Lately I've been reading Judith Butler. I have to say that she is one of the most difficult theorists I have grappled with in a long time. It is so exciting. I feel that high again...the high that comes from wrestling with some amazingly difficult passages, and feeling like a light turns on when you finally get it. Suddenly you just don't see the world in the same way. Everything changes. And you lose something which is what I am reading about with Butler right now.
In The Psychic Life of Power, Butler writes about about subjection. She wishes to examine the ambiguity that lies at subject formation. But that is for another entry. What I find so interesting right now, this evening, is Butler's reading of Lacan and Freud. She argues that internalization is formed through loss. She writes
"Significantly, Freud identifies heightened conscience and self-bereavement as one sign of melancholia, the condition of uncompleted grief. The foreclosure of certain forms of love suggests that the melancholia that grounds the subject signals an incomplete and irresolvable grief. Unowned and incomplete, melancholia is the limit to the subject's sense of pourvoir, its sense of what it can accomplish and, in that sense, its power"(23).
Last week, with a certain professor, we talked a lot about Lacan and how he sees subject formation built through loss. And then I read this. This idea that love, desire, etc, functions through a loss of something makes a lot of sense. Especially when one thinks of this lost as homosexual. Being bisexual is an interesting position from which to look at this loss. I think perhaps for me this loss is somewhat known.
I have never identified my sexuality as merely about sex but rather about the possibilities of love and desire. Calling myself bisexual opened up many possibilities for me but it also entailed losses. The gay/lesbian community often wants nothing to do with bisexual people. Despite the rumors it is not easier to get a date! I was accused often of just wanting sex, and of not being willing to fully commit to lesbianism. In other words, I was a coward. I loss an opportunity to fully explore dating, loving, women, and I also lost an opportunity to be a part of a community.
And then what happens when the bisexual goes monogamous? I love my partner (a man), and I love the family we created but there is underlying all this a loss. By choosing to be monogamous (and yes I understand this a normalized function probably of heterosexuality), I have closed off a part of my sexuality. And while we could be open, could invite someone into our family, that too would entail a certain set of losses.
It's a bit tragic to think of all these losses. I see how so much of who we are is built upon losses that we often can not speak or bring forth. As Butler points out, sometimes they are so repressed we can not even grieve them.
4 comments:
You, my dear, dear friend are no coward, screw the lesbians...eh, well you know what I mean. I would never blog about something half so personal. And you know, talking about loss in abstraction seems a bit weird. I mean one inclination is to react with a question about whether these catagories are meaningful or epistemologically sound. But that inclination falls away in the face of the reality of loss, felt. And without loss, what can be gained? Meaning gains its gravitas in virtue of loss, felt. I think that it simply means more to "love Horatio" having given up the possibility of exploring a relationship with a woman (and I don't mean sexually. That isn't necessarily closed off completely, though I'd remind you of the complexity of even that). But, a devoted emotional relationship with another woman can't really be practical without giving up a certain and profound degree of intimacy with Horatio. What was missing in Sartre's relationship with Simon De Bouvoir? I don't know, but there is always loss.
I, for one, suffered a profound loss for my marriage. I gave up the practical possibility of pursuing a professional intellectual life. I still grieve. And yet there is a certain and very real sense that trancends on a personal level the abstraction of a socially constructed compulsory heterosexuality and it's attendant monogomy. For one, if my wife is subsumed in this discourse, then for all intents and purposes it is as real as gravity. For two, If my wife cannot emotionally bare the time spent alone while my mind and time are completely absorbed in academia (or another person, if you want to keep the example consistent) then whether my monogomy is socially constructed or not is irrelevent in the face of the profound loss of all things in the midst of utter lonliness. On a personal level in the midst of a given episteme or myth structure or world view or sphere or whatever structure or complex one choses to invoke, the theory is utterly devoid of meaning. And even historically, if a given view never gains currency (if you'll forgive the economic metaphor) or dominance then it can have no share in truth (if you'll forgive the platonic metaphor). Whether there is some objectivity or not, if it is not the recieved view and established at all levels of culture, what meaning does it have? (yeah yeah, if a rock falls on your head and kills you, etc. etc. But you can be more aware or less aware of falling rocks depending on your understanding and beliefs about hard round things and where they come from (or on or in to bring it back around)).
Chris
Yes we talked about this...and I agree of course that these social constructs are real...sometimes deadly so. The risk of proclaiming oneself gay is manifest. The deaths of so many gay men testify to the frightening power of society and what happens when we buck that.
So what happens when we do see these fissures? Do we have room to stretch the conventions? Can we learn to develop intimacy with more than just our spouse, and does that necessairly have to take away? I'm not sure to be honest. Do we not maintain intimacy with multiple people at a time? I find myself as in love with my children as my husband. There are differences to this intimacy but it is very intense. There are times when I find this overwelming and exhausting, and I know that my marriage did lose a level of intimacy with each child.
Basically, I am thinking a great deal about how loss is maybe inevitable but not necessairly tragic. Perhaps loss is what happens with each change, and that the richness we find in loss balances the tragic element.
No i don't think it has to be tragic. And yes i do think you can stretch the conventions. But how much you can stretch the conventions would have to depend on the veracity of those conventions. Like water pressure on a baloon, the deeper the water or the more pervasive the conventions the harder it is to stretch.
Which brings up the absolute necessity for someone like Foucault or perhaps more succintly, Derrida in any enterprise seeking redefinition. The kind of radical skepticism that such thinkers engender is a necessary precondition for the stretching of any conventions that fall under a given episteme (this term of Foucaults is the one that most covers whatever it is that stands for a complex of knowledge or belief. Perhaps myth covers more, but i'm not sure. I'd have to have a clear definition and I don't right now). In any case, without this doubt, there is no stretching. The episteme is as profound as objective God (or science) reigning down with his law.
But since we are Post- something, then many of our conventions are in shallow water or even air and can be stretched. Butler apparantly realizes this theoretically as many more practically minded people living unconventional lives do as well. And so the convention that seems to mean the most to you is stretched and justifiably so.
More later
Anyway, so what I really wanted to say was that I don't think it has to be tragic. But without some kind of framework for understanding loss, it can't be anything but tragic because it induces so much personal pshychological chaos and can lead to dissaster. So on the two levels we're working on here -- the broadly cultural and, the profoundly personal -- doubt induces a state of chaos (culturally, say the epistemological breakdown resulting from the musings of Foucault and his contemporaries and children, and personally, say with you losing some intimacy by brining another person in or me losing my religion and identity). That chaos in the case of the culture was and is tragic, because we no longer have truth to point to as the arbiter of our confusion (and many would claim that the moral relativism it engenders in the general population is leading us to disaster). It is also profoundly optimistic because there were very many things wrong with the truth we were clinging to. That chaos in the case of your relationship to Horatio will only be tragic if you don't have any framework for understanding it. In my case, someone(nink nink, wudge wudge) wanted to provide that framework. I chose chaos. Jody and I had to find our own meanings in eachother. Being fed meaning in that case while more comfortable and less tragic would have been horribly innapropriate however comic.
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