Subjective dispossession and objet a
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22 The discursive moment Butler adds to the Hegelian scene of recognition focuses on the place of language, norms and social conventions that structure the ‘visibility’ of others: I think it is important to realize that if and when recognition happens, it happens through established languages and norms, and that the claim to be recognized sometimes requires innovating new modes of language and new social conventions. This is why some persons and creatures are "recognizable" when others are not. (2010c). 23 This is a personal transcription of an informal discussion by Judith Butler who attended a graduate seminar on her book Giving an Account of Oneself at Claremont Graduate University (2010e). 24 Butler strikes a sensitive note when, in seeking to shift the very coordinates of intelligibility when it comes to approaching the other, she introduces the ‘immigrant’ the ‘immigration hearing’ etc. Nothing stokes mass popular hysteria more than this particular signifier of exoticism, otherness and of course fear and terror(ist). Butler’s work on displacing the ‘truth of’ the immigrant, advocating for a different structure of address based not on a discourse of ‘truth’ but a narrative of ‘trauma’ ‘longing’ ‘reconciliation’ ‘love’ for instance, reflects her attempt to think a post-nationalist version of global citizenry. 25 Cultural translation is the hard work of finding out how meaning is produced in different cultural contexts. 26 Note here once again Butler’s relation to the copula ‘is’. 27 In another context, Jodi Dean relates how in Freud’s Totem and Taboo the killing of the father by the band of brothers accomplishes the move from arbitrary authority to the rule of law, from nature to culture, “Law frees us from the absolute, arbitrary demands of the Other.” Killing the father ended their submission to arbitrary force, and instituting the rule of law regulates access to among other things women and the use of violence (Žižek’s Politics 145). 28 The Lacanian symbolic is the big Other. It is the system of rules, norms and regulations that the subject follows. It is also the system of language which ‘speaks’ the subject. Butler’s seeks to show how the Lacanian symbolic order is a sedimentation of norms and thus subject to change. 29 The Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913), placed the signified over the signifier: and did not really see the bar separating the terms as an actual ‘bar’ whereas Lacan reversed Saussure: giving more prominence to the Signifier, plus Lacan treated the bar as a bar, meaning that not only was the relation between the terms arbitrary, there was a constant slippage of the signifieds underneath the signifiers. The primary relation was the signifier — signifier relation. Lacan’s definition of a signifier: “a signifier represents the subject to another signifier” does not make reference to a signified. 30 Regarding the question of sexual difference Butler asks, “If it is symbolic is it changeable? I ask Lacanians this question, and they usually tell me that changes in the symbolic take a long, long time. I wonder how long I will have to wait” (2004c, 212). 31 For Lacanians access to the symbolic means access to language itself. If access to the symbolic is foreclosed for any reason, psychosis is the result. 32 In “The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis” Lacan states the following: Man thus speaks, but it is because the symbol has made him man. ... The primordial Law is therefore the Law which, in regulating marriage ties, superimposes the reign of culture over the reign of nature, the latter being subject to the law of mating. The prohibition of incest is merely the subjective pivot of that Law. ... This law, then, reveals itself clearly enough as identical to a language order. For without names for kinship relations, no power can institute the order of preferences and taboos that know and braid the thread of lineage through the generations. (2006, 229-230) 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 Download 480.65 Kb. Share with your friends:
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