Erotic Welfare

Sexual Theory and Politics in the Age of Epidemic

Judith Butler, Maureen MacGrogan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780415902021
• eBook ISBN: 9781317857266
• Topic: Filosofía
• Subtopic: Historia y teoría filosóficas

A trenchant critique of sexuality in an age of discipline, where bodies and pleasures have become sites of regulatory power.

I

Erotic Welfare

1

Author's Introduction

One remains loyal to the tradition because one has nothing to say about the doctrine itself.

Lacan, “Function and Field of Speech and Language,” Ecrits

Writing a book is an act of presumption, assumption, and to that extent an act of hubris, a gesture that assumes that all that has come to represent orthodoxy and authority is somehow incomplete, in need of transgress, transcendence, and supplementation. A book always emerges from a lack, whose transitivity migrates between the world that seems to call for it and the writer whose lack invests the call with some kind of mobilizing significance. Although a book represents a condensation of a process of labor and struggle offered to readers for whom those struggles will never be visible (and if they are, it's a problem), hence an object of self-effacing sacrifice, it is also a gesture that already comes in the form of demand—a demand for time, energy, attention, advocacy, and maybe sympathy, from strangers for whom the author, if present is all, is so only as a structuring absence, the trace of a voice, a fictive persona, a point of view that recedes and is recast in each act of reading, yet whose name also becomes the place where failures, gaps, and errors are laid to rest.

The reader's decision to open the book, in some sense to activate it, is, despite the phenomena of synoptic reviews and word of mouth, essentially an act of faith which must trust or at least anticipate the very promise that the unread text represents. As a writer reflecting on the ironies of her own process and of the larger forms of exchange operative in the system of reading and writing, I both depend on those promissory protocols, but also find myself anxious in the face of them, anxious about the possibilities of fulfilling promises, or at least not making false ones. This opening somewhat polemical preamble is an attempt at least to circumvent some of those, by saying enough that those who should spend no further time here will be spared the temporal expenditure at the same time that I clearly hope to seduce others, in part by employing some of the strategies I have learned from a real master, the woman who uses the telling of stories to keep herself alive, the figure who has come down to us with the name Scheherazade. The figure of S is known to us, and this is not unusual, only through the representations produced by a member of her audience, i.e., only from the point of view of her addressees, her interlocutors, and her targets. That her effect, dare I say her power, is represented primarily through the figure of seduction is not surprising under the circumstances, nor is the tendency to emphasize her exoticness, her singularity, and her otherness. S certainly is an extraordinary figure, at least to the extent that she occupied a rather extraordinary position, namely, that of being a woman performing in and for the seat of power, a woman whose position was to perform power in a way that the powerful then simply could not do without. In this moment, S has produced the position from which she is no longer simply the object of the male gaze and its functional economy. Her stories, dances, performances also have the effect of dislocating or decentering power by capturing it in the shifting veils of its own misrecognitions. S's art was that of producing the story of how to disempower the resistances of that power to the very forms by which it itself is contested and resisted. Even though her feats are recounted from one who has already been figured by their effects, S does give us some clues, if one knows how to read this meta-story, i.e., against the grain, or between the veils.

One of S's major tactics, according to the legend we've received, was her dance of the seven veils. In this moment, S can be imagined exploiting the ambiguities of the play between the presence that has since seduced and produced Western metaphysics, and the discourses of its deconstruction, as evolutionary repetitions of the rituals of mastery still baring the pleasures of the fort/da game, the delight in differences. But S's reversal comes from the way in which her specular performance of difference also makes a difference in the economy of difference. This difference is neither that of the episodic reversals outlined in the master/slave dialectic in Hegel, nor in the seduction theory of Sartre. For Sartre, the transitivity of power is exchanged between positions that, although different, are different symetrically—one is a negation/denial of the other, hence the subtext of mutual dependency. The positions of men and women are different. They are opposite but they are opposite asymetrically. Women in patriarchy cannot simply figure their transcendence in the death of the master, as the slave can. Nor is the moment at which they episodically capture the other by capturing his gaze, his body, his desire, the kind of act that has much negotiable currency beyond itself. S's power is neither that of the rebellious slave nor that of the seductress. Her power is that of performing the spectacle of difference which cannot be mastered. This disruption works, at some level, by confounding the anticipatory structures of a masculinist scopophilia and voyeurism, in which the truth is seen, illuminated, optimally and in the most neutral medium. S shows that the antinomies of this economy can be exploited in a way that disappointment is recoded as pleasure and as a perpetual promise. At one level S is a tease, but certainly one with whom her audience is more than complicit. Her success and their enjoyment depends on a mutual and unspoken compact of deception that not only willingly, indeed, desirously suspends or brackets disbelief, but also renders inoperative the categories of beliefs, warrants, and grounds in the world veiled by and through S's dance. The dance is a strip-tease, a ritual in the production and dissimulation of femininity. It is the performance of a feminine masquerade that promises but never unveils itself to its unseen producers, its audience, the men screened by the veils to the point where they are no longer the masters of presence and absence, no longer the markers of difference, the choreographers of the masquerade but rather, those whose expectations are constantly defied by the force of the spectacle to which they are now being subjected. S's genius was not only to make them want her by precisely never giving them what they wanted, but to do this in a way that made them only want more of the same. S's genius was that she perfected her craft under the gaze of those at whom she aimed without ever tipping her hand. Each one of those thousand and one nights, she could entertain them with the stories of the strategies by which she kept herself, and many other women after her, alive.

Now, S is probably not the most apt figure for appropriation by a philosopher, even or maybe especially if that philosopher is also female and a feminist. Seduction, the strip-tease, the veil are not traditional philosophical tools. Philosophers are supposed to be the voices that remove men from the realm of caves and shadow into the light. Not a compact of deception, but of truth. But in many ways S is a very apt figure for the woman philosopher, who is bound to need different figures with which to decorate her space. Because S does produce a truth, a truth about difference and power and stories—and it is partly the truth of strategics and the subtleties of performance, particularly the performance of stories that are always also seductions, and therefore the situations in which the performer must always be other than what is performed. It is that very difference that kept S, and many of us since, alive.

So, for my part, I want to try to put in play the lesson of S, by performing some of what I see as my difference, without tipping my hand. It begins with my recognition of the different addresses I intend or imagine for this work, and what might be read, or projected on one's anxious days, as radically differing sets of expectations and demands. Sartre says, I think rightly, that to write is first to choose for whom one writes. Speech, writing are to and for and from the Other(s). Who those others are likely to be, particularly for a book of this kind, are already to some extent predetermined or over-determined by traditional divisions of knowledge and the institutionalization of disciplinary differences. In this respect, the book is written by someone who was trained in philosophy and wants to be read by philosophers, at the same time that the effect of this reading is intended to destabilize and contest the contemporary constitution of philosophy's boundaries and conventions. Of course, I also want this book to be read by people not trained in philosophy, including many feminists, I imagine, who may be actively hostile to philosophy insofar as it marks a particularly conspicuous example of masculinist hegemony. The question of audience, the kind that becomes a real issue in writing, however, is not one of market sociology, but rather is played out in the question of language, voice, position, and context.

In this respect, I am engaged in the ultimately paradoxical project of trying to seduce those whose business it is to steel themselves against seduction. I propose to tell stories of a difference that will exploit the very power they aim to contest or destabilize. In terms of textual strategies, this means that much of this discourse will speak from or on the basis of that which has been taught to me as “the history of philosophy,” but will do so in a very unorthodox way. Such confrontations with the law are encoded in a figure of anxiety, that is part of what the law is for; and hence my opening evocation of an erstwhile father from whom it is also easy to maintain an ironic distance and a kind of authorization for my enterprise of intervening in what another superlative tactician, Hélène Cixous, calls “the chain of fathers.” Because times and especially the instruments of power have changed significantly since S's days, I will need more than veils to do the work, especially because I also lack her grace and other charms. Only some of that charm can be passed along in a discursive chain between prospective adoptive mothers, fathers, and their children. Hence, a need to produce/perform a dance of self-authorization, like Scheherazade, a masquerade of masking and unmasking. The mobilizing fiction here is that of the bandita.

The bandita is a fiction born, like the fiction of a discourse of truth opposed to fiction, from lack, desire and demand. The bandita fiction is the mobilizing myth of successful transgression, the figure whose legend and mystique lie precisely in her abilities both to transgress its boundaries and to escape capture by eluding the logic of the posses that pursue her. She has no proper name—she is the figure of impropriety. She keeps moving in and out of the shadows. Unlike S, she is not confined to a single space. She can appear anywhere, and we can learn much here about the tactics of quick movement and surprise and movements of resistance to capture by law. Her performance, unlike S's, works best when there is no one watching, since she supports herself, as many dispossessed people do, as a trader, in this case, of the relics she has ruthlessly appropriated by robbing graves, taking that which can be translated into negotiable currency, i.e., that which has or is of value, and leaving the remainder. She does not seduce her pursuers through veils, she lassoes them, encircling with a force that can be instrumentally immobilizing. She stuns first and asks questions later. Her aim can be uncanny, and her life depends on it.

The bandita is successful in transgressing and eluding the law because she understands and in some sense identifies with it, albeit from the other side. She is an outlaw only through and by its office. It is from the side of the law that her legend is produced; as compensation for its own lack, this legend learns to produce pleasure in the subversion of the law. But living as she does at the frontiers, crossing and traversing borders at will, unimpeded save by the limits of her energy, her very mobility is also a source of anxiety, a terrorist in the kingdom where the dead and private property are supposedly sacred. The bandita survives outside the sphere of domesticated stabilized identities. It is not that she has no attachments, but that her attachments are polymorphous, outside the fixed economies of exchange of family and kinship. Her way of life represents a form of refusal, specifically, a refusal of the role of object of exchange in favor of a position from which she can at least cut her own deal, and if there are ties that bind, she is the one tying the knot. Such adventurism, when it is female, is often recoded as promiscuous and, in this sense, the bandita is a figure not of too little loyalty but of too much, preserving the effective surplus from all those she has encountered in her travels, a surplus that is both gift and compensation for a life lived always on the way.

All authorial personae, and perhaps authors themselves, are constructions. Such constructions are both chosen and found, happen to us as we happen to them, and are therefore also overdetermined. They reveal, disclose, represent, seduce, offend, symbolize to and for a reader, or better, in a more hopeful mode, readers. There they work, or fail to, within a differential calculus that no construction could consciously anticipate, much less try to accommodate. Maybe personae, or voice, as Malraux said of style, really emerges only in and through the other. But voices are not accidental, and these days they also cannot really be unselfconscious. Too much theory from too many places has killed or at least ironized any claims to textual innocence, as readers or writers. Even if all that is written here is only a proliferation of signs, we are the products of their manipulation and, therefore, how one writes this matters.

What does the trope of the bandita imply? Playing with the remains of dead men, ruthless pillaging, taking what's needed and leaving the rest. The bandita recycles these remains, rather than recasting them as reliquary objects of display, under glass, protected from desecration. They are already desecrated—and also embalmed by others. The remains recycled make a different map, and mark new intersections between discourses, disciplines, forms of “knowledge.” The bandita, according to legend, is promiscuous, and this book is not only intellectually incestuous but paradigmatically promiscuous, bedding with many, remaining with none, loyal to no single woman or man. The bandita cannot stay on the main roads but has to find her own way. Even if others have been this way before, the trails are not clearly marked. That might very well defeat the purpose (there is no honor amongst thieves, and probably less amongst their pursuers). Not all routes are the right ones. There is digression, and indirection, in part because one never knows where one is safe, especially when administrations change so often. Sometimes the problem is that one is not sure where one wants to go, or one only knows how to get to places one can or no longer wishes to be. The bandita moves quickly. She has to. Often this speed works to her advantage, there is so much ground to cover. Sometimes not, and something is missed along the way. But even though she moves alone or in small bands, the pace of her progress is not entirely self-determined, although it is determined by what she is pursuing, and what is pursuing her. This cannot be helped. It comes with the territory.

Banditas take risk, and despite their well-deserved reputation for bravery and brazenness, they also get scared sometimes. Such fright is certainly not entirely unfounded. Not all silence is comforting, not all surveillance is sympathetic. At such moments, they wonder why or when they stopped being dutiful daughters, and try to retrieve the desires that brought them to this place. Most of the time we can remember.

These fictions of feminine authority represent my effort to find/construct a way to speak as one identified as/with the problematic fiction, “woman philosopher.” My reflections on this problematic are offered in recognition that this possibility is one with a certain historical specificity, and that until recently that conjunction, as problematic as it is, could not have been made at all, a designation withheld as a means of denying whatever legitimacy or inscribed authority that term now contains to the works which offer the thinking of women. The position of a woman philosopher is structured by the space between—a space of contradictions to be spanned by attempting precisely to try, to dwell or, at least, to work in a place from which one is also always already exiled, dispossessed, a space of difference produced by/as a consequence of the difference between the frontiers that give the territory its particular labyrinthine shape.

These complications, moreover, are not only structural, but proliferate in the form of ambivalence and conflict that are operative at the epistemic and existential levels, the nexus of which is often coded as the dilemma of the postmodern. The postmodern economy is one in which systems and currencies of exchange and linkages between them have so proliferated that any notion of fixed identity dissolves in the momentum and range of these exchanges, a technological extension of the bandita's life on the roads between. That the text that follows is postmodern is likely only in the sense that it takes the postmodern to be the place from which one writes, the place that is precisely not a place, but a network of places linked by the movements by which they become places along the way. The text is the process of linking that which has not yet been mapped in quite this way or is the fiction by which the lack is being specifically put into play in my performance. This linkage will involve a transgression of the traditional frontiers and borders by which the map of Western knowledge is usually drawn. This redrawing of the map is not a matter of or in the manner of a simultaneous projection. It does not presume or assume the integrity of the space it enters, an integrity that emerges only for a point of view at a distance and at great height. The kind of mapping I propose is more in the manner of producing tales that precisely are designed not to end, to perpetuate the telling as a way of staying alive, and to do so by moving through a space that one is not mastering, but moving through, because it has not been thoroughly mapped, projected, surveyed by the eyes of the law.

Juggling may be the best metaphor for what I'm doing—juggling, depending on one's paradigmatic affiliations, signs, referents, contexts, ideas, events, theories. On the one hand, I want to talk about historical specificities—sexual epidemic in the 1980s and its implications for contemporary sexual politics. On the other hand, I want also to exploit this as an occasion for a (again depending on one's paradigm) broader, more conceptual, theoretical, abstract, visionary, speculative discourse on the relationship between sex, power, and philosophy. Already a problematic if not to say presumptuous concept, certainly one that is likely to be hard to market. Where to place such a book—inside or outside philosophy, the women's section, sociology, speculative metaphysics? This is no small consideration in a historical moment where the division and production of knowledge is not unrelated to the structures of the commodity.

From the other side, where does this text place itself—already problematic— whom does it address, from where, for what end? And why should anybody care, and who wants to be just another false prophet on the remainder table, if one's text gets that far? What justifies such an undertaking?—i.e., the expenditure of at least my time and resources, and presumably, should this make it to print, the time and energy of the readers, as well as of those who will print, edit, market the product of my labors. Who am I and where am I in writing this—from what voice, syntactic and otherwise? Why the first person to begin, when the question of identity is at stake? Am I the associate professor tenured at a midwestern university, trained in the history of philosophy, or the teacher of feminism and women's studies? Or am I the child who learned to command attention through words? Is mine a position of privilege or vulnerability—the privilege that follows from being white, middle-class, educated, tenured, the vulnerability that comes from being a woman, in a marginal area of a marginal discipline and the position of isolation that often induces? There are other privileges and vulnerabilities that could be stipulated—some in fact are likely interchangeable, others ambiguous (where does one place being heterosexual, for example?). What is the fiction that seems both to necessitate and to undermine the process of disclosing, confessing one's position, and...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Thinking Gender
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Editor's Introduction
• Part I. Erotic Welfare
• Part II. Selected Writings
• Other Works by the Author
• Works Cited in Part I
• Index