Sex for Structuralists

The Non-Oedipal Logics of Femininity and Psychosis

Shanna de la Torre

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9783319928944
• eBook ISBN: 9783319928951
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Personality in Psychology
• Index: Social Sciences

This book argues that structuralism makes itself useful when it engages with the non-Oedipal logics of femininity and psychosis. Building from the psychoanalytic belief that norms repress unconscious desire while structures open onto the creative resources of the symbolic, Sex for Structuralists looks to key texts in myth, trauma, and unconscious fantasy by Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, and Claude Lévi-Strauss. It also examines innovative writings by contemporary Lacanian thinkers in order to discover what becomes of structuralism when the ground upon which it ostensibly stands (namely, that of the zero symbol or the incest prohibition) drops out from under it.

© The Author(s) 2018

Shanna de la TorreSex for Structuralistshttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-92895-1_1

Begin Abstract

1. The Criteria of the Future

Shanna de la Torre¹

(1)

Minneapolis, MN, USA

Shanna de la Torre

Email: [email protected]

End Abstract

Near the end of his essay “How Do We Recognize Structuralism?,” written and published in 1967, Gilles Deleuze describes structuralism’s future. Having outlined the six formal criteria of any structuralism (“the simplest ones,” ¹ he notes), Deleuze has arrived at the final criteria, those concerned with transformation, the transformation specific to the method that structuralism is: The point where what was a subject—a subject now broken up—becomes a practice. It’s obscure, he writes: “these last criteria, from the subject to practice, are the most obscure—the criteria of the future.” ²

Structures , he has explained, “discover on their own account veritable languages” ³ ; they are the things of invention, found, and founding. And the process of determining a structure unfolds, Deleuze observes, with “no general rule”—“no general rule at all,” he writes; “structuralism implies, from one perspective, a true creation, and from another, an initiative and a discovery that is not without its risks.” ⁴ Structures discover, and structuralism creates: In each of these brief notes on structure and structuralism’s essentials, Deleuze underscores structuralism’s groundlessness, pointing to the ways in which it is a method without any guarantee that could authorize either the unfolding of its work or the languages thereby discovered. What makes such work possible? Deleuze begins to answer: The criterion of the empty square, which is the space in structure that makes it play: “It is always as a function of the empty square,” he writes, “that the differential relations are open to new values or variations, and the singularities capable of new distributions, constitutive of another structure.” ⁵ But, what makes it possible for any given subject to accompany the “empty or perforated” ⁶ space that makes a structure play? What makes it possible for a subject neither to “occupy” nor “desert” ⁷ that space, but accompany it, and “mutate” ⁸ with it, and create? And, why would any subject want to?

These questions belong to the criteria of the transformation of the subject, named by Deleuze as the thresholds of structuralism’s future; and in this chapter and the chapters to follow, I will approach these questions by way of the teachings and writings of Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, and Claude Lévi-Strauss. Structures , I contend, open onto the resources of the symbolic and therefore, potentially, desire. They thus mark an important point of contact between the method of structuralism and the ethics of psychoanalysis. And while Deleuze suggests that “a structuralist hero” ⁹ is located at the site where the subject, by some obscure maneuver, becomes a practice, I argue that structuralism is at its most interesting when it voids itself of its heroes and engages with subjective logics instead. Furthermore, I argue that sex matters to this evacuation, for it makes a difference where a subject is logically positioned with respect to the space in structure that makes it play. For Lacanian psychoanalysis, as Deleuze notes, that empty space is the “symbolic phallus ”; and while the symbolic phallus—to which I will return—is “neither the real organ, nor the series of associable or associated images,” “it is indeed,” as Deleuze writes, “sexuality that is in question, a question of nothing else here, contrary to the pious and ever-renewed attempts in psychoanalysis to renounce or minimize sexual references.” ¹⁰ I would say the same about this project: It is indeed sexuality that is in question, a question of nothing else here.

Over the course of the project, I will develop the following claim: It is at those sites where structuralism engages with the non-Oedipal logics of psychosis and femininity , or the not-all , that it makes manifest the possibility and creativity that are unique to its method and, thereby, makes itself useful. ¹¹ Consequently, it is important to determine those sites within structuralist writings where such logics are operative. For while structuralism has not necessarily been known for these—has, in fact, been generally regarded as virtually coterminous with the Oedipal logics for which Freud and Lévi-Strauss, in particular, are famous or infamous—it is nonetheless the case that structuralism offers more by way of non-Oedipal logics than some of its critics have suggested. I would submit that these logics appear, in fact, at key junctures in structuralist texts. Therefore, I will work with such examples in the chapters to come, focusing first upon the writings of Lévi-Strauss, wherein he—by way of myth, trauma, and exploratory thoughts on symbolic thought and social structure —touches upon and builds out the non-Oedipal logics that I contend make structuralism’s usefulness manifest. I will work too with these examples’ links to the writings of Freud and Lacan, who, from the beginning, have a certain way of tuning into what Lacan will eventually refer to as “the real-of-the-structure,” ¹² and whose clinical engagements make emerge again and again that the “subject of the unconscious … gears into the body.” ¹³ What the non-Oedipal logics of psychosis and the not-all also bring relentlessly out into the open, as it were, is that there are holes—fortuitous in their own way—that no myth or logical operator can make “good”; and—what can be difficult for some non-Oedipal subjects—neither are they “bad.”

To be sure, Lévi-Strauss may appear to be an unlikely candidate for such a project, and for good reason. For one, his theoretical interest in women (who, as I will discuss in Chapter 6, ought not to be confused with feminine or not-all subjects) appears to be limited to their slightly curious status as subjects who are also objects—bearers, as it were, of two kinds of bodies. ¹⁴ In The Elementary Structures of Kinship, he finds that they circulate as words do, writing of the link between kinship and language that “these results can be achieved only by treating marriage regulations and kinship systems as a kind of language … That the mediating factor, in this case, should be the women of the group, who are circulated between clans, lineages, or families, in place of the words of the group, which are circulated between individuals, does not at all change the fact that the essential aspect of the phenomenon is identical in both cases.” ¹⁵ And while, anticipating protest, he specifies, “words do not speak, while women do,” ¹⁶ perhaps his truest love was in fact structural linguistics: Deleuze calls him “the least romantic” ¹⁷ of the structuralists, while Gayle Rubin famously responds to his description of women as subjects who are also objects by declaring, “This is an extraordinary statement. Why is he not, at this point, denouncing what kinship systems do to women, instead of presenting one of the greatest rip-offs of all time as the root of romance?” ¹⁸ Indeed, why not?

I do not dispute any of the above. And I share Rubin’s strong opposition to contemporary versions or residues of the practice of “the exchange of women” and any attempt to justify it in the name of nature, culture, politics, or otherwise. This is not only an issue of human rights; it is a principle at the heart of psychoanalysis today, which joins Rubin in affirming that no human can be an object and goes one step further by engaging the analysand in a process of working-through in which he, she, they, or ze may discover the same by way of the love of the truth of the unconscious. ¹⁹

Thinking logically about Lévi-Strauss, we might say that his writings on the incest prohibition and the elementary structures of kinship elaborate at their base an unambiguously Oedipal logic, which I would like to define as a logic that installs a certain kind of limit, namely a limit capable of simultaneously barring a deadly enjoyment and enabling a smaller “share” of enjoyment. That the limit plays an enabling function is, I suggest, partly responsible for the fact that Oedipal logics have been so conducive to the (hetero)normative uses for which Oedipus tends to be known. In other words, this word “share” is significant: For those subjects for whom this limit is operational (in the language of Lacanian psychoanalysis, masculine subjects), the limit is both external to and internal to the subject; and in its external iterations, it has been given to acquiring the force of a norm. I will develop further the question of the limit that operates within the logic of ma...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. The Criteria of the Future
• 2. Primal Scene, Ground Zero: Lévi-Strauss, Lacan, and the Wolf Man Beyond the Seduction
• 3. Madness and the Sensitive Anthropologist: Lévi-Strauss’s New Structuralism
• 4. Two Traumas, Not One: The Feminine in Myth
• 5. The Mythologist’s Aesthetic Task: Amelia
• 6. Sex for Structuralists: From Myth to Fantasy
• 7. How Do We Use Structuralism?
• Back Matter