of his
schema, see Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego,
in SE 18:65-143.
peggy phelan
REFLECTIONS ON ANDY WARHOL AND RONALD REAGAN
THE SAME:
I had a good friend who loved to reply, “Same ol’, same ol’” whenever I
asked how she was. After she delivered this assessment, she’d laugh conspiratorially and say, “Thank God.” To her, a barometer tuned to
sameness was the truest indicator of her emotional climate. After a tumultuous childhood, a steady life was an ideal life. This aspiration is
common enough, but my friend was exceptional in the theatricality of
her pronouncement: the repetition of “same ol’” had to be exact. She
concentrated completely on producing the same flat affect and the same
amount of breath in each of the four words. It was as if the ability to say
the words was the guarantee that she had arrived in a landscape of The
Same. And then, having arrived once more, her bubbling laughter —
effusive, emotional, relieved — seemed to give it all away. She could
afford to laugh because she had accomplished the same difficult speech
act one more time.
Her mini-performance, repeated often, helped me see the appeal of
sameness. I had thought that an ideal life required adventure, a hazard
of countries, languages, currencies, experiences. I was part of the
generation that began by speaking the mantra of sexual and racial
difference and ended up mouthing the mantra of diversity in the
workplace, while witnessing the hollowing out of the political force of
everything in between. Here, I have been invited to reflect on the
transformation of our fixation on difference into our contemporary
preoccupation with the same. It’s easy enough to see the trap in this
invitation — let’s really be different and write about the same. But I hope
that the discussion will do something more than celebrate difference’s
adaptive capacities. I think the best way to ensure the more radical possibility at the heart of the romance with the same is indeed to see it as
romance, as a melody that makes us move toward one another.
In recent years I have argued that Andy Warhol and Ronald Reagan
are the same in that they both fell in love with the same and made the
rest of us want to fall too. Warhol, the supreme copyist of our age,
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66
understood the appeal of the same in part because he grew up in a lower-class immigrant household and recognized early on that he would have to perfect a kind of mimicry in order to deflect
attention from the things he disliked (his nose, for example) toward the things he did like (his
art, especially his drawings on paper). Perceiving himself as permanently barred from feeling at
home with the glamorous and powerful (even when he was at the height of his fame), Warhol
tried to make each act, each artwork, each dinner party, a variation on the same. His explanation
for why he painted Campbell’s soup cans — “because I ate soup every day for lunch for twenty
years” — was his first foray into fame; before long, he had created his own factory dedicated to
the production of Andy Warhols. Believing that if he had a model he’d know what to do, Warhol
took sex classes to learn how to do it; he silk-screened dance diagrams and placed them on the
floor of the Sable gallery to teach himself and others where to put their feet; and he studiously
read fashion magazines, first to learn how to dress and act, and then to learn how to make a
better magazine himself. Learning to make a better life took a little longer.
Enthralled by the effects of the copy, Warhol dedicated himself to the complex labor of loving
the same. Part of such love involves a high tolerance for boredom, and Warhol surely was the
champion of endurance. Films such as Sleep, a five-hour-and-twenty-one-minute film of John
Giorno sleeping, and Empire, an eight-hour single shot of the Empire State Building as the light
on its façade changes, confirmed that. Taping the conversations of Ondine for twenty-four hours
to create the 451-page a: a novel, Warhol also recorded his own seemingly infinite tolerance for
the mundane. Absolutely radical in his acceptance of the dull, Warhol made his art from that
which we look at over and over and therefore overlook. Like his brothers who owned a scrap
shop, Andy was good at recycling and reusing what would otherwise be discarded or remaindered
as everyday junk. For him, newspapers, photobooth portraits, and old shoes became objects
with which to create an immense archive of the same.
Unlike those hooked on exact repetition and replication, however, Warhol was interested in
the invariable errors and mistakes that made the pursuit of the same an always-failed enterprise. He said he preferred transmutations to transmissions, and not only in the realm of the
transfer from source to copy: he celebrated errors in the performance of subjectivity itself. “I can
never visualize the right person in a part,” Warhol writes in his Philosophy. “The right person
for the right part would be too much. Besides, no person is ever completely right for any part,
because a part in a role is never real, so if you can’t get someone who’s perfectly right, it’s more
1
satisfying to get someone who’s perfectly wrong. Then you know you’ve really got something.”
And if Warhol was obsessed with anything, it was with getting something. Thinking like a young
starlet but powerful enough to do something with such thoughts, Warhol transformed the tradition of the casting couch. In his film Couch, Warhol frames the place where the young starlet
performed privately in order to gain a job as a public performer and makes it the setting for
sexual trysts involving combinations of partners that make the Hollywood couch appear tame
indeed. Warhol’s interest in casting “someone who’s perfectly wrong” opened up performance
opportunities for a wide and often wild assortment of Superstars.
67
Ronald Reagan, like Warhol, was devoted to the fine arts of transmutation, transmission, and
transference. He understood that such arts rely on repetition, recitation, and the ability to please
a diverse audience with the same jokes, the same political allegories, and the same dark fears.
But he also learned — the hard way — that while he enjoyed repeating the same stories, his
audience did not necessarily like to hear them again and again. Reagan’s first wife, Jane Wyman,
cited Reagan’s “boring conversation” as one of the contributing factors in her decision to seek a
divorce. Among the many results of the divorce was Reagan’s ambition to keep enlarging his
audience. He also seems to have tried to turn his fondness for repetition into something with
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Like Herman Melville’s Bartleby, Warhol was a copyist who outwitted the masters of modern
capital. He “preferred not” to celebrate the cult of artistic originality; rather, he forged a career
based on reversing and exposing the values that both sustain and corrupt high art. These values
are linked to the values of the erotic market as well. Taking the grade school art class as his
inspiration, Warhol hosted “coloring parties” as an alternative to the gay cruising scene, on the
one hand, and as a more erotic adult education class, on the other. He’d invite handsome young
men over to his apartment to color in his round outlines of cherubs, cats, and shoes. A group of
men would sit around the table, passing work back and forth while Julia Warhola, the artist’s
mother, would encourage them. After finishing their work, the men would be taken out to a
party. Warhol understood artistic inspiration as a measure of erotic desire: those who inspired
him to go to work, rather than to go to bed, were often his most revered objects of desire. Truman
Capote turned him into a secretary — no small feat given Warhol’s casual regard for written
English. And then, having failed to receive a response to one year’s worth of daily love letters,
Warhol turned to drawing covers for Capote’s books. These drawings are remarkable for their
sameness: fey cupids darting about looking for a place to land their arrows. But these frolicking
cherubs should not obscure the aggressivity involved in Warhol’s use of them. Warhol covered
Capote’s books in images of the same figures because he sought a way to withstand the erotic
distraction to which Tru-man, the fiction writer, drove him. In so doing, Warhol made it seem as
if every book Capote wrote contained only two words: love me. Covering pages written by Truman
with his drawings of naked angels and naked boys wielding arrows and pens, Warhol also was
drawing out his attraction to the author. Because Warhol was simultaneously drawn to Truman
and withdrawn from him, he covered and smothered Capote’s creativity with his own. Erotic
drive transformed Warhol’s blotted line into a quivering arrow tracing the imprint of someone
else’s earlier touch. Warhol’s art returns repeatedly to a previous line in order to realign it within
the groove of his own erotic drive.
which he could charm his next wife, Nancy Davis. Together, the Reagans made their lives resemble a film. When confronted with his tendency to confuse real life with films, Reagan readily
admitted that he “probably watched too many war movies, the heroics of which [he] sometimes
confused with real life.”2
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68
His love letters to Nancy, written over a period of forty years throughout dramatically different economic and political circumstances, all convey the same theme: I can’t wait to get home to
Mommie. While Warhol was able to reduce or to concentrate Capote’s fictional output to the
words love me through his covers, Nancy Reagan was able to encourage Reagan’s attraction to
the same by turning herself into a kind of still center, a constant version of the same for him.
Able to laugh repeatedly at the same joke she had heard hundreds of times, her tolerance for
boredom was much greater than Jane Wyman’s. Had it been focused on more than one man, it
might have rivaled Warhol’s own. Warhol recognized his affinity with Nancy and worked hard to
get her to allow him to use her image on the December 1981 cover of Interview. His magazine
was among the first to be more fascinated by Nancy than by the president.
Ronnie’s interest in Nancy was abiding, but it was an interest that began well before he knew
her. In his usual disarmingly candid way (he often seems to be the only public figure bereft of
any awareness of his own unconscious), he addressed her as Mommie in his most intimate letters. She has recently published excerpts from this astonishing correspondence. Her decision to
make these letters public can perhaps be explained as an expression of a long-repressed
aggressivity, not unlike Warhol’s response to Capote’s lack of reply to his demonstrations of
love. Having been off-stage now for some eleven years, and caring full time for Ronnie, who may
no longer remember that she remains his still center and still the center of his life, perhaps
Nancy decided to publish this private correspondence because of her own drive to be recognized
in the external world now. In 1967, while governor of California, he wrote:
Dear Mommie,
The Gov. slept here — but not well. We have to stop this silly business. In fact I may buy a tent, load
the jeep, take you away from all your friends & go live on our mountain. Then we’ll only talk to each
other [sic?].
I love you & I’ll see you Sunday.
The Traveling, Non Sleeping
3
Guv.
But of course they never did go live on a mountain. Instead he dedicated himself to revealing
what he liked repeatedly to call the “shining city on a hill,” and shortly after they left the White
House, he became too ill. But they did hold fast to their repetitions. Actors trained in mouthing
others’ words, Nancy and Ronnie might be seen as avatars of postmodern theories of intimacy
as a series of iterations and replays. From the White House, on a small piece of White House
stationery, he wrote “I love you” ten times, like a schoolboy at the blackboard. Between the ninth
and tenth repetition he inserted the phrase “And besides that,” as if to demonstrate that he
would brook no objection and that he knew she would never need to make any. (It’s also a good
hint of Reagan’s style of argument: repeat the same point without variation.) Nancy has reprinted
it along with some of the many cards and letters he sent her throughout their long marriage. Her
caption reads: “I had this note framed and keep it on my desk today.”4 Another letter written
from The White House reads:
Welcome Home Little “Poopchin.”
I’ve missed you and can’t wait to get home tonight.
…
I miss you, I love you, I miss you, I love you etc. etc. etc. Well, I’ll be with you soon and if I haven’t
made it clear I really do love you.
5
Your Husband
69
One morning not long ago I spent hours pouring over photographs of Ronnie and Nancy at
the Ronald Reagan Presidential Museum and Library in Simi Valley, California. I took a break
for lunch and while seated outside on the small terrace, I saw Nancy walk by in the very same
clothes she had been wearing in photographs taken twenty years before. Her hair, shoes, and
earrings were the same. I was startled. I thought that perhaps I had spent too much time staring
at pictures and that my psyche, in a state of rebellion against all that stillness, had created this
animated hallucination. Unsure, I decided to test the veracity of the walking doll I saw in front of
me. I smiled and asked, “How are you?” Two security guards came forward and formed a kind
of human shield around her. I realized I desperately wanted her to reply, “Same ol’, same ol.’”
But of course she did not. She smiled and asked instead, “Are you enjoying the library?” Before
I could reply, the security men had whisked her into the back seat of a black car. As they drove
away, I turned back to the acres of papers, prints, and photographs that comprise the Reagan
archive, and realized the whole project was dedicated to keeping everything about the fortieth
president exactly the same. Thus, when the forty-second president, George W. Bush, tries, as he
often does, to be like Reagan, I know it is redundant. It’s all already The Same.
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The repeating et ceteras here are affectionately exhausted. The erotics of exhaustion are among
the same’s most fascinating fruits. To repeat “I miss you, I love you etc.” is to revel in the freedom of not needing to be new. And perhaps the liberation from reflection, the exemption from
anything as strenuous as originality, encourages a kind of lightness and laughter that offset the
difficult drama of trying to be The Same Reagans in public.
1.
Andy Warhol, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol: From A
to B and Back Again (New York: Harcourt Brace
Jovanovich, 1975), 83.
2. Qtd. in Lou Cannon, President Reagan: The Role of a Lifetime (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1991), 60.
3. Nancy Reagan, I Love You, Ronnie: The Letters of Ronald
Reagan to Nancy Reagan (New York: Random House,
2000), 97.
4. Ibid., 142.
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70
5. Ibid., 139.
graham l. hammill
ARE WE BEING HOMOSEXUAL YET?
The question that my title raises is implied, I think, in Michel Foucault’s
later writings and his interviews on homosexuality. The scandal concerning the Homosexual that, according to Foucault, nineteenth-century
science invented is that he cannot escape his sexuality. It pervades,
defines, and freezes his very being. “Nothing that went into his total composition was unaffected by his sexuality. It was everywhere with him.”
His homosexuality “was consubstantial with him.”1 Homosexuality
becomes a secret that, try as he may, the homosexual cannot hide because it is now manifest in his gestures, his choice of clothes, and his
facial expressions. In this scenario, to be a homosexual is to recast one’s
own particular relation to the problem of being within the generic
protocols of homosexual desire and enjoyment, so that within these protocols one can discover the truth of being. In contrast, Foucault argues,
to be gay is explicitly and purposively “not to identify with the psychological traits and the visible masks of the homosexual,” not to be trapped
in a game of recognition in which to be a homosexual is to let sexuality
define the very truth of one’s being, either through identification or
through the logic of repression. But if we are working not to be homosexual in one way, it seems that we are not quite homosexual in another.
“We have to work at becoming homosexuals,” Foucault explains, “and
not be obstinate in recognizing that we are.” To be gay is not to be, but to
become, to invent, define, and develop a “way of life.” Instead of following the progressions for individual and social development established
and rendered meaningful by heterosexual rituals, gays “face each other
without terms or convenient words, with nothing to assure them about
the meaning of the movement that carries them towards each other. [We]
have to invent, from A to Z, a relationship that is still formless.” 2
Of course, this is not at all to suggest that straights — singles and
couples, men and women — have easy or untroubled relations to the
rituals and cultures of heterosexuality. Nor is it to suggest that some
straights might not have a great deal invested in ways of being outside
these rituals and cultures. In many ways, to characterize homosexuality
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72
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in opposition to heterosexuality too narrowly limits the general problem of sexuality and desire
against which Foucault positions his works. But Foucault’s statements suggest that one of the
things that distinguishes gays from straights is the peculiar relation that homosexuality assumes
to knowledge and practice. Because the nineteenth-century invention of the generic homosexual
is accompanied by a general prohibition of practical knowledge about how to be a homosexual,
this invention introduces a syncope in the field of sexed being. Instead of attempting to express
the essence of homosexuality (which is impossible to know how to do even if one gives over to
the demand to be a homosexual), gay practice as Foucault envisions it paradoxically seizes this
syncope in order to turn against that essence. It is here that psychoanalysis has most productively taken up the Foucauldian problematic, for this relation to knowledge suggests that the
homosexual lifestyle engages the unconscious outside a logic of prohibition. As Leo Bersani
argues, whereas male heterosexuality is a “traumatic privileging of difference” as sexual difference, male homosexuality privileges a “sameness” that “has already detraumatized sexual difference.” “[S]ame-sex desire,” Bersani proposes, “while it excludes the other sex as its object,
presupposes a desiring subject for whom the antagonism between the different and the same no
longer exists.”3 Rather, in the detraumatizing of sexual difference, what is not known is not prohibited but emerges in a version of practice that, in turning against its own particular determination, engages the unknown as non-connectedness and non-relationality. For Bersani, this
non-relationality is the means by which to transfigure generic homosexuality into new modes of
sociality. As he and Ulysse Dutoit so precisely put it, “homosexual desire is a reaching out toward an other sameness. Homosexuality expresses a homoness that vastly exceeds it but that it
nonetheless has the privilege, and the responsibility, of making visible.”4
But, at least following Foucault, this reaching out towards another sameness has less to do
with a supposed sameness between sexual subject and object and more to do with homosexuality’s
relation to history. Because gay practice is grounded on a syncope, in the task of invention, what
gays face in a particular way and as a particular kind of group is the otherness of history as
immanent possibility. “Homosexuality,” writes Foucault, “is a historic occasion to re-open affective and relational virtualities, not so much through the intrinsic qualities of the homosexual but
because the ‘slantwise’ position of the latter, as it were, the diagonal lines he can lay out in the
social fabric allow these virtualities to come to light.” There is, of course, nothing permanent
about homosexuality’s relation with this immanent possibility. Foucault insists that whatever is
significant about homosexuality is so because homosexuality has an occasional — and not
enduring — relation to historical alterity. Even so, Foucault insists, this relation to the otherness
of history is what makes homosexuality so disturbing and so interesting: not just that two or
more men are having sex, but more specifically that as a life practice these two or more men
offer “new alliances” and “unforeseen,” “improbable” modes of being.5
I suggest that what sustains this relation to historical alterity is the aesthetic. This is not to
privilege the aesthetic as such, but to privilege its relation to mediation. It is specifically through
the aesthetic’s capacity for mediating the nonconceptual that homosexuality can empty itself of
its pseudo-scientific and psychological significance and express “an other sameness” as a nonnecessary but not impossible future sociality. In what follows, I shall begin with a discussion of
how in the 1990s queer theory used the performative to suggest and to occlude relations between
homosexuality and historical alterity; I shall then go on to explore some ways in which a psychoanalytic ethics in conjunction with Theodor W. Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory may help to elaborate
the kinds of relations between homosexuality and historical alterity that Foucault suggests.
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Sedgwick uses the performative to elaborate queer as a rhetorical practice. In Tendencies, she
places the term “queer” in opposition to the unity of meaning produced by the social equivalents
that conspire to solidify social identity and social time. The social, as Sedgwick presents it, is
comprised of a fractured set of semi-autonomous spheres that tends to line up as almost irresistible analogies, especially when it comes to endowing sexual identity with meaning. Education,
family, religion, the medical establishment, government, and entertainment all conspire to consolidate heterosexual masculinity and femininity and to endow each with value and significance.
Queer, Sedgwick proposes, unjoins and disengages these seemingly irresistible analogies which
support that unity of meaning. To this extent, she argues, queer “can never only denote.”
Unlimited by its content, queer has the formal effect of disarticulation in its show of representational force. Sedgwick suggests that queer “seems to hinge much more radically and explicitly
on a person’s undertaking particular, performative acts of experimental self-perception and
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In contemporary queer studies, historical alterity has been among the most under-theorized of
all the various forms of otherness now under consideration. Queer studies has tended to transform what for Foucault is an historical relation to the otherness of history into a kind of essential
being, so that to be a homosexual is to be granted the immediacy of political subversion. In this
way, a turn from the figure of the homosexual whose sexuality is consubstantial with him has
led to identification with the figure of the homosexual whose politics is consubstantial with him.
What has permitted this argument for political immediacy is, I think, the pervasiveness of the
performative as a heuristic for characterizing the particularly complex relations of sexuality to
communication. Inasmuch as it does not emphasize mediation, the performative can turn into a
kind of discursive realism in which, as J. L. Austin puts it, saying makes it so.6 Of course, this
need not be so. Early on in queer studies, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick used the performative to highlight the relationship between Foucauldian ethics and history. But when the performative became,
especially with Judith Butler’s work, a means of theorizing political being, it also became the
means for expressing homosexual enjoyment as politically forceful in itself.
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filiation”; queer performativity “dramatizes locutionary position itself,” the position implied by
what Austin calls the locutionary act — the act, that is, of saying something.7 As well as a rhetorical
practice, queer performativity engages a certain ethical practice in which one stylizes oneself
through a mode of address that aims to unhinge social equivalents.
To explain what I mean, let me contrast Sedgwick’s use of the performative with Austin’s. As
is well known, Austin defines the performative as a statement that does something as it is said.
What distinguishes the performative from statements that report or describe something is that
it is judged felicitous or infelicitous, and not true or false, in reference to a set of protocols that
the performative assumes (for example, that there exist a set of conventions by which the statement can be judged, that the persons and circumstances are appropriate for the attempted actions,
that all participants act according to the assumed conventions, and so on).8 For the performative
statement “I do” to work, it must be uttered in the officially sanctioned conventions of the marriage ceremony, with all relevant participants acting in accord with these conventions during
the ceremony and after. Austin is primarily interested in what he calls illocutionary acts,
“performance[s] of an act in saying something as opposed to performance[s] of an act of saying
something.” 9 As he argues, illocutionary acts are utterly conventional; they work precisely to the
degree that they conform to an assumed though unarticulated set of social protocols. One might
say in a more Lacanian vein that illocutionary acts are addresses to the Other that find their
satisfaction in the satisfaction of the Other. Moreover, as Shoshana Felman has demonstrated,
the illocutionary act produces a referential excess — “the force of utterance” — upon which the
performative is grounded; this is a force that the conventions by which the performative is judged
do not and cannot grasp. Instead, the performative is caught in the temporality of repetition and
failure.10 For Sedgwick, queer stands several degrees apart from this mode of address. Her
emphasis on queer performativity assumes illocutionary acts that dramatize the locutionary position precisely to the degree that they fail to conform to an assumed, unarticulated set of social
protocols. In her use of the performative, Sedgwick argues for a mode of address that aims to
produce disjunction in the Other, and the disjunction that this address produces becomes the
ground for “experimental self-perception and filiation,” new and unexpected relations to oneself
and to others.11 Although Sedgwick herself does not make this argument, her analysis implies
that what enables queer performativity to function as an ethical practice is the way in which, as
a rhetorical mode of address, it attempts to get the subject out of the time of the Other. Aiming
precisely at “junctures” where “meanings and institutions can be at loose ends with each other,”
queer performativity attempts to engage a temporality outside an insistent repetition that
Sedgwick perhaps best characterizes in the title of her chapter I have been discussing: “Queer
and Now.”12
The “now” that Sedgwick demands is not grounded in the display of the ego but in a fundamental re-orientation of knowledge. What kept queer from being the 1990s version of the 1970s
This line of questioning is more or less what Judith Butler’s use of the performative tends to
foreclose. With Butler, the performative casts queer as a reified category of being. In Gender
Trouble, she proposes that far from being an a priori essence, sex is an effect of repeated selfstylization. Sex, she argues, is not before the symbolic; it is an effect of repetition within the
symbolic.14 Worrying over how her earlier, anti-essentialist analysis got misinterpreted to mean
that one can freely create one’s own sexuality, that one could in fact control this repetition,
Butler returns to the performative in Bodies that Matter to argue that it splits the subject between
psychological and political being. In part, she argues that the performative assumes a social
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While I do not mean to suggest that Sedgwick pulls together the various threads that I have
been discussing, especially when considered against the obviously Foucauldian backdrop of her
work, she does imply a crucial question concerning homosexuality and historical alterity: How
might queer, as a rhetorical and ethical practice, help to produce gay culture outside the epochal
logic of western modernity? How, that is, might queer help to produce a minor culture whose
relation to historical alterity — past, present, and future — asserts the now over and against the
modern?
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free play of différance, and what still lets the term remain open for critical recuperation today, is
its trenchantly historical relation to homosexuality, a relation that is rendered critically necessary by the legitimating efforts of the modern age. As Freud, Klaus Theweleit, and others have
argued, homosexuality serves a double-duty in the modern age. As Sedgwick puts it, on the one
hand, same-sex bonding is “heightened in its visibility, in its perceived problematicalness, and
not least importantly in its investments with a charge specifically of ‘sexuality’ and of sexual
representativeness and of sexual knowledge.” 13 On the other hand, she continues, the modern
regime maintains an intense separation between this heightened visibility, as both homosexuality
and homosociality, and anything that would allow the charges of deviant sexuality to be legitimately inhabited with any sense of emotional and ethical complexity. In other words, queer
makes the assumption that the modern age is predicated upon a homophobic prohibition, a
kind of learned ignorance, which positivizes the unknowing of homosexual desire. This learned
ignorance lets the modern age exclude an understanding of its operant principles from the modes
of knowledge that these principles tend to produce, thereby making homosexual practice — in
lifestyle, sexual acts, and both aesthetic and critical production — into a strange allegory for
modernity’s lack of self-knowing. Situating this historical thesis in the context of Sedgwick’s
discussion of the performative, it becomes clear that as a representational practice, queer has
the force of disarticulation only to the extent that it grounds itself upon that unknowing, neither
to reinstate homophobic prohibition nor to cathect homosexual identity in an effort to re-instate
liberal self-understanding, but to navigate a third way which attempts to challenge the modern
age in its reliance on a backdoor metaphysics of sexuality.
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psychology of repudiation. Inasmuch as the performative posits identity through the reiteration
of norms by which that identity is rendered legible or illegible, licit or illicit, performativity presupposes fantasmatic figures that are at the same time prohibited. For heterosexual bourgeois
culture, organized as it is around the nuclear family, these figures tend to be those of abjected
homosexuality. As Butler puts it, “[t]he binarism of feminized male homosexuality, on the one
hand, and masculinized female homosexuality, on the other, is itself produced as the restrictive
specter that constitutes the defining limits of symbolic exchange. Importantly, these are specters produced by that symbolic as its threatening outside to safeguard its constituting hegemony.”15 That is, as gender is articulated through the norm of heterosexuality, it also produces
homosexuality as a confusing, spectral limit. I would like to leave to one side the clunky generality of this formulation — the way in which the logical formulation Butler locates seeps into and
determines the content of the symbolic, as if social fantasy were on the same level of generality
as symbolic forms — and point out instead its bizarre political claim: because of this logic of
repudiation, to be gay or lesbian is already to do political work. If “the heterosexual presumption of the symbolic domain is that apparently inverted identifications will effectively and exclusively signal abjection rather than pleasure, or signal abjection without at once signaling the
possibility of a pleasurable insurrection against the law or an erotic turning of the law against
itself,” then, Butler reasons, “the resignification of gay and lesbian sexuality through and against
abjection is itself an unanticipated reformulation and proliferation of the symbolic itself.” 16 The
political imperative here is, simply, Enjoy your homosexuality! The performative assumes a
politics of subversion. As Butler argues, “[i]f the figures of homosexualized abjection must be
repudiated for sexed positions to be assumed, then the return of those figures as sites of erotic
cathexis will refigure the domain of contested positionalities within the symbolic,” as “a subversive rearticulation of the symbolic.”17 In her political commitments, Butler reifies the mediation
of a prohibition on homosexuality into politicized being. In her argument, consciousness of a
homophobic prohibition implies the mediation of that prohibition in such a way that proffers
homosexual enjoyment not in its quiddity but in its radical otherness. Butler’s political recasting
of performativity claims this otherness as the basis for identity in a deeply solipsistic effort to
break through the mediation of alterity to the incarnation of Difference itself.
While the utopian hope of Butler’s argument is for homosexuality as a political form of being
that can, in its being, magically divest the social of its repressive force, the net effect of her use of
performativity is the reification of queer in relation to a totalized version of the social. More than
likely, any articulation of identity through the performative gravitates towards this possibility,
insofar as the performative constitutively reproduces alienated identity as a means for satisfying
social value — the felicity or infelicity of the performative utterance evaluated in relation to
abstract and, in most accounts, generally unlocated social norms. What makes the performative
so susceptible to such a debasement, is that it cannot grasp representational force as an historical
form. Austin will propose that illocutionary force is a matter of convention, “an act done as
conforming to a convention,” but he offers no strong way of grasping that force as the expression
of a historically specific authority.18 In general, this may not be such a problem, but for queer
theory it is, especially since instead of achieving some radical force, in the 1990s queer has attained an exhibition value that has simply commodified queer and endowed it with exchange
value in the marketplaces of the academia and of youth culture. We will go further, I think, if
with Foucault we conceive of homosexuality as a practice that produces a knowledge that it
cannot entirely grasp. In a certain sense, this is only to suggest that queer must maintain a more
materialist version of mediation, one that grasps homosexuality in relation to a horizon of understanding. In another sense, it is also to suggest that it is by way of this queer knowledge that
contemporary homosexuality maintains a relation with the historical alterity that Foucault locates. But this will mean taking much more seriously the unconscious and its relation to history.
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There is a knowledge which is not known, a knowledge of enjoyment about which the speaking
being wants to know nothing at all. Proposing this as a definition of the unconscious, Lacan
argues that “[t]he subject,” at least the psychoanalytic subject, “results from the fact that this
knowledge must be learned.” Is Lacan suggesting that we must find in enjoyment the truth of
our being? Is this metaphysical quest the project of psychoanalysis? Far from it. Ever interested
in rendering dynamic the structural reference points that he adduces, Lacan goes on to argue
that such an effort would be impossible. If the knowledge that must be learned is “in the Other,”
it is not something that the Other can communicate as information. “The hitch,” as Lacan puts
it, “is that the Other, as locus, knows nothing.”19 The point of Lacan’s seemingly contradictory
statements is that, while the effort to discover in enjoyment the truth of our being is an inadequate way to grasp the unknown knowledge of enjoyment that burdens the subject, it is not
enough simply to stop asking the question. Rather, we must also understand the work that the
question attempts to accomplish. The problem, Lacan argues, is that the effort to find in enjoyment the truth of our being obscures and covers up the Other’s fundamental incompleteness. To
stop doing this, we must also begin to elaborate new ways for relating to and understanding the
incompleteness of the Other. Let’s return to Foucault’s sentences that I quoted earlier. In turning
from the homosexual whose sexuality is consubstantial with him, gays “face each other without
terms or convenient words, with nothing to assure them about the meaning of the movement
that carries them towards each other. [We] have to invent, from A to Z, a relationship that is still
formless.” 20 Here, where the Other does not know, where meaning, ritual, and social customs
fail, we must invent more than just new ways of talking about relationships. We must invent
new languages and new ways of relating to one another and to meaning.
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Meaning is, of course, a tricky thing. As a general rule, Lacan proposes, every subject constituted
in the field of meaning will have encountered the problem of desire in meaning’s constitutive
capacity to go awry. “A lack is encountered by the subject in the Other, in the very intimation
that the Other makes to him by his discourse. In the intervals of the discourse of the Other, there
emerges...something that is radically mappable, namely, He is saying this to me, but what does
he want?” 21 In the intervals of the discourse of the Other, the subject encounters the incompleteness of the Other’s knowledge. However, in an attempt to make these intervals mean, the subject
goes on to impute to the Other some knowledge about the subject that would supposedly complete it. For an epoch such as ours, in which the question of how to find in sexuality the truth of
one’s being is so insistently central, the subject specifically imputes to the Other knowledge of
his or her particular relation to sexual enjoyment. Such an investment in the Other amounts to
granting the Other the capacity to define the being of the subject as “what would have been if
you had understood what I ordered you to do,” as Lacan puts it.22 Taking on this demand leads
to a series of difficult questions concerning sexuality: What do I do as a man? What do I do as a
woman? What does my homosexuality mean? But such questions are simply red herrings that
trap the subject increasingly in the domain of the Other, as formulations that quite neatly serve
to organize subjective alienation. Taking on these questions will simply locate and focus the
temporal conundrum which is this demand’s fundamental ruse. To any effort to be a good man,
woman, homosexual, or whatever, the Other can respond by proposing an alternative past —
“what would have been if you had understood what I told you to do” — that serves to measure
the inadequacy of your comprehension. For contemporary gays, this dynamic can become quite
serious. Think, for example, of the increasing popularity of conversion parties, in which socalled “seekers” have unsafe sex with “gift givers,” HIV positive men, so that the former can
become infected with AIDS. These parties amount to submitting homosexual being to the Other’s
demands for authenticity in order to short-circuit those demands’ temporal conundrum with
the implacable finitude seemingly afforded by a terminal disease while also claiming the infinite
enjoyment seemingly afforded by unprotected sex. The assumption of these parties is that the
authentic truth of homosexual being turns out to have been AIDS after all, and to acknowledge
this truth is to recover that most authentic of expressions of gay male enjoyment: bareback sex.
With a psychoanalytic ethics, the speaking being must learn how to divest the Other of this
ersatz omniscience by coming to understand that, in its address to the Other, the subject engages a more radical otherness that neither the subject nor the Other comprehends. In response
to the question, He is saying this to me, but what does he want?, Lacan proposes two reference
points: the generalized Other that stands in as the locus of meaning from which the subject is
constitutively alienated, and the particularized objet a that marks an alterity accessible neither
to the subject nor to the generalized Other. And he goes on to argue for the separation of these
two as the basis for psychoanalytic practice. Instead of hearing in this question a demand to be,
the psychoanalytic subject (the Lacanian subject, at least) must confront the fact that the Other
does not know. Although it is nearly impossible to avoid punctuating the intervals one encounters
in the discourse of the Other with a question mark, Lacan suggests the importance of formalizing the question itself in order to shift the problem from one of meaning — how in practice do I
answer the question of desire as it seemingly issues from the Other? — to one of being — in what
ways has this question inadequately formulated particular relations between the subject, the
Other, and a more radical alterity? That is, in formalizing the question of desire, one can begin to
see that question’s inadequacy in organizing and determining the being of the subject. Formalization does not, of course, render being more meaningful. Rather, in this formalization, the
objet a, which marks this alterity, becomes “an absolute point with no knowledge” — no knowledge for the subject and no knowledge for the Other.23 As such, it is the point that marks the
possibility of loosening the Other’s stranglehold on being by translating the seeming inevitability
of submitting to the Other in order to gain self-understanding into a more radical understanding of the contingency of knowledge and enjoyment.
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Recently, Tim Dean has proposed that this separation of radical alterity from a generalized
Other is at issue in certain relations between male homosexuality and art. Acting as if the generalized Other knows something about the subject’s particularized relation to otherness amounts
to a secondary process of personification, as Dean terms it, in which the subject attempts to allay
his or her self-perceived strangeness by acting as if the Other held the keys to the correct forms
of being.24 In this act of personification, the subject defends against alterity as if it were a radical
threat. And, of course, in some senses it is a radical threat, since the alterity in question threatens
to divest the subject of its comfortably alienated relation to meaning and self-understanding.
Instead of understanding sexuality as the expression and communication of deeply personal
feelings, Dean, following Bersani, argues that we must recognize the extent to which sexuality
engages a fundamental non-connectedness and non-relationality that short-circuit recognition
and meaning. This non-connectedness, Dean argues, is what gay sexuality is already about:
“While arguments extolling the democratic utopianism of queer public sex totally mystify what
actually goes on in the sex clubs and outdoor venues where men gather for sex, nevertheless the
sexual activity in these places has the virtue of emphasizing connections with body parts rather
than with persons. Gay public sex is often thoroughly impersonal in a way that throws into relief
how relationality involves other persons contingently. Men having sex through a gloryhole reveal
that sexual relationality is as much about the Other and the objet a as it is about interpersonal
connectedness.” 25 Crucial here for Dean is not sexual enjoyment in itself but the relation to alterity
that gay public sex formulates. These practices of more or less anonymous sex suggest that sexuality fundamentally is much more about impersonal personification and alterity than it is about
self-expression.
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Moreover, Dean argues, the creative potential of the gay lifestyle lies not simply in the proliferation of sexual pleasures but more significantly in the expansion of ways for expressing and
navigating radical otherness through aesthetics. Noting specifically that AIDS has entered the
contemporary symbolic order to such an extent that on the level of social fantasy “each of us is
living with AIDS,” Dean proposes that it has become extraordinarily urgent to show how that
statement concerning existence does not comprehensively define homosexual being.26 Contemporary homosexuality needs an understanding of the aesthetic that explores and expands the
capaciousness of homosexual being and homosexual enjoyment outside the domain of sexual
practice. Dean argues that, instead of giving oneself over to the Other and attempting to personify
the homosexual to find the truth of our being, we must sublate homosexuality’s fundamental
relation to alterity into a variety of aesthetic manifestations, of which he proposes sexual experiences may be a subset. The aesthetic does not transcend sexuality; it subsumes and clarifies it.
Dean writes:
The high estimation of male beauty that is so common among certain men should be understood as a
subset of a more general aesthetic commitment to beauty, rather than as a specific sexual preference....
Not only would it be narrow-minded to treat aesthetic passion as either superior or inferior to sexual
passion, but there exists ample historical grounds for claiming that homosexual investments in art
precede our current definition of gayness in primarily erotic terms. From a psychoanalytic perspective, the leather queen’s admiration of bodies at the gym is just as much a sublimation as the opera
27
queen’s passion for arias.
Following Lacan, Dean proposes that accessing the alterity that art affords would involve separating the particular alterity around which each subject is constituted from the generalized Other,
a separation that would render sexuality fundamentally impersonal, non-proprietary.
Psychoanalytic engagements with Foucauldian ethics have had the extremely useful effect of
forcing psychoanalytic thought to shake off its creeping homophobia and heterosexism. Nevertheless, when it comes to aesthetics, especially the relation of aesthetics to alterity, both
psychoanalysis and queer studies might find a stronger ally in Adorno than in Foucault. Foucault’s
understanding of aesthetics is, I suspect, too strongly attached to self-fashioning. Even as he
proposes a relation between aesthetics and the radically exterior unthought, Foucault does so
through askesis as an “activity of oneself in the exercise of thought.”28 With Foucault, the problematic of the self tends to return, even in that self’s repeated divestiture. Adorno’s aesthetic
theory does, in some ways, address the problem of art in a way analogous to the Foucauldian
problematic of the homosexual. Adorno proposes that the truth of art is not to be found in Art
but in particular artworks. Like the Foucauldian ethics of the homosexual lifestyle that is based
on a turn from the homosexual as an ossification of being, in Adorno’s account modern artworks
turn against Art Itself as a reified, bourgeois concept. The modern artwork begins to answer the
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For Adorno, this alterity is always historically situated. The artwork that addresses the question
What is Art? by working to make art something other than what it has been also displays its own
dynamic incompleteness as an uncanny historical phenomenon. Even as the artwork reproduces
alterity as nonconceptuality — as an absolute point with no knowledge, as Lacan puts it — that
absolute point is available as a particularly strange form of historical understanding. In artworks,
what is excluded from knowledge emerges as excluded, certainly not reifed as philosophical or
theological truth, but as the “unconscious writing of history.” 32 This does not mean that art writes
history by revealing deeply embedded archetypes and other symbols from a society’s mythic
past. Rather, artworks write history by splitting the contemporary moment from a society’s selfunderstanding of it. In Adorno’s writing, the artwork is something like Benjamin’s “dialectical
image.” “Where thinking comes to a standstill in a constellation saturated with tensions,” Benjamin writes, “there the dialectical image appears. It is the caesura in the movement of thought.”33
Benjamin understands the dialectical image as a temporal dislocation, a “differential of time,”
that, dissatisfied with its own present, awaits a future that can “blast open the continuum of
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question What is Art? by taking on the task of becoming something other than what Art has
been up to now. Only, Adorno will assume that the product of such an inquiry is unhinged from
its producer. The artwork may or may not reflect the artist’s intentions, political aspirations,
fantasies, and so on. This is not, for Adorno, what is significant. What is significant is how, as
product, the artwork disengages conceptualization as it submits to a particular dialectic between
alterity and its mediation. In its commitment to becoming, an artwork aims at radical alterity. In
this way, art attempts to “complete knowledge with what is excluded from knowledge,” 29 but
since art is a material thing, it aims at completing what is excluded from knowledge in technologically and socially limited forms of mediation. Thus, artworks always only offer the opportunity
of “perceiving mediately” this excluded knowledge.30 Artworks that aim at alterity do not produce it as such, but reproduce it in particularly mediated ways that encrypt what is radical about
alterity in particular sensual forms. Reading Dean’s focus on the aesthetic through Adorno’s
dialectic of mediation and alterity, we might say that what makes art queer is neither how it
represents or expresses the truth of the self, nor how it nuances or adds meaning to our understanding of sexualities, but how it engages the general Other of meaning in order to presentify
nonconceptuality in material form. In this way, almost all art is open to queer analysis. By the
same token, what makes queer art, I propose, is how works of art — quite broadly conceived —
cathect precisely this dialectic. I do not suggest that queer art simply participates in the
proliferation of ambiguity or of nonsense. Rather, I suggest that queer art cathects incomplete
mediation of alterity in its seemingly infinite and often baroque variability. If homosexual desire
is “reaching out toward an other sameness,” as Bersani and Dutoit contend,31 then queer art is
not the representation of that other sameness but the sensual enjoyment of this reaching out.
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history.”34 As Benjamin is careful to point out, this “blast” does not occur in a strong messianic
fulfillment that assuages the dissatisfaction of the past by endowing the now with an absolute
significance that breaks with the past. It occurs in the weak messianism of historical materialism whose emphasis on repetition renders that “differential” legible as a kind of hieroglyph. He
explains: “It is not that what is past casts its light on what is present, or what is present its light
on what is past; rather, image is that wherein what has been comes together in a flash with the
now to form a constellation. In other words: image is dialectics at a standstill. For while the
relation of the present to the past is purely temporal, the relation of what-has-been to the now is
dialectical: not temporal in nature but figural.” 35 A work of art will orient itself towards the now
not just in topical references difficult for future generations to understand, but also through
unspecified, because contemporary, protocols of fashion, sensibility, and social form.36 Insofar
as they take up anew the question What is Art?, artworks aim at the limits of these protocols to
refashion them. At issue, as Adorno explains it, is evaluation. Artworks committed to a praxis of
becoming solicit — self-consciously or not — an aesthetic response that is itself grounded in
“progressive consciousness,” the awareness of “antagonisms on the horizon of their possible
reconciliation.”37 In taking up a praxis of becoming that aims at alterity through protocols of
fashion, sensibility, and social form, art reproduces the very horizon of the contemporary as
aesthetic shudder, what Adorno calls the “irruption of objectivity into subjective consciousness.” 38
In this marvelously erotic image, aesthetic shudder translates the historicity of art into an experience that divests the self of its most progressive relation to meaning. While this divestiture
may be the basis for elaborating a variety of ethical attitudes towards the world, to take this
shudder as revelatory in itself would be, I think, to reinscribe art within the domain of theology.
Or, in Lacanian terms, enjoyment in such a divestiture amounts to claiming jouissance at the
splitting of the Other in order to defend against that very splitting. But, Adorno continues, the
very dynamic that produces the shudder, an artwork’s orientation towards newness and
progressiveness, is also what makes it so quickly dated. Each artwork in its own particularity
sediments the progressive consciousness it solicits into its form, as an outdated, historical mode
of apprehension. In this way, artworks are “the self-unconscious historiography of their epoch.”39
Attempting to overstep the particular limits of the contemporary, artworks unwittingly ossify
the progressive consciousness that they solicit into modes of progressive consciousness that
trace out radical alterity in its historical particularity. Even as artworks promise jouissance, as
time passes they drain its substance so that it locates — as the past of a possible future — the
historical alterity towards which the work of art pointed.
If a psychoanalytic ethics involves the separation of the general Other of meaning from a more
particular version of alterity, then, following Adorno, we might say that the aesthetic raises this
separation to the level of history. Artworks enact the separation of past historical significance
from a more radical sense of historical alterity. However, even as artworks translate history into
aesthetic experience, they only ever offer history in its effects. What Adorno’s “progressive consciousness” misses, even as it traces it out, is the historical alterity towards which the artwork
has aimed. For this reason, if there is a sense of non-relationality or non-connectedness that the
aesthetic produces, it is fundamentally a severance from history that utterly vitiates the notion
of ethical practice as a form of direct political practice.
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So, are we being homosexual yet? Perhaps the best response is to say that in its engagements
with radical alterity, homosexuality repeatedly harkens a collective subject, another sameness
yet to be realized, that watches over this lifestyle from the vantage point of a futureless future,
awaiting its own deflation.
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Such a conclusion may make Adorno’s aesthetic theory seem extremely unproductive for queer
theory, especially for versions of queer theory that want to see political being as consubstantial
with homosexuality. But, in a certain way, it gets at what is most radical in the gay lifestyle. I
began this essay by proposing that in the turn from homosexual being to gay lifestyles, gays face
the otherness of history as immanent possibility. I would like to conclude by suggesting that it is
precisely this turn from homosexual being to gay lifestyles that commits gay lifestyles to some
version of the aesthetic. If the particular historical problem of homosexuality is the prohibition
of knowledge that accompanies the invention of the homosexual, then it is the aesthetic that
takes over this prohibition and makes it produce modes of being that, although at present “still
formless,” as Foucault puts it, at some point will have been. Following Foucault, we can say that
contemporary homosexuality stands between the poles of ongoing aesthetic practice and
incomplete social formation. While doubtless the latter determines the former, the former oversteps the latter in reproducing out of incompleteness what Foucault calls visible virtualities.
But, following Adorno, I want to add that these virtualities appear in a very particular way. They
are not visible as such; rather, as the gay lifestyle turns from and in practice attempts to negate
homosexual being, it will tend — like the work of art — to solicit a kind of progressive consciousness in order to deflate it. I mean this not as a general capacity but as a particular phenomenon:
because of the way it is constituted as a practice that negates its own determination, to any and
every effort to reconcile antagonisms between homosexual being and incomplete gay social formation, the gay lifestyle can respond by showing that this reconciliation is not it. These virtualities
emerge from the future — a future grounded in the deflation and sedimentation of the forms of
progressive consciousness that the gay lifestyle solicits.
1.
Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage,
1980), 43.
2. Foucault, “Friendship as a Way of Life,” trans. John
Johnston, in Essential Works of Foucault 1954-1984, Vol.
1: Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, ed. Paul Rabinow (New
York: New Press, 1997), 138, 136.
3. Leo Bersani, Homos (Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 1995), 39, 59-60.
4. Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit, Caravaggio (London: BFI,
1999), 80.
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5. Foucault, “Friendship as a Way of Life,” 138, 136, 137.
6. J. L. Austin, How To Do Things With Words, ed. J. O.
Urmson and Marina Sbisà (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1975), 6-7.
7. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Tendencies (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993), 6, 9. See also Austin, 95.
8. Austin, 14-15.
9. Ibid., 99-100.
10. Shoshana Felman, The Literary Speech Act: Don Juan with
J. L. Austin, or Seduction in Two Languages, trans.
Catherine Porter (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983),
79-80, 96.
11. Sedgwick, 9.
12. Ibid., 6.
13. Ibid., 49.
14. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990), 136, 140.
15. Butler, Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of
“Sex” (New York: Routledge, 1993), 104.
16. Ibid., 110.
17. Ibid., 109.
18. Austin, 105.
19. Jacques Lacan, Seminar XX: On Feminine Sexuality: The
Limits of Love and Knowledge: Encore, 1972-1973, ed.
Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: Norton,
1998), 96-98, italics added.
20. Foucault, “Friendship as a Way of Life,” 136.
21. Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Alan Sheridan (New
York: Norton, 1981), 214.
22. Lacan, Seminar XX, 31.
23. Lacan, Four Fundamental Concepts, 253.
24. Tim Dean, Beyond Sexuality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 253.
25. Ibid., 274. Dean explores relations of homosexuality to
alterity more extensively in “Homosexuality and the Problem of Otherness,” Homosexuality and Psychoanalysis, ed.
Dean and Christopher Lane (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 120-143.
26. Dean, Beyond Sexuality, 96.
27. Ibid., 277-278.
28. Foucault, The Use of Pleasure, trans. Robert Hurley (New
York: Vintage, 1985), 9. See also my discussion of Foucault
in Sexuality and Form: Caravaggio, Marlowe, and Bacon
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 13-21.
29. Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, ed. Gretel Adorno
and Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 54.
30. Ibid., 58.
31. Bersani and Dutoit, 80.
32. Adorno, 192.
33. Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard
Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), N10a, 3.
34. Ibid., N1,2; Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry
Zohn (New York: Schoken, 1969), 262.
35. Benjamin, The Arcades Project, N3, 1.
36. Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans.
John Osborne (London: Verso, 1985), 183.
38. Ibid., 245.
39. Ibid., 182.
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37. Adorno, 191.
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adrian rifkin
A METHODOLOGICAL DAYDREAM…
SEXUAL ANAPHORA:
[We] can even say that anaphora is the most
basic form of repetition. It is then a figure that
plays materially and uniquely on the sound of
words. We have anaphora when, in a segment
of discourse, a word or a group of words is taken
up again at least once, just as it is at whatever
position in the text this might be.
— Georges Molinié, “Anaphore”1
If I open my discussion of sameness with this quotation, it’s not just
because one beginning is as good as another — though one may as well
set out from a paperback reference book as from a Hellenistic grammar;
it makes little difference if one has no idea where one might be going
and intends only to drift from one point to another. Or indeed, if one
intends, as I do now, only to establish that the suppositions I will be
making might indeed be points — at least they would have this in
common, other than the sound or echo of philosophies of the self — the
same and the object in their complex interaction.
But it is also that Molinié’s definition might seduce someone who is
listening attentively for the sounding of a same-desire in the noise of
language. In Roland Barthes’ A Lover’s Discourse is it not the same thing
that always lacks? Does not this thing always appear only through words,
without its sameness ever having more of a name than lack, or loss or
simply failure — whatever the intense particularity and differentiation
of each configuration in his dictionary of love?2 In the illustration below,
the replication of taut concaves, the superfetation of the sèmes of sex
and conventional codings of sexual desire overwhelm the visual field in
an anaphoric ecstasy that projects longing beyond the inevitable cumshot.
Molinié goes on to give his own example of anaphora, a quatrain from
Paul Valéry that uses the word voir four times; “but,” he remarks, “despite
the apparent syntactic symmetry, the distribution of this repeated word
is not rigorously identical.” In the extraordinary complexity of voir’s
positions and relations, then, anaphora gives an attractive breath of life
to its text, a rhythm and a suspense. It is as if the figure itself, with its
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88
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elusive stability, pleasurably allows différance its quality as a condition of the subject. The
anaphora is both the rhetorical accomplishment of a sovereign subjectivity and a kind of
stammering or semantic postponement of the subject, although the figure itself is necessarily
not a unit of meaning but a microstructure.
There are dryer or more rigorous expositions of anaphora. One need only turn to Tzvetan
Todorov’s discussion of the repetition of pronomial functions to see that anaphora is not always
quite the same as itself and that its forms — which structure pronouns, nouns, and verbs — do
not work in exactly the same way.3 But I will stick with Molinié’s relatively simple version not
only for its charm but because it enables me to approach sameness without immediate recourse
either to comparison, analogy, or homology; that is to say, without running through the canon of
its theoretical framings and the grounds on which it can be established. Rather, as in Valéry, the
idea of an unfolding, a reprise, or a condensation of meaning in difference, throughout the
duration of an utterance or the length of a paragraph or stanza, sets sameness free from the
structures of comparability, which otherwise establish its character as a concept for classification
and control.
The introduction to Michel Foucault’s The Order of Things is so complete in its exposition of
this matter that it leaves us with little choice other than to imagine how we might, as a political
gesture, set about finding an escape from comparability without lapsing into a sentimental
individualism (if that could ever be the outcome of avoiding a rhetorical procedure). Evidently
sameness and comparison can hardly be taken apart and each is a starting point for thinking
about the other and the narratives that surround them. According to the formulation given by
the Abbé de Condillac in his De l’art d’écrire, comparison is a figure concerned primarily with
the relation of like to like. Yet, to follow Foucault, it may well be that comparison alone establishes
the likeness of two things by organizing and disclosing the categories of appearance that can
name their similarities or samenesses within a particular dispositif. As a political gesture, then,
comparing the unlike seems to be an inevitable and desirable abuse of invention, a positive turn
to catachresis as resistance. Following the unsettling of the sign in différance, the ironically
deconstructive gesture of turning things over into sameness might in turn become
deconstruction’s nemesis. This points to the conceptual absurdity of sameness after Foucault,
Freud, or Derrida.
Sameness itself has always itself to be contained and ordered in order to order and to name.
Comparing two paintings with each other — suspected Boticellis, for example — each against an
established Boticelli to see if either or both are by the master himself, is not quite the same as
comparing one’s lover to a summer’s day or Achilles to a lion. In fact, as we know, in the second
case the summer’s day falls short of the lover’s attributes, while in the third the lion is the only
proper measure of heroic courage. But in all three cases comparison has to do with establishing
a set of common properties shared by or common to objects (Achilles and the lion both roar?) or
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subjects. Inevitably, comparison concerns the location and measurement of attributes within
the framework of a specific system such as an art-historical canon, the poetics of affect, the
figuring of the epic, and so on. In the event, the lover is more temperate than a summer’s day;
Achilles is exactly like a lion in respect of his courage; the earlobe in painting 1 is less like that in
an established Boticelli than the lobe in painting 2, which is in turn a separate difference or
sameness from that of the story — perhaps all three depict the same scene in the life of Christ —
yet another sameness which is not necessarily related to the other details compared by the
connoisseur.
In and between all our instances, sameness is conjunctural, particular, partial, different, and,
while tending to tautology, liable to disperse into disparate kinds of narrative. In the case of the
Boticelli, for example, such a comparison could lie at the heart of a story of crime or forgery, an
illegal export, mafiosi doings, and so on. Or it might just as well be an element in some studies of
art historiography and the theory of the connoisseur. In the case of the summer’s day it has to do
neither with the loved one nor with the summer’s day but with the opening of a space for the
hyperbolic figuring of the lover’s capacity to love. To insist on my point, then, sameness is only
conceptually valuable within a narrative framing that renders it specific or as unlike other
instances of sameness as possible.
Anaphora is not dependent: on the contrary, we might think of it as an excess to comparative
sameness’s tautology while remaining
ambivalent with respect to the agency of the
utterance. My illustration is indicative of this
in its elaboration of a difference between
sameness and resonance, which in this
particular cartoon is as much invested in
contingency of butt and breast as that of dick
and dick. As the whole cartoon unfolds, the
drifting between metaphor, metonymy, and
synecdoche becomes a play with the unsameness of the comparable, the swelling of a
leathered buttock, a dick-head, a nipple, or a
breast.
It is one of the very few Tom of Finland
cartoons that involves a female. She has been
ordered away from the young sailor she has
picked up by a marauding cop, who takes the
sailor for himself. As a small male orgy builds
From Kake (samizdat copy, Paris, circa 1983)
up before the frustrated girl, the cop hands her
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his nightstick. In his own way Tom is telling us about the difference between the penis and the
phallus, and that whatever this might be, they can have the same effect. Or he is telling us that
the substitution of the penis for the phallus via the fantasy of the hypertrophic male organ
produces an echo in which the penis becomes differenced from itself in its escalating but
impossible approach to the dimension of the signifier; which here, in the shape of the symbol of
police power, can anyway be set aside to be absorbed by the female “lack.” This complexity is
what gives the images its anaphoric resonance rather than collapsing the various terms into a
categorical cum-shot.
Ironically, this resonance sounds in an image which is unproblematically gay, one that needs
hardly be read against the grain to produce its gayness, or against the grain of historical
interpretations — as, say, is the case with Caravaggio. In this respect gay pornography is not
very queer. In some sense, it is even the inverse of queer insofar as its excess derives from its
fanatical adherence to the comparison of like with like, which anaphora eventually structures as
never truly identical. Read against the grain precisely to reveal itself as their repressed or uncanny
signified, the queer that discloses itself in historical materials is analogous to anaphora’s echoing,
but in a different way. It proceeds by means of a form of repetition that, in eliding its agent
through the serendipity, naturalizes the self’s echo in historical materials, enabling the queer
subject to see or hear itself as such in all fragmentary emergings. If these are disclosed after the
event, it is by no means in the après coup, but rather as the fully and deliberately restaged
trauma of exclusion or repression.
In search of an analogy for this I want to drift into a reflection about the inseparable fates of
Echo and Narcissus. Between the laterally inverted same reflected in Narcissus’ pool and the
repetition of others’ last words to which Echo is condemned — that is to say, between repetition
in vision and in hearing, each disjoined from identity by inversion or delay — there is a mournful
4
or a joyful enunciation of either loss or presence, yet indifferently, as if they were the same. The
queering of historical culture, whether of an artist like Caravaggio, a whole genre of nineteenthcentury social novels, or of an urban space, entrains the recognition of a self that can only be
perceived as such after it has been reclaimed both from and through inversion; from its own
inversion and elision in history, and through the riposte that is the inversion of historical
significance. Those historical gestures or enunciations, once revealed as factitious, which is the
quality of the queer, then come to refigure the newly discovered self as both like and unlike itself
— if only because facticity is now played out as essence. The fake assumes the sometime authority
of the copy in the performance of sex and gender, as the price of signifying and admitting the
(im)possibility of origin. The performance is nothing but the acting out of disclosure that marks
the queer critique of identity. It is as if Narcissus’ tears, which shatter his reflection, and Echo’s
repetitions, which unvoice her, have merged signs of the inauthentic.5
This figure of sameness as a series of disguised yet similar and coexisting hyper-particularities
occupies a curious apposition to those that haunt conflicting philosophies of the seventeenth
century — in Locke and Descartes, for example, where the same or sameness is a crucial concept
for the stability of knowledge in the subject-object relationship, a guarantor of the subject’s
stability. In the end we might find ourselves, in our post-textual universe of theory, more at
home with the fragile, nervous, and rather hysterical certainties of René Descartes’ thinking of
the molten wax in his “Second Meditation,” with its subtle oxymoron of “an infinitude of similar
changes,”6 than with John Locke’s syllogistic and anti-essentialist sureness in his Essay
Concerning Human Understanding:
Even during the period for which any living being is said to live and to retain his identity — as a man,
for example, is called the same man from boyhood to old age — he does not in fact retain the same
attributes although he is called the same person….What happens with pieces of knowledge is even
more remarkable; it is not merely that some appear and others disappear, so that we no more retain
our identity with regard to knowledge than with regard to the other things I have mentioned, but that
8
each individual piece of knowledge is subject to the same process as we are ourselves.
91
It is hard to know quite where to engage with Locke’s argument, which is so complete in its
logic and so utterly unqueer in the terms I have been elaborating. Unfix “place,” for instance, as
Freud does in his metaphor of Rome as a map for the human mind, with its untoward facts of
coexistence, and Locke’s logic loses its footing straight away. It is a logic of and for the same as a
counter-problematic, as a viable category of the positivity of knowing — even though the syllogism may, for a modern ear, sound like a fetishistic practice in its repetitions. It is a logic that
will continue to echo through analytic philosophy, just as Diotima’s more precarious or teleological discourse on the same topic in Plato’s Symposium echoes weakly or perversely here,
underlining the confusion of the old idealist and materialist logics of the same:
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When we see anything to be in any place in any instant of time, we are sure, (be it what it will) that it is
that very thing, and not another, which at that same time exists in another place, how like and
undistinguishable soever it may be in all other respects: And in this consists Identity, when the Ideas
it is attributed to vary not at all from what they were that moment, wherein we consider their former
existence, and to which we compare the present. For we never finding, nor conceiving it possible, that
two things of the same kind should exist in the same place at the same time, we rightly conclude, that
whatever exists any where at any time, excludes all of the same kind, and is there it self alone. When
therefore we demand, whether anything be the same or no, it refers always to something that existed
such a time in such a place, which ‘twas certain, at that instant, was the same with it self and no other:
From whence it follows, that one thing cannot have two beginnings of Existence, nor two things one
beginning, it being impossible for two things of the same kind, to be or exist in the same instant, in the
7
very same place; or one and the same thing in different places.
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If in Locke one thing can correlate only to one space, in Plato there is effectively no space at
all, as it dissolves before the sophistic question. Diotima’s differencing of the same is shortly to
be sublimated into the category of the beautiful, which contains all the differences that pertain
to it, as if it were a form of entropy. And in this sense the sameness of the human or the “piece of
knowledge” is nothing but a rhetorical anaphora, fleetingly pleasing to the ear before it fades
into beauty’s flat-footed and categorical sameness — which is so unlike the stretchy effects of the
sublime. It is not at all the same as Descartes’ looking at himself looking at the wax that changes
and, despite this, still seeking the minimal guarantee of self-sameness which is built on the
awareness of its own challenge or disruption. Despite the romantic history of the Symposium,
Diotima’s reproductive theory of sameness and immortality is as straight as straight, and sames
the same(-sex) just as if it were any other longing for the beautiful.
Yet were we to take the desired perpetuation of one’s sameness through the possible forms of
progeny Diotima outlines — through social, sexual, or intellectual reproduction — it is striking
how queer this becomes as a retroactive process. The progeny of the queer is always in the past,
or in the spaces of the present, disrupted as it passes by. The future exists as little more than the
promise of a democratic entropy finally brought on by recognition, the absorption of the desire
for the same into a universal sameness or de-differentiation due to the equality of all desires.
The iterative project of the queer is to bring its own historical presence into the preconscious of
contemporary enunciation and to announce that self hyperbolically as always having been the
repressed precondition of the normative’s enunciation.
But were we to emphasize the anaphoric structure of Locke’s argument, it would dissolve into
rhetorical procedure as the other of logic’s persuasive, well-judged mode of sounding a conviction
that syllogism can secure only as tautology. Anaphora would then be the hysterical symptom of
the unavailability of the same in language, here masquerading as logic or as rigor. But still, the
same to which Narcissus’ flowery memorial and Echo’s voice belong is not a thing in Locke’s
sense at all, though it does seem like an objet in Lacan’s; nor is it an object in the sense of the
common origin for two separate things, a reverberation and a flower, though both — flower and
echo — are comparable as things only in terms of that common moment of their origin. This
same is a same of before language and yet only in it, the desire of the other; and, in consequence,
if we are to pursue a logic of a kind, Echo and Narcissus are similar in that they are equally
effects of desire’s absence — they are a way of telling absence. Locke’s “…from whence it follows…”
is terribly beside the point of this sameness, yet allows us to see that this other sameness of
things, in coexistence and imbrication, as an effect of the object’s lack or absence, is always
profoundly historical. It has to be remade at every human contingency. The same has to be
invented as a supposition at each moment of its iteration, but each new moment is overdetermined
and, in that, the same is also old, as old as the differences that enable it to appear.
If this queer kind of sameness of contingency resembles something in Locke, it is rather more
like the relation between substance and qualities, the perceptible and the imperceptible, the
concept and the sign. It, as a form of relation, has something of performance to it, insofar as it is
only the perceived, in its transient particularity, that realizes the concept.
93
Or, we might begin to see that the same is not comparable with the same. At the moment of its
performance, or execution, the thing is as if a metaphysical thing, fully present, yet it is anchored
only in the enoncé, determined as possible by the dispositif, and referring either to no-thing or
to some-thing that precedes the entry into language, the initial repression of the drives for
example. The problem of a syncretic theoretical field is mapped out in the microstructural figure
of this last sentence of mine, in the repetition of the same word, “thing,” in a non-iterative relation
to itself and a non-systematic relation to its context, being by turn either subject or object of a
performance, and so disrupting both the passivity of its concept on the one hand and its usual
close liaison with “no” and “some” on the other. If this is so, and can be admitted, then the
theory of the subject risks merging with its poetic. And that we might say, is a pure utopia: where
the poetic and the thetic become the same.
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In a different register again, examples of this might be the “oceanic” feeling or the “uncanny”
in Freud, the triggering of which depends upon a same mechanism of a contingent relation
between the earliest of repressions and a now, while the now is never the same, even if it triggers
the same kind of effect.9 But here the same suggests some kind of a transfigured regression, to a
sameness that precedes the differentiation of individuals. The sameness after differentiation is
the sameness of belonging to a series, such as the series of numbers tattooed on the inmates of
concentration camps. The final effect of this sameness is the de-differentiation of life and death.10
Sameness is accomplished through the elimination of any signs of incomparability, which is
another form of the hyperbolic enunciation of identity. The French writer Jean-Louis Bory,
pointing out the accumulation of serial numbers that register us as drivers, with social security,
in the passport office, at the bank, and so on, noted that none of these have as yet become the
same as us.11 And even if denotation arrived at the moment of wholly instrumentalizing difference — this driver is not that driver — how would these numbers relate to his Denise, his notquite-the-same-as-himself gay self? The question is less dramatic than that of the camps; but
the very difference between them touches once again against the menace of a non-anaphoric
entropy, the untoward effects of badly invested desire.
My thanks to Barbara Engh for her help with this piece, which
I hope she will enjoy.
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94
1.
Georges Molinié, Dictionnaire de rhétorique (Paris: Les
usuels de poche, 1992), 49. It would have been more dignified to begin with Cicero or Dennis of Halicarnassus than
an undergraduate handbook, yet Molinié has a subtle way
of treating his discussions as an after-effect of these long
histories.
My essay is so clearly indebted to the work of Judith Butler, Jacques Derrida, Jonathan Dollimore, Leo Bersani,
Michel Foucault, David Halperin, and Pat Califia, among
others, that I let their words often echo through mine without footnotes — my confidence that my references will be
recognized is matched only by my idleness.
2. Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments, trans.
Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1978), is
exemplary in its repetitions-in-difference, at both the complex, structural level of the iteration of interlocutory names,
“Lacan,” “Werther,” and so on, and at the local and particular moment of trying to seize on a meaning or an image.
3. Oswald Ducrot and Tzvetan Todorov, Dictionnaire encyclopédique des sciences du langage (Paris: Seuil, 1972), 358ff.
Ducrot and Todorov’s reading of anaphora is far more complex than mine. For an approach closer to mine, see Algirdas
Julien Greimas and Joseph Courtès, Sémiotique:
Dictionnaire raisonné de la théorie du langage (Paris:
Hachette, 1979), 14, 15.
4. Ovid, Metamorphoses, Book III, trans. Frank Justus Miller
(London: W. Heinemann, 1984). See also Naomi Segal,
Narcissus and Echo: Women in the French Récit (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1991) for a discursive
overview of the myth as literary practice.
5. The repetition of this process in the larger field of what we
call identity studies enlarges the anaphoric figure as a canon
of cathected objects — Artemisia, Caravaggio, Gertrude
Stein, Oscar Wilde, and so on. But that is yet another story
of comparison taking hold, mapping field and habitus.
6. “No, certainly it is not that, since I imagine it admits of an
infinitude of similar changes, and I nevertheless do not
know how to compass the infinitude by my imagination,
and consequently this conception which I have of the wax
is not brought about by the faculty of imagination. What
now is this extension? Is it not also unknown? For it becomes greater when the wax is melted, greater when it is
boiled, and greater still when the heat increases; and I
should not conceive [clearly] according to truth what wax
is, if I did not think that even this piece that we are
considering is capable of receiving more variations in
extension than I have ever imagined” (René Descartes,
Meditations on First Philosophy, in The Philosophical
Works of Descartes, vol. I, trans. Elizabeth S. Haldane and
G. R. T. Ross [New York: Cambridge University Press, 1979],
155, brackets in original.)
7. John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Peter H. Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975),
328. References to Descartes and Locke were originally located on the internet by searching the words “same” and
“sameness” on philosophic and psychoanalytic sites. In
effect this process is essential to the slightly bizarre composition of my essay, which itself repeats the anaphoric
structure with such research methods.
8. Plato, The Symposium, trans. W. Hamilton (Baltimore: Penguin, 1951), 88-89. See, for example, David Wiggins,
Sameness and Substance (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1980)
for an acme of the contemporary analytic philosopher’s relation to a problem that has not even a perspective on a
post-Derridean displacement of the question of meaning.
9. Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, in The
Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of
Sigmund Freud, ed. and trans. James Strachey et al. (London: Hogarth Press, 1953-1974), 21 :64; Freud, “The
‘Uncanny,’” in SE 17:217-256.
10. See Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (New
York, Zone, 1999) for a sustained discussion of this question. Agamben’s Adornian critical pessimism articulated
through Benveniste’s principle of enunciation is especially
pertinent to a critique of the desire for infinite differentiation.
11. Jean-Louis Bory, Ma moitié d’orange (Paris: Julliard, 1973),
115-116.
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judith roof
INDIFFERENCE
Perhaps, with luck, it will end the kind of thrillride movies that exploit what I think of as a
comedy of violence. All of that seemed to come
out of a pre-Sept. 11 world where people were
not really feeling anything, and so the cinema
was all about physical sensation. Well, there is
no shortage of feeling now.
— Baz Luhrmann1
PREAMBLE: NO SHORTAGE OF FEELING NOW
On the one hand, we strain against our indifference. Boredom, complacency, lack of compassion, absence of intervention, failures of empathy,
willed ignorance, or blindness to distinctions results in a politics and
culture of sameness — a dispassionate status quo straining toward the
standardized diversity of a global market. This indifference is reflected
in everything from American foreign policy to its lack of domestic social
programs, from the homogeneous bourgeois ideal that dominates the
western cultural imaginary to the increasing homogenization and worldwide distribution of an indifferent American culture. In its extreme
resistance to anything disturbing or threatening, indifference leads to
tragedy. In its complacent acceptance of inequities, indifference becomes
the enabling climate for the Kitty Genoveses of the world, its turned head
wasting the last clear chance to avoid violence.2 Indifference underwrites
the universal subject; enough universalizing seems to produce
indifference. Indifference lies in unquestioning accord with ideology as
itself an unquestioned set of valences. Indifference erases the violence
of indifference itself. The escalating ferocity of attempts to smash complacency mounted by the compassionate of all ilk match the ethical
poverty of the indifferent.
On the other hand, we might not care about our indifference at all,
remaining indifferent as only the very comfortable or the very beaten
down can be. The point when we appear to be most caring may be when
we are most indifferent of all. This caring may be a way to ease the inner
tensions that disrupt the lovely psychic quiescence Freud characterizes
as the pleasure principle. Empathy, then, may well be the mechanism by
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which an individual can stave off, defend against, and defuse the disturbances — the differences — that prevent a desirable state of low excitation in the psychic economy. The ambivalent
play of empathy and indifference in public discourse and fundamentalist fervor extends the
psychodynamics outlined by Freud in Beyond the Pleasure Principle. The various ways we deploy indifference demonstrate the suggestive inter-relation among psychodynamics, discursive
formations, and ideologies. They suggest why and how cultural narratives about empathy and
indifference provide both effective defenses against difference of any kind and produce the sustaining fictions of totalitarianism.
THE DIFFERENCE IN INDIFFERENCE
How is it that one manifestation of caring already hints at an indifference? While sympathy
itself may be genuine, it is perhaps more directed at comforting ourselves than others. We try
hard to equalize our own shock, anxiety, and trauma by extending empathy, generosity, and
succor to others. Trying to relieve the pain around us is also an effort to level the pain within. In
this cynical economy, humanitarianism is self-preservation, not only in the distant expectation
of its return favor or a better culture, but also in the way such actions constitute the individual
effort to regain balance and peace.
How is it that this desire for a return to even feeling — for the comforts of sameness — veers
towards indifference? And why is indifference simultaneously both deeply and stubbornly sought
and the object of outraged sanctimony? On the one hand, those who would wish compassion,
empathy, or even mitigating action want to understand caring gestures as pure and unselfish
generosity. They refuse to see instances of laudable self-sacrifice as the public resolution of
individual tension or the necessary expression of a more self-serving need. On the other hand,
indifference, empathy’s opposite, evinces an a priori lack of feeling and culpable self-indulgence — a willed ignorance sustained in the face of catastrophe. Postures of indifference are
interpreted by champions of charity as the selfish self-protective acts of those who refuse to
recognize the immediacy and material urgency of tragedy, oppression, and pain. For example,
turning tragedy into commerce, marketeers and pirates of trauma and disaster are obvious
instances of this outrageous mode of indifference. Less obvious are the politicians who trade on
the ill fortune of others by using it as a platform for the public display of compassion. Still less
obvious is what Christopher Hitchens describes in Vanity Fair: the burst of passion focused on
reestablishing community that masks in its communitarian appeal the ways such fervor provides
both an emotional cushion and an ideological shield to insulate individuals against the intrusion
3
(violent or otherwise) of differences of all kinds.
This last, ideological altruism may be the most culpable of all insofar as it resorts to protective
ideas that enable a dismissal or denial of the differences and inequalities that produce tragic
circumstances in the first place. Indifference, as a laudable or reprehensible devotion to sameness
(depending on one’s point-of-view), serves as an armor against any change of status, disturbance of the status quo, or even variation in condition that might suggest there has never really
been a same at all. From the perspective of the indifferent who are more than likely either
indifferent to their indifference or defensive about it, indifference is an admirably loyal adherence
to normalcy as the vestige of a higher principle (“What’s wrong with America!? Love it or leave
it!”). The “normal” equate indifference with ideals of devotion, fidelity, consistency, and
patriotism. Such normative indifference ignores or elides the differences that might produce
tension, contention, or a lack of group unity.
The passionate coexistence of these opposing postures towards indifference — indifference as
culpable, indifference as necessary — suggests not only that indifference is an ambivalent concept,
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Indifference can indeed seem minor, taking the form of a willed ignorance of difference or the
casual refusal to recognize one’s own privilege. This indifference is related to the philosophical
generalizations that elide differences, resulting in the categorical homogeneity — the presumption of sameness — that grounds humanist metaphysics. The universalizing gestures of some
critics and philosophers, for example, produce an indifference to gender, sexual, or racial
differences that also has an effect on the social, cultural, or political well-being of those whose
difference is the object of indifference. Indifference, thus, seems a necessary condition for any
kind of abstract thinking, but at the same time selfish and/or stupid from the perspective of
those who are excluded and upon whose difference or otherness such abstractions often depend.
The aphoristic “All men are created equal” is the doctrinarian license for this kind of humanistic
indifference, asserting sameness as a desirable, mandated condition in such a way (as the framing condition for national ideology) that it is maintained even in the face of obvious material and
social disparities. Thus, patriotism often consists of the stubborn assertion of this idea of sameness
in the face of any difference; claims of discrimination are thus unpatriotic, especially in times
when patriotism has rushed to the scene like an antibody to the site of infection.
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Of course, critics of profiteering and other callous responses to tragedy are right to suggest
that commercial indifference enables the perpetuation of evil and social injustice, though most
critiques of such behavior are made on the basis of a vague ethical distaste rather than any sense
that capitalizing on tragedy is a symptom of a broader malaise.4 Further, all species of public
indifference are material and political insofar as they become a pretext for ignoring differences
in economic power, education, gender, race, class, and religion, which, though threatening the
centrality and power of dominant regimes, also anchor the materiality of disparate treatment. Is
indifference, then, a matter of degree? When circumstances are extreme, indifference or lack of
sympathy becomes maximally culpable. If the status quo reigns, does indifference become invisible as a mere attribute of privilege or a necessary part of group identification?
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but also that the sameness it fronts is never self-same. Rather, this sameness consists of several
intermingled phenomena. Sameness is expressed as two different affects: a condition of inappropriate unfeeling or a sense of felicitous normalcy. In the realms of the social, the psychic, and
narrative, sameness is a structural category. In the social, indifference translates into the sweeping homogenizations of ethnic, racial, or gender identity, nationalism, or even sports fandom. In
these instances a category organizing a particular aspect of self-identity serves as a point of
sameness or commonality enabling the suppression of differences in favor of similarity, which
in turn becomes a motivating factor for group identification. Group identification, then, mutes
differences as a way of maintaining the illusion of common interest.
As a structural category of both the psyche and narrative, sameness is a happy, alluring, but
paralyzing site of low excitation — the pleasure of the pleasure principle or the premature elations of homosexuality or incest, which, according to Freud, should be quickly overcome in the
larger heteronormative narrative by the proper aim and object and which dominant culture
perceives as threatening the hetero-status quo.5 In the social, sameness is a positive feature to be
sought — or even forcibly produced. In the psyche, sameness is a respite that becomes an enemy
to be overcome, the pleasure principle succeeded by the reality principle and Eros, a sameness
replicating itself endlessly in each venue of potential action, its iterations a spectre of stuttering
withdrawals across a field of self-reflecting mirrors. In narrative, sameness threatens death — of
the subject, of the story — through the absence of productive possibility.
These different samenesses might happily co-exist, were it not for the moral confusion excited
by indifference, which becomes an impasse of culpability and truth. As I suggested above, we
both blame indifference and seek it. The ways we define, identify, and regard indifference gauge
our position somewhere between a Judeo-Christian matrix of compassion and the annals of
normalcy and belonging. If we condemn indifference, we are worthy beings; but worthy beings,
like deities or justice, are blind to differences. Normal people are not indifferent to the suffering
of others; normal people are all the same. How, in this paradox of indifference, can anything
ever be the same?
The problem is that the affect of indifference, though ambivalently associated with both social
difference (some people suffer) and sameness (people are not really different and all people
should care), does not correspond to the psychic laziness upon which culpable indifference is
ultimately blamed. Instead, displays of care, which seem like high psychic investment, work
toward reestablishing psychic peace as indifference to vicissitudes. This psychic indifference or
sameness (sameness because it represents an evenness in excitation) is the product of great
psychic labor — a war even — whose impetus is archaic and economic. The psychic economy
struggles to return to a state of low anxiety, which might be understood as the individual version
of the social felicities and lack of anxiety enabled by group identifications. Psychically, the battle
is for indifference. Culturally, we battle indifference (uncaring) to reach indifference (normalcy
and sameness). Resolving this ambivalence, which itself represents a tension among different
registers of sameness, sparks the dangerous alignments or strivings toward the sameness of
totalitarianisms, which are as deadly to the socius as low excitation might be to the organism.
The differences of sameness, hence, sustain a valuable ambivalence, which must exist in all its
contradictions as a defense against both truth and death.
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But what seems to be a conflict is in fact the story of the interdependency of these samenesses
that actually promotes and sustains indifference. Generally, narratives align indifference with
the dominant, either as an attitude to wield or one to inflict. This version of indifference as selfsame dominance masks the mechanisms of displacement and projection that transfer threats of
disturbing difference from self onto others who become their repositories. This reverses the
roles of villain and victim, empowered and powerless, aligning the complacent (and culturally
dominant) with the position of victim in narratives of suffering. Thus arise reverse discrimination
suits as well as such social phenomena as the Promise Keepers, who shift the site of indifference
from their formerly indifferent selves who let things slide to liberal forces of evil (such as feminists and gay people) indifferent to basic patriarchal morality and the differences upon which
such systems depend; survivalists, who battle public indifference in the face of gluttonous federal power-grabbers; and fundamentalists of all ilk, for whom difference (even and especially
sexual difference) is an abomination that must be subordinated in the service of a very monological
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NARRATIVE INDIFFERENCE
The conflicts between social and psychic sameness, between sameness and indifference, are
sustained culturally through narrative — in stories of the causes of indifference and in tales of
the ills it causes. In the narrative (or metanarrative) of ruling indifference, indifference is a
luxury enjoyed by a cadre of socially-same dominant and powerful people. Empathy and caring
are the lot of the underdog, those whose differences do not permit indifference for long. These
two groups clash. Difference dashes indifference from its complacency to become a better
sameness that then returns to the bliss of indifference again. We must, for example, now return
to our “normal” lives in order to preserve America’s economy. In a competing story of indifference, impoverished or otherwise disadvantaged protagonists struggle endlessly, beaten into
indifference by repeated misfortune. The ones who can remain impassioned prevail. This is the
pattern of all narratives of reform in which social sameness is linked to an indifference that is
linked to wielding power. The first story situates indifference as a cause of suffering, the second
locates it as an effect. In both stories, indifference is linked to a group sameness. Indifference is
ambivalent, a sameness to be overcome and a normalcy to be wished for, depending upon where
one is in relation to empowered agents of discrimination.
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truth. Narratives of indifference are offered as justification for “liberating” movements, whose
goal is the suppression of gender, racial, sexual, and religious difference. They utilize the very
oppression the dominant perpetrate as a way of gaining sympathy and additional power against
the interest and at the expense of those whose differences stimulated indifference in the first
place. And they are in contradistinction to narratives of oppression that come from the side of
the oppressed in which the oppressors are never indifferent, but are rather purposefully invested
in racism, sexism, homophobia, patriarchy, nationalism, or religious fervor.
These stories of indifference should look familiar. Not only do they circulate widely in the
world, they also have the virtue of working from all sides at once, shifting rapidly across the
twinkling, opalescent fields of power, becoming a matter of shifting perspective in realms
masquerading as truth. They reflect the basic pattern of western narrative itself, at least as Peter
Brooks outlines it as a structuralist dynamic where sameness (as suggested above, taking the
form of an object-choice that is too same, as in incest or homosexuality) is a danger to be overcome
by difference. Indifference functions as an attribute of both protagonist and antagonist in narrative as well as supplying another analog to the more libidinal manifestations of narrative sameness
listed above. On the level of ideology, we are always either included as the indifferent “we” — as
in “we the people” — that erases differences of all kinds in the face of a larger opponent, or we
are the “we” who see the collapsing ideology that subtends this communal “we.” We are, in other
words, either included (and hence same) or excluded from narrative. Our status as protagonist
or antagonist shifts depending on where indifference is located. The location of indifference
ultimately depends upon point-of-view. In popular culture, indifference is the justifying injustice
for most action and adventure dramas, from James Bond to Die Hard to The Matrix. Bond must
fight villains who depend on the indifference of the world to enable their perfidious schemes.
John McLean must spend half a movie convincing an indifferent world that insurgents have
taken over an office tower, an airport, or a subway system. The Matrix develops an elaborate
allegory accounting for indifference as a machine-perpetuated pre-partum. Most narratives of
social change, like Lifetime movies or such 70s favorites as The China Syndrome, involve an
assault on indifference as at least half the battle.
But while locating indifference as an ethical antagonist, narratives that deploy such indifference tend to assert it as a fait accompli, as already a same indifference. The difference against
which the good strive is not itself an object of interest except insofar as it provides a moral
nemesis, a condition or ground that makes action significant. Indifference, however, is worth
examining in itself as the unlikely (because indifferent) knot that links psychical dynamics,
narrative, affect, and ideology, thus betraying the difference in sameness itself. As affective
indifference takes over the narrative functions of sameness from the permutations of Freud’s
aim/object matrix, not only does it screen the far more complex mechanism outlined above by
which cultural power is maintained; it also justifies, complies with, and produces western, white,
masculinist ideologies by explaining why the status quo evades disturbance, refuses recognitions of differences, eschews any kind affirmative action, and renders itself the victim.
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Reading indifference as a psychical construction with narrative implications anatomizes cultural and political causality, not by way of excusing it, but as a way to understand differently why
such postures are so recurrent and resistant to change, even when conscious discourse and societal
pressure offer substantial motivation for compassion. (Need I mention the oxymoronic
“compassionate conservatism”?) In one sense such a reading situates the hackneyed category of
ideology as literally a cultural unconscious that is subject to a species of Freud’s mechanism of
the reversal of affect, outlined in his discussions of sado/masochism and voyeurism/exhibition6
ism. In another sense, it explains how both psychically and culturally, the ideologically
empowered who operate indifference become the heroic and marginalized sites of difference —
in other words, it explains ideology as a deployment of indifference. This chiasmus elucidates
how it is that the differences represented, at least narratively, as dangers to the body politic
(most notably, homosexuality as perhaps the signal example of a social threat evidenced by the
accusations of Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, but also feminism and multiculturalism) become
the sites of a dangerous sameness (stasis and indifference) that signal the End of Culture as We
Know It. Penetrating indifference in paradoxically the same gesture iterated in the heroic narratives above allows a more dynamic account of the inter-relations among narrative, ideology,
sameness, and empowerment. Understanding indifference as a complex mechanism bound up
in psychical and narrative processes might suggest a non-oppositional way around the trap of
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These metanarratives of indifference are neither incidental nor rationalizing but rather essential
to the very production of indifference in the first place. If, as I will argue, indifference is a manifestation of the pleasure principle, then metanarratives of indifference produce its ambivalent
positioning and themselves participate in the constant return to indifference as cultural versions
of this psychodynamic. As Brooks shows, the psychodynamics outlined by Freud in Beyond the
Pleasure Principle both deploy and define the dynamics of western narrative. The pleasure
principle as a specific part of that psychodynamic works culturally both as an effect of narrative
in that narrative returns us to the pleasure of low excitation and in the ways the pleasure principle is synecdochized by and localized in indifference as an affect. The affect of indifference
then stands for all qualities and sites narratively (and ideologically) positioned as same (everything
from homosexuality and incest to fascism) in its guise as both a cause of ills to be vanquished
and as an ill to be healed by a fresh infusion of difference. In this way threats of sameness such
as homosexuality are transformed into an indifference that is simply overcome by heterosexuality
(or heterogeneity), the core story Freud himself recounts in Three Essays on the Theory of
Sexuality.
wanting simply to assert difference in the face of indifference, a ploy that never works because
that oppositional arrangement is the structure that produces indifference in the first place. An
analysis of indifference might account for the ambivalence around indifference itself as an affect
that is both knowing and unknowing, culpable and incorrigible, but which itself seems to
perpetuate indifference as a norm. Finally, looking at the psychonarrative role of indifference
provides another way to understand the passionate indifference of fundamentalisms, which are
the logical results of the victory of the pleasure principle.
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SAME INDIFFERENCE
Indifference is represented as an effect of some sort of disproportion, both in its origins and
effects. Representations of indifference’s source always evoke questions of scale. Imagined
topographically, as Freud imagines the Perceptual System-Conscious/Unconscious, indifference
might be described as the affective condition achieved when the scale of an event is vastly out of
proportion to a perceiver’s self-perceived positionings.7 Scale can be geographical distance such
as when complacent Americans are indifferent to ongoing ethnic butchery in other parts of the
world; numbers as in the vastness of so many tobacco or traffic deaths per minute; ideological
worth as in the case of violence against gays and lesbians, which does not merit concern because
gays are a small minority who ask for it; or size as when we are indifferent to the formation of
arterial plaque or the erosion of the ozone layer because these phenomena are either too small
or too large to be seen. This topography also translates into temporality: indifference occurs
when events are too close in time (we are stunned and hence do not recognize the import of
events) or too distant in time (we worry we will forget the Holocaust and lapse into indifference). Duration or repetition can also produce indifference, for example, when the repetition or
perpetuation of terror inures one to its effects. Disparities in scale produce a threat to the conceptual apparatus as a kind of perceptual displeasure, a forced engagement with the world in a
scope disproportionate to the human body or its powers of intervention.
Operating variously as a quality of the antagonist (in narratives of oppression where the indifferent cause social ills) and of the protagonist (in narratives of group triumph over dangerous
difference), indifference is itself understood through several different cultural analyses, each
containing some estimation of its essential liability for cultural ills. Indifference might be
understood as a lack of appropriate reaction, a failure to respond to suffering — the heartlessness of the ruling class, for example. Or indifference is a willed and motivated ignorance or
failure of recognition of differences from positions of power that threatens the social, cultural,
or physical well-being of those whose differences are elided. This occurs in claims of universality
or even impersonality made by those in a position to deny difference. A good example of this is
the United States Constitution, which must constantly be revised in relation to previously
unrecognized differences somehow not automatically included in the universal subject of America.
Indifference might be a sociopathic genetic disorder that produces an inability to recognize the
claims of others at all and permits violent and socially irresponsible behaviors. This pathology
has been claimed as a defense that has been used in several criminal trials. Or indifference is just
a lack of difference, the repetition of averageness, that would seem to represent stasis.
Indifference’s failures are failures of affect and cause — failures of the subject to act in a properly
compassionate and ethical fashion, failures of the perceptual system to pull disparate events
together into a sensible chain (narrative) that will provoke a suitably emotional response.
Indifference is an affective problem because it is a narrative problem (and vice versa), and the
narrative that provides the key to its enigma (or perhaps auspiciously non-enigma) is Freud’s
account of the dynamics of instinct and libido in Beyond the Pleasure Principle.
The tension produced by the reality principle in addition to the strains of everyday existence
would explain why it is that the individual cannot just subsist in some kind of pleasurable, infantile
state — a sort of perpetual indifference. Freud imagines a kind of parallel topography for this
basic conflict in the brain, suggesting that tensions take the form of a “perceptual unpleasure,”
which “may be perception of pressure by unsatisfied instincts; or it may be external perception
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The pleasure principle works in a dynamic that is binary on many levels. On the most elementary level, Freud pits the pleasure principle against outside events that disturb the individual:
“the course of those [mental] events is invariably set in motion by an unpleasurable tension,
and…it takes a direction such that its final outcome coincides with a lowering of that tension —
that is with an avoidance of unpleasure or a production of pleasure” (7). Because by itself this
course would result in a rather premature quiescence or death, the pleasure principle must cope
with another rival, the “reality principle.” “This latter principle,” Freud explains, “does not
abandon the intention of ultimately obtaining pleasure, but it nevertheless demands and carries
into effect the postponement of satisfaction, the abandonment of a number of possibilities of
gaining satisfaction and the temporary toleration of unpleasure as a step on the long indirect
road to pleasure” (10).
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Despite its ambivalent alignments with power, indifference in all of these metanarratives is a
defensive strategy, a retreat figured as a failure of ethics on the side of the powerful and as a
failure of spirit on the side of the oppressed. Begetting sameness and begotten from it, indifference is a manifestation of the pleasure principle. For Freud, the pleasure principle means that
“the mental apparatus endeavors to keep the quantity of excitation present in it as low as possible
or at least to keep it constant” (9). It “is a tendency operating in the service of a function whose
business it is to free the mental apparatus entirely from excitation or to keep the amount of
excitation in it constant or to keep it as low as possible” (62).
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which is either distressing in itself or which excites unpleasurable expectations in the mental
apparatus — that is, which is recognized by it as ‘danger’” (11). These perceptions, imagined
spatially in the Perceptual System-Conscious (Pcpt.-Cs)/Unconscious, are located “between outside and inside” and are turned toward the external world (24). This outwardly-turned borderline takes on a kind of physiological presence as cerebral cortex, the locus of consciousness. This
physiological site becomes metaphorically a “crust” or “shield” against outside stimuli and further provides ready-made routes for the passage of certain repeated kinds of excitation (26, 28).
According to Freud, the “little fragment of living substance” “acquires the shield in this way: its
outermost surface ceases to have the structure proper to living matter, becomes to some degree
inorganic and thenceforward functions as a special envelope or membrane resistant to stimuli.
In consequence the energies of the external world are able to pass into the next underlying
layers, which have remained living, with only a fragment of their original intensity” (27). Manifested organically as a kind of sacrificial death, the surface of the brain becomes indifferent,
“resistant to stimuli.” At the same time behaving as a kind of filter, this shield buffers and dilutes
external excitements, allowing the individual to survive.
Indifference can be seen as the affective correlate to this cortical defensive structure. Indifference is the attitude that ensues when the individual has been buffeted by too many “perceptual
unpleasures,” which take the form of a kind of disproportion that represents either physical or
psychical danger. It is probably equally obvious at this point that this is just another version of
an old account of the threats occasioned by the perception of sexual difference — castration and
fetishism.8 But if we put these models together, indifference becomes an automatic and instinctual
affective defense to all kinds of differences. If fetishism can be seen as a way of neutralizing or
negotiating difference through an object, then fetishism is a correlative of the pleasure principle. Its production of indifference as disavowal is a version of how the psychic system treats
excitations coming from within the individual, which, it turns out, are transformed via projection into excitations coming from outside.
More important, these internal excitations “are...in their intensity and in other, qualitative,
respects — in their amplitude, perhaps — more commensurate with the system’s method of
working than the stimuli which stream in from the external world.” The system’s “working”
involves two “definite results.” One is that feelings of pleasure or unpleasure “predominate over
all external stimuli.” The other is that “a particular way is adopted of dealing with any internal
excitations which produce too great an increase of unpleasure: there is a tendency to treat them
as though they were acting, not from the inside, but from the outside, so that it may be possible
to bring the shield against stimuli into operation as a means of defense against them. This is the
origin of projection” (29). Projecting unpleasant excitations onto an outside source enables a
defense that alters unpleasure to pleasure, permitting the individual to return to or maintain a
state of low excitation — that is, indifference. If the fetish is an externalized version of this mechanism in that it neutralizes difference in providing a projective site for the disavowal of an absence,
then narrative is the cultural version of the fetish, allowing the projection of disturbance outside.
Instead of affording an object substitute, narrative as itself already an externalized projection of
the same psychical dynamic provides a substitute dynamic that transposes desired indifference
(or the pleasure principle) into both obstacle and goal, while its projections of disturbance take
a form predicted by a kind of psycho-ideology — as some “other” whose disturbing difference
can be substituted as the cause of the disturbance. Difference itself is threatening to the psychic
apparatus’s ability to return to quiescence, introducing as it does the “fresh, ‘vital difference’
which must then be lived off” (55).
Freud explains the necessary importation of difference as a baroque elaboration of the psychic apparatus itself, one that deploys a specifically heterosexual rescue as a way of salvaging
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Sameness, thus, becomes the enemy to be overcome even as it is the end to be sought. In its
projection outward, difference becomes an excessive and threatening sameness. This displacement and reversal transforms difference from the disturbance that starts the story (or the
unpleasant emotion) into sameness as an obstacle to be overcome and, at the same time, a threat
to the continuation of the story, as Brooks argues. This latter function is the primary dilemma in
Beyond the Pleasure Principle: how to explain the forces that perpetuate existence if what the
psychic apparatus seeks is low excitation; how to provoke interest if what we want is indifference.
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The sexual difference that haunts this scenario may be less a primary difference and more
already a figuration of the terms within which the processes of the psychic apparatus come to be
characterized by Freud, who uses the competing models of asexual conjunction and sexual
reproduction of micro-organisms to illustrate the complicated dynamics of a restless psychic
system. These models, however, import a complex set of narrative hetero-ideologies that both
reflect and predict the narrative positions that will absorb psychic projections, not as difference
(defined as sexual difference, but also any other kind of difference established ideologically as a
constitutive opposition such as race, national, or ethnic origin, religion, sexual preference, and
so on), but rather, in a reversal of affect, as sameness — or the sought indifference itself. Reversal of affect is Freud’s term for the way feelings of one kind are transformed into their opposite.
This transformation often accompanies a physical displacement from one site or position to its
opposite. For example, in “Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria,” Freud analyzes Dora’s
negative response to Herr K’s advances as a reversal of affect; that is, in Dora, feelings of lust
were reversed into feelings of disgust while genital sensations were displaced upward to the
9
throat. In a similar manner, sadistic or exhibitionistic impulses manifest themselves as their
opposites — as masochism and voyeurism. These, too, involve a mechanism of projective
displacement, from self to other, active to passive.10
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difference. This situates the pleasure principle itself as a kind of stasis or sameness that must be
overcome within the psychic apparatus in order to perpetuate the existence of the individual.
This recovery comes, however, by way of trying to explain the pleasures of unpleasure. Freud
further complicates his dynamic model of the psyche by asking why individuals repeat
unpleasurable experiences, a seeming exception to both the pleasure principle and the reality
principle. What tendency toward low excitation or survival can come from repeatedly bringing
traumatic memories into consciousness? While repetition can provide pleasurable opportunities for mastering trauma (as illustrated by Freud’s famous example of the child’s fort/da game),
it nevertheless brings unpleasurable excitation to the fore.
While the pleasures of mastery are Freud’s answer to the enigma of repetition, the example
provides the pretext for the introduction of another stream of psychic life: Eros as a combinatory
principle on the model of heterosexual reproduction. On the one hand, Freud explains Eros as
analogous to the urge to reproduce as a kind of sexual instinct whose impetus is to prolong life
by introducing difference. “For on our hypothesis the ego-instincts arise from the coming to life
of inanimate matter and seek to restore the inanimate state; whereas as regards the sexual instincts, though it is true that they reproduce primitive states of the organism, what they are
clearly aiming at by every possible means is the coalescence of two germ-cells which are differentiated in a particular way. If this union is not effected, the germ-cell dies along with all the
other elements of the multicellular organism” (44). The introduction of matter from a different
organism prolongs existence. “This [the influx of “fresh amounts of stimulus”] tallies well with
the hypothesis that the life process of the individual leads for internal reasons to an abolition of
chemical tensions, that is to say, to death, whereas union with the living substance of a different
individual increases those tensions, introducing what may be described as fresh ‘vital differences’
which must then be lived off” (55). Difference thus becomes the impetus to life, while sameness
becomes an impetus toward death. What has been topographical (sameness inside, difference
outside) becomes temporal — difference now instead of sameness so sameness can be reached
at a later and more proper time.
This very shifty sameness shifts again to a position after difference, becoming thus both its
extension and precursor. As Freud reiterates, “the dominating tendency of mental life, and
perhaps of nervous life in general, is the effort to reduce, to keep constant or to remove internal
tension due to stimuli... — a tendency which finds expression in the pleasure principle” (55-56).
The countervalent sexual instincts or Eros, however, does not originate in the repetitions that
would seem to counter the pleasure principle. Rather, Freud locates or relocates Eros as an
instinct — as “an urge inherent in organic life to return to an earlier state of things” — that is, as
the pleasure principle again (36). This time, however, the earlier state of things to which the
organism returns is a mythical wholeness as represented by the doubled beings of Aristophanes’
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SO WHAT? THE FUNDAMENTAL DIFFERENCE
In this way sameness or indifference becomes the structural enemy of narrative and ideology
even as both work to provide the defense that enables the perpetuation of indifference. But so
what? So what if indifference is a manifestation of the pleasure principle? Does this mean we are
doomed to oscillate between caring and indifference, roused only by increasingly egregious
assaults? Or do we, as in every other scenario, project our differences outwardly in order to
preserve a sameness within, the only difference being that the frame of projection has changed
from within to without? Does this mean that the recent outpouring of public sympathy is also
already really a mechanism for returning quickly to a state of sameness on the level of the social
where we all become patriotic and forget our differences? In other words, what seems to be no
shortage of feeling is also a mechanism for returning quickly to a shortage of feeling, notably a
shortage of the wrong kind of feelings — fear and doubt. This might mean that the direction of
our caring is indeed aimed toward self-preservation and in fact the preservation of an undisturbed
environment, a status quo of self-sameness — indifference.
As a manifestation of the pleasure principle, indifference accounts in part for the tautologies
of our narratives, for the ways they reverse the positions and identities of sameness and indifference. By displacing the indifference wielded by the dominant (indifference as a willed ignorance
of difference, indifference as a presumed group sameness) onto those who do not share the
privileges of the dominant because they are in some way different, the different become the loci
of sameness while the indifferent become the catalytic, active differences generating change and
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story cited by Plato. These doubled beings, who consisted of three genders (two men, two women,
and one of each) were sundered by Zeus and from that point have tried to come back together —
hence sex. Drawing an analogy between these beings and the particulate matter that comprises
living flesh, Freud notes a tendency to come together in ever larger pieces and systems that
reproduce an earlier state of things instead of forming entirely new structures.
This reconfiguring of sameness as difference links pleasure and the pleasure principle to
difference rather than to sameness, which becomes increasingly identified with death rather
than inertia. While Eros introduces tensions whose release is a rather spectacular pleasure, the
pleasure principle as a site of indifference works “unobtrusively,” Freud observes (63). Aligned
with death, the pleasure principle is more on guard against disturbances “from within,” those
internal differences and tensions projected outwardly as a danger to be defended against. Internal
differences become externalized sameness that threatens a cessation of Eros, which by joining
differences produces pleasure and perpetuates life. Sameness in the guise of indifference becomes the enemy of life itself, its valence reversed from its original function of preserving the
individual. And yet at the same time, the projection of indifference outside enables internal
indifference to continue.
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movement. The displacement of indifference from an indifferent protagonist to an antagonist
marked as somehow different that results in this reversal of narrative roles preserves the privilege
of indifference (not recognizing difference), which is ultimately rescued by both narrative and
ideologies masquerading as agents of progressive change — as the opposite of the indifference
that such narrative sustains and protects. This displacement accounts for both the alignment of
difference with the dominant and the perpetuation of ideologies that are themselves structured
around assignments of difference such as sexism, racism, homophobia, patriotism, and even
classism. But as typical deployments of the strategic articulations of indifference, these
discriminations are nothing compared to the (w)holistic fervor of various brands of totalitarianism, which in disrupting the very possibility of indifference take indifference to an entirely new
level.
The site of disturbance in this indifferent urge is finally quite fundamental: religious fundamentalisms of all kinds. Fundamentalisms bind truth, passion, and uniformity. In other words,
fundamentalisms align affective indifference (the mien of an unrecognition of difference) with
psychic calm and the social sameness of group identification around a single truth. The combination of an apparent disregard for difference (especially the validity of religious difference)
with the psychic and social comforts of doctrine produces a sameness and conformity across the
social, psychic, and ideological that relocates sameness from a category of low excitation to a
category of high excitation. Indifference is thus transformed from a passive attitude to the active
intolerance of differences. Fundamentalism’s enabling misrecognition is the truth itself, generally
presented as Word, which, unlike other words, is unambiguous, self-same, and tolerates no
deviation. The duty of believers is to eliminate any deviation from the Word. Rather than seeing
the possibility for any exteriority, totalitarian fundamentalisms (Christian, Jewish, Muslim) work
on a universal and eternal scale. Thus, there is no place to project differences: all must be absorbed
and/or hidden (as in the case of Afghani women). Passion becomes a feature of a quest for
sameness. Though one might argue that these fundamentalisms depend equally on the presence
of the infidel of some ilk, the imaginary of fundamentalism entails a total incorporation as the
moment of greatest passion. This narrative of a passionately desired sameness plays against the
narratives of projected difference that characterize patriotism, ethnocentrism, homophobia,
sexism, and racism. However, it is not just another, perhaps more extreme version of them, but
a narrative whose extreme scale threatens to render difference inoperable once and for all. If
Nazism and Stalinism were, as Thomas Friedman suggests, secular totalitarianisms that orchestrated the greatest disasters of the twentieth century, then totalitarian fundamentalisms threaten
with a deadly sameness in the twenty-first century on a scale beyond the political or the racial.11
While non-fundamentalists might acknowledge their fear of fundamentalism as a fear of its
deadly sameness, fundamentalisms play the pleasure principle differently, reversing the relations
between sameness and low excitation, making sameness passionate, difference deadly, aiming
toward death as life, refusing the infusion of difference as life-giving. We might say that in his
deployment of narrative, Freud was himself already anti-fundamentalist. Or we might say that
resistance against fundamentalism’s urge toward sameness is another version of “beyond the
pleasure principle” played out in the grandest scale possible. If this is the case, Freud’s narrative
of psychic life has turned out to be all too accurate a reading of contemporary cultural dynamics.
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This fundamentalist narrative, finally, is itself the master narrative of indifference. It can admit
no difference at all just as it must be indifferent to all but its own deadly version of truth. It is the
ecstatic version of the pleasure principle; its indifference to all but its own ends terminates all
other indifference. At the same time its indifference cannot be broached by either a competing
difference or indifference. Resistance is futile; the logic of fundamentalism, like that of Star
Trek’s famous borg, is that difference will be assimilated or destroyed and indifference will simply
be absorbed. Unity as a response to this dynamic reiterates — in fact, mimics — the totalitarian
unity against which it is formed, a unity which itself no longer permits difference or even indifference but the same passionate drive for a unified truth. This structural stuttering occurs because
of the way the fundamentalist narrative aligns the pleasure principle with truth. There is no way
to combat this except by doing the same, since the scale of the truth surpasses — is indifferent
to — all other scales of difference. The only way, then, to evade the monolithic, universalist
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We have fought this battle for millennia. The battle itself contains the very contradictions
with which I began this discussion: same is never the same. But what fundamentalism shows us
is the ways sameness is finally not indifference, but a passionately sought uniformity that
represents truth as the place of a final rest. The battle then is not so much against indifference,
but against the wrong kinds of indifference, the wrong kinds of sameness, which, as Freud
suggests, lead to a premature and improper end. In this sense, then, Freud’s narrative of the
pleasure principle is finally the narrative of fundamentalism, of seeking the best and truest end.
And both the narrative of fundamentalism and Freud’s narrative of the pleasure principle situate
the “wrong” kinds of samenesses — infantilism, homosexualities, incest — as immature, selfgratifying, and ultimately untrue versions of sameness, while the unified sameness of the truth
as an inspired unity in difference is the proper sameness with which to end. Obviously, this is
another version of overt heterosexual ideology, but it also shows perhaps why it is that homosexualities are among the first practices vilified by fundamentalisms. Homosexualities are competing brands of sameness, wrong destinations, alternate sites of perceived indifference that
both get in the way of the real path to truth (represented by fundamentalist unity) and suggest
that there is more than one truth to be had (enlightened pluralism). Linking all versions of
sameness to indifference, thus, is a way of complying with the fundamentalist narrative of passionate sameness.
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totality of fundamentalism is to eschew the connection between truth and the pleasure principle
altogether, not in postmodern opposition (that is, many truths vs. one which is the battle that
already plays around contemporary fundamentalism), but rather in detaching narrative from its
own ends, from the very idea of an end where truth and/or low excitation reside as the fundamental pattern of human existence. But how do we do this?
1.
Rick Lyman, “At Least for the Moment, a Cooling Off in the
Culture Wars,” New York Times, 13 November 2001, late
ed., E1.
2. Kitty Genovese, a New York City resident, was stabbed repeatedly in 1964 over the space of an hour and eventually
killed by an assailant who returned again and again while
her neighbors watched but failed to intervene.
3. “More than I worry about flag-waving I worry about what
will happen when flag-waving has to stop. All the ceremonies of emotion, from children’s drawings to fund drives,
are prone to diminishing returns” (Christopher Hitchens,
“For Patriot Dreams,” Vanity Fair [December 2001]: 156).
6. Freud discusses the “reversal of affect” most specifically in
his discussion of sadism/masochism and voyeurism/exhibitionism in “Instincts and Their Vicissitudes,” in SE 14:109140.
7. Freud situates unpleasure as a perceptual problem in
Beyond the Pleasure Principle, in SE 18:11. Subsequent references will appear parenthetically within the text.
10. See Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, in SE
7:156-159.
11. Examining the problem of fundamentalism, Friedman
writes: “All faiths that come out of the biblical tradition —
Judaism, Christianity, and Islam — have the tendency to
believe that they have the exclusive truth....The opposite of
religious totalitarianism is an ideology of pluralism — an
ideology that embraces religious diversity and the idea that
my faith can be nurtured without claiming exclusive truth.
American is the Mecca of that ideology, and that is what
bin Laden hates and that is why America had to be destroyed” (Thomas L. Friedman, “The Real War,” editorial,
New York Times, 27 November 2001, late ed., A19).
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5. See Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, in The
Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of
Sigmund Freud, ed. and trans. James Strachey et al. (London: Hogarth Press, 1953-1974), 7:123-245. In “Freud’s
Masterplot,” in Literature and Psychoanalysis: The
Question of Reading: Otherwise, ed. Shoshana Felman
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982), 280300, Peter Brooks demonstrates the ways narrative as a
dynamic parallels the categories Freud discusses in Beyond
the Pleasure Principle, in SE 18:1-64.
9. Freud, “Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria,” in
SE 7:28-29.
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4. During the 2002 Winter Olympics, for example, television
commentators questioned the Russian pair skaters’ decision
to pay homage to the tragedy of September 11, suggesting
that using the event was an instance of bad taste on the
part of non-Americans. This performance was later contested by accusations of rigged voting.
8. See Freud, “Fetishism,” in SE 21:154-155.
christopher lane
OR WHY SAMENESS IS NOT A SYNONYM FOR GAYNESS
SIMILITUDE,
Although “sameness” usually has negative connotations, describing all
that is bland and homogeneous, when the term crops up in lesbian and
gay politics it tends to carry a positive spin, promising equality via a
logic of equivalence. In this context, equivalence becomes a precursor to
equality, the latter its reward. For instance, the Human Rights Campaign
adopted as its logo a simple equal sign (“=”); in doing so, this national
gay and lesbian organization wanted to convey that homosexuals should
lack none of the social, legal, and political advantages currently bestowed
on heterosexuals. Implying unity by its leveling effect on psychosexual
relations, sameness in this guise not only heralds compatibility among
equals, but also permits healthy substitutions rendering men and women,
and gays and straights, almost interchangeable. Thus has the “homo”
succeeded in making the “homogeneous” almost sexy.
My concern is the logic of this equivalence — the homology binding
and collapsing disparate homosexualities — which flourishes beyond political strategies, in theories now associated with them. When sameness
is understood as synonymous with “gayness,” what gets masked is an
asymmetry subtending same-sex relations, obscuring substitution’s
practical and conceptual limitations. Some of the idealist rhetoric
accompanying accounts of sameness casts this state as a precursor to
relational extension and collective fusion among gays and lesbians, in
ways apparently escaping the dyadic crises marring heterosexual
coupling. Such reasoning is, I think, selective and mistaken, not only
concealing vast cultural differences among lesbians and gay men, but
also hinting at a form of psychical alikeness that simplifies a plethora of
sexual identifications, including their real or “extrasymbolic” effects.
When gay and lesbian sexualities are couched in this way, much —
though not all — psychoanalytic wisdom disappears. This is partly
because homosexuality can seem to obviate sexual difference and to escape the difficulty inherent in all forms of human desire. Accordingly,
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lesbians and gay men are said to enjoy intimacies that, owing to shared genitality, are devoid of
“real” implications — which is to say, unsymbolizable effects that may result in bliss and pleasure as well as shock, distress, and even trauma. As homophobia continues to burgeon, the
desire to associate homosexuality solely with pleasure seems understandable, but it’s also intellectually and politically limiting. And while attention to the differences besetting this model of
sameness logically should destroy it, as inconsistencies betray assumptions about gay unanimity, what tends to happen instead is that those highlighting the drawbacks of this model are cast
as hostile to queer thought and thus as advocates of such fiercely contested topics as monogamy,
gay marriage, and normativity. By contrast, those advocating sameness become locked in
assumptions about compatible forms of antifamilialism — assumptions that surely need
examining.
In order to study the conceptual ramifications of these debates, I shall consider Leo Bersani’s
work in some detail, for it’s both the most eloquent statement about sameness — or what he calls
“inaccurate self-replication” — and the farthest-reaching attempt at stressing the relational possibilities of near-alikeness. Although I will begin by addressing conceptual differences between
Bersani’s Homos and Caravaggio’s Secrets, co-authored with Ulysse Dutoit, I want to use those
differences to compare Bersani’s recent reading of Plato’s Symposium to Lacan’s thoughts on
this multivalent text. In doing so, I hope to put in relief the claim that the movement of Bersani’s
recent work hews closest to the positive effects of “nonantagonistic sameness” in queer theory,
whereas Lacan’s stresses the volatile or real implications of similitude between sexual partners. 1
Disputing that sameness is an apt synonym for gayness, I will argue that similitude is in fact a
better term, having profound implications for queer thought. Indeed, the advantage of this latter term, including political interest in the range and difficulty of gay and lesbian desires, offsets
the loss of any specificity attached to claims about sameness.
Attentive readers may note that Bersani is not a simple proponent of either sameness or queer
theory. Indeed, his emphasis on “inaccurate self-replication” logically should limit the value he
places on what he calls “homo-ness,” bringing him closer to Lacanian arguments about asymmetry and similitude. Intriguingly, however, Bersani not only has resisted this last move, but
has done so by voicing objections to Lacanian psychoanalysis, particularly its emphasis on lack
as a precursor to all forms of desire. Consequently, it is impossible to engage fully with his objections from within the purview of Lacanianism without appearing to miss the point or to beg the
question. This is why my reading of Bersani’s work revisits his and Lacan’s different arguments
about Plato, adopting an approach that is both comparative and necessarily disjunctive. For,
paradoxically, when Bersani is closest to the question of similitude (via that of “inaccurate selfreplication”), he is also most opposed to Lacanian arguments and most fascinated by works
ostensibly promoting extensibility, including those of Plato, Caravaggio, and Jean Laplanche,
an analyst-philosopher whom some prize as more heterodox and accessible than Lacan but others
regard as a mere borrower and diluter of Lacan’s arguments who gains popularity in exact proportion to his perceived distance from Lacan.
Although I see truth in each claim, a full discussion of this complex turn in French psychoanalysis is beyond the scope of this essay. Beginning instead with the fascinating conceptual
differences between Homos and Caravaggio’s Secrets, we can assess how each book represents
extensibility, one of the factors distinguishing Bersani’s work as excitingly original. In Homos,
for instance, extensibility makes possible the kind of pluralized sameness that gives the book its
arresting title. “Homo-ness” is for Bersani “[a]n anticommunal mode of connectedness,” because,
in an oxymoronic fashion, it dissolves before supplementing selfhood. “Homo-ness” generates a
tenuous “we,” that is, whose “pleasing instability” allows us to reconceive sociality.2
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On the face of things, this shift may not seem dramatic. There are even grounds for arguing
that Bersani’s earlier work — including his brilliant essay “Lawrentian Stillness” — questions if
identity multiplied or replicated remains identity at all.5 Nevertheless, the arguments in Bersani’s
recent books vary in ways pertinent to my discussion. Whereas in Homos Bersani’s key interest
is the tension between political self-recognition and the dissolution of selfhood through samesex erotic bliss, Caravaggio’s Secrets styles connectedness in a post-identitarian fashion, without
immediate regard for sexual politics. For this reason, it deals less with homosexuality, yet also
critiques psychoanalytic accounts of “lack-in-being.” Discussing the aesthetic and ontological
ramifications of subjective dispersal, Bersani and Dutoit contend that, through art — and
Caravaggio’s in particular — we can locate a “relational system” generally obscured by politics
and ideology (73).6 Rather than advancing a corresponding fantasy that art should “restore a
fantasmatic wholeness,” Caravaggio allegedly highlights “an active insertion into the movement
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Yet there is obviously an intriguing tension in Bersani’s title, because in plural form the “homo”
ceases to signify pure “sameness,” owing to Bersani’s near-contemporaneous emphasis on
“inaccurate self-replication,” and instead gestures to an alterity in homosexuality that lies in
tension with what is “hetero,” or “other,” to sameness. That is, the nouns “homosexuality” and
“heterosexuality” have Greek rather than Latin etymologies, and thus signify “same-” and “othersexuality,” rather than biological sex. Because of Bersani’s interest in sameness, however, in
Homos he cannot easily navigate or sustain this conceptual distinction between “same-” and
“other-sexuality.” In Caravaggio’s Secrets, by contrast, Bersani and Dutoit point their argument
about extensibility in a different, less sexually specific direction, placing stronger emphasis on
“inaccurate self-replication” relative to space and inorganic matter.3 The phrase and argument
recur in Bersani’s most recent essays, “Genital Chastity” and “Against Monogamy,” where Bersani
writes evocatively about “the subject’s non-intimate connections” to the world, including but
not reducible to “multitudinous points of disseminated sociality.”4
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of being,” signaling that “we are not cut off from anything; nothing escapes connectedness, the
play of and between forms” (72). Connectedness resulting from “inaccurate self-replication” is
thus central to Bersani and Dutoit’s ethico-political view of human relations. A basis for their
critique of psychoanalysis, the question of connectedness emerges from their interest in a form
of sameness that is nonantagonistic, representing desires that are irreducible to specific groups
or persons. A move that Bersani might have called “de-gaying” in Homos is, in Caravaggio’s
Secrets, a sign of our almost symbiotic relationship to the world.
For instance, in their analysis of Caravaggio’s Betrayal of Christ, Bersani and Dutoit claim
that “the very distinction between subjective and objective is meaningless,” because Caravaggio
“immobiliz[es these] relations” (71, 72). Later, they change tack slightly, arguing that the painter’s
interest in his subjects’ “between-ness” represents “a casual, poignant and haunting intimacy”
between the two realms we inhabit: that of “physical individuated existence” and that of “being
as a disseminated connectedness throughout the universe” (82). Accordingly, the “distinction
between subjective and objective” does not completely disappear. Rather, it gets displaced by
Caravaggio’s willingness to render additional relationships to the world, a sign, ultimately, “of
the natural extensibility of all being.”7
Although Bersani and Dutoit might see little value in this move, we could connect what they
are arguing here to a body of psychoanalytic work that elaborates on that part of being that
remains surplus and unrepresentable. In Civilization and Its Discontents, for instance, Freud
explicitly juxtaposes feelings of “‘oneness with the universe’” with a “repugnance which
cannot…always be accounted for,” but which is often directed at loved ones.8 He does so to underscore the uneasy coexistence in every subject of what, following Lacan, we would now call
real and imaginary identifications, the former having effects almost contrary to the Romantic
motif of “oneness with the universe” that Freud scornfully dismisses. As Bersani recognizes —
indeed, discusses at length in “Against Monogamy” — psychoanalysis’s conceptual understanding
of objects yields a tangled, even antagonistic rendering of desire and lack-in-being. At such
moments, the resulting stress on our inability to leave anything “forgotten, given up, [or] left
behind” clashes with his and Dutoit’s thoughts on relationality (19). For Gide, Proust, and Genet,
as Bersani eloquently writes in Homos, “otherness is articulated as relay stations in a process of
self-extension,” not as a register whose strangeness elicits shock and even trauma.9 So, central
to this comparative discussion of sameness are quite different ways of conceiving gaps among
subjects and the psychical remnants that drive them together before, perhaps, flinging them
apart. Whereas in Bersani’s model such remnants generally enable connections between samesex partners (as, for instance, “a nonthreatening supplement to sameness”),10 in Freud’s and
Lacan’s terms such remnants, thwarting reciprocity, permit tragicomic forms of connection governed largely (though not entirely) by the subject’s post-Oedipal bearings.
It should be clear, I hope, that these differences are not trivial or minor quibbles; they represent almost contrary ways of conceiving our sexed and sexual relationship to other beings
(“people” or “subjects” would sound anachronistic here). In Bersani and Dutoit’s hands, for
example, being is rendered extensible, nonappropriative, and nonproprietary; in Lacan’s hands
(and often in Freud’s), the subject extrapolated violently from being tends to endure a hostile,
even paranoid relationship to the world. However, rather than addressing such elements as
drive, affect, and the gap between the subject and its body, Bersani and Dutoit, in their analysis
of Caravaggio’s St. John the Baptist with a Ram, stress the enabling conditions of the painting’s
“illuminated relationality” (72): “In their outward spread, the horns de-narrativize the picture,
extending the youth away from himself, connecting him, as the other fanlike structures [in the
painting] do, to a realm of being he can’t contain, where there are no borders or figures, no
beginning or end. This, then, is the youth’s secret, one not of interiority but rather of indefinite
extensibility, a secret of unrepresented, and unrepresentable, ontological affinities” (82).
Before answering these questions, we should note in passing that identity itself means a type
of “sameness.” The Latin term idem (“same”) spawned the late Latin noun identitas, which
11
represents the “quality of being the same.” Identity itself is thus predicated on a notion of
replication, though one that Bersani would not favor, since it offers only egoic narcissism through
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For Bersani and Dutoit, this radical uninterest in selfhood represents an intoxicating reprieve
from the burdens of consciousness and the jouissance that limns our relationship to objects.
Released from anxiety about relational insufficiency, Caravaggio’s youth is spared the type of
suffering that, according to Lacan, molds desire as an imaginary antidote to ontological lack.
What Bersani and Dutoit want to reconceive here is nothing less than a tradition from Plato to
Lacan (and beyond) that has viewed desire as an outcome of “lack-in-being,” such that the subject seeks solace in that which is not self-identical to it. But the questions, I think, are whether
Bersani and Dutoit can finally displace psychoanalytic attention to castration and loss as factors
prefiguring desire, and whether their alternative is psychically and conceptually persuasive.
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One could say much about this fascinating interpretation. To begin with, Bersani and Dutoit’s
partial rejection of Laplanche’s model of the “enigmatic signifier” arguably makes possible their
stress on “indefinite extensibility” and “unrepresentable, ontological affinities.” But, as I will
soon show, their thoughts on these ineffable connections would look quite different if we filtered
them through the Lacanian concepts of the lamella and the real. Moreover, sameness for Bersani
and Dutoit is not organized by resemblance to even another being or body; it arises from the
youth’s apparent uninterest in self-duplication. Ceasing to care about physical and psychic boundaries, the young man does not sequester elements of the external world, and displays little or no
regard for self-possession. He seems to accept that he is positioned “somewhere between two
realms of being”: the physical and the ontological (82).
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the replication, rather than the dissolution, of identity. The whole thrust of his work from at least
A Future for Astyanax on is, indeed, to engage with impulses that “obliterate the very field in
which the anecdotes of personality are possible.” 12 Thus in “Against Monogamy,” he speaks of
“refiguring…the relational” as a way to “help us to elaborate modes of being-in-the-world to
which the concept of identity itself might be irrelevant.” 13
At such moments, one sees why D. H. Lawrence’s fascination with “lapsing out” of consciousness and Samuel Beckett’s interests in stasis influence Bersani’s argument so profoundly: for if
desire simply permits “the extensibility of sameness,” generating a demand for objects perceived
only as “more of what [one] is,”14 then within these terms the alterity of the object must vanish
alongside what is most ontologically injurious about the drive’s enabling attachments in the first
place.15 Eschewing what is most antipathetic to consciousness about our unconscious sexual
relation to objects, Bersani risks resurrecting in modified form (as Lawrence arguably does in
Women in Love) the very egoic structure that would derail his anti-identitarian argument. While
the unconscious escapes integration or accommodation, it also disables any hope of
rapprochement between sexuality and an extensible ego. Bersani would say, at such moments,
that castration is an unnecessary roadblock here, limiting extensibility to post-Oedipal
configurations, because it is irrelevant to the forms of connection he wants to amplify beyond
subjectivity and personhood; yet it is also here, for Lacanians, that the negative associations of
the real cannot be bracketed or dismissed by fiat, not least because the real is inseparable from
the very movement toward objects that Bersani wants to cultivate.
“Within the Freudian scheme,” Bersani and Dutoit rightly observe, “the ego’s profound mistrust of the world can be ‘overcome’ only by a narcissistic identification with the hated object,
one that masochistically introjects that object” (41). It would indeed be difficult to advance a
psychoanalytic understanding of objects that did not involve violence or, at the very least, radical suspicion, whether the object is hated. But the question goes beyond whether Bersani and
Dutoit can posit “ego-identifications (or ego-extensions, we would now be inclined to say)” that
are “not reducible to a sexualizing shattering of the ego or to the sadistic project of destroying
what is different from the ego” (41). In advancing this formulation, they recast the category of
the real by turning it into a realm promoting connection rather than trauma or impossibility.
Published the same year as Caravaggio’s Secrets, “Against Monogamy” suggests — in a way
quite contrary to Lacan — that identification “can truly dissolve the fixity of Oedipal desires that
are, paradoxically, at once monogamous and promiscuous.” 16
In displacing Freud’s and Lacan’s interest in more mimetic (and consequently violent) aspects
of identification, Bersani and Dutoit risk returning desire to the field of positivity, rather than
that of the unconscious and lack. It is facile to imply the recurrence of a secret identitarianism in
their work (something I am not claiming), not least because they caution so eloquently against
this result. Yet it is difficult to see how “ego-extensions,” even in this modified form, can escape
the most violent and restrictive aspects of imaginarized relations. Additionally, questions arise
about how the drive and the real might be sundered without destroying connectivity entirely;
and how, concerning objects and sexuality, these relations could preserve the radically
transformative potential of “unrepresentable ontological affinities” without either shoring up or
completely destroying the ego, thereby incapacitating the subject (82). Given Bersani’s reliance
on aesthetics and their account of “the procedures by which the mind de-phenomenalises the
world,” some idealist and utopian strains of thought seem to inform their argument.17
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So, for the sake of clarity, we should stress what may be obvious to readers of this journal:
Lacan insists that the objet a is not symbolizable, but is instead a little piece of the real coated
with jouissance. That is, not only is the objet a inimical to selfhood and resistant to meaning, but
it is also “foreign” to the ego, and thus an entity both eliciting connection and thwarting extensibility. Lacan even implies that the objet a is violently stimulating precisely to the degree that it
fails to sanction union or lasting intimacy. In his “schema L,” moreover, he indicates — in ways
Bersani presumably would support — that the ego mistakes as self-identical the specular being
(a) in which it aspires to find itself. This, then, is partly Lacan’s explanation for “inaccurate selfreplication,” though in his model it is constitutive of subjectivity — which is also to say,
ontologically disabling, because it remains in basic tension with being. To this fascinating argument, Lacan adds two factors that Bersani, in his most recent work, has begun to downplay.
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Although there are profound differences among these scholars,18 Bersani and Dutoit do partly
join Jonathan Dollimore and Judith Butler here, at least to the extent that all adopt various
methods of recasting psychoanalytic arguments about lack, while in the process viewing castration as “an energized fixation permanently haunted by loss.” The phrase is Dollimore’s, who
argues that Lacan’s “tragic ontology of desire” is apparent when the analyst discusses homosexuality in Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past.19 In Seminar I, for instance, Lacan argues
that the homosexual subject “exhausts himself in pursuing the desire of the other, which he will
never be able to grasp as his own desire, because his own desire is the desire of the other….The
intersubjective relation which subtends perverse desire is only sustained by the annihilation
either of the desire of the other, or of the desire of the subject….[I]n the one as in the other, this
relation dissolves the being of the subject.” 20 Dollimore represents this passage — and Lacanian
accounts of perverse desire in general — as heterosexist, insofar as Lacan points to a problem
about the jouissance of same-sex relations that heterosexuals apparently are more adept at
masking. I am convinced neither that Lacan believes this, nor that he is wrong to address forms
of jouissance, irreducible to homosexuality, whose outcome may be bliss, suffering, or both.
Although this is surely a subject on which psychoanalysts have much to say, invariably it remains
one on which even the most capacious forms of queer theory skid to an abrupt halt.
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First, the “wall of language” enabling symbolic relations tends to block the imaginary axis, hemming in imagoes that are not easily symbolized.21 Second, the objet a, which seems to promise
imaginary wholeness, is inseparable from the real, which means that Lacan cannot conceive of
self-extension independently of a realm that beleaguers meaning and mobility. This point
arguably goes to the heart of Bersani’s differences with Lacan, though it also surely indicates
why Bersani is so reluctant to view the real as a negative entity and increasingly willing to join
other critics in viewing castration as little more than a psychoanalytic fable promulgated by
those either obsessed with loss or intent on conflating homosexuality with perversion. Lacan, by
contrast, tells us what “the intersubjective relation” fantasmatically “annihilat[es]” in order to
sustain itself, thereby implying that even self-extension is ontologically damaging.22
As is well-known, however, Lacan viewed the ensuing sexual crisis as closer to comedy than
tragedy. In fact, he says that Plato takes “the subject of Eros, that is to say, desire…in the
Symposium…even to the point of farce.” 23 Moreover, instead of tilting the various failures of
sexuality toward heteronormativity, Lacan, as Tim Dean compellingly shows, underscores the
antinormative implications of his intrinsically “perverse” depiction of the objet a.24 Of course,
these arguments are not news to Bersani, who for years has outlined what is psychically and
aesthetically compelling about Laplanche’s emphasis on the “enigmatic signifier,” partly to confront and partly to veer away from Lacan. Consequently, I wish to turn here to Bersani’s reading
of Plato’s Symposium, since his account of this extraordinarily rich work forms the basis for his
critique of psychoanalysis in “Genital Chastity.”
I cannot here document fully how multiple perspectives on desire jostle for prominence in
Plato’s work, preventing any unitary description of love, lack, or desire. Whereas Phaedrus
passionately extols virtue and self-sacrifice, for instance, Eryximachus de-sexualizes love by likening it to a sense of general “harmony,” applying it to almost everything in the world (medicine,
music, meteorology, and so on). Enforcing the well-known, asymmetrical distinctions between
the lover (erastes) and the beloved (eromenos), Plato nonetheless differs from both Freud and
Bersani in rendering genital similarity subsidiary to the predominant, and more determinative,
distinctions of age and rank in Hellenic culture. A sign of this asymmetry is Xenophon’s insistence that “the boy does not share in the man’s pleasure in intercourse, as a woman does; cold
sober, he looks upon the other drunk with sexual desire.” 25 (As K. J. Dover adds, “what the
eromenos get[s] out of submission to his erastes…is, no bodily pleasure; should he do so, he
incurs disapproval as a pornos and as perverted.”) 26 Moreover, Freud stresses in his Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality that the object for the ancients was infinitely less important
than the instinct — an emphasis that, Freud says, reverses ours, where “we despise the instinctual activity in itself, and find excuses for it only in the merits of the object.”27 There is a strong
risk, in other words, that we will call self-identical various traits of Hellenic philosophy and
psychology, only to find that they were defined in ways quite contrary to our expectations.
One example would be Bersani’s reading of Aristophanes’ famous myth of the originally three
sexes — male, female, and male-female — each having twice our number of limbs and organs.28
For to be somewhat pedantic, if two-thirds of humanity in this fable can claim to desire on the
basis of extending sameness (and for me this is a big if), then the remaining one-third of humanity
— the one that was male-female and that splits from “androgyny” into heterosexuality — cannot
operate in this way. Because this original third undermines Bersani’s point about sameness, he
includes it only as an afterthought;29 I suggest that it should be the exception that disproves any
“rule” attributed to sameness. Nor is it incidental that Zeus instructs Apollo in the fable to turn
around the necks and faces of the cleaved entities “toward the wound, so that each person would
see that he’d been cut and keep better order.”30 For even after our navels have been sewn up,
Aristophanes implies, we retain a physical “reminder of what happened long ago”31 — a sort of
phylogenetic memory of loss that keeps us looking for replacements. The unmistakable suggestion here is that desire arises from a deficiency of being — indeed, as an effect of castration.
123
Bersani’s is evidently the most positive way of framing Aristophanes’ claim that “love does the
best that can be done for the time being.” 39 According to Bersani here, love for sameness eclipses
the crucial rift instantiating the demand for such love in the first place. Overall, he wants us “to
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Lack is so integral to desire in the Symposium, we might say, that Aristophanes cannot
represent the latter without the former. What of sameness? Do these replacements bear any
semblance to our “original,” lost self? Glossing Aristophanes’ well-known concession that “the
nearest approach to [the ideal] is best in present circumstances,” 32 Bersani writes: “We
love…inaccurate replications of ourselves. The philosophical lesson of the fable is that we relate
to difference by recognizing and longing for sameness.” 33 Summing up Aristophanes’ argument,
Lacan too underscores in seminar eleven “the search by the subject, not of the sexual complement, but of the part of himself, lost forever, that is constituted by the fact that he is only a sexed
living being, and that he is no longer immortal.”34 But here the resemblance to Bersani’s argument ends. For Lacan goes on to speak about “the partial drive, …profoundly a death drive,”
which “through the lure of the sexed living being…induce[s us] [induit] into…sexual realization.” 35 The verb “induces” captures his sense that this is a forced choice, rather than a field of
pleasure in which the subject elects to participate. What appears to be the missing part of
ourselves, Lacan cautions, is really “the lamella,” a grotesque, unsymbolizable factor that intercedes between us and the object, “surviv[ing] any division, any scissiparous intervention.” 36 The
lamella is in short “the libido, qua pure life instinct,” and thus “what is subtracted from the
living being by virtue of the fact that it is subject to the cycle of sexed reproduction.” 37 Underscoring
a rationale for psychoanalytic emphasis on lack-in-being, the lamella impedes ego-extensions
by running them alongside the impossible. This “unreal…[but] not imaginary” entity is, we might
say, a conceptual check on any idealism we could attribute to self-extensibility.38
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see difference not as a trauma to be overcome but as the non-threatening supplement to
sameness”40 — hence his suggestion that castration should be irrelevant to this scenario. Yet as
Lacan’s eleventh seminar makes clear, there is a very different way of reading these sentences —
a way, resembling the narrator’s thoughts in Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles, insisting
bleakly that “completeness is not to be prophesied, or even conceived as possible. Enough that
in the present case, as in millions, it was not the two halves of a perfect whole that confronted
each other at the perfect moment; a missing counterpart wandered independently about the
earth waiting in crass obtuseness till the late time came. Out of which maladroit delay sprang
anxieties, disappointments, shocks, catastrophes, and passing-strange destinies.”41 According
to Hardy’s narrator, this “counterpart” or lamella is the very entity that thwarts sameness and
union, rendering both impossible. If one adopted the model that Hardy and Lacan espouse, in
other words, the idea that sameness is possible, desirable, and sustainable would quickly crumble.
The closest subjects get to each other, in this second paradigm, is in an experience of the asymmetry and similitude that ensues from the bungling and awkward “delay” — an effect that holds
whether or not the gap opens between same- or differently-sexed beings. Thus does similitude
finally part company with sameness.
Let me spell out the most politically contentious outcome of this distinction. When similitude
replaces sameness and affinity substitutes for “homo-ness,” the popular idea that homo- and
heterosexuality follow different ontological and political tracks proves unfounded.42 Here is the
rub for many scholars, who want queerness to be both inclusive and antinormative — that is, to
absorb radical elements of even heterosexuality while spearheading a set of interventions against
the family, marriage, the state, and so on.43 The point is that arguments about queerness still
rely on conceptually untenable and impoverished notions of sexual-political specificity. Thus,
although Bersani amplifies in Homos the effects of “a potentially revolutionary inaptitude —
perhaps inherent in gay desire — for sociality as it is known,”44 Hardy’s and Lacan’s interest lies
in the “maladroit delay” interrupting all such sexual homologies, implying that same- and differently-sexed objects wreak the same ontological havoc on us all, since in both cases the objet a
is inseparable from the real.
My point is similar to the one that Guy Hocquenghem makes in the recently translated essay
“On Homo-Sex, or Is Homosexuality a Curable Vice?” In this somewhat inchoate meditation on
sameness and sexuality, whose conclusion differs considerably (though not entirely) from
Bersani and Dutoit’s, Hocquenghem contends that queer arguments about sexual specificity
and “content” rely on false conceptions of sexual truth and authenticity. He tries to eviscerate
sexual categories of content, that is, whereas Bersani and Dutoit, despite aspiring to have the
same effect on subjectivity, nonetheless tie “homo-ness” to (homo)sexual specificity. According
to Hocquenghem, “[n]o two points, subjects or persons are truly similar, for the space in which
a comparison might be made is but the pattern woven between monads striving to be.” 45 These
dissimilar monads weaving their pattern necessarily cannot sustain discrete sexual identities,
which means that Hocquenghem — although he does not quite acknowledge this — makes homoand heterosexuality conceptually indistinguishable.
Although Hocquenghem’s Leibnizian (and Lacanian) formulation about “monads striving to
be” stems partly from his admission, circa 1987, that he shares with many gays and lesbians a
“desire to ‘blend in,’” he does not advance this point in the interests of assimilation or quietism.
On the contrary, Hocquenghem’s concern is “less a desire to hide than to be undifferentiated,”
which sounds like an impressively Gallic spin on queer theory.46 For the latter, undifferentiation
may sound vexing, to the extent that it seems to accept the status quo. Counterintuitively, however,
Hocquenghem views this position as intensifying homophobic conflict, precisely because the
result downplays differences between homo- and heterosexuality. Such an outcome — a “near
imperceptibility” or “subtle lack of differentiation” between gays and straights — allegedly irks
homophobes more than does homosexuality’s “frank…visibility.” 47
125
In short, and for different reasons, problems of specificity haunt and beset Hocquenghem’s
and Bersani’s accounts of “near imperceptibility” and “homo-ness.” The very bid to dissolve
distinctions between gays — indeed, between persons — cannot feasibly coalesce with a contrary desire to view sexuality, however paradoxically, as determined by non-shattering sameness.
One need only read Bersani’s earlier work on sexuality, especially in The Freudian Body, to
grasp why. So, while it is possible to tie his more recent work to perceptions of Lacanian
heterosexism and the “prejudicial hierarchies of difference” organizing heterosexual couples
and families,50 it also seems necessary to concede that the argument pulls in two directions here.
UMBR(a)
Although I support Hocquenghem’s interest in emptying sexual categories of meaning and
apparent consistency, I think his thoughts on homophobic violence are for two reasons untenable.
If perfect undifferentiation were possible (much less desirable) for all sexed beings — a notion
echoing Aristophanes’ fable — then homophobia logically would dissipate or prove impossible
to enforce, since persons would be indistinguishable in terms of sexual preference. More relevant to my argument, Hocquenghem’s emphasis on the illusion of “tru[e] similar[ity]” among
gays and lesbians breaks down the spirit of relationality driving “homo-ness.” Recall his point
that “[n]o two points, subjects or persons are truly similar, for the space in which a comparison
might be made is but the pattern woven between monads striving to be.” Invoking what I earlier
described as interpersonal crises of asymmetry, Hocquenghem’s point renders moot — even
poignantly absurd — any thought of sameness at the level of groups and communities.48 Indeed,
given this perspective on dyadic relations, it is impossible to extrapolate from his formulations a
vision of non-antagonistic sameness. Instead, the proximity between subjects is, from his perspective, a cause of passion and violence — the “narcissism,” indeed, “of minor differences.” 49
Bersani cannot convincingly turn lack into an “extensibility of sameness” without reinstating
even notional control over our movement toward objects. These, I have argued chiefly via Lacan,
propel us toward the impossible real as it manifests itself in and beyond other people.51 To paraphrase Hocquenghem, the real is one of the key reasons “no two points, subjects or persons are
truly similar”; this register is also why “the space in which a comparison might be made” besets
and makes possible “the pattern woven between monads striving to be.”
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126
When Bersani argues in “Against Monogamy” that “an alien world best exercises its seduction
when it appears with the familiar aspect of sameness,” he makes a related point, but not to the
same end.52 “Sameness” may be a “familiar aspect” to us, but it is a fallacy to view even superficial alikeness as a way to offset or counteract what is most intolerable about our “alien world.”
The latter eventually overrides all presumptions of homology and equivalence among lesbians
and gay men, manifesting real traits that shatter any equals sign we might erect as a fragile
bulwark in our defense.
I am very grateful to Tim Dean, Christopher Herbert, Mikko
Tuhkanen, and the editorial board at UMBR(a) for comments
on an earlier draft.
13. Bersani, “Against Monogamy,” 5.
1.
15. In “Homosexuality and the Problem of Otherness,” in Dean
and Lane (eds.), esp. 122, 126 — an essay to which I am
indebted — Tim Dean argues that at such moments otherness is psychically distinct from difference, and that the
subject can experience the former without the latter. I am
arguing, by contrast, that Bersani’s rhetorical and
conceptual stress on the object being “more of what [one]
is” collapses this distinction by perceptually recasting what
is most “foreign” and inassimilable about the object. On this
point, we might note that the noun object (stemming from
the Latin objectum), designating what is “throw[n] towards”
or “place[d] in front of” an entity, is etymologically related
to objection, signifying an “obstacle,” or “something presented to the sight” (The Concise Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology, 318).
According to the OED, similitude refers to subjects who
“resemble” each other — that is, who bear “the likeness of
some other person or thing.”
2. Leo Bersani, Homos (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
1995), 10, 76, 9.
3. Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit, Caravaggio’s Secrets (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1998), 5. Subsequent references will
appear parenthetically within the text.
6. See also Bersani, “Against Monogamy,” 20-21.
7. Ibid., 20.
8. Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, in The
Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of
Sigmund Freud, ed. and trans. James Strachey` et al. (London: Hogarth, 1953-1974), 21:72, 106n.
9. Bersani, Homos, 7.
10. Ibid.
11. The Concise Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology, ed.
T. F. Hoad (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), 227.
12. Bersani, “Lawrentian Stillness,” 164.
17. Ibid., 18.
18. I discuss these differences in “Uncertain Terms of Pleasure,”
Modern Fiction Studies 43:4 (1996): 813; and “Dispensing
with the Self: Bersani and Self-Divestiture,” in Clark and
Royle (eds.), 47-73.
19. Jonathan Dollimore, Sexual Dissidence: Augustine to
Wilde, Freud to Foucault (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1991), 202. Similarly, Judith Butler argues that “there
does seem to be a romanticization or, indeed, a religious
idealization of ‘failure,’ humility and limitation before the
Law, which makes the Lacanian narrative ideologically
suspect,” even after conceding that “every identification,
precisely because it has a phantasm as its ideal, is bound to
fail” and that Lacan “partially pursued…the ‘comedic’
dimension of sexual ontology” (Butler, Gender Trouble:
Feminism and the Subversion of Identity [New York:
Routledge, 1990], 56, 55, 47).
127
5. Bersani, “Lawrentian Stillness,” in A Future for Astyanax:
Character and Desire in Literature (Boston: Little, Brown,
1976), 164, 174, 179.
16. Bersani, “Against Monogamy,” 15.
UMBR(a)
4. Bersani, “Against Monogamy,” in Beyond Redemption: The
Work of Leo Bersani, ed. Timothy Clark and Nicholas Royle,
a special issue of Oxford Literary Review 20:1-2 (1998): 5.
See also ibid., 20, and Bersani, “Genital Chastity,”
Homosexuality and Psychoanalysis, ed. Tim Dean and
Christopher Lane (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
2001), 361, 363, 365.
14. Bersani, “Genital Chastity,” 365.
20. Jacques Lacan, Seminar I: Freud’s Papers on Technique,
1953-1954, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. John Forrester
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 221-222,
also qtd. in Dollimore, 202.
21. Lacan, Seminar II: The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the
Technique of Psychoanalysis, 1954-1955, ed. Jacques-Alain
Miller, trans. Sylvana Tomaselli (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1988), 244.
22. Ibid.
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128
23. Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Alan Sheridan (New
York: Norton, 1981), 232.
24. See Dean, Beyond Sexuality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), ch. 6.
John Brenkman provides a slightly different but still largely
compatible account of Lacan’s relation to the Symposium
in “The Other and the One: Psychoanalysis, Reading, the
Symposium,” in Literature and Psychoanalysis: The
Question of Reading: Otherwise, ed. Shoshana Felman
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982), esp.
414-432. See also Morris B. Kaplan, “Eros Unbound: A
Queer Reading of Plato’s Symposium,” in Sexual Justice:
Democratic Citizenship and the Politics of Desire (New
York: Routledge, 1997), 81-113.
36. Lacan, Four Fundamental Concepts, 197.
37. Ibid., 198.
38. Ibid., 205.
39. Plato, 193D.
25. Qtd. in K. J. Dover, Greek Homosexuality, rev. ed. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989), 52.
40. Bersani, “Against Monogamy,” 20.
26. Ibid.
41. Thomas Hardy, Tess of the d’Urbervilles: A Pure Woman
(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982), 83.
27. Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, in SE
7:149n.
28. Bersani, “Genital Chastity,” 365.
29. Ibid.
30. Plato, Symposium, trans. Alexander Nehamas and Paul
Woodruff (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1989), 190E.
31. Ibid., 191A.
32. Ibid., 193C.
33. Bersani, “Genital Chastity,” 365.
34. Lacan, Four Fundamental Concepts, 205.
35. Ibid.; Lacan, Le séminaire, livre XI: Les quatre concepts
fondamentaux de la psychoanalyse (Paris: Seuil, 1973), 187.
42. See Jean-Luc Nancy, Being Singular Plural, trans. Robert
D. Richardson and Anne E. O’Byrne (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 2000), 96.
43. See, for instance, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s list of what is
“queer” in Tendencies (Durham: Duke University Press,
1993), 8.
44. Bersani, Homos, 76.
45. Guy Hocquenghem, “On Homo-Sex, or Is Homosexuality a
Curable Vice?,” trans. Bill Marshall, New Formations 39
(1999-2000): 74. Similarly, Adam Phillips squelches two
patients’ anxious fantasies of cloning and self-replication,
declaring with reassuring authority: “People, in actuality,
can never be identical to each other. Perhaps this relentless
wish for absolute identity — that even real cloning cannot
satisfy — conceals, tries to talk us out of, a profound doubt
about our being the same as anything” (Phillips, “Sameness
Is All,” in Promises, Promises: Essays on Psychoanalysis
and Literature [New York: Basic, 2001], 341). The point
has special meaning, of course, in the context of even “inaccurate self-replication.”
46. Hocquenghem, 74.
argument attractive. Nevertheless, crises over jouissance
and the lamella fall out of Nancy’s discussion of coexistence,
as if this condition were for him unimaginable without the
foreclosure of everything, concerning sexuality, that guarantees the failure of coexistence.
52. Bersani, “Against Monogamy,” 16.
47. Ibid.
48. This point is elaborated, albeit to different ends, in Robert
Browning’s Fifine at the Fair, in which Don Juan, seeking
to justify adultery with Fifine, explains to his wife, Elvire,
that their marital estrangement is inevitable:
50. Bersani, “Against Monogamy,” 5.
51. This is one reason Nancy’s comparable meditations on the
ontology of coexistence, in Being Singular Plural, stressing “the proximity that disperses [écarte]” selfhood, have
nothing to say about sexuality and sexual difference (Nancy,
96). Underscoring key philosophical differences between
what is self-identical and what is merely similar to consciousness, Nancy cannot render sexuality even a limited
anchoring point in his perspective on spacing and
commingling. To this extent, Bersani might find Nancy’s
129
49. Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, in SE 21:114.
UMBR(a)
Never shall I believe any two souls were made
Similar; granting, then, each soul of every grade
Was meant to be itself, prove in itself complete
And, in completion, good, — nay, best o’ the kind, — as meet
Needs must it be that show on the outside correspond
With inward substance, — flesh, the dress which soul has
donned,
Exactly reproduce, — were only justice done
Inside and outside too, — types perfect everyone.
How happens it that here we meet a mystery
Insoluble to man, a plaguy puzzle?
(Browning, Fifine at the Fair, in Robert Browning: The Poems, ed. John Pettigrew with Thomas J. Collins [New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1981], vol. 2, 26 [ll. 43.655-664]).
mikko tuhkanen
BERSANI AND DELEUZE
BECOMING SAME:
How does one reject the habitual action and common sense that, as effects
of subjection, may be crucial to one’s very emergence and survival as a
subject? How is it possible to pry open the “lines of force” that have
rigidified into recognizable structures of existence through the habits of
the self, of living? How much, and what forms, of one’s continued
existence as a subject can one hazard in risking the unpredictability of
becoming? Addressing these questions, Michel Foucault, in his ethics
texts and late interviews, locates in gay sexuality and “lifestyle” of the
early 1980s forms of ascesis, of open-ended and inevitably dangerous
relations to the self, that demand of us new modes of connectedness to
the world. Crucial for Foucault is the “formless,” “unforesee[able]” character of this connectedness: the subject must “invent,” not “discover,”
new relations to oneself and to others through rapport à soi, a constantly
modified care of the self.1 Homosexual “lifestyle” — through, for example,
the practices of friendship and S&M — provides a breeding ground for
such new relatedness. Above all, one must resist turning this becominghomosexual into a program with clearly articulated goals: “As soon as a
program is presented, it becomes a law, and there’s a prohibition against
inventing. There ought to be an inventiveness special to a situation like
ours….The program must be wide open.” 2
Here we can detect reasons for the common discomfort that political
activists have with Foucault’s work. For example, commenting on the
seeming omnipotence of power that one finds in Foucault’s genealogical
texts, David Larmour, Paul Allen Miller, and Charles Platter write that
Foucault’s “view [of power as “ubiquitous and inescapable”] has troubled
those who see political struggle as a positive force for the improvement
of human life, for this conception of power seems to offer limited
possibilities for meaningful political change.” 3 Once we note that
“meaningful” silently stands as a synonym for “predictable” or
“programmatic,” we begin to understand the basic differences and incompatibilities between Foucauldian and liberal/liberationist politics.
For the latter, the meaningfulness of political struggle becomes
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132
inextricable from a vision of a future whose formation can be predicted from, because it is premised on, the present, existing reality. It can be argued that, for example, the politics of the
1970s gay liberation, in all its disruptiveness, followed a Marcusean understanding of authentic
sexuality and selfhood as buried somewhere underneath the repressive cultural machinery of
normalization; gay liberationists saw themselves as midwives to a future whose knowable lineage would guarantee the recognizable form of the newborn. In opposition to this, Foucault
repeatedly insisted on the importance of allowing the emergence of the future as an unforeseeable and possibly monstrous becoming through something he calls, importantly, “affective and
relational virtualities.” 4 A politics that elicits the emergence of the virtual is incompatible with
programs whose outcomes can be articulated before their actualization; once our political practices solidify into predictions and plans, the virtual is pre-empted into the existing modes of
being.
This rejection of mappable struggles explains also the radical break between the first and
latter two volumes of The History of Sexuality. In a 1984 interview Foucault notes that he did
embark on the proposed six volumes, tracing the genealogy of several concepts in the history of
sexuality,5 but abandoned them because he almost “died of boredom writing those books.” 6 Despite such a close encounter with death-in-writing, what was missing from the venture was,
according to him, a sense of “risk”: the risk of failure, of not knowing if one could complete the
project.7 Importantly, it is to these “dangerous” texts, “widely misinterpreted and even more
widely ignored,” 8 that Leo Bersani turns in his efforts to initiate what he calls “our most urgent
project now,” that is, “redefin[ing] modes of relationality and community, the very notion of
sociality.” 9 Even before his encounter — at least in print — with Foucault’s work, Bersani similarly wanted to negotiate the openness of the future by rejecting approaches where what is to
become is envisioned before its emergence. Already in Baudelaire and Freud, he argues that
our disappointment with or rejection of the present symbolic must not congeal into utopic projects
because these always depend on the foreseeable, on visions “of something.” 10 In foreseeing the
future, that is, such programs pre-empt the emergence of the radically new.
To allow this unforeseeability, one must, Bersani argues, move beyond the forms of disciplinary subjectivity that predetermines one’s relations to the outside. While I am here able only to
inaugurate such a project, I propose that, to gloss this new form of relatedness, or the “ethical
imperative to re-adjust or to re-orient our extensions,” 11 we may want to trace the suggestive
links between Bersani’s work and that of Gilles Deleuze, whose sympathy with Foucault’s project
is well documented.12 Obviously, I do not argue for anything like a complete agreement between
Bersani and Deleuze. Finding strict correspondences between their work would amount to, precisely, the disciplinary project of re-cognizability that both thinkers criticize. Rather, I suggest
that we can find in (or more accurately between) their work the kind of “resonance” or “intensity”
that Deleuze picks up on between himself and Foucault: “It’s not just a question of intellectual
understanding or agreement,” he writes in Negotiations, “but of intensity, resonance, musical
harmony.” 13 Such intensities and harmonies are not locatable in either body of work but take
place, incorporeally as it were, between the two. We can thus draw an analogy between, on the
one hand, my suggestions about the resonance between Bersani and Deleuze and, on the other,
what the latter writes about the encounter of bodies: he insists that an encounter-as-becoming
“is not common to the two [bodies]” but “is between the two.” 14
BEYOND THE ENIGMATIC SIGNIFIER
133
Most notably, the shift in Bersani involves his increasing misgivings about psychoanalysis’s
ability to carry forward the rethinking of sexuality and relatedness he is interested in. Such doubts
are not new to Bersani. Throughout his writing, he has noted the paradoxical functioning of
psychoanalysis as, on the one hand, “the most pervasive, and the most prestigious modern form
of a discursive technology of self-knowledge and self-creation,” and, on the other, a discourse
whose disorienting moments of “theoretical collapse” grind the disciplinary inquiry to a halt.15
Yet, whereas psychoanalysis seems to be suited to explaining the kind of erotic appeal that Bersani
theorizes with Jean Laplanche’s notion of the enigmatic signifier, the relatedness that he and
Dutoit call the correspondence of forms 16 — or what we may call sameness — is, he (both singly
and with Dutoit) now argues, inconceivable from within psychoanalysis’s conceptual framework.
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Bersani’s recent work marks a consistent step forward in the project that has engaged him from
Baudelaire and Freud (1977) to Homos (1995). During this investigation, he has not shied away
from disagreeing with and modifying his earlier formulations. Given these sometimes drastic
rearticulations, it is not surprising that his critical reception has lagged behind, remaining loyal
to formulations that he himself has already discarded. For example, if Homos did not already do
so, Caravaggio’s Secrets, his new collaboration with Ulysse Dutoit, and his most recent essays
should give pause to queer theorists who have put to productive use the concept of ébranlement,
the ego’s traumatic shattering in sexuality’s jouissance. In Homos, Bersani questions the radicality
of this concept, which emerged in his early work of the 1970s and, taking a distinctively political
turn, became an eminently appropriable concept for queer theory in “Is the Rectum a Grave?” If
in The Freudian Body he is concerned with tracing how the disruptive potential of sexuality is
“domesticated” in and by Freud’s narrative of sexual development, he seems to be sensitive to —
or, somewhat less generously, paranoid of — the way in which radical projects are defused through
their very articulation. In Homos, he similarly notes how the seemingly most transgressive forms
of sexuality and relationality may necessarily remain indebted, in their opposition and resistance,
to the economies they queer. Ultimately, they too are rendered mere moments in disciplinary
productivity that tame the disruptive potential of the new.
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Psychoanalysis would reduce the radical alterity of sameness to a re-cognition of the familiar
erotic appeal of the lacking partial object, of the seductive secret.
Throughout his work, Bersani has been concerned with the ethical value of what he already in
Baudelaire and Freud names “psychic mobility” and “unanchored identity.” 17 For him, sexuality
confounds the disciplinary ambitions of identity-formation — identities that enable the exercise
of authority — in opening the subject to the world through the kind of “obscene passivity” that
he identifies as the phobogenic core of homosexuality in “Is the Rectum a Grave?”: the openness
of gay sexuality to ébranlement that not only names the radical passivity of sexuality’s jouissance
but also the zero-degree tension of death. 18 In The Freudian Body, he argues, rephrasing
Laplanche, that such an openness stems from the infant’s traumatic encounter with the
unmanageable stimuli that threaten to unbind the incipient ego during its earliest stages of
development. If “[s]exuality…is intolerable to the structured self,” this is because it emerges
precisely as the jouissance of an ungovernable shattering that the infant survives by finding
masochistic pleasure in it.19 Sexuality, as this encounter with the real that the ego cannot cathect
or facilitate in its existing mode, is close to the pleasure of the complete discharge of energies
against which the reality principle guards us. In this shattering, the Bersani of Baudelaire and
Freud, “Is the Rectum a Grave?” and The Freudian Body finds an ethical moment of relatedness
that is premised neither on the masterful ambitions of His Majesty the Ego nor on “the redemptive reinvention of sex,” but on a radical openness to the world.20
Initially, he and Dutoit follow a familiar line of argument in Caravaggio’s Secrets. As much as
Bersani postulates in Baudelaire and Freud that “going toward the object in fantasy may be
equivalent to going away from it,” 21 Caravaggio’s paintings, he and Dutoit contend, exemplify
the double movement of sexuality, of invitation and withdrawal, propelled by the enigmatic
signifier. The enigmatic signifier for Laplanche structures the child’s first entry into subjectivity
in which the mother (unintentionally) seduces the child with an address that the child is unable
to “‘metabolize.’” 22 Such a blockage constructs a secret that is inherent in sexuality itself, and in
Caravaggio this “double movement” is visible in “the soliciting move [of, for example, Bacchus
in Bacchino Malato] toward the viewer, and the self-concealing move away from the viewer. It
is...the movement away that fascinates, indeed that eroticizes the body’s apparent (and deceptive)
availability. The latter is at once put into question and sexualized by the suggestion of a secret.”
Sexuality emerges when seduction to reading is “qualified by a partially self-concealing movement of retreat” (3). This seduction is simultaneously our initiation into relationality: “we are
originally seduced into a relation by messages we can’t read, enigmatic messages that are perhaps
inevitably interpreted as secrets.” 23
Our inability to read, to symbolize, the enigmatic signifier introduces lack into being — or,
perhaps more appropriately, our being as fundamentally lacking. Desire, as “an epistemological
category,” “is constituted, originally, as the exciting pain of a certain ignorance” (40). If desire is
the seduction to read, the ego and the unconscious too emerge in conjunction with the enigmatic signifier: the unconscious, according to Laplanche, is constituted in primal repression by
those parts of the maternal address that the child is unable to symbolize (39-40, 63-64). In this
primal erotic appeal, “an ego is erotically solicited into being” (40).
135
Despite initiating desire, inherently mobile in its endless displacements, the enigmatic signifier, Bersani and Dutoit now argue, in fact seduces the subject to a posture of immobility: it
“structures a relation according to fixed gazes — not only the gaze of the one being seduced, but
also the gaze of the seducer, who is himself (or herself) seeking in the curious and subjugated
look of the other the secret of his (or her) own seductive power” (42). Working towards “the
possibility of spatial interests not defined or directed by the imaginary secrets of the other,”
Caravaggio, they suggest, envisions this new kind of relatedness — unhampered by the erotically soliciting secrets that circulate between subjects, unknowable to both the seduced and the
seducer — through what they call “a betrayal of his subjects” (42). Betrayal becomes in Caravaggio,
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But as Bersani and Dutoit point out, the enigmatic signifier that seduces us to being and to
intersubjectivity also proscribes that relatedness as a paranoid and incorporative interrogation
of the other and the world. Indeed, even if the object of desire is inevitably lost and “[t]he mobility
of the desiring imagination makes the identity of the desiring self problematic,”24 such shattering of the self does not dis- and re-orient our intersubjective coordinates. Rather, intersubjectivity
here is based on secrets that appear just beyond our reach, behind the mask of the objet a.
Pointing to “the inadequacy of knowledge as a category capable of containing the modes of
relationality” (73), Bersani and Dutoit logically emphasize unreadability as a site where such
coercive relatedness fails and where one may begin to envision a different form of connectedness. Yet, we must carefully distinguish between two forms of unreadability, as much as we
must, according to Bersani and Dutoit, notice in Caravaggio “two kinds of concealment” (39).
The first concealment refers to the erotic address of the enigmatic signifier, the second to “the
‘concealment’ of an unmappable extensibility of being” (39). In the former, the enigmatic signifier itself, blocking symbolization, becomes precisely the object of paranoid, inevitably failing
investigation, which we can characterize in a Foucauldian vein as a form of disciplinary
productivity. To this unreadability Bersani and Dutoit oppose the form of failure they find most
interesting in, say, Beckett, Rothko, and Resnais, in whose work Bersani designates “failure” as
the artists’ “failing with respect to certain traditions and expectation connected to the medium
in which they were working.” 25 Contrary to the unreadability of the enigmatic signifier, which
incites “paranoid aggression” or “mistrust” of the other and the world (94), this latter form of
failure “inhibits a kind of appropriation of the work which we tend, as a result of a great deal of
quite effective cultural training, to take for granted.”26
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as in Jean Genet’s work, “an ethical necessity.” 27 It marks a withdrawal of interest — and we can
give this term its psychoanalytic specificity here — from the riddle-work that the enigmatic
signifier initiates. For Bersani and Dutoit, it points to a form of relationality that does not address
the secreted, individual core of the other. By the same token, it is a betrayal of what we have
come to understand as the integrity of the historical and historicizable subject: Caravaggio hereby
illustrates a shift from historicity to ontology, a “move from historical subjects to modes of being”
(43). Similarly, Genet’s betrayal is a more effective disruption of symbolic economy than the
acts of appropriation and parody. Genet, Bersani claims in Homos, “is basically uninterested in
any redeployment or resignification of dominant terms that would address the dominant
culture.” 28 Betrayal is, then, crucially different from the vicissitudes of performativity, or “inaccurate repetition,” that Judith Butler theorizes.29 “Genet’s use of his culture’s dominant terms…are
designed not to rework or to subvert those terms, but to exploit their potential for erasing cultural
relationality itself (that is, the very preconditions for subversive repositionings and defiant
repetitions).” 30 Genet withdraws from the symbolic circuits whose resignification, however subversive, would merely repeat their laws. Through betrayal, the subject, instead of being caught
in a game of paranoid identification and knowledge,31 is opened to a play of inaccurate replication in which we find disparate parts of ourselves outside ourselves, enabling strange
correspondences not between subjects but among dislocated, “impersonal” shards of what we
have come to understand as the completeness of our being.32 Betrayal is “an ethical necessity”
because it unhinges our intersubjective relation to the other and to the world and, instead, calls
for us to respond “incorrectly” to the erotically soliciting address, helping us to envision “a
nonsadistic relation to external reality” (69).
In Caravaggio’s Secrets, Bersani and Dutoit chart this movement “from a fascination with
the enigmatically soliciting look…to other modes of spatial (and, implicitly, of affective and moral)
connectedness” (99). In “Genital Chastity,” Bersani similarly suggests that, in Aristophanes’
speech in Plato’s Symposium, desire emerges not as one for difference or complementarity but
for “the extensibility of sameness.” 33 He contends that what we seek in our lost halves is not
difference, not the lacking organ of psychoanalysis, but rather an “inaccurate replication” of
ourselves. He hereby articulates a form of relationality that confounds appropriative models of
self and desire.34 If “[a]ll being moves toward, corresponds with itself outside of itself,” 35 then
this movement is not characterized by the illusion of the “belong to me” aspect that Lacan sees
in the representations of the Cartesian subject.36 Sameness, or one’s inaccurate replication, is
different from narcissism in that there is no bound self that can be in a specular relation to its
mirror image. Rather, this new relationality allows what Bersani calls “impersonal narcissism,”
in which “the self out there is ‘mine’ without belonging to me.”37
Unlike intersubjectivity initiated by the enigmatic signifier, this new form of connectedness
comes into being when “the very gesture of concealment is performed as a physical contact
HABITS OF DIFFERENCE
Tracing his thought to Spinoza, Deleuze conceptualizes such interconnectedness in terms of
modes, which express eternal attributes. These modes can be understood as virtualities out of
which particular bodies-as-relations are actualized: they are the given, unique relations of
extensive parts: “A given mode ‘comes to exist,’ comes into existence, when an infinity of extensive parts enter into a given relation: it continues to exist as long as this relation holds.” 43
137
The impersonal, interspecies connectedness between the boy and the ram echoes Deleuze’s antihumanism, which conceives of our being in the world in terms of assemblages and mixtures of
bodies. Bersani, tracing “the relation of the human body not to a more or less enigmatic human
intentionality, but rather to a vast family of materiality in which community is no longer a function
of reciprocal readings of desire” (6), argues that “we can find ourselves already in the world —
there not as a result of our projections but as a sign of the natural extensibility of all being.” 38
Deleuze concurs: “you are all this already….You are always an assemblage for an abstract machine,
which is realized elsewhere in other assemblages. You are always in the middle of something;
plant, animal or landscape.”39 Suggesting what Keith Ansell Pearson calls “non-human becomings
of life,” 40 Deleuze insists that bodies are always assemblages and relations: “Mixtures are in
bodies, and in the depth of bodies: a body penetrates another and coexists with it in all of its
parts, like a drop of wine in the ocean, or fire in iron.” 41 In Rosi Braidotti’s terms, both Deleuze
and Bersani trace the flows of “open-ended, interrelational and trans-species” “nomadic” bodies
that “explode[] the boundaries of humanism at skin level.”42
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rather than a provocatively isolating move” (79). Such a gesture is illustrated, according to Bersani
and Dutoit, by St. John the Baptist with a Ram, in which the youth’s turning away opens him to
a contact with the animal. Thus what we may read as an erotically soliciting pose — at once
offering and hiding, making available and turning away — opens onto another connectedness,
this time between species. Rather than presenting the erotic emblems foregrounded in paintings such as Victorious Cupid, St. John is structured by a number of “fanlike structures opening
outward, away from the youth’s body” (81). The painting de-privileges sexuality and brings out
a more diffuse sensuality of surfaces — a “nonerotic sensuality” (79) — thereby offering a “scene
of erotic provocation in which excitement would no longer be a function of an impenetrable
subjectivity” (81). Our attention is displaced from subjective interiority (what does the youth
want? what does he desire?) to the “indefinite extensibility” (82) — the youth’s interminable
connectedness to other spaces and surfaces around him, extending in lines beyond the painting
to an indefinite space. With the disappearance, or emptying-out, of the enigmatic signifier, the
sensual is redirected from secret interiority to the indefinite openness of surfaces and spaces —
in this case, to the sensual connectedness between species.
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According to Deleuze, a body consists of the “parts [that] belong to it...in terms of a certain
relation (of motion and rest) that characterizes it.” 44 Each body is made of smaller bodies that
accommodate themselves to or “resonate” with one another in a field of gravity or density: “There
are no existing bodies, within Extension, that are not composed of a very great number of simple
bodies.” 45 Some parts (or smaller bodies) that contribute to the singular relations are shared
with other bodies, in which these parts enter into different relations. In other words, bodies do
not form self-enclosed or separable fields but overlap with other bodies, sharing some parts that
each body submits to a unique relation. Distinct from one another in their specific internal relations, they are connected through the parts they share (and, ultimately, the single substance of
which they are expressions). In this sense, bodies parallel what Deleuze and Félix Guattari refer
to as philosophical concepts. Concepts too are constellations of multiple components. While
concepts in themselves are “whole,” they remain “fragmentary wholes.” 46 They resonate with
other concepts, sharing components: “Concepts are centers of vibrations, each in itself and every
one in relation to all the others. This is why they all resonate rather than cohere or correspond
with each other.” 47 Concepts do not form “a puzzle,” a constellation of tightly interlocked pieces;
rather, they, like bodies, form a relation through their resonance, an incorporeal frequency, as it
were, that is unique for each singular concept or body. 48
Such resonance and interpenetration of bodies and concepts, I suggest, echo Bersani’s notions of inaccurate replication and extensibility of being. According to both Deleuze and Bersani,
we find ourselves already in the world, not in the form of a narcissistic mirror image nor the
uncanny double but in partially corresponding forms, in a dynamic of “the incorporeal” or “impersonal narcissism.” Bodies become or disintegrate in a series of unforeseeable encounters
where the relations that mark bodies’ uniqueness are strengthened, complicated, or destroyed.
Following Spinoza’s ethics, Deleuze writes that “good” encounters are those that enhance or
multiply the already existing relations, while “bad” (not “evil”) encounters are inimical to the
current resonance of bodies. In either case, encounters are always marked by a ceaseless productivity of relations, that is, by becoming: “this process is that of all generation of formation,
that is, of all coming into existence.”49
Like encounters, what Deleuze calls repetition emerges as “the fundamental category of a
philosophy of the future [la philosophie de l’avenir].” 50 L’avenir, that which is to-come, denotes
the radical, unpredictable future whose virtual becoming must take place outside representation.51 Such a call for repetition and difference beyond representations is echoed by Bersani’s
fascination with unreadability: that is, if difference is inimical to representation for Deleuze,
sameness is closely linked to the unreadable for Bersani. In Caravaggio’s Secrets, failures of
interpretation become ethical moments where coercive epistemological concerns yield to ontological modes of being in art and literature. Bersani refers to the move to ontology when he
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describes his project as one of thinking of “presences of the subject in the world that are not
effects of interpretation, projection or identification. The art [Bersani and Dutoit have] studied
suggests, in different ways, that we are already in the world (even before we appear in it…),
there are always relations, and not simply because we interpret and project and introject the
world.”52
Both representation (in Deleuze) and readability (in Bersani) — even when the latter names
the necessarily failing interrogation of the enigmatic signifier — foreclose the emergence of the
future in constricting us to the predetermined circuits of desire-in-lack. Both Bersani and Deleuze
wish to alienate us from our comforting modes of recognizability, which immobilize becoming
into common sense or habit. Indeed, re-cognition is the opposite to, or pre-emptive of, encounters.53 Similarly, referring to Henri Bergson’s work on duration and evolution, Deleuze notes
that “habit never gives rise to true repetition.”54 For Bergson, habit emerges nearly irresistibly in
the necessary intermingling of élan vital and matter. As he writes in Creative Evolution, life
infiltrates matter through a kind of deception — “a dint of humility” — to use it for its own
purposes: “Life ha[s] to enter…into the habits of inert matter, in order to draw it little by little,
magnetized, as it were, to another track.” 55 Matter’s resistance, however, often overcomes the
suppleness and mobility of the vital impulse, “draw[ing] to itself the ever-alert activity of this
higher principle, …convert[ing] it to its own inertia and caus[ing] it to revert to mere automatism.”56 Having taken the form of matter, life is almost inevitably seduced and trapped in
“parasitic habits” in its inert forms of matter.57 Like “ready-made” “garments” donned out of
necessity for a particular occasion but consequently naturalized, habits become a layer of dead
matter constricting the mobility and freedom of the living organism: “the body will become to
the soul what...the garment was to the body itself — inert matter dumped down upon living
energy.”58
Bergson insists that habitual actions pre-empt the unforeseeability of becoming. As forms of
matter arrest the movement of élan vital, “hypnotiz[ing]” it, there begins the marking of time,
the illusion of reversibility and repeatability: “Life in general,” Bergson writes, “is mobility itself;
particular manifestations of life accept this mobility reluctantly, and consequently lag behind. It
is always going ahead; they want to mark time.”59 One can predict the future of such unorganized
bodies because they are framed in “ready-made” slices out of the “whole.” “The mechanistic
explanations...hold good for the systems that our thought artificially detaches from the whole.
But of the whole itself and of the systems which, within this whole, seem to take after it, we
cannot admit a priori that they are mechanically explicable, for then time would be useless, and
even unreal. The essence of mechanical explanation, in fact, is to regard the future and the past
as calculable functions of the present, and thus to claim that all is given.” 60 In Deleuze, such
mechanistic predictions are exemplified by scientific experiments conducted in “relatively closed
environments” where the openness and unpredictability of encounters have been eliminated.61
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For Bersani, identities figure as something like habits, as coagulations of our infinite extensibility. Taking on such habits may be necessary for the continuity of particular forms of life, but
they simultaneously constrict and discipline becoming. As much as habits for Bergson articulate
yet immobilize life’s thrust of becoming, Deleuze contends that both habit and memory are necessary for repetition to emerge as “the category of the future,” yet repetition “mak[es] use of
them as stages and leav[es] them in its wake.” 62 For Bersani, identities domesticate becoming
into the somnolent state of habitual action whereby the endless, inaccurate replication and
correspondence of forms — the mixture of bodies, as Deleuze would say — are arrested into recognizable forms. Similarly, what Bergson calls habit-memory domesticates difference and
prevents (Deleuzian) repetition. As Deleuze writes, one must “[o]ppose repetition not only to
the generalities of habit but also the particularities of memory.” 63 If psychoanalysis argues that
“in mental life nothing which has once been formed can perish,” 64 both Bersani and Deleuze
question the subject’s absolute, immobile faithfulness to the past. Echoing Nietzsche, they point
to forgetting as a condition of becoming; and for both, it is in its insistent return to memory
where psychoanalysis prevents a thinking of the new: “We move by forgetting,” Bersani writes,
“and no human faculty is more alien to psychoanalysis than that of forgetting.”65 Deleuze too
emphasizes the necessity of “active forgetting and affirmative experimentation with what is yet
to come.” 66 For him, repetition, as “the thought of the future,” constitutes a break from habitual
action and memory.67 If the first passive synthesis is one of habit and thus linked to the present,
the second passive synthesis is the condition of memory and the past. The third, active synthesis
is one of forgetting: in Nietzschean terms, it enables the affirmation of the eternal return, the
willing forgetfulness, the actualization of the new from the virtual.68
THINKING SAMENESS
Considering these brief suggestions about Bersani’s and Deleuze’s shared trajectories, we can
conclude that, through their thinking of mixtures of bodies and of communication of forms,
both theorists engage us in conceptualizing what Braidotti calls “viral politics,” that is, politics
that eschews the human as its necessary agent and instead emerges from a “dynamic process of
interaction between the human and the non-human.” 69 The comparison between Deleuze and
Bersani suggests to us what is perhaps a surprising revelation about the latter’s work: he sketches
in his latest texts a philosophy of affirmation, of life’s ineffable productivity. The emphasis on
relationality offers him a way to think about infinite interconnectedness that characterizes
Deleuze’s thinking about encounters of bodies and the univocity of Being.
“Viral politics” — or politics of becoming — allows the emergence of possibilities that, as I
noted in the opening of this essay, vary from current modes of being so drastically as to constitute monstrosities. In a Darwinian sense, of course, such “teratological variations” are only rarely
sustainable; more often than not, in crossing the limits of tolerable change, they constitute evolutionary disadvantages that are eliminated by natural selection. 70 However, in the rare cases
where these unforeseeable variations do survive, they do so by precipitating an evolutionary
leap that radically transforms the existing horizon of possibilities. That such metamorphoses
are terrifying in their unknowability explains why even radical forms of politics, while finding
the existing conditions intolerable, may refuse to embrace an unpredictable future as their aim.
In this context, Foucault’s rejection of planned resistance in his post-genealogical texts challenges us to think of politics as evolutionary becoming, thwarting power’s ability “to make the
eruption of the event part of the fabric of the known.” 71 Like Foucault’s politics, whose future
must remain “wide open,” 72 evolution, according to Bergson, has no habits or plans: “A plan is a
term assigned to a labor: it closes the future whose form it indicates. Before the evolution of life,
on the contrary, the portals of the future [les portes de l’avenir] remain wide open.” 73
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141
In his implicit focus on the question of sameness, Bersani seems to suggest that, having
congealed into a predictable program, our thinking of difference may have foreclosed the operations of what Deleuze calls “difference in itself [différence en elle-même].” 74 If sameness emerges
as a category of becoming, this is because it opens at this precise historical moment as the
defamiliarizing figure of the new. By connecting Bersani to Deleuze, we may be able to pursue
the interimplicated questions of thinking and becoming, the two central themes in the latter’s
work.
1.
Michel Foucault, “Friendship as a Way of Life,” trans. John
Johnston, in Essential Works of Foucault, Vol. 1: Ethics:
Subjectivity and Truth, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: New
Press, 1997), 136; “On the Genealogy of Ethics: An Overview of Work in Progress,” in Essential Works, vol. 1, 263.
142
12. See Gilles Deleuze, Foucault, trans. Seán Hand (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998).
2. Foucault, “Friendship as a Way of Life,” 139.
13. Deleuze, Negotiations, 1972-1990, trans. Martin Joughin
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 86.
3. David H. J. Larmour, Paul Allen Miller, and Charles Platter, “Introduction: Situating The History of Sexuality,” in
Rethinking Sexuality: Foucault and Classical Antiquity, ed.
Larmour, Miller, and Platter (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), 18.
14. Deleuze and Claire Parnet, Dialogues, trans. Hugh
Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1987), 7.
4. Foucault, “Friendship as a Way of Life,” 138.
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Work of Leo Bersani, ed. Timothy Clark and Nicholas Royle,
a special issue of Oxford Literary Review, 20:1-2 (1998): 5.
5. As Arnold Davidson notes, the back cover of the French first
edition listed the forthcoming volumes, which were to deal
with “the problematization of sex in early Christianity,”
children’s sexuality, women’s sexuality and bodies, perversions, and the “biopolitics” of population and race
(Davidson, “Ethics as Ascetics: Foucault, the History of Ethics, and Ancient Thought,” in The Cambridge Companion
to Foucault, ed. Gary Gutting [New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994], 117).
6. Foucault, “An Aesthetics of Existence,” trans. Alan
Sheridan, in Politics, Philosophy, Culture: Interviews and
Other Writings, 1977-1984, ed. Lawrence D. Kritzman (New
York: Routledge, 1988), 47.
7. Ibid., 48.
8. Davidson, 115.
9. Qtd. in Tim Dean, Hal Foster, and Kaja Silverman, “A Conversation with Leo Bersani,” October 82 (Fall 1997): 4.
10. Bersani, Baudelaire and Freud (Berkeley and Los Angeles:
University of California Press, 1977), 3.
11. Bersani, “Against Monogamy,” in Beyond Redemption: The
15. Bersani, The Freudian Body: Psychoanalysis and Art (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 30, 3, 10.
16. Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit, Forms of Violence: Narrative
in Assyrian Art and Modern Culture (New York: Schocken
Books), 1985. In Bersani’s own work, this term is renamed
“communication of forms” (Bersani, “Against Monogamy,”
20).
17. Bersani, Baudelaire and Freud, 2.
18. Apart from gay men’s sexuality, Bersani locates exemplars
of such “obscene” openness and passivity — “the terrifying
appeal of a loss of the ego, of a self-debasement” (Bersani,
“Is the Rectum a Grave?,” in AIDS: Cultural Analysis/Cultural Activism, ed. Douglas Crimp [Cambridge: MIT Press,
1988], 220) — also in artists. He argues that in Baudelaire,
for example, “the artist loses his virile identity through an
obscene openness to external reality which makes him an
artist but which also makes him— a woman” (Bersani,
Baudelaire and Freud, 14).
19. Bersani, Baudelaire and Freud, 77; The Freudian Body, 3839; “Is the Rectum a Grave?,” 217. See also Laplanche, “To
Situate Sublimation,” trans. Richard Miller, October 28
(1984): 20-23.
20. Bersani, “Is the Rectum a Grave?,” 215; Baudelaire and
Freud, 14.
21. Bersani, Baudelaire and Freud, 38.
22. Bersani and Dutoit, Caravaggio’s Secrets (Cambridge: MIT
Press, 1998), 40. Subsequent references will be given parenthetically within the text. See also Bersani, “Genital
Chastity,” in Homosexuality and Psychoanalysis, ed. Tim
Dean and Christopher Lane (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2001), 356; and “Sociality and Sexuality,” Critical
Inquiry 26:4 (Summer 2000): 646. These essays are nearly
identical; where the same text appears in both, I have cited
only “Genital Chastity,” the more recent of the two.
23. Bersani, “Sociality and Sexuality,” 646.
24. Bersani, Baudelaire and Freud, 40.
27. Bersani, Homos (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
1995), 151.
28. Ibid., 152.
29. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990); and The
Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 1997), esp. 1-30. Bersani objects
particularly to Butler’s reading of Jeannie Livingston’s film
Paris Is Burning. He argues that, rather than subversively
resignifying the terms of a racist and homophobic culture,
the subjects in the film, “in their pathetically minute attention to the styles of power from which they have been
permanently excluded, …perform nothing more than their
own submission to being brainwashed, safely sequestered,
and, if necessary, readied for annihilation” (Bersani,
Homos, 49; see Butler, “Gender Is Burning: Questions of
Appropriation and Subversion,” in Bodies that Matter: On
31. See Jacques Lacan, “Seminar on ‘The Purloined Letter,’”
trans. Jeffrey Mehlman, in The Purloined Poe: Lacan,
Derrida, and Psychoanalytic Reading, ed. John P. Muller
and William J. Richardson (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1988), 28-54; and Lacan, Seminar II: The
Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis, 1954-1955, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans.
Sylvana Tomaselli (New York: W. W. Norton, 1991), 175205.
32. Parenthetically, let us note the inadequacy of language to
think this dynamic, which makes the above self-reflexive
and proprietorial gestures (“we find…ourselves”) anachronistic. Rather, here we must begin to conceive of this
mixture of bodies or inaccurate replication in terms of an
impersonal, subject-less connectivity. Tim Dean briefly discusses the question of “impersonality” in terms of
psychoanalysis’s understanding of sexuality and fantasy in
Beyond Sexuality (Chicago University Press, 2000), 85,
261 ff. While I am unable here to pursue this link, we may
note, anticipating my turn to Deleuze’s work below, that
the notion of impersonality occupies also Deleuze: see John
Rajchman, The Deleuze Connections (Cambridge: MIT
Press, 2000), 80 ff.
33. Bersani, “Genital Chastity,” 365.
34. Here Kaja Silverman’s concept of “heteropathic
identification” approximates that of inaccurate replication.
Like the latter, Silverman’s notion seeks to articulate an
143
26. Royle, 174.
30. Bersani, Homos, 153.
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25. Nicholas Royle, “Beyond Redemption: An Interview with
Leo Bersani,” in Clark and Royle (eds.), 174. For discussion
of Beckett, Rothko, and Resnais, see Bersani and Dutoit,
Arts of Impoverishment: Beckett, Rothko, Resnais (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993).
the Discursive Limits of “Sex” [New York: Routledge, 1993],
121-140). Obviously, Butler’s “inaccurate repetition” must
be clearly distinguished from Bersani’s “inaccurate self-replication”: one way to think of this difference in Deleuzian
terms is to note that, while Butler’s performativity is ironic,
the proper register for betrayal and inaccurate selfreplication would be humor (see Deleuze, Difference and
Repetition, trans. Paul Patton [New York: Columbia University Press, 1994], 5).
identificatory mode based not on the complete correspondence of self to the desired other but a partial sameness,
that is, a replication where parts of ourselves resonate with
or correspond to the outside. See, Silverman, The Threshold of the Visible World (New York: Routledge, 1996), 2227 and passim.
35. Bersani, “Genital Chastity,” 365.
36. Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1994), 81.
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144
37. Bersani, “Genital Chastity,” 365; see also Bersani and
Dutoit, Caravaggio’s Secrets, 20, 77.
49. Deleuze, Expressionism in Philosophy, 210.
50. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 5, 94; Deleuze,
Différence et répétition (Paris: Presses universitaires de
France, 1968), 12, 125.
51. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 8, 10. On the question
of the “virtual,” see Pearson, Philosophy and the Adventure of the Virtual: Bergson and the Time of Life (London:
Routledge, 2002).
52. Royle, 187, ellipsis in original.
53. Deleuze and Parnet, 8.
38. Bersani, “Against Monogamy,” 20.
54. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 5.
39. Deleuze and Parnet, 112-113.
55. Bergson, Creative Evolution, trans. Arthur Mitchell
(Mineola: Dover, 1998), 99.
40. Keith Ansell Pearson, Viroid Life: Perspectives on Nietzsche
and the Transhuman Condition (London: Routledge, 1997),
109.
41. Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, ed. Constantin V. Boundas,
trans. Mark Lester with Charles Stivale (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), 5-6.
42. Rosi Braidotti, Metamorphoses: Towards a Materialist
Theory of Becoming (Cambridge: Polity, 2002), 124.
43. Deleuze, Expressionism in Philosophy, trans. Martin
Joughin (New York: Zone, 1992), 208.
44. Deleuze, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, trans. Robert
Hurley (San Francisco: City Lights, 1988), 32.
45. Deleuze, Expressionism in Philosophy, 201.
56. Bergson, Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic,
trans. Cloudesley Brereton and Fred Rothwell (New York:
Macmillan, 1911), 28.
57. Bergson, Creative Evolution, 113.
58. Bergson, Laughter, 50; see also ibid., 149.
59. Bergson, Creative Evolution, 104, 128.
60. Ibid., 37.
61. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 3.
62. Ibid., 94.
63. Ibid., 7.
46. Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, trans.
Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 16.
64. Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, in The
Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of
Sigmund Freud, ed. and trans. James Strachey et al. (London: Hogarth, 1953-1974), 21:69.
47. Ibid., 23.
65. Bersani, “Against Monogamy,” 21.
48. Ibid., 19.
66. Rajchman, 133.
67. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 7.
68. Ibid., 79 ff.
69. Braidotti, 266.
70. See Elizabeth Grosz, “Darwin and Feminism: Preliminary
Investigation for a Possible Alliance,” Australian Feminist
Studies 14:29 (1999): 35.
71. Grosz, “Thinking the New: Of Futures Yet Unthought,” in
Becomings: Explorations in Time, Memory, and Futures,
ed. Grosz (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999), 16.
72. Foucault, “Friendship as a Way of Life,” 139.
145
74. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 94; Différence et
répétition, 126.
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73. Bergson, Creative Evolution, 104-105; L’évolution créatrice
(Paris: Félix Alcan, 1914), 114. See also Bergson, The Creative Mind: An Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. Mabelle
L. Andison (New York: Citadel, 1992), 104.
REVIEWS
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MULHOLLAND DRIVE
Dir. David Lynch, 2001
THE ART OF THE RIDICULOUS SUBLIME: ON
DAVID LYNCH’S LOST HIGHWAY
Slavoj Žižek
(Seattle: University of Washington Press,
2000), 56 pp.
Only in the Lynchian universe does one get
from Lost Highway to Mulholland Drive via
The Straight Story. Somehow on Lynch’s
roadmap, the route from Lost Highway’s
“anonymous megalopolis not unlike Los Angeles” 1 to Mulholland Drive’s city of dreams/
city of night L.A. coincides directly with the
260-mile stretch of land that reaches across
America’s Heartland from Laurens, Iowa to
Mt. Zion, Wisconsin. To most people the gap
between the two typically Lynchian noirinfluenced films (both of which conveniently
take their names from real or imaginary
roads) and the simple, seemingly naïve tale
of an old man, Alvin Straight, who travels on
his 1966 John Deere riding mower to see his
sick brother will seem unbridgeable. Fans of
Lynch distrust or discount his foray into
“straight” storytelling — either setting it apart
from his other films or ignoring it altogether
— but one can’t help but realize that in Lynch’s
hands The Straight Story is a supremely
funny movie and, more importantly, one cannot help but take it seriously, that is, one can’t
help but include it within the set of Lynch’s
films. Of course, the film is Lynch making fun
of himself (and his critics): if his films are
notoriously and increasingly convoluted, this
one is, in every sense of the word, straight.
The joke is almost too perfect, but as we know
from Freud, jokes are to be taken seriously.
For Slavoj Žižek, Alvin Straight, the patient,
persistent ethical subject, is the height of
modern-day subversion.2 Žižek comments
that old-style subversion, such as we expect
from Lynch (the dark world of sex and violence), has been so thoroughly incorporated
into the norm that it has lost its subversive
power and in turn, the norm, the “straight
man,” has become the real threat. The problem with this proposal is that it merely
reverses the common treatment of Lynch’s
films: whereas the traditional fan would
remain loyal to the Lynch who points to a
world of sex and violence threatening the
norms of everyday life and dismiss the boring, plodding story of an ordinary man who
unquestioningly pursues his goal of seeing his
brother, Žižek sees that same ordinary man
as a model of fidelity who poses more of a
threat to today’s society than the threats of
perversion and death that we expect from
Lynch. Žižek’s hypothesis maintains the essential opposition between the norm and its
subversion except that for him the subversive
becomes the norm and the normal, subversive. Yet, the addition of the third and most
recent Lynch film, Mulholland Drive, to this
set suggests that perhaps we can’t think in
terms of this opposition at all.
Mulholland Drive is in many ways a return
to Lost Highway (as we will see, the two films
are startlingly similar in structure). This
rating!) — has everything to do with the
typically Lynchian practice of disintegration
identified by Žižek. The Straight Story is in
fact the result of the disintegration of psychical unity, but instead of getting the resulting
elements set out side by side, we get only one
of these components: the drive.
147
If the condensation of meaning around images that we are accustomed to finding in
Lynch’s work is largely abandoned in The
Straight Story, it is only to re-appear as a condensation of meaning around signifiers. As
we have noted, the title of the film refers at
once to the nature of the story it tells, the
surname of its main character, the very geography of the film itself — not to mention the
landscape it covers — and to the body of
“convoluted” Lynch films that preceded it.
Likewise, it is possible to see how, in a film so
preoccupied with the physical act of driving,
meaning congeals around this signifier and
what is produced is not only driving but, in
the same gesture, the drive. Now, we must not
misunderstand this by thinking that Alvin
Straight driving his lawnmower is a metaphor
for Straight’s own (ethical or otherwise) drive.
This would suggest that the actual driving
expresses something about Alvin Straight as
a character. I think Lynch resists this impulse,
that is, he resists filming Straight as a character all together. It seems clear to me that
what Lynch is filming is the driving, and by
filming this driving he simultaneously creates
the images we see and a concept of the drive
as such. In other words, The Straight Story
is a film about the drive not insofar as Alvin
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return is in itself interesting, but it is all the
more strange that the two films are separated
by Lynch’s most seemingly uncharacteristic
film, The Straight Story. Rather than thinking of Mulholland Drive as simply Lynch’s
return to form, or a return to the “conventionally subversive,” the challenge is to think of
the three films as a continuous development
of the same thought. Perhaps the most important lesson of Žižek’s book on Lost Highway,
The Art of the Ridiculous Sublime, is how to
recognize the “conventionally subversive”
Lynch as always an exercise in disintegration
and decomposition: the supposed unities of
the subject and of the subjective experience
of reality are always split in Lynch’s films, broken down into their components. For
example, Žižek identifies the fundamental
decomposition in Lost Highway as the breakdown of reality into “the ‘desublimated’
aseptic drabness of daily reality” and “its
fantasmatic support, not in its sublime version, but staged directly and brutally, in all
its obscene cruelty” (13).3 It is easy to see that
we get a similar (although by no means identical) decomposition of reality in Mulholland
Drive. At first glance it seems that it is just
this complexity that is missing from The
Straight Story, and yet there is something
undeniably strange about the straightness of
this story. It turns out that the very
strangeness of The Straight Story — its slow,
persistent pace; the flatness of the characters
and narrative; and the lack of any emotionally charged or intense scenes (even to the
extent of earning the film an unheard-of G
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Straight as an ethical subject reveals something about the drive but rather because the
actual filming of driving itself produces an
idea of the drive. What is fascinating about
the film is the way in which the drive stands
alone in it and as a result, the film manages
to be at once strange — and this strangeness
is itself compelling — and yet utterly boring.
This notion of the drive functions as an important correction to what one might assume
a theory of the drive would look like for Lynch:
pure, uncontrollable life energy like what
Žižek describes as the New Age/Jungian reading of Lynch’s supposed “universal subconscious spiritualized Libido” (3).
First, what drives Lynch’s film is not a life
energy or force, which is to say, it is neither
human nor even biological but rather mechanical and inhuman. In the “real” world, the
drive would of course be encountered as
something inhuman within the human. However, because Lynch extracts the drive,
making it appear in its bare form, it becomes
a mechanical thing: it is the energy of the
lawnmower and not of the poor, old, crippled
body of Alvin Straight. Second, after The
Straight Story, the drive can’t be thought of
as a wild, free-floating energy that explains
for instance the shifting of identities in
Lynch’s other films. (The point being of course
that the drive never should have been thought
of in this way, but in taking The Straight Story
seriously, we see unequivocally that this idea
of the drive crumbles.) Instead the drive is a
persistent, plodding energy that brings not the
excitement of “Anything is possible” but the
insistence that “This is not impossible.” Finally, the drive itself does not bring depth and
infinite layers of ambiguous meaning; it
generates a stunning flatness in both the narrative and the image and a lack of any real
sense of depth of meaning. Placing The
Straight Story alongside, rather than against,
Lynch’s other films suggests that the concept
of the drive found in the former is also found
in the latter, with the provision that in those
other films the drive never appears
disentangled from other psychical functions.
Furthermore, The Straight Story makes explicit the fact that what is at issue in the drive
is some lost part of the subject’s being: Alvin
Straight wants to be reunited with his brother,
Lyle. This film introduces in a compressed
form the very real problem of the double that
haunts much of Lynch’s work, including Lost
Highway and, most spectacularly, Mulholland Drive. Lyle Straight is at once that
originally lost part of Alvin, the Thing itself,
insofar as he marks the absolute end of the
journey, complete satisfaction, and thus, by
implication, death (there is no denying that
the near-motionless, silent satisfaction at the
end of the film is a mark of finality and death),
and yet Lyle is also that part of Alvin that
somehow remains foreign, that is most intimate only at the point at which it is minimally
different from him. This second aspect of the
brother is visually presented in a startling
form at the end of the film when Alvin and
Lyle sit side by side on the porch like inaccurate mirror reflections of one another. In the
figure of Lyle Straight, then, the idea of the
the distortions of temporal and narrative
linearity, the interpenetration of reality and
fantasy, and especially the “fluidity of identities that are not tied to fixed selves” because
in Mulholland Drive these things seem to represent fundamental truths about women. In
other words, all the strangeness that has
always put off critics of Lynch’s films seems a
little less strange and a little more true when
one is talking about women. Of course, those
critics who suggest that this view of woman is
Lynch’s innovation in his latest film are dead
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149
double is itself doubled, but because each of
the doubles is embodied in the same character, it is easy to miss the importance of this
point; nevertheless, in Mulholland Drive
Lynch takes this compounded double and
decomposes it, breaking it into its two distinct
parts and forming the center upon which that
later film turns.
Turning to Mulholland Drive, then, we find
that precisely those things that most annoyed
critics about Lost Highway — the shifting
identities, the “narrative incoherence,” the
torsion of time and space — are deemed acceptable, compelling, and even “satisfying” in
this new film. How do we account for this
seemingly unaccountable change of opinion?
Perhaps, as one critic suggests, it is because
the identities shift but “not before the characters have been solidly established,”4 or
because Lynch finally manages to keep his
bizarre twists under control in some narratively “satisfying” way. But these explanations
hardly seem adequate, or rather these claims
cannot even be said to be true and as proof of
this, one can simply look at any critical
attempt to re-tell or reconstitute a narratively
satisfying plotline or even a logical list of characters. 5 The most significant change that
Lynch introduces in the shift from Lost Highway to Mulholland Drive is not a command
over character or plot nor certainly a mastery
of the film’s temporal paradoxes; but rather,
an alteration in the central relationship from
one between a man and a woman to one between two women. This change makes all the
difference: critics are finally willing to accept
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wrong and end up merely attributing all the
clichéd misunderstandings of Lynch’s work to
a theory of the woman. Lynch’s work is often
reduced to (and frequently praised as) an
ecstatic plunge into fantasy that defies and opposes conventional notions of reality. If, as I
have argued, this is a misunderstanding of
Lynch’s films, it is equally a misunderstanding of Lynch’s women. Mulholland Drive is
profoundly new not even because it offers any
theory or truth about woman per se but rather
because it casts a look at sexual difference
from the side of the woman. It is important
to recognize that it is not that Mulholland
Drive happens to be a story about the relationship between two women and thus says
something about women but rather the reverse: in order for the film to say anything
about woman, it must involve two women. In
other words, in order to view sexual difference from the side of the woman it is
impossible to avoid the question of narcissism, and it is this question that drives the
development of the double in Mulholland
Drive.
The curious relationship between Lost
Highway and Mulholland Drive has to be
thought of in precisely these terms; if the first
looks at sexual difference from the side of the
man, the second views it from the side of the
woman. For this reason, one must notice that
both films take part in the same structure (of
reality and fantasy) but cut into that structure
from fundamentally differently perspectives
such that they will always fail both to coincide with one another and to fulfill one
another as complements. The two films are
not the same (a tempting reading several critics seem to fall into) nor are they opposed.
Very briefly, the plot of Lost Highway goes
something like this: Fred Madison (played by
Bill Pullman) is the impotent husband of the
brunette Renee (Patricia Arquette). After
some mysterious events, Renee turns up
murdered and Fred is imprisoned for her
murder but in prison he is transformed into a
young mechanic named Pete Dayton
(Balthazar Getty) and is released. The mechanic begins an affair with a blonde named
Alice (Arquette again), the mistress of the
mobster Mr. Eddy, also known as Dick
Laurent. Pete’s relationship to Alice proves as
impossible as Fred’s to Renee, as Alice indicates when she whispers to Pete, “You’ll never
have me!” and disappears. Pete turns back
into Fred and Mr. Eddy is killed by the Mystery Man (from earlier in the film). Fred
returns to the house he shared with Renee to
deliver the message, “Dick Laurent is dead,”
on the intercom of his house — a message Fred
wakes up to receive in the very beginning of
the film. The film ends with Fred driving into
the desert pursued by the police. Žižek casts
this plot in psychoanalytic terms as follows:
“We are dealing with a real story (of the impotent husband, etc.) that, at some point (that
of the slaughter of Renee), shifts into
psychotic hallucination in which the hero
reconstructs the parameters of the Oedipal
triangle that again make him potent —
significantly, Pete turns back into Fred, that
is, we return to reality, precisely when, within
the space of psychotic hallucination, the
impossibility of the relationship reasserts itself, when the blond Patricia Arquette (Alice)
tells her young lover, ‘You’ll never have me!’”
(15).
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151
One might want to read Mulholland Drive
in precisely this way, except with a woman in
the main role: Naomi Watts plays both Diane
Selwyn, the down-and-out, second-rate
actress and spurned lover of fellow actress,
Camilla Rhodes (Laura Elena Haring), and
Betty Elms, the up-and-coming young starlet
and new lover to a beautiful mysterious
amnesiac (Haring again) in place of Bill Pullman’s Fred and Balthazar Getty’s Pete.
Already we can see a problem with this
reading insofar as the doubling of the main
character works differently in Mulholland
Drive than in Lost Highway. The matter cannot be resolved by simply saying that whereas
Fred and Pete were played by different actors,
the same doubling effect is maintained in the
later film except with one actor playing both
roles. If we are to understand Mulholland
Drive, we can’t turn too quickly to the visually and thematically similar Lost Highway
while ignoring the middle film of Lynch’s “trilogy” of “road” movies. Mulholland’s “drive”
may have as much in common with the driving of The Straight Story as it does with a
certain lost highway. If Lost Highway uses
the double to allow the main character (FredPete) to renegotiate the Oedipal (not to
mention the classic film noir) triangle in an
attempt to make himself potent and to make
possible the sexual relation between man and
woman, Mulholland Drive puts the double to
considerably more complex uses. Obviously,
the Diane-Betty doubling functions in a way
that is structurally similar to the Fred-Pete
one — that is, the transformation of one into
the other symbolically marks a movement
from reality to fantasy or vice versa — but, in
Lost Highway understanding this transformation is the key to understanding the movie,
whereas in Mulholland Drive this particular
instance of doubling is of almost no interest
and does not go far in getting at the central
problems of the film.
Here I agree with critics who point out that
the brilliance of Mulholland Drive lies in
roughly the first two-thirds of the movie: up
to that rabbit-hole moment where a certain
structure of fantasy and reality is revealed
and, significantly, including the material written as the ABC pilot (which ended with Betty
and Rita’s discovery of the corpse in Diane’s
bungalow) and a “transitional” section that is,
I would argue, the conceptual center of the
film, the place from which the film should be
understood, and also the place in which Lynch
does something genuinely new. (It is not to
be overlooked that this peculiar transitional
section was created as a direct result of the
interruption of Lynch’s initial plan: the continuation of the pilot as a series.) I can’t give
a full reading of the film here but rest assured
that it would have to include a thorough
account of the three main elements of the
transitional section: first, the scene in which
Betty helps Rita cut her hair and makes a
blond wig for her; second, the sex scene
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between Betty and Rita; and third, the entire
sequence inside Club Silencio. What is so important about this section is that it marks the
climax of a problem of doubling around which
the movie has turned up to this point. That is
to say, the real and truly complex problem of
doubling exists within the so-called fantasy
section of Mulholland Drive and not between
the fantasy and reality sections. The obvious
point is this: the problem here is not between
Betty and Diane but within Betty herself; it is
a problem of narcissism in the psychoanalytic
sense. What complexifies this point is that the
doubling we have to deal with is not between
Betty Elms and Diane Selwyn but rather, on
the one hand, Betty and Rita and, on the other
hand, Betty and the dead body of Diane
Selwyn. In Mulholland Drive, the problem of
the double is itself doubled. Or rather: in
Mulholland Drive, there is the double and
then there is the Same. Both have the force of
the uncanny; however, while the double leads
to the dead body, the horror of the Thing Itself, the Same is the creation of something
new, in the image of oneself: the transformation of “Rita” into the newly-blond reflection
of Betty that marks the first act of that crucial
transitional section. In Mulholland Drive it
is that confrontation with the double, one’s
own dead body, that precipitates that allimportant second moment of sameness. It is
this relation of the double with the same that
needs to be thought.
– Theresa Giron
1.
Slavoj Žižek, The Art of the Ridiculous Sublime:
On David Lynch’s Lost Highway (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2000), 13.
Subsequent references will appear parenthetically within the text.
2. Žižek, “When Straight Means Weird and Psychosis Is Normal,” http://www.lacan.com/
ripley.html.
3. Similarly, Žižek writes later in the book: “It is
as if, in Lynch’s universe, the psychological
unity of a person disintegrates into, on the one
hand, a series of clichés, of uncannily ritualized
behavior, and, on the other hand, outbursts of
the ‘raw,’ brutal, desublimated Real of an unbearably intensive, (self-)destructive, psychic
energy” (35).
4. Philip Lopate, “Welcome to L.A.,” Film Comment (Sept/Oct 2001): 44.
5. See for instance the Lopate article already cited,
as well as Amy Taubin, “In Dreams,” Film Comment (Sept/Oct 2001): 51-54, and Graham
Fuller, “Babes in Babylon,” Sight and Sound
(December 2001): 14-17.
LAN YU
Dir. Stanley Kwan, 2002
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153
Setting: Beijing, China. Time: before and after the student movement in Tiananmen
Square, 1989. Characters: Hangdong, a rich
businessman, promiscuous and macho; Lan
Yu, a poor student, faithful and delicate. Plot:
Lan Yu, short on cash for his tuition, decides
to prostitute himself for the first time.
Hangdong spots him and picks him up before
his client arrives. The initial relation between
them turns into a more serious affair only as
Lan Yu finds himself gradually falling in love.
Their relationship, already made precarious
by Hangdong’s lewdness and Lan Yu’s participation in the student movement, collapses
as Hangdong meets an intelligent
businesswoman. However, his attempt at
heterosexuality soon fails, and an unexpected
encounter brings Lan Yu and Hangdong back
together. But as a result of the latter’s fraudulent business, the reunion is soon broken off
again by Hangdong’s imprisonment. In order
to bail his lover out, Lan Yu sells the house
Hangdong has bought him. Yet, their
happiness is short-lived as an accident
melodramatically ends Lan Yu’s life.
This is the story of Lan Yu, originally published in 1996 as the online serial Beijing
Story by the pseudonymous Beijing Comrade.
By turning China’s first hypertext into a film,
Stanley Kwan made his entry into film festivals such as Sundance and Cannes. Of course,
for devotees of queer Asian cinema, the names
Sundance and Cannes do not represent the
ultimate prize. In fact, compared with Farewell My Concubine, Lan Yu does not have the
Shakespearean sweep Chan Kaige manages to
evoke. It also lacks Zhang Yuan’s subversive
treatment of cross-dressing and heterosexual
surrender in East Palace West Palace. Juxtaposed with Shu Kei’s A Queer Story, its
exploration of a middle-aged queer man’s direct confrontation with traditional virtues is
trivial. If the closet is an issue, in no way does
Lan Yu approach the provocation of Tsai
Ming-liang’s The River, in which a closeted
father and son unknowingly commit incest
while cruising a sauna. Obviously, too, the
emotional struggle of Lan Yu’s couple is minor
in comparison to Wong Kar-wai’s nowcanonized gay classic Happy Together. While
Lan Yu was intended to be simple, it falls short
of Fleeting by Night’s finesse and idyll. Most
disappointingly, it misses the clarity of Kwan’s
earlier work, such as the melodramatic
Rouge.
Given the proliferation of queer films in
Asia over the past ten years, the comparisons
could probably go on and on. This is not to
say that the problem of Lan Yu has to do with
what and how many queer films preceded it,
however. Beyond such historical or quantitative burdens, the general complaint against
Kwan has to do with Lan Yu’s narrative discontinuity and its unfaithful adaptation.
Purged of the novel’s graphically sexual details, Kwan’s film features mild wrestling and
chaste lovemaking, resulting in a desexualized
narrative. With its focus on the graphic
details, the original hypertext, which was later
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published in book form in Taiwan, allows us
to see the convolution of Hangdong’s psychical struggle with Lan Yu. On the other hand,
many critics see the film as lacking in depth.
Eden Law, for example, complains that it does
not bother to account for Handong’s emotional development, that it skips over the
eventual end of his heterosexual marriage,
and that it pays little attention to the relation
between Lan Yu’s and Hangdong’s psychical
states. Law seems to assume “anyone living
in China or Beijing” would be able to fill in
the diegetic gaps and understand why
Handong and his wife break up and why Lan
Yu cries after the student movement.1 Law’s
observation appears to me to point not only
to the question of cultural comprehension,
but also to the fact that it is not Kwan who
desexualizes the novel, but the Western audience, for whom what Bersani would call the
“chaste promiscuity” of the film becomes incomprehensible. In other words, although the
film is about homosexual relations, its chaste
treatment of sexual matters makes no sense
to viewers who are completely accustomed to
the sexually explicit blockbusters made in
Hong Kong and Hollywood.
However, auteurists might recall that Kwan
is not particularly interested in making his
sexual subjects explicit. On the contrary, his
earlier productions have expressed a continual obsession with silence and keeping
sexual matters implicit. In Love Unto Waste,
an English title that totally changes the
meaning of the original Chinese one, Underground Affair, he already exhibits his interest
in secretive affairs and the notion of the unspeakable. In Full Moon in New York, a film
about the indescribable difficulties of immigration and assimilation, the lesbian desire
of one of the characters is silent. Kwan’s first
gay film, Hold You Tight, presents a number
of highly contrived scenarios of suppressed
love: Ah Moon’s love for her husband, Fung
Wai, is mere marital duty; Tong’s closeness
with Fung Wai is asexual homosexual desire;
and Jei’s sexual relationship with Ah Moon is
a disguise of his fantasy for Fung Wei. The
seeming intimacy — mostly sexual — between
Kwan’s characters in these films appears as a
sham when we, as audience, are aware of their
“real” intent, which lies elsewhere. They appear to give in by bowing to the voice of
superegoic conscience. This superego manifests itself not only on the level of character
but is also found on the level of the film itself,
in the editing that produces narrative lacunae, temporal dislocation, and even the ironic
discrepancy between the titles and the actual
events in the films. Such gaps give the characters the power — however peculiar in that
it causes some parts of these films to seem
frustratingly boring and fragmented — to resist the demands of confessional narratives
and moral condemnation. Putting it differently, the superego in Lan Yu redefines the
“Don’t ask, don’t tell” imperative thus: Do ask,
but we don’t tell.
Such silence is radically unknowable in its
effects. It may be seen as either a conformity
to the heterosexism of filial piety, or as a
resistance to the disciplinary injunctions of
– Anthony Siu
1.
Eden Law, review of Lan Yu, http://www. gary.
gray.clara.net/reviews/lanyu.htm.
2. Slavoj Žižek, “‘I Hear You With My Eyes’; or,
The Invisible Master,” in Gaze and Voice As
Love Objects, ed. Renata Salecl and Žižek
(Durham: Duke University Press, 1996), 93.
3. Stanley Kwan, Still Love You After All These,
VCD, Hong Kong: ICQ, 1997. [Author’s translation]
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At one point in the documentary Still Love
You After All These, Kwan speaks of the
inevitability of coming out. Quoting from a
classical Cantonese opera, he says, “denying,
denying, still needs to admit.”3 The object of
denial and admission, although absent in his
enunciation, is presumably a reference to his
own homosexuality. What is queer about this
is that both subject and object of Kwan’s sentence are absent. While the Chinese language
does not necessarily require a subject and an
object to make a sentence complete, the silent object is not non-existent. Just as
Hangdong’s silence, it is that which resists
definition. So, without saying what he cannot
deny and has to admit, does Kwan really come
out in this documentary? Yes, he asks his
mother what she thinks of his relationship
with William, and no, he never says that he is
gay. Here, silence points to the real that compels questions of sexual difference.
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visibility. Consider the silence at Hangdong’s
wedding: When asked to take their wedding
photo, Hangdong stands in front of the camera posing as a happily married man. Yet, he
frowns, looks at his wife, Zheng Ping, turns
back to the camera, and immerses himself in
silence. No word is spoken for several
seconds. What follows is a fade-out to total
blackness. We should not, however, mistake
this as Hangdong’s mere failure to respond
to his wife’s sarcastic remark, which warns
him to leave behind his frivolous emotional
affairs. The two looks into the camera, that is,
at the audience, can no longer be thought of
as Hangdong’s contemplation of the question
Che vuoi?, what does the Other want from
me? Rather, such silence can bespeak either
conformity or resistance. As in Edward
Munch’s painting The Scream, in which the
ghostly figure’s scream, instead of being
heard, is seen as the strokes of the brush reverberating in the air, Hangdong’s revelation
of his homosexuality is not meant to be
declared. In place of a declaration of sexual
orientation, what we have in this scene is the
figure of silence that Lacan talks about when
he suggests that voice and silence relate to one
another like figure to ground. Or, in Slavoj
Žižek’s words, “silence is not (as one would
be prone to think) the ground against which
the figure of a voice emerges; quite the contrary, the reverberating sound itself provides
the ground that renders visible the figure of
silence.”2 Silence thus serves as the object a
that causes Hangdong’s desire; it is an object
cause of desire independent of gender.
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LACAN’S SEMINAR ON “ANXIETY”: AN
INTRODUCTION
Roberto Harari
Trans. Jane Lamb-Ruiz (New York: The Other
Press, 2001), 282 pp.
Although notions of sameness and difference
have become popularized within contemporary psychoanalytic dialogues, is it possible
exclusively to focus on either one concept? Given that such strict divisions are
complicated or, in some cases, refused (take,
for example, extimacy, the Moebius strip, and
the Borromean knot) by psychoanalysis, it
would seem that sameness and difference
might also be considered neither as antipodes (in a relation of pure difference) nor as
two sides of the same theoretical coin (in a
relation of fungibility and thus sameness). In
fact, in the work of many contemporary theorists, it is nearly impossible to speak of one
concept without referring to the other. What
Roberto Harari offers in his recently translated book, Lacan’s Seminar on “Anxiety”: An
Introduction, is precisely this: a way to
understand the complex interplay between
sameness and difference, through the concept
of anxiety.
Insisting that no one Lacanian concept can
rightfully be considered in isolation from
others, Harari braids together several strands
of Lacan’s thinking (including such concepts
as acting out, passing to the act, sublimation,
and the object a) and avoids the reductive
approach whereby a complicated theoretical
system gets reduced to either simple relations
of conceptual equivalence or a terminological landslide. Harari manages throughout the
book to maintain a careful balance of
pedagogical clarity — supporting his thinking with appropriate clinical examples and
references to various Freudian and Lacanian
texts — and theoretical rigor — delving into
the relations between several particularly vexing concepts — as he navigates through a
broad range of topics. This gesture is, of
course, highly appropriate, particularly in
light of Lacan’s own insistence in the tenth
seminar that “anxiety is very precisely the
meeting point where you will find waiting
everything that was involved in my previous
discourse.” 1 And although a careful consideration of the relations between several
Lacanian concepts forms the backbone of
Harari’s work, his overall focus is on three
instances in which one can experience anxiety: the refusal of castration, the passage
through the fantasy, and the sensation of the
uncanny.
Harari points out that anxiety, far from
being an occasional experience, operates at
the interstices of the process of subjective
constitution in which the object a and the fantasy simultaneously come to the fore (51). On
the level of subjectivation, castration enacts
a fundamental cut, bringing to bear the subject of desire and also constructing a limit to
jouissance. Or, as Harari puts it, castration
necessarily involves a restriction and thus
installs a partial, phallic jouissance; what remains is “an imaginarization of plenitude, as
jouissance in the Other” (255). In other
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The subject’s fantasy is thus a barrier set
up to maintain desire and stave off anxiety;
however, the fantasy is also the framework
through which anxiety can irrupt. All of this
necessarily begs the question: how can the
subject’s relation to the object a, which is the
cause of desire, also involve anxiety? Harari
offers a possible answer to this question
through an extensive discussion of Lacan’s
work on the object a. By referring to several
diagrams (some of his own, some of Lacan’s),
Harari begins to explain that “the reverse of
the object a, when the borders that it tries to
cover are erased, is its hidden opposite side,
that is, das Ding” (74). By making this point,
Harari clarifies Lacan’s notion that anxiety is
not without an object. That is to say that the
object of anxiety is an enigmatic something
that seems to threaten the subject, indeed, the
status of the subject as such. Since, as we have
just seen, the subject’s fantasy is constructed
through the mechanisms of castration and the
fantasy is the relationship between the subject and the lost object (lost due to castration),
it seems quite logical that a change in that relationship would alter the very status of the
subject. Indeed, Harari affirms that the fantasy accounts for the fact that “the desire of
the barred subject is barred in reference to
what causes it: the object a” (37), which
necessarily means that an alteration of the
fantasy structure, an unhinging of the object
a, takes the subject beyond lack or desire and
thus to a confrontation with anxiety.
We must, however, be precise. Harari indicates that a change in the subject’s relation to
the object a in the fantasy structure yields
anxiety and that the underside of the object a
is das Ding, but, we must ask, which causes
anxiety: the object a or das Ding? Regarding
the question of the relation between anxiety
and the role of the a in the fantasy, Harari
makes assertions that, at least at first, seem
virtually contradictory. He claims at one point
that “anxiety implies the appearance of the
object a precisely where nothing was expected” (138) and then goes on to describe
“anxiety as irrupting when the object a is on
the verge of falling away” (231). Although a
clear answer that would draw together each
of the above two points is, as far as I can tell,
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words, castration establishes the barred subject, the subject of desire, separated from the
whole Other and pursuing a partial object, the
object a, a process from which the formula of
fantasy is derived. What results from this process of subjectivation is therefore not only a
lacking subject but also an Other with a lack,
a barred Other associated with anxiety.
Nevertheless, by fantasmatically sustaining a
relation only to the object a, the subject maintains him- or herself on the level of desire, not
anxiety, using the object a as if to plug up the
hole in the Other. Logically, then, Harari’s
treatment of castration and subjectivation
pays heed to the fact that the refusal of castration — the refusal of lack or desire — is
accompanied by anxiety, since, as he reiterates Lacan’s point, what the subject cannot
tolerate within him- or herself is not lack,
which is a common misreading, but rather
lack of lack, that is, anxiety.
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not fully delineated in Harari’s work, I would
argue that any modification of the distance
between the subject and the object a, whether
that change entails either a confrontation with
or a falling away of the a, can result in anxiety. If the distance inherent in the fantasy
structure dissolves, so too does the distance
indicative of the space of desire, which means
that desire gives way to jouissance and anxiety ensues. The immanent collapse of the
fantasy results in anxiety because, as Harari
notes, anxiety is the signal that appears when
the division between desire and jouissance
begins to be erased (36). By maintaining the
fantasy structure, the barred subject remains
barred and anxiety is kept at bay.
Harari does not, however, exclusively consider the role of the object a in anxiety; he is
also careful to address the integral relation
between the a and das Ding. He first notes,
following Lacan, that the object a is in itself a
liminal concept, “a biceptor. It belongs neither to one nor the other; it is between one
and the other” (113). Accordingly, the object
a can be thought of in terms of an intimate
imbrication of sameness and difference. Recalling the process whereby the object a is
constituted and both subject and Other are
barred, we can thus understand why a
dislocation of the a would be equivalent to a
confrontation with its anxiety-inducing underside, that is, das Ding. On this point Harari
is careful to explain that although the object
a can be conceptualized without referring to
anxiety, a discussion of anxiety must inevitably take it into account (78). This is a very fine
and subtle distinction, one that explains why
anxiety can arise when the object a is about
to drop away and reveal that which it had
blocked out: the anxiety-inducing desire of
the Other associated with das Ding. What is,
of course, most threatening about the potential confrontation with the abyss of das Ding
is that it implies what Harari describes as a
“return to the nets of maternal desire”
(73). When the fantasy structure is affected
so that the object a no longer holds its position as cause, the fantasy collapses into its
inverse where that which was veiled is suddenly, alarmingly, revealed and the subject
becomes the object for an all-encompassing,
suffocating Other. Or, as Harari succinctly
puts it, “[t]he object that provokes anxiety in
the neurotic is the a-Thing, that is, the desire
of the Other, as the Other requires that the
subject erase its borders, handing itself over
to it in an unconditional manner” (75). In this
fashion, Harari indicates that the passage
through the fantasy is occasioned by the
alarm-bell of anxiety, signaling the call for a
return once again to a safe space of desire.
From Freud and Lacan we know that the
passage through the fantasy in which there is
a sudden, anxiety-laden confrontation with
that which had been hidden bears a striking
similarity to the sensation of the uncanny.
Likewise, Harari crystallizes this point as he
expounds the linkage between anxiety and the
uncanny. Having already explained that
anxiety accompanies the passage through the
fantasy in which there is an unexpected confrontation with that which had been hidden,
slightly, hauntingly, different — inevitably
speaks to the essential problem of the subject
as such. That is, the subject — split between
conscious and unconscious, familiar and not
familiar, sameness and difference — by
definition cannot be one, which is the fundamental point that Harari makes throughout
his exposition of anxiety. The subject experiences a shattering anxiety when lack comes
to be lacking and one suddenly encounters
one’s obverse — when castration is refused,
the fantasy collapses upon itself, and the uncanny irrupts — through situations in which
the same is never quite the same.
– Cristina Laurita
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159
the abyss of das Ding, Harari, remaining
faithful to Freud’s definition, goes on specifically to draw a parallel between das Ding and
the uncanny. Harari asserts that, like das
Ding, the uncanny is precisely “those things
that, destined to remain hidden, have nevertheless become manifest. It is what irrupts
when it should not have appeared; what
should be lacking is the uncanny” (62). And,
as we know, when lack comes to be lacking
we are in the realm of anxiety.
This unforeseen disturbance within the
field of the familiar that Harari associates with
the uncanny and anxiety produces a split
within the order of appearances that is
nothing if not disturbing, in every sense of the
word. Appropriately, Harari explains that
anxiety is an edge phenomenon,
“suspend[ing] the functioning of the
imaginary mapping that intuitively recognizes
the difference between an inside and an
outside” (162). In this sense we can consider
anxiety and the uncanny within the context
of the real, the register in which binary pairs
such as inside/outside and same/different are
disbanded. An uncanny encounter is marked
by such a confusion of boundaries, which is
particularly evident in the phenomenon of the
double, the anxiety-inducing phenomenon
par excellence. While a theorization of the
connection between the double and anxiety
would take us beyond the scope of Harari’s
book, I would only suggest that the problem
of the double — that is, the double that is
alarmingly, uncannily, at once both an
ostensible replication of the self and yet
1.
Jacques Lacan, Seminar X: Anxiety, 19621963, unpublished, trans. Cormac Gallagher,
14 November, 1962.
CONTRIBUTORS
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LEO BERSANI is the author of The Freudian Body: Psychoanalysis and Art (Columbia, 1986),
The Culture of Redemption (Harvard, 1990), Homos (Harvard, 1995), and, in collaboration with
Ulysse Dutoit, Arts of Impoverishment: Beckett, Rothko, Resnais (Harvard, 1993) and
Caravaggio’s Secrets (MIT, 1998).
TIM DEAN is the author of Beyond Sexuality (Chicago, 2000) and co-editor, with Christopher
Lane, of Homosexuality and Psychoanalysis (Chicago, 2001). Starting in fall 2002, he will be
Associate Professor of English at the State University of New York at Buffalo.
GRAHAM L. HAMMILL is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Notre Dame,
where he teaches Renaissance literature and literary theory. He is the author of Sexuality and
Form: Caravaggio, Marlowe, and Bacon (Chicago, 2000).
CHRISTOPHER LANE is Professor of English at Northwestern University. He is the author of The
Burdens of Intimacy: Psychoanalysis and Victorian Masculinity (Chicago, 1999) and The Ruling Passion: British Colonial Allegory and the Paradox of Homosexual Desire (Duke, 1995), as
well as editor of The Psychoanalysis of Race (Columbia, 1998) and co-editor, with Tim Dean, of
Homosexuality and Psychoanalysis (Chicago, 2001). His next book, Civilized Hatred: The Antisocial Life in Victorian England, is forthcoming.
JAMES PENNEY is currently a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada
Postdoctoral Fellow at the Centre for the Study of Theory and Criticism, University of Western
Ontario. His work has appeared in the Journal for the Psychoanalysis of Culture and Society
and Paragraph, and his essay on Julia Kristeva was included in The Psychoanalysis of Race, ed.
Christopher Lane (Columbia, 1998). He is currently completing a book manuscript called The
World of Perversion: Psychoanalysis and the Impossible Absolute of Desire, and beginning a
new project on the politics of transference entitled The Structures of Love.
PEGGY PHELAN is the author of Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (Routledge, 1993) and
Mourning Sex: Performing Public Memories (Routledge, 1997). She is the Ann O’Day Maples
Chair in the Arts at Stanford University.
ADRIAN RIFKIN is Professor of Visual Culture and Media at Middlesex University and the author
of Street Noises: Parisian Pleasure, 1900-40 (Manchester, 1993) and Ingres, Then and Now
(Routledge, 2000), and recently a number of short articles on queer issues and contemporary
artists, Kant, and gay S&M pornography.
JUDITH ROOF is Professor of English at Michigan State University. She is the author of A Lure
of Knowledge: Lesbian Sexuality and Theory (Columbia, 1991), Come As You Are: Sexuality
and Narrative (Columbia, 1996), Reproductions of Reproduction: Imaging Symbolic Change
(Routledge, 1996), and most recently All About Thelma and Eve: Sidekicks and Third Wheels
(Illinois, 2002).
MIKKO TUHKANEN, a graduate student of Comparative Literature at the State University of New
York at Buffalo, has published essays in African American Review, GLQ, and Modern Fiction
Studies (forthcoming in 2002).
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CALL FOR PAPERS
UMBR (a) 2003
ON LACAN AND THE LAW
It is a critical commonplace that the law is, for psychoanalysis, a central
concept; the law denotes both the emergence of the subject and of the
symbolic itself. In psychoanalysis, there is nothing without the law.
Could psychoanalysis, with its particular rendering of the law, be equally
central to our understanding of the legal field? It is only recently that
legal scholars have begun to engage with psychoanalysis in a systematic
way. How might we explain the recent proliferation of scholarly activity
taking place at the intersection of psychoanalysis and the law? How is
psychoanalysis uniquely suited for legal critique? How might such
interdisciplinary exchange work to augment or improve the law?
For Lacan, the subject is the subject of the unconscious. Is the psychoanalytic subject consistent with the way the law functions? In what ways
does a psychoanalytic account of subjectivity assist us in understanding
various legal phenomena? How do the reciprocal interventions in the
fields of psychoanalysis and law open up possibilities for thinking
matters of, for example, memory, guilt, evidence, ethics and responsibility? Does the law, like psychoanalysis, represent another “impossible
profession”?
UMBR(a): A Journal of the Unconscious is currently seeking
articles that confront such questions for its spring 2003 issue on Lacan
and the Law. We are particularly interested in writing that engages
Freud and/or Lacan, as well as Kant, Hegel, Badiou, and Balibar. Legal
scholars are encouraged to submit articles.
Submissions should be 1,500-6,000 words in length, must be submitted
on a 3.5 diskette (MSWord) and in hard copy, and must be received no
later than December 1, 2002. Please send all submissions to:
UMBR(a)
c/o Alissa Lea Jones
Center for the Study of Psychoanalysis and Culture
408 Clemens Hall
SUNY-Buffalo, North Campus
Buffalo, New York 14260-4610
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