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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 academias 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 hegemonys 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. UMBR(a) 4 5 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 UMBR(a) 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 UMBR(a) being absorbed to the death drive an absorption to which the Nirvana principle or the principle of inertia logically leads. Following Leo Bersanis work, at least up until Homos, we can suggest that homosexuality lays bare the death drive that is domesticated, or bound, in heterosexualitys narrative trajectory. (Indeed, in Bersanis 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 thinkings constitutive drive leads beyond the pleasure principle, beyond the symbolized realm. Given Lacans 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 Foucaults 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 Butlers work neither should one posit sameness any ontological value. Christopher Lanes 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, Warhols 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. 7 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 UMBR(a) 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 Simmels 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 Simmels 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 UMBR(a) 9 UMBR(a) 10 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. Simmels 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 individuals 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 UMBR(a) 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 Simmels 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. UMBR(a) 12 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 oceans 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. Schrebers 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 Simmels 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 subjects 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 UMBR(a) paradoxically, to something beyond itself. That possibility has frequently been examined in literary texts in, for example, texts as different from one another as Stendhals The Charterhouse of Parma and Molières 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. UMBR(a) 14 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, Freuds 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 Freuds 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 Freuds 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 Psychologys 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 UMBR(a) 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 UMBR(a) 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. Freuds 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 males 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 psychoanalysiss 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 UMBR(a) 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 Freuds 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 Platos 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 UMBR(a) 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 Freuds description of the egos relation to the ego ideal (or the super-ego). The latter eroticizes interdiction (which is perhaps itself merely the escape route from otherness, the subjects 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 subjects 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 Freuds 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 Foucaults study of ancient Greek and Roman practices of the self in the second and third volumes of The History of Sexuality UMBR(a) 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 Swanns Way, Proust exactly dates the shift I am speaking of in Swanns 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 Lacans term, the desire of/for her desire. Swanns sexual fascination, bizarrely yet logically, has little to do with Odettes 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 Swanns 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 Prousts 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 UMBR(a) 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. UMBR(a) 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 Simmels 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 UMBR(a) 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 Foucaults 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 others 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 egos 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, Swanns 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 OHiggins, 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. UMBR(a) 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 Foucaults 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 ones 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 UMBR(a) 25 UMBR(a) 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 ones 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 Foucaults 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 latters 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 Foucaults 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 ones 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 ones 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 Foucaults 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 ones 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 individuals 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 formers 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 signs 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. UMBR(a) 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 ones own history can free thought from what it silently thinks, and so enable it to think differently. 4 Here the phrase ones own history refers to both the history of ones epoch and ones own specific trajectory within that context. The possibility of liberating thought from what it silently thinks suggests achieving some distance from unspoken assumptions ones 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 Foucaults sentence as an allegory of psychoanalysis: the object is to learn to what extent the effort to think ones 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. UMBR(a) 28 inconsistently on discourses of identity (for example, by using a philosophical sense of nonidentity to try to undermine oppressive social identities), and that Lacans 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 Derridas 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 Freuds 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 Lacans account of the unconscious as an effect of spoken discourse. My purpose in recalling these old debates, however, is not to negotiate Derridas 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 Foucaults 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 UMBR(a) 29 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. Homosexualitys 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 latters 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 UMBR(a) 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 Lacans 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, Lacans 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 Bersanis 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 UMBR(a) 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 ones 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 cultures 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 clones 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? UMBR(a) 32 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 ones 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 clones 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. UMBR(a) 33 Rather, Im 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 clones 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 wearers 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 robins 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 UMBR(a) While the gay hanky code promotes differentiation based on the kind of erotic activity desired, it also militates against the clones 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. Havent set foot inside a gym since high school? All the more likely that youll 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 youre hirsute or smooth, circumcised or not, tattooed or not, bald or not you will qualify as some strangers 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 desires 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 Lacans 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 Livingstons documentary about Harlem drag balls, and theorized most UMBR(a) 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 cultures fixations on normative objects of desire by proliferating the possible activities and sites of eros. Further, in highlighting the partiality of desires 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. Lacans 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 Lacans 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, Lacans 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 Butlers 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 ones 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 Bersanis 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 UMBR(a) 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 Lacans account of narcissism emphasizes the subjects 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 ones psychic difficulties through the body of the sexual partner! Yet what does Lacans 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. Lacans 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 Laplanches 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 Lacans 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. Bersanis 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 Batailles sense than in Lacans 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 Bersanis 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 worlds impersonal ontology.23 UMBR(a) Bersani argues that ontological relationality becomes visible in certain artworks and certain manifestations of homosexuality; the question of Caravaggios sexuality brings these two dimensions together.21 When considering Bersani and Ulysse Dutoits 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 iek 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? UMBR(a) 38 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 Foucaults and Lacans 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 Husserls 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 lUn Theres 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. Halperins 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). UMBR(a) 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 Lacans rewriting of Cartesianism, see Mladen Dolar, Cogito as the Subject of the Unconscious, in Cogito and the Unconscious, ed. Slavoj iek (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. UMBR(a) 40 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? Youre always with men, you have mustaches and leather jackets, you wear boots, what kind of masculine image is that? Maybe in ten years well 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 Robins 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 Freuds 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, Caravaggios 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 Theres 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. UMBR(a) 23. In a brilliant meditation on Ralph Waldo Emersons 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: Emersons 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 UMBR(a) 43 UMBR(a) 44 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 Deans account of how the object of jouissance supersedes sexual difference by specifying the roles of Lacans three registers in his theory of the subject of desire. Deans 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 subjects 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 subjects desire. Dean effectively suggests that the real eclipses the symbolic medium for intersubjectivity when he appropriates Lacans 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 Guattaris anti-Oedipal theory of the deterritorialization of desire, it is unclear how Deans 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 Freuds passages on the phallic stage, was originally both the penis and UMBR(a) Renata Salecls otherwise excellent Sexuation anthology, which assumes by omission that all sexuation occurs in conformity with the subjects 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 Deans 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 Deans work what relation this object has to what Lacan called sexuation. What Dean calls the objects 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, Deans 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. UMBR(a) 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 Deans 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 subjects symbolic identification by means of the agency of jouissance. Put differently, the real does not get rid of the subjects 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 subjects 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 mothers or mother figures 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 todays complex sociological realities, is that the paternal function is precisely a function for Lacan, and therefore will be linked within any given subjects 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, UMBR(a) 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 Andrés 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 UMBR(a) 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 mothers death, Danys father invites his son to sleep with him in his bed every night, rationalizing this invitation with reference to his desire to convert Danys room into a memorial for the deceased. According to Andrés narration of his patients 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 mothers 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 newborns 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 patients real name) is used to designate both boys and girls in the patients cultural context (Andrés 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 Danys 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 Danys mother would knowingly allow her son to wear a pair of her pantyhose after school before the fathers 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 mothers 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 fathers 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 Andrés interpretation of Danys discourse, it is important for my purposes to observe that the self-instrumentalization with respect to the Others enjoyment in Danys 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 Danys 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 womens 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 Danys 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 Lacans definition of the perverse structure: the subject offers him- or herself as the object-cause and realization of the Others 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. UMBR(a) 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 mothers desire for a child virtually guarantees the feminine quality of Danys future symbolic identifications. Given that the patently odd particularities of Danys 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, Danys 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 Others desire is not Am I homo- or heterosexual? but rather Am I a man or a woman? 50 UMBR(a) 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 Danys 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 subjects 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 Danys 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 Danys 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 Danys fantasy constructions finds clear expression in his response of absolute conformity with respect to his mothers desire for a female baby. In spite of the mothers 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 mothers unconscious desire, made manifest at the level of her enunciation, for a child of the other sex. Danys entire unconscious life appears to structure itself around a dynamic of self-instrumentalization with respect to this desire articulated between the lines of his mothers discourse. Ultimately, André explains Danys perversion with reference to his passionate quest for perfect fusion with what he interprets as the Others 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 Andrés 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 Andrés view, 51 PHILIPPE, OR THE IMAGINARIZATION OF CASTRATION UMBR(a) Danys analysis lasts for only a year and a half, culminating in what André calls an affirmation of the patients 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 Others desire without requiring the acting out of his masochistic fantasy and the suffering to which it gives rise. The significance of Danys 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 subjects castration? To put it in simpler terms, from where does the neurotic male homosexual desire? It is not clear, I would suggest, if Andrés 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. UMBR(a) 52 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 Lacans 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 Andrés theory of male homosexuality and the facts of the case of Philippe. Despite its often patently phobic limitations, Andrés 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. Andrés 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 Lacans 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 Andrés concern with the male homosexuals 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 homosexuals sexuation? In Andrés 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, Philippes 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 UMBR(a) imaginarization of castration [un ratage par excès dimaginarisation 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 Andrés 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 Andrés 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, Philippes 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 Philippes 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. UMBR(a) 54 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 Milans Duomo cathedral where he finds himself thrown into an even more acute attack of panic while gazing upwards at a statue in the cathedrals dome of the Lord placing a crown on Jesus head. Andrés 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 analysts 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 friends 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 Philippes tripartite narrative, namely the patients panicked viewing of the coronation statue, André suggests that this event calls into question a second time Philippes masculine identification. Though Gods 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 Gods 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 analysands choice of profession 55 On my reading of this case history, however, it is not at all clear why André chooses to qualify Philippes 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 Philippes 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. Philippes 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 Philippes 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 analysts 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 UMBR(a) as a response to the lavish attention Philippes mother accorded to her sons 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 Philippes 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 fathers word in the familial symbolic environment, Philippes 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 mothers death. At this crucial point of the case history, André begins to explore the dynamic of what he calls Philippes fetishism, insisting that the patients 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 Andrés 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 mens briefs, more surely than a womans bikini, reassure Philippe that there is something behind the veil, even if this something remains hidden from sight (186). UMBR(a) 56 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 subjects 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 Lacans 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 subjects libidinal investment in the male body is a displaced manifestation of the perverse denial of the mothers 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 Andrés 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 subjects 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 UMBR(a) 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 todays post-sexological discourse of sexual orientation. Furthermore, the notion of cross-sexuation I here propose is indifferent to gender. This means that a subjects being cross-sexuated carries no necessary consequences for this subjects 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 cant describe the attraction of one male to another male if, according to the popular notion that Proust appears to accept, such men have a womans 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 UMBR(a) 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 subjects attributes have been exhausted. Nevertheless, Bersanis 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 subjects 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 girls unconscious life,19 then in speaking of the gay mans 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 mans 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 objects 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 subjects desire, but UMBR(a) 59 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 desires 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 mens 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 subjects self-relation and its ability to feel at home within the terms of its own subjectivity. UMBR(a) 60 This would require recognizing that the object that causes desire is not the beautiful, selfcontained, gym-trained, hypermasculine body of, say, Tom of Finlands men, but rather another object: partial, decorporealized, unsettling, formless, uncanny more akin to Deans 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 lifestyles 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 Antigones Claim: Kinship Between Life and Death (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000). 2. Joan Copjecs 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 Lacans 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. Ones 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. UMBR(a) 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 Salecls 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 Deans book: since desire, according to Lacan, is an effect of the speaking subjects imprisonment within the structures of language, any assertion about the reals 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 Deans scepticism about the value of Marcuses work for queer theory betrays the rather under-nuanced fashion in which Deans 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 Deans 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. UMBR(a) 62 10. Serge André, LImposture 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 Andrés 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 Marcs 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 Philippes allegedly perverse structure is contrasted, and given also that, as I will shortly argue, Andrés 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 Marcs 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, Marcs Oedipal conflict is classic: he desires his mother (thanks to the fact that he was initially separated from her through the fathers intervention) and is therefore forced to confront his father as a rival (173-174). Though the fathers early, caring relation with his son prevents Marc from identifying symbolically with his mother, Marcs virility is marred by his fearfulness before the later, more primal version of the father. Though I agree that the form of Marcs 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, Marcs 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 McDougalls 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 Lacans concept of sexuation, Kaja Silvermans suggestive, but virtually ignored, work on femininity in male homosexuality in the Freudian texts should be consulted in this respect. See A Womans Soul Enclosed in a Mans 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 Freuds 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 Freuds 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 UMBR(a) 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 girls 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 Lacans 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 Freuds 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, shed 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. Its easy enough to see the trap in this invitation lets really be different and write about the same. But I hope that the discussion will do something more than celebrate differences 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, UMBR(a) 65 UMBR(a) 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 Campbells 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 hed 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 cant get someone whos perfectly right, its more 1 satisfying to get someone whos perfectly wrong. Then you know youve 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. Warhols interest in casting someone whos 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. Reagans first wife, Jane Wyman, cited Reagans boring conversation as one of the contributing factors in her decision to seek a divorce. Among the many results of the divorce was Reagans ambition to keep enlarging his audience. He also seems to have tried to turn his fondness for repetition into something with UMBR(a) Like Herman Melvilles 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. Hed 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 artists 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 Warhols casual regard for written English. And then, having failed to receive a response to one years worth of daily love letters, Warhol turned to drawing covers for Capotes 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 Warhols use of them. Warhol covered Capotes 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 Capotes creativity with his own. Erotic drive transformed Warhols blotted line into a quivering arrow tracing the imprint of someone elses earlier touch. Warhols 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 UMBR(a) 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 cant wait to get home to Mommie. While Warhol was able to reduce or to concentrate Capotes fictional output to the words love me through his covers, Nancy Reagan was able to encourage Reagans 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 Wymans. Had it been focused on more than one man, it might have rivaled Warhols 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. Ronnies 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 Warhols response to Capotes 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 well only talk to each other [sic?]. I love you & Ill 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. (Its also a good hint of Reagans 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. Ive missed you and cant wait to get home tonight. I miss you, I love you, I miss you, I love you etc. etc. etc. Well, Ill be with you soon and if I havent 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. Its all already The Same. UMBR(a) The repeating et ceteras here are affectionately exhausted. The erotics of exhaustion are among the sames 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. UMBR(a) 70 5. Ibid., 139. graham l. hammill ARE WE BEING HOMOSEXUAL YET? The question that my title raises is implied, I think, in Michel Foucaults 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 ones 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 ones 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 UMBR(a) 71 72 UMBR(a) in opposition to heterosexuality too narrowly limits the general problem of sexuality and desire against which Foucault positions his works. But Foucaults 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 homosexualitys 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 homosexualitys 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 aesthetics 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. Adornos Aesthetic Theory may help to elaborate the kinds of relations between homosexuality and historical alterity that Foucault suggests. 73 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 persons undertaking particular, performative acts of experimental self-perception and UMBR(a) 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 Butlers work, a means of theorizing political being, it also became the means for expressing homosexual enjoyment as politically forceful in itself. UMBR(a) 74 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 Sedgwicks use of the performative with Austins. 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 Butlers 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 ones 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 75 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? UMBR(a) 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 modernitys lack of self-knowing. Situating this historical thesis in the context of Sedgwicks 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. 76 UMBR(a) 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. Butlers 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 Butlers 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. UMBR(a) 77 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 Lacans 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 Others fundamental incompleteness. To stop doing this, we must also begin to elaborate new ways for relating to and understanding the incompleteness of the Other. Lets return to Foucaults 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. 78 UMBR(a) 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 meanings 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 Others 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 ones 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 demands 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 Others 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 questions 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 Others 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. UMBR(a) 79 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 subjects 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. UMBR(a) 80 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 homosexualitys 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 queens admiration of bodies at the gym is just as much a sublimation as the opera 27 queens 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. Foucaults 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 selfs repeated divestiture. Adornos 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 Adornos account modern artworks turn against Art Itself as a reified, bourgeois concept. The modern artwork begins to answer the 81 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 societys mythic past. Rather, artworks write history by splitting the contemporary moment from a societys selfunderstanding of it. In Adornos writing, the artwork is something like Benjamins 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 UMBR(a) 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 artists 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 Deans focus on the aesthetic through Adornos 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. 82 UMBR(a) 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 artworks 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 Adornos 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. 83 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. UMBR(a) Such a conclusion may make Adornos 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. UMBR(a) 84 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. UMBR(a) 37. Adorno, 191. 85 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, Anaphore1 If I open my discussion of sameness with this quotation, its 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 Moliniés definition might seduce someone who is listening attentively for the sounding of a same-desire in the noise of language. In Roland Barthes A Lovers 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 voirs 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 UMBR(a) 87 88 UMBR(a) 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 Todorovs 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 Moliniés 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 Foucaults 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 lart décrire, 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 deconstructions 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 ones lover to a summers day or Achilles to a lion. In fact, as we know, in the second case the summers day falls short of the lovers 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 UMBR(a) 89 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 summers 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 summers day it has to do neither with the loved one nor with the summers day but with the opening of a space for the hyperbolic figuring of the lovers 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 samenesss 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 UMBR(a) 90 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 anaphoras 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 selfs 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 Echos 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 subjects 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 Lockes 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 Lockes 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 Lockes 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 Diotimas more precarious or teleological discourse on the same topic in Platos Symposium echoes weakly or perversely here, underlining the confusion of the old idealist and materialist logics of the same: UMBR(a) 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. UMBR(a) 92 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. Diotimas 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 beautys 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, Diotimas 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 ones 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 normatives enunciation. But were we to emphasize the anaphoric structure of Lockes argument, it would dissolve into rhetorical procedure as the other of logics 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 Echos voice belong is not a thing in Lockes sense at all, though it does seem like an objet in Lacans; 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 desires absence they are a way of telling absence. Lockes 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 objects 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. UMBR(a) 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. UMBR(a) 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 Lovers 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 Todorovs 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 philosophers 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. Agambens Adornian critical pessimism articulated through Benvenistes principle of enunciation is especially pertinent to a critique of the desire for infinite differentiation. 11. Jean-Louis Bory, Ma moitié dorange (Paris: Julliard, 1973), 115-116. UMBR(a) 95 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 UMBR(a) 97 UMBR(a) 98 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, empathys 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 ones 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 (Whats 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, 99 Indifference can indeed seem minor, taking the form of a willed ignorance of difference or the casual refusal to recognize ones 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. UMBR(a) 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? UMBR(a) 100 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. 101 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 UMBR(a) 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 Americas 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. UMBR(a) 102 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 Freuds 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. 103 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 Freuds 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 UMBR(a) 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. UMBR(a) 104 SAME INDIFFERENCE Indifference is represented as an effect of some sort of disproportion, both in its origins and effects. Representations of indifferences 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 perceivers 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. Indifferences 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 Freuds 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 105 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). UMBR(a) 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). 106 UMBR(a) 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 systems method of working than the stimuli which stream in from the external world. The systems 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 apparatuss 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 107 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. UMBR(a) 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 Freuds 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 Doras negative response to Herr Ks 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 UMBR(a) 108 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 Freuds famous example of the childs fort/da game), it nevertheless brings unpleasurable excitation to the fore. While the pleasures of mastery are Freuds 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 109 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 UMBR(a) 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. UMBR(a) 110 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. Fundamentalisms 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 fundamentalisms urge toward sameness is another version of beyond the pleasure principle played out in the grandest scale possible. If this is the case, Freuds narrative of psychic life has turned out to be all too accurate a reading of contemporary cultural dynamics. 111 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 Treks 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 UMBR(a) 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, Freuds 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 Freuds 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. UMBR(a) 112 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 childrens 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). 113 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 Freuds 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. UMBR(a) 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 substitutions 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, UMBR(a) 115 UMBR(a) 116 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 its 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 Bersanis work in some detail, for its 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 Bersanis Homos and Caravaggios Secrets, co-authored with Ulysse Dutoit, I want to use those differences to compare Bersanis recent reading of Platos Symposium to Lacans thoughts on this multivalent text. In doing so, I hope to put in relief the claim that the movement of Bersanis recent work hews closest to the positive effects of nonantagonistic sameness in queer theory, whereas Lacans 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 Bersanis work revisits his and Lacans 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 Lacans 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 Caravaggios Secrets, we can assess how each book represents extensibility, one of the factors distinguishing Bersanis 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.2 117 On the face of things, this shift may not seem dramatic. There are even grounds for arguing that Bersanis earlier work including his brilliant essay Lawrentian Stillness questions if identity multiplied or replicated remains identity at all.5 Nevertheless, the arguments in Bersanis recent books vary in ways pertinent to my discussion. Whereas in Homos Bersanis key interest is the tension between political self-recognition and the dissolution of selfhood through samesex erotic bliss, Caravaggios 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 Caravaggios 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 UMBR(a) Yet there is obviously an intriguing tension in Bersanis title, because in plural form the homo ceases to signify pure sameness, owing to Bersanis 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 Bersanis interest in sameness, however, in Homos he cannot easily navigate or sustain this conceptual distinction between same- and other-sexuality. In Caravaggios 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 Bersanis most recent essays, Genital Chastity and Against Monogamy, where Bersani writes evocatively about the subjects non-intimate connections to the world, including but not reducible to multitudinous points of disseminated sociality.4 UMBR(a) 118 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 Dutoits 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 Caravaggios Secrets, a sign of our almost symbiotic relationship to the world. For instance, in their analysis of Caravaggios 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 painters 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 Caravaggios 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 psychoanalysiss 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 Dutoits 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 Bersanis model such remnants generally enable connections between samesex partners (as, for instance, a nonthreatening supplement to sameness),10 in Freuds and Lacans terms such remnants, thwarting reciprocity, permit tragicomic forms of connection governed largely (though not entirely) by the subjects 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 Dutoits hands, for example, being is rendered extensible, nonappropriative, and nonproprietary; in Lacans hands (and often in Freuds), 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 Caravaggios St. John the Baptist with a Ram, stress the enabling conditions of the paintings 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 cant contain, where there are no borders or figures, no beginning or end. This, then, is the youths 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 119 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, Caravaggios 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. UMBR(a) One could say much about this fascinating interpretation. To begin with, Bersani and Dutoits partial rejection of Laplanches 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 youths 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). UMBR(a) 120 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. Lawrences fascination with lapsing out of consciousness and Samuel Becketts interests in stasis influence Bersanis 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 drives 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 egos 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 Caravaggios 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 Freuds and Lacans 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 Bersanis 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.17 121 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 Lacans 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. UMBR(a) 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 Dollimores, who argues that Lacans tragic ontology of desire is apparent when the analyst discusses homosexuality in Prousts 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. 122 UMBR(a) 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 Bersanis 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 Laplanches emphasis on the enigmatic signifier, partly to confront and partly to veer away from Lacan. Consequently, I wish to turn here to Bersanis reading of Platos 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 Platos 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 Xenophons insistence that the boy does not share in the mans 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 Bersanis 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 Bersanis 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 hed 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 ago31 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 Bersanis 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 UMBR(a) 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 Bersanis 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.38 124 UMBR(a) see difference not as a trauma to be overcome but as the non-threatening supplement to sameness40 hence his suggestion that castration should be irrelevant to this scenario. Yet as Lacans eleventh seminar makes clear, there is a very different way of reading these sentences a way, resembling the narrators thoughts in Thomas Hardys Tess of the dUrbervilles, 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 Hardys 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 Hardys and Lacans 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 Dutoits, 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 Hocquenghems 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, Hocquenghems 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 homosexualitys frank visibility. 47 125 In short, and for different reasons, problems of specificity haunt and beset Hocquenghems and Bersanis 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 Bersanis 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 Hocquenghems 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, Hocquenghems 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, Hocquenghems 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. UMBR(a) 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 Bersanis 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, Caravaggios 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: Freuds 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 Freuds Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis, 1954-1955, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Sylvana Tomaselli (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 244. 22. Ibid. UMBR(a) 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 Lacans 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 Platos 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 dUrbervilles: 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. OByrne (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), 96. 43. See, for instance, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwicks 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 Nancys 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 Brownings 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 Nancys 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 Nancys 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 ones 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 ones 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 theres 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 Foucaults work. For example, commenting on the seeming omnipotence of power that one finds in Foucaults genealogical texts, David Larmour, Paul Allen Miller, and Charles Platter write that Foucaults 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 UMBR(a) 131 UMBR(a) 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 Foucaults 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 ones 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 Bersanis work and that of Gilles Deleuze, whose sympathy with Foucaults 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: Its 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 psychoanalysiss 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 Laplanches 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 psychoanalysiss conceptual framework. UMBR(a) Bersanis 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, Caravaggios 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 egos traumatic shattering in sexualitys 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 Freuds 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. UMBR(a) 134 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 sexualitys 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 infants 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 Caravaggios 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 Caravaggios 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 childs 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 bodys 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 cant 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, UMBR(a) 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.26 136 UMBR(a) as in Jean Genets 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, Genets 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 Genets use of his cultures 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 Caravaggios 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 Platos 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 ones 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 Deleuzes 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 Braidottis 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 UMBR(a) 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 youths 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 youths 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 youths 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. 138 UMBR(a) 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 Bersanis 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 Spinozas 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 lavenir]. 50 Lavenir, 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 Bersanis fascination with unreadability: that is, if difference is inimical to representation for Deleuze, sameness is closely linked to the unreadable for Bersani. In Caravaggios 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 UMBR(a) 139 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 Bergsons 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 Matters 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.61 140 UMBR(a) 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 lifes 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 subjects 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 Bersanis and Deleuzes 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 latters work: he sketches in his latest texts a philosophy of affirmation, of lifes ineffable productivity. The emphasis on relationality offers him a way to think about infinite interconnectedness that characterizes Deleuzes 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, Foucaults rejection of planned resistance in his post-genealogical texts challenges us to think of politics as evolutionary becoming, thwarting powers ability to make the eruption of the event part of the fabric of the known. 71 Like Foucaults 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 lavenir] remain wide open. 73 UMBR(a) 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 latters 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. UMBR(a) 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, childrens sexuality, womens 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 Bersanis own work, this term is renamed communication of forms (Bersani, Against Monogamy, 20). 17. Bersani, Baudelaire and Freud, 2. 18. Apart from gay mens 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, Caravaggios 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 Butlers reading of Jeannie Livingstons 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 Freuds 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 psychoanalysiss 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 Deleuzes 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 Silvermans concept of heteropathic identification approximates that of inaccurate replication. Like the latter, Silvermans notion seeks to articulate an 143 26. Royle, 174. 30. Bersani, Homos, 153. UMBR(a) 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, Butlers inaccurate repetition must be clearly distinguished from Bersanis inaccurate self-replication: one way to think of this difference in Deleuzian terms is to note that, while Butlers 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. UMBR(a) 144 37. Bersani, Genital Chastity, 365; see also Bersani and Dutoit, Caravaggios 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. UMBR(a) 73. Bergson, Creative Evolution, 104-105; Lévolution 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 146 UMBR(a) MULHOLLAND DRIVE Dir. David Lynch, 2001 THE ART OF THE RIDICULOUS SUBLIME: ON DAVID LYNCHS LOST HIGHWAY Slavoj iek (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 Lynchs roadmap, the route from Lost Highways anonymous megalopolis not unlike Los Angeles 1 to Mulholland Drives city of dreams/ city of night L.A. coincides directly with the 260-mile stretch of land that reaches across Americas 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 cant help but realize that in Lynchs hands The Straight Story is a supremely funny movie and, more importantly, one cannot help but take it seriously, that is, one cant help but include it within the set of Lynchs 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 iek, Alvin Straight, the patient, persistent ethical subject, is the height of modern-day subversion.2 iek 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 Lynchs 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, iek sees that same ordinary man as a model of fidelity who poses more of a threat to todays society than the threats of perversion and death that we expect from Lynch. ieks 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 cant 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 iek. 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 Lynchs 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 Straights 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 UMBR(a) return is in itself interesting, but it is all the more strange that the two films are separated by Lynchs most seemingly uncharacteristic film, The Straight Story. Rather than thinking of Mulholland Drive as simply Lynchs 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 ieks 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 Lynchs films, broken down into their components. For example, iek 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 148 UMBR(a) 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 iek describes as the New Age/Jungian reading of Lynchs supposed universal subconscious spiritualized Libido (3). First, what drives Lynchs 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 cant be thought of as a wild, free-floating energy that explains for instance the shifting of identities in Lynchs 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, Lynchs 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 subjects 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 Lynchs 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 Lynchs 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 Lynchs innovation in his latest film are dead UMBR(a) 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 films 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 150 UMBR(a) wrong and end up merely attributing all the clichéd misunderstandings of Lynchs work to a theory of the woman. Lynchs 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 Lynchs films, it is equally a misunderstanding of Lynchs 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. Petes relationship to Alice proves as impossible as Freds to Renee, as Alice indicates when she whispers to Pete, Youll 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. iek 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, Youll never have me! (15). UMBR(a) 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 Pullmans Fred and Balthazar Gettys 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 cant turn too quickly to the visually and thematically similar Lost Highway while ignoring the middle film of Lynchs trilogy of road movies. Mulhollands 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 Ritas discovery of the corpse in Dianes 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 Lynchs initial plan: the continuation of the pilot as a series.) I cant 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 152 UMBR(a) 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, ones 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 iek, The Art of the Ridiculous Sublime: On David Lynchs Lost Highway (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2000), 13. Subsequent references will appear parenthetically within the text. 2. iek, When Straight Means Weird and Psychosis Is Normal, http://www.lacan.com/ ripley.html. 3. Similarly, iek writes later in the book: It is as if, in Lynchs 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 UMBR(a) 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 Hangdongs lewdness and Lan Yus 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 latters fraudulent business, the reunion is soon broken off again by Hangdongs 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 Yus 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 Chinas 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 Yuans subversive treatment of cross-dressing and heterosexual surrender in East Palace West Palace. Juxtaposed with Shu Keis A Queer Story, its exploration of a middle-aged queer mans 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-liangs The River, in which a closeted father and son unknowingly commit incest while cruising a sauna. Obviously, too, the emotional struggle of Lan Yus couple is minor in comparison to Wong Kar-wais nowcanonized gay classic Happy Together. While Lan Yu was intended to be simple, it falls short of Fleeting by Nights finesse and idyll. Most disappointingly, it misses the clarity of Kwans 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 Yus narrative discontinuity and its unfaithful adaptation. Purged of the novels graphically sexual details, Kwans 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 154 UMBR(a) published in book form in Taiwan, allows us to see the convolution of Hangdongs 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 Handongs emotional development, that it skips over the eventual end of his heterosexual marriage, and that it pays little attention to the relation between Lan Yus and Hangdongs 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 Laws 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. Kwans first gay film, Hold You Tight, presents a number of highly contrived scenarios of suppressed love: Ah Moons love for her husband, Fung Wai, is mere marital duty; Tongs closeness with Fung Wai is asexual homosexual desire; and Jeis sexual relationship with Ah Moon is a disguise of his fantasy for Fung Wei. The seeming intimacy mostly sexual between Kwans 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 Dont ask, dont tell imperative thus: Do ask, but we dont 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 iek, I Hear You With My Eyes; or, The Invisible Master, in Gaze and Voice As Love Objects, ed. Renata Salecl and iek (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996), 93. 3. Stanley Kwan, Still Love You After All These, VCD, Hong Kong: ICQ, 1997. [Authors translation] 155 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 Kwans 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 Hangdongs 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. UMBR(a) visibility. Consider the silence at Hangdongs 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 Hangdongs mere failure to respond to his wifes 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 Hangdongs 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 Munchs painting The Scream, in which the ghostly figures scream, instead of being heard, is seen as the strokes of the brush reverberating in the air, Hangdongs 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 ieks 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 Hangdongs desire; it is an object cause of desire independent of gender. UMBR(a) 156 LACANS 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, Lacans 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 Lacans 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 Lacans 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 Hararis 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 157 The subjects 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 subjects 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 Lacans work on the object a. By referring to several diagrams (some of his own, some of Lacans), 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 Lacans 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 subjects 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 subjects 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, UMBR(a) 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, Hararis 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 Lacans 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. 158 UMBR(a) not fully delineated in Hararis 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 ones 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 UMBR(a) 159 the abyss of das Ding, Harari, remaining faithful to Freuds 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 Hararis 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 160 UMBR(a) 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 Caravaggios 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 ODay 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). UMBR(a) 161 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 UMBR(a) 162