Selfhood through Dispossession

from J. Aaron Simmons’ review of Judith Butler’s Giving an Account of Oneself, JCRT 7.2, Spring 2006, pp. 85-87:

Counter to the predominant tradition in ethical theory — which claims that it is on the basis of a self-sufficient and free subject that we are able to assign agency, expect responsibility, and exact punishment for moral failure — [Judith] Butler argues that “what we often consider to be ethical ‘failure’ may well have an ethical valence and importance that has not been rightly adjudicated by those who too quickly equate poststructuralism with moral nihilism.” If Butler is right, then the basis for morality is not self-identity, but the exposure to others; not self-recursion, but constitutive incompleteness; not a final subjective narrative, but the continual desire and attempt to not close down the task of narrative itself.

…sociality, as Butler demonstrates drawing upon the work of Adriana Caverero, need neither be primarily conceived according to “the model of reciprocal recognition” (Hegel) nor the “view of life [that is] essentially bound up with destruction and suffering” (Nietzsche). Rather, selfhood is possible only as a dispossession from oneself in relation to the other. I am not my own and this fact is what lies behind the call to give an account of myself in the first place. “It is only in dispossession that I can and do given any account of myself,” Butler writes. Crucially, this constitutive sociality is not a problem for ethics, but the very wellspring from which problems can be viewed as ethical. Continue reading…

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Nakedness

from Jean-Luc Nancy, A Finite Thinking (2003), pp. 39-40; 45:

To conceal, dérober, to dis-guise, if you like, is also to disrobe. And yet this is but one aspect of the term, since “robe” and “disrobe” have the same origin (as English “rob” or German rauben suggest, the robe would, in the first instance, be a garment seized by a thief). We all know Bataille’s phrase “I think in the same way that a woman undresses,” and there are plenty of texts that deal with what is thus laid bare. A thinking that conceals itself, therefore, is also one that undresses itself, that disrobes, exposing itself, more specifically, as a naked woman: as truth.

To be naked is, first and foremost, to be undressed, to be without any covering that could present or signify a state or a function. It is to reveal everything but, at the same time, to show that there is nothing more to see. It is to show that there’s nothing beyond nakedness except still more nakedness. Hence, I cannot see nakedness except by placing it at a distance from the object, by situating it in terms of the (medical, anthropomorphic…) object. I see nakedness only by entering into it, or by letting it enter into me.

What this means is that nakedness can only be opened or, rather, that it is itself an opening. And this, in turn, means that nakedness touches on the other. There is no solitary nakedness. If I am naked and alone, I am already an other to myself, an other with myself. By its very essence, a nakedness touches on another nakedness: it wants to touch, no longer to see, to enter into the night of nakedness. It touches it and opens it by opening itself to it. And yet, essentially obscure and devoid of all foundation, all it opens is its closure; it leads onto the night. But it still leads; it still opens. Continue reading…

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Continuous and Discontinuous Being

from Georges Bataille, Death and Sensuality (1962), pp. 12-13, 17-18:

It is my intention to suggest that for us, discontinuous beings that we are, death means continuity of being. Reproduction leads to the discontinuity of beings, but brings into play their continuity; that is to say, it is intimately linked with death. I shall endeavor to show, by discussing reproduction and death, that death is to be identified with continuity, and both of these concepts are equally fascinating. This fascination is the dominant element in eroticism…The whole business of eroticism is to destroy the self-contained character of the participators as they are in their normal lives.

Stripping naked is the decisive action. Nakedness offers a contrast to self-possession, to discontinuous existence, in other words. It is a state of communication revealing a quest for a possible continuance of being beyond the confines of the self. Bodies open out into a state of continuity through secret channels that give us a feeling of obscenity. Obscenity is our name for the uneasiness which upsets the physical state associated with self-possession, with the possession of a recognized and stable individuality. Through the activity of organs in a flow of coalescence and renewal, like the ebb and flow of waves surging into one another, the self is dispossessed, and so completely that most creatures in a state of nakedness, for nakedness is symbolic of this dispossession and heralds it, will hide; particularly if the erotic act follows, consummating it. Stripping naked is seen in civilizations where the act has full significance if not as a simulacrum of the act of killing, at least as an equivalent shorn of gravity. In antiquity the destitution (or destruction) fundamental to eroticism was felt strongly and justified linking the act of love with sacrifice.

… Continuity is what we are after, but generally only if that continuity which the death of discontinuous beings can alone establish is not the victor in the long run. What we desire is to bring into a world founded on discontinuity all the continuity such a world can sustain.

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Secrets and Betrayals

from Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit, Caravaggio’s Secrets (1998), p. 39-42:

…Jean Laplanche has recently located the category of the enigma at the very point of emergence of what might be called the psychoanalytically constituted subject… Adult sexuality is implanted in the child in the form of what Laplanche calls an enigmatic signifier — that is, a message by which the child is seduced but which he or she cannot read.

…It is how we read the summons, the seduction, the soliciting that determines who or what we are. The inability to decipher the enigmatic signifier constitutes us as sexual beings, that is, beings in whom desire or lack is central. However peculiar it may seem to speak of desire as an epistemological category, we propose that desire as lack is constituted, originally, as the exciting pain of a certain ignorance: the failure to penetrate the sense of the other’s soliciting — through touch, gesture, voice, or look — of our body. This failure is itself dependent on a more fundamental reading: the reading of the soliciting as a secret. The secrets of the unconscious may be nothing more than the introjection of the secrets the other involuntarily persuades us to believe he or she holds without allowing us to read them. The withheld being with which the other addresses us is the other’s desirability.

…The enigmatic signifier 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. But his work also allows Caravaggio to experiment with a gaze diverted from a space circumscribed by a mutual fascination. The youth in the Fortune Teller raises the possibility of spatial interests not defined or directed by the imaginary secrets of the other. Perhaps the exploration of this possibility requires a suspension of strictly human interests, a removal from those existential contexts in which paranoid fascination is the human subject’s spontaneous response to the other’s soliciting (or even interested) gaze.

Caravaggio effects this removal by a betrayal of his subjects. The historical configurations of these subjects are reproduced in his painting, but at the same time the subjects appear, for the first time, as models of a relationality within which their historicity dissolves. The relations that emerge from this shift of register reformulate both intersubjectivity and metaphysics. Caravaggio is a crucial figure in the history of a suspicion fatal to the procedures and the confidence of philosophy: the suspicion that truth cannot be the object of knowledge, that it cannot be theorized. More exactly, the notion of truth itself is a consequence of the primacy given to knowledge. And knowledge “misses” being; it comes, so to speak, when we cease to remember that being happens not as a demonstration but as a kind of showing.

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Nonidentitarian Sameness

from Tim Dean, Hal Foster, and Kaja Silverman, “A Conversation with Leo Bersani,” October, Vol. 82 (Autumn, 1997), pp. 3-16:

Leo Bersani: … I am interested in a pleasure in losing or dissolving the self that is in no way equated with loss, but comes rather through rediscovering the self outside the self. It is a kind of spatial, anonymous narcissism…

…This is the move Ulysse [Dutoit] and I trace in Caravaggio’s painting: from the teasingly enigmatic eroticism of the portraits of boys to the nonsexual sensuality of physical contacts, extensions, and correspondences, from a problem of knowledge (and interiority) to a kind of cartography of the subject, a tracing of spatial connectedness.

Kaja Silverman: …what interests me is the move you make beyond the categories we conventionally use to think the relational — categories like bodies and psyches. So I’m still very fascinated with that period of your and Ulysse Dutoit’s writing that extends from The Culture of Redemption, through Arts of Impoverishment, to Homos. Think, for instance, of the following formulation in Homos: “His sexual preference,” you write of a protagonist in Gide, “is without psychic content; there are no complexes, no repressed conflicts, no developmental explanations; only the chaste promiscuity of form repeatedly reaching out to find itself beyond itself.” With a sentence like this, you help us rethink the relational in terms of design. You remind us that the ego is in fact a form, although we don’t usually think about it that way… There is a lot to be gained in thinking about the ego in formal terms. First, it’s de-anthropomorphizing. It permits us to begin conceptualizing relationality outside the usual human categories, which have become very reduced in recent years through the insistence upon race, class, gender, etc. It helps us to understand that what we are at the level of the ego may be a much more complex issue than we are accustomed to imagining… Continue reading…

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In the Bedroom of the Countess

Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, 1888, as reproduced in Masochism, trans. Jean McNeil (1989), p. 276:

At the age of ten I already had an ideal woman. I yearned for a distant relative of my father’s — let’s call her Countess Zenobia — the most beautiful and the most promiscuous woman in the country.

It happened on a Sunday afternoon: I shall never forget it. I had come to play with the children of my aunt-in-law — as we called her — and we were left alone with the maid. Suddenly the countess, proud and resplendent in her great sable cloak, entered the room, greeted us, kissed me (which always sent me into raptures) and then exclaimed: “Come, Leopold, I want you to help me off with my furs.” She did not have to ask me twice. I followed her into the bedroom, took off the heavy furs that I could barely lift, and helped her into the magnificent green velvet jacket trimmed with squirrel that she wore about the house. I then knelt to put on her gold-embroidered slippers. On feeling her tiny feet in my hands I forgot myself and kissed them passionately. At first my aunt stared at me in surprise, then she burst out laughing and gave me a little kick.

While she was preparing our tea we played hide-and-seek; I do not know what devil prompted me to hide in my aunt’s bedroom. As I stood concealed behind a clothes rack, I heard the doorbell and a few moments later my aunt entered the bedroom followed by a handsome young man. She closed the door without locking it and drew her lover into her arms.

I did not understand what they were saying, still less what they were doing, but my heart began to pound, for I was acutely aware of my situation: if they discovered me I would be taken for a spy. Overcome with dread, I closed my eyes and blocked my ears. I was about to betray my presence by sneezing, when suddenly the door was flung open and my aunt’s husband entered into the room accompanied by two friends. His face was crimson and his eyes flashed with anger. But as he hesitated for a moment, wondering no doubt which of the two lovers to strike first, Zenobia anticipated him.

Without a word, she rose, strode up to her husband and gave him an energetic punch on the nose. He staggered; blood was pouring from his nose and mouth. But my aunt was still not satisfied; she picked up a whip and, brandishing it, showed my uncle and his friends the door. The gentlemen were only too glad to slip away, and not last among them, the young admirer. At that moment the wretched clothes rack fell to the ground and all the fury of Madam Zenobia was poured out on me: “So you were hiding, were you? I shall teach you to play at spying.”

I tried in vain to explain my presence, but in a trice she had seized me by the hair and thrown me on the carpet; she then placed her knee on my shoulder and began to whip me vigorously. I clenched my teeth but could not prevent the tears from springing to my eyes. And yet I must admit that while I writhed under my aunt’s cruel blows, I experienced acute pleasure. No doubt her husband had more than once enjoyed a similar sensation, for soon he returned to her room, not as an avenger but as a humble slave; it was he who fell down at the feet of the treacherous woman and begged her pardon, while she pushed him away with her foot. Then they locked the door. This time I was not ashamed, and did not block my ears, but listened attentively at the door — either from spite or childish jealousy — and again I heard the crack of the whip that I had tasted only a moment before.

This event became engraved on my soul as with a red-hot iron; I did not understand at the time how this woman in voluptuous furs could betray her husband and maltreat him afterward, but I both hated and loved the creature who seem destined, by virtue of her strength and diabolical beauty, to place her foot insolently on the neck of humanity.

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