Queer Traversals

Psychoanalytic Queer and Trans Theories

Chris Coffman

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781350200029
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Crítica literaria LGBT

Working at the intersection of psychoanalytic, queer, and transgender theories, this book argues for the need to read Lacanian psychoanalysis through a queer and trans-positive framework. In so doing, it challenges the dimensions of fantasy at play in efforts to insist on the continued validity of the binary gender system. Targeting the Lacanian concept of "sexual difference" - that desire is structured through the difference between masculine and feminine - it argues that this idea is not transhistorical, as orthodox Lacanians claim, but rather a historically contingent fantasy. As such, it argues that psychoanalytic queer theorists need to go beyond this fantasy to register truly the full range of sexualities and modes of embodiment. Examining texts as diverse as films such as Hedwig and the Angry Inch and literary texts such as Paul takes the Form of a Mortal Girl, the book enables a queer and trans- inclusive model of theorizing subjectivity in psychoanalysis, psychosocial studies and cultural studies.

1

Queering Žižek

Queer theorists have long had a vexed relationship to Slavoj Žižek, whose work has attracted considerable criticism from Judith Butler’s Bodies That Matter (1993) to Jack Halberstam’s The Queer Art of Failure (2011) and others’ writings.¹ Despite these critiques, a revised version of Žižek’s theoretical framework would be useful for queer theory because his politically oriented psychoanalysis offers strategies for altering existing social structures. Bringing Jacques Lacan’s account of subjectivity and the social to bear on cultural and political concerns, Žižek asks how existing ideological formations are constituted and how they might be transformed. He adapts Lacan’s theory of the interlocking imaginary, symbolic, and Real orders to account for the way fantasies and desiring subjectivities arise through engagement with existing social formations. Within the Lacanian triad, the Real is the deepest source of psychical resistance and therefore, for Žižek, the order in which intervention must happen for change to succeed. He proposes a politicized twist on Lacan’s argument that the goal of analysis is for the analysand to traverse and thereby go beyond the fantasies animating subjectivity. Whereas the point of traversing the fantasy in the clinic is to open up alternative ways of structuring individual experience, for Žižek its objective is to reconfigure the symbolic by intervening in the Real and prompting social change.

The argument that traversing the fantasy can rearticulate the Real can be reframed as useful to queer theory’s goal of fundamentally transforming the social, despite Žižek’s hostility to poststructural queer theory. Queer people stand among those Žižek has “not deemed useful enough to be preserved or retained”—albeit not, as Butler claims, as the unsymbolizable Real (Ahmed 2019: 20). I nonetheless contend that his work remains useful for queer theory, in Sara Ahmed’s sense of “queer use as reuse . . . for a purpose that is ‘very different’ from that which was ‘originally intended’” (Ahmed 2019: 198–9). Arguing for uses of Lacan that Žižek would likely refuse, this chapter rearticulates the latter’s ideas in queer-positive terms, clearing one of psychoanalysis’ “fainter trails” that adapts Lacan’s thinking for queer and trans-affirmative ends (Ahmed 2019: 20).

Žižek’s insistence that sexual difference is Real and thus intractable has been a stumbling block for queer theorists interested in developing an account of subjectivity that apprehends desire’s workings across the full range of genders and sexualities. This position has animated a longstanding dispute with Butler. Whereas she interprets Lacanian sexual difference as a binary opposition located in the symbolic and therefore available for resignification, Žižek insists that it is instead an antagonism in the Real, and therefore immovable.² Žižek also notes that its inevitable failure produces myriad sexual possibilities, including queer ones. Although James Penney rightfully asserts that Žižek “decisively ‘won’” the debate with Butler, this chapter pushes past it by turning Žižek against himself in the service of—rather than in opposition to—the aims of queer theory he and Penney critique (Penney 2014: 47).

Žižek’s interpretations of sexual difference’s intractability are problematic. Notwithstanding the potentially queer effects of its failure, its underpinnings are defined heterosexually, according to the logic I describe in the Introduction as (hetero)sexual difference. Joan Copjec similarly promulgates this account of (hetero)sexual difference in Read My Desire (1994), which—as Adrian Johnston notes—questionably argues that Kant’s “antinomies” anticipate Lacan’s theory of sexuation despite not making any “explicit references to . . . sexuality or gender identity” (Johnston 2008: 28). Nonetheless, in Sex and the Failed Absolute, Žižek repeats and expands upon Copjec’s argument (Žižek 2019a: 107–18). However, their interpretation of sexual difference as an antinomy resulting in “the deadlock of sexed being” mobilizes a circular logic conflating sex with gender and conceiving of desire in heterosexual terms, even if—as Copjec and Žižek claim—sexual difference’s failures animate sexual diversity (Johnston 2008: 28).

It is important to understand that Žižek reiterates this ideology within a body of writing that has a different aim than that of other Lacanian work, for he does not seek to explicate the “true” meaning of Lacan’s texts. Instead, he grafts the psychoanalyst’s ideas into new philosophical and political contexts to alter existing social formations. This chapter, too, is not a return to a “true” or “pure” Lacan but rather a queer reworking of Žižek. By exploiting ways Žižek’s argument for sexual difference’s intransigence undoes itself, I turn his political version of Lacan’s theory of traversing the fantasy against itself to argue that it is possible to go beyond (hetero)sexual difference. Despite Žižek’s protestations to the contrary, (hetero)sexual difference is a fantasy Lacanian psychoanalytic theory needs to traverse to fully register the many possible configurations of desiring subjectivities. Doing so also opens up possibilities for understanding other axes of identity—such as gender, race, ethnicity, and nationality—as operating “beside” or even independently of (hetero)sexual difference in subjective formation (Sedgwick 2003: 8).

(Hetero)sexual Difference and the Real

I emphasize the need to traverse the fantasy of (hetero)sexual difference because such a move dislodges the point de capiton quilting the imaginary, symbolic, and Real. In Lacanian theory, these three orders are inextricable. Though the imaginary can be roughly described as the realm of the specular image and the symbolic as that of the signifier, they are bound up in one another. Lacan explains that within “the symbolic matrix in which the I is precipitated in a primordial form,” imaginary identification “situates” yet alienates the ego through the subject’s misrecognition of his or her mirror image (Lacan 2006e: 76). The symbolic—the realm of the signifier, the big Other, and the law—is linked to the Real, a concept that has been the site of frequent conceptual misprisions in debates over sexual difference. As Charles Shepherdson and Bruce Fink observe, the Real has two distinct but related meanings for Lacan, one “presymbolic” and the other “postsymbolic” (Shepherdson 2008: 27). Shepherdson explains that the process of “symbolic retroaction”—Freudian Nachträglichkeit—produces the former as a mythological effect of the latter (Shepherdson 2008: 37, 47). Whereas the presymbolic Real is a “hypothesis” formulated in the symbolic’s terms, the postsymbolic Real “is characterized by impasses and impossibilities due to the relations among the elements of the symbolic order itself” (Fink 1995: 27). My own use of the term “Real” references its postsymbolic sense. This Real is not radically unreachable by the symbolic but rather, as Copjec points out, the site at which the failures of symbolic mandates are inscribed (Copjec 1994: 201–36).

Žižek’s own inflection of Lacan turns on the three orders’ inextricability but also on the possibility of transforming their coordinates by altering the point de capiton. As Mari Ruti explains, for Lacan the fundamental fantasy—the unconscious fantasy structuring experience—drives psychical life and “perpetuate[s] unconscious patterns of behavior” constricting the subject (Ruti 2008a: 498). Psychoanalysis’s objective is to traverse this fantasy and attenuate its grip on the psyche. Grafting this theory into the realm of politics, Žižek argues that by targeting the quilting point, traversing the fantasy seeks not to undo the subject’s surface-level “symbolic identification,” but to gain “distance towards”—and ultimately go beyond—the underlying, “fundamental fantasy that serves as the ultimate support of the subject’s being” (Žižek 1999: 266). This involves an intervention in the Real that prompts a radical divestiture in the terms governing the symbolic order and that clears ground for them to be supplanted by a new paradigm. I will explain the technical workings of this process further as my argument proceeds.

At this point, I will note that traversing the fantasy offers a more trenchant challenge to the symbolic’s coordinates than Butler’s argument (first put forth in Gender Trouble [Butler 1990] and refined in Bodies That Matter [Butler 1993]) that it is possible to change the symbolic order by resignifying its phallogocentric terms.³ As Žižek, Penney, and others observe, a central problem with Butler’s strategy—and reading of Lacan—is that it engages only the symbolic and imaginary but not the Real.⁴ By contrast, traversing the fantasy unsettles the symbolic, imaginary, and Real by dislodging the point de capiton.

Like Žižek, Butler is concerned with the interplay between psychical and social resistance, and with the way—as they and Ernesto Laclau put it in the introduction to Contingency, Hegemony, Universality—“new social movements often rely on identity-claims, but ‘identity’ itself is never fully constituted; in fact, since identification is not reducible to identity, it is important to consider the incommensurability or gap between them” (Butler, Laclau, and Žižek 2000: 1). My argument for queering Žižek carries forward this joint project of undercutting categories of identity that Contingency shares with queer theory, which initially emerged as a challenge to identity-based formations of “gay and lesbian studies.” While uneven in its grasp of the particulars of Lacan’s thought, queer theory aligns with his work in this persistent refusal of stable identity. If Butler, Laclau, and Žižek agree that social movements cannot remain “democratic” without engaging “the negativity at the heart of identity,” however, they disagree significantly about that negativity’s form and consequences (Butler, Laclau, and Žižek 2000: 2).

Butler often presents negativity as the result of the imaginary undercutting of symbolic law. She focuses on those two orders in critiquing Lacanian arguments that the psyche is capable of resistance, and rightfully notes that symbolic mandates’ failure does not ensure their transformation. However, she assumes that “Lacan restricts the notion of social power to the symbolic domain and delegates resistance to the imaginary” (Butler 1997: 98). Arguing that the imaginary “thwarts the efficacy of the symbolic law, but cannot turn back upon the law, demanding or effecting its reformulation,” she concludes that “psychic resistance thwarts the law in its effects, but cannot redirect the law or its effects” (Butler 1997: 98). She thereby downplays the potential for transformation via the Real, which is quilted to the other two orders and is the deepest source of resistance.⁵

When Butler addresses the negativity at play in Laclau’s and Žižek’s accounts of the Real, she emphasizes that order’s role as “the limit-point of all subject-formation”—as “the point where self-representation founders and fails” (Butler 2000c: 29–30).⁶ Reading the Real in Žižek as “that which resists symbolization” (Butler 1993: 21) and as the “limit-point of sociality” (Butler 2000a: 152), she asks,

why are we compelled to give a technical name to this limit, “the Real”, and to make the further claim that the subject is constituted by its foreclosure? The use of the technical nomenclature opens up more problems than it solves. On the one hand, we are to accept that “the Real” means nothing other than the constitutive limit of the subject; yet on the other hand, why is it that any effort to refer to the constitutive limit of the subject in ways that do not use that nomenclature are considered a failure to understand its proper operation? Are we using the categories to understand the phenomena, or marshaling the phenomena to shore up categories “in the name of the Father”, if you will?

(Butler 2000a: 152)

While Butler is right to question the tautological logic through which Žižek and other Lacanians prop up the law of the Father and its corollary, (hetero)sexual difference, through appeals to the Real, the questions of terminology at stake in their disagreement are more significant than she suggests. In the above passage, she misinterprets and misuses Lacan’s concept of “foreclosure,” as I argue in Insane Passions (Coffman 2006: 18–22). In Seminar III, Lacan uses the term “foreclosure” to refer to a psychotic’s rejection of the primal signifier anchoring the symbolic and grounding “normal” subjectivity. In Bodies That Matter, Butler correctly notes that foreclosure happens to signifiers: she writes that “what is foreclosed is a signifier, namely, that which has been symbolized” (Butler 1993: 204). However, she goes on to generalize that mechanism as foundational to all forms of subjectivity rather than as specific to psychosis: she writes that foreclosure “takes place within the symbolic order as a policing of the borders of intelligibility” (Butler 1993: 204). This claim misses Seminar III’s presentation of foreclosure as the governing mechanism of psychosis—not necessarily of all forms of subjectivity. Upon this error Butler builds a case that the symbolic order itself is capable of effecting foreclosures that consign queer bodies to the unsymbolizable Real (Coffman 2006: 18–22).⁷ In the above passage from Contingency, this difficulty leads Butler erroneously to conceptualize the Real as itself foreclosed.

Similar misprisions inform Butler’s claim that Žižek renders those who do not conform to hegemonic definitions of gender the unlivable, “permanent outside” of the social and figures “a whole domain of social life that does not fully conform to prevalent gender norms as psychotic and unlivable” (Butler 1994: 37). She justifiably questions the presuppositions through which Lacan’s Seminar III defines the symbolic as the realm of paternal law in which the subject is constituted by taking the Name of the Father as a metaphor for his own being, subjecting himself to phallic signification and the law of castration. This account implies that to “foreclose” the Name of the Father, rejecting phallic primacy and sidestepping (hetero)sexual difference, is to court psychosis characterized by the delusional return in the Real of inversions of normative genders and sexualities. Butler’s critique of this theory fuels her argument that Žižek, in The Sublime Object of Ideology (1989), rigidifies sexual difference as the “rock of the real” consigning queers to the social’s “permanent outside” (Butler 1993: 197; Butler 1994: 37).

Although Butler’s concerns about Žižek’s account of sexual difference are well justified, problems arise in her construal of the Real as the realm of psychosis. First, by equating the Real with “abject” queer bodies, she attempts to symbolize the unsymbolizable. As Tim Dean points out, “[t]he theory that attributes to the real specific social and sexual positions is Butler’s own, since Lacan characterizes the real as asubstantial, unsexed, and ungendered” (Dean 2000a: 210). Second, Butler misreads Lacan’s account of psychotic “foreclosure”; her conflation of the Real with psychosis results from this error (Coffman 2006: 18–22). Though in psychosis, the Real is the realm in which the foreclosed signifier returns, the Real is not equivalent to psychosis. To the contrary: for Lacan, even “normal” subjectivity is anchored by interlocking the imaginary, symbolic, and Real. As Malcolm Bowie notes, the principal difference between the psychotic and the “normal” subject is that for the former, the relationship between the three orders becomes incoherent as the result of a “mispositioning of Subject and Other” in which the “imaginary becomes real . . . by passing through the symbolic dimension without being submitted to its exactions and obliquities” (Bowie 1991: 109). In this account, the queer appears as psychotic only if the Name of the Father remains the anchor of the symbolic order and the signifier the psychotic forecloses.

Yet to state—as Lacanians such as Žižek often do—that the Real is the site at which the symbolic fails is not the same as to say that the Real is constituted through foreclosure in the technical sense. Moreover, to argue that foreclosed signifiers return in the Real or that the symbolic fails there is not to say that the Real is reducible to those phenomena. As Penney notes, Butler’s critique reflects “a misapprehension of the relation between the symbolic and the real,” the latter of which “manifests the symbolic law’s own externality to itself, its self-difference” (Penney 2014: 60). Because “[t]he real imposes as the symbolic order’s destiny the ceaseless repetition of its failure to totalize itself in such a way that it might impose a normative matrix for both sexual identity and kinship relations,” it does not necessarily shut down theorizations of diverse sexualities; instead, it actively facilitates “the subversion of normativity,” sexual or otherwise (Penney 2014: 60).

Butler also overlooks the Real’s potential for facilitating transformative resistance, even though she is r...