Zizek and Butler on Obama

Anthony has suggested, and I agree, that Zizek and Butler’s articles on Obama might be productively compared.

More Violence

Without making this too much of an ad hominem, I often get the impression that theologians and other Christians who loudly proclaim that violence is a necessary evil are much more focused on the “necessary” part than the “evil” part. All the good ends that the “necessary evil” of violence is supposed to serve fade into the background, and the result is essentially an outright defense of violence as such. One begins to detect a fascination with violence, seeing in it a heroism that arises not from the athleticism of war but rather from a certain supra-moral “toughness,” a willingness to “get your hands dirty.”

Such a stance should be unsurprising: Is there anything more distinctively Christian than the fascination with motiveless malignity, the desire to violate the law precisely for the sake of violating the law? When it comes to violence, this Christian nihilism is even more dangerous because violence really is fascinating.

Once in a seminar discussing Butler’s Precarious Life, I said that if a situation arose where I was, say, about to be mugged but somehow managed to get the better of the mugger, I would be tempted to beat the shit out of him — almost glad that he had attacked me, so that I would have a justification. I don’t think I’m a uniquely violent person, but everyone else protested: “No, of course not, I would never have that attitude, I don’t understand what you’re saying.”

As I clarified after everyone defended their own peaceful instincts, I was trying to get at the point that it is naive to think that violence can be simply an indifferent “means to an end” — it has its own attraction. What possible meaning would the discipline of nonviolence have if not for this very attraction? If anything, a practitioner of nonviolence should be more conscious of the fascination of violence than an outright advocate of violence is — a practitioner of nonviolence precisely because everything in them wants to be an advocate of violence.

Butler and Anselm

After carefully reviewing the FAQ, I have determined that I am indeed allowed to post a PDF of my article entitled “The Failed Divine Performative: Reading Judith Butler’s Critique of Theology with Anselm’s On the Fall of the Devil,” which will be appearing in the April issue of The Journal of Religion.

Butlerianism: On Elegant Couples

If one is pressed for time and can only read two books, it is my opinion that one can feel entitled to speak with a certain degree of authority about Judith Butler if one has read only The Psychic Life of Power and Precarious Life. No other combination of two books seem to me to deliver what this combination does — including any possible combinations of which Gender Trouble would be a member, since one would have to “waste” the second book offsetting one’s erroneous impressions of Gender Trouble.

This declaration gives me an idea for a potentially fun passtime that will help generate volume of comments I need to help me get through the remainder of this Butler paper (approx. 10 more pages). For any given author, what two books can one read to grasp the “whole” of the author’s thought in as elegant and economical a manner as possible? Bonus points for combinations that leave out the most obvious choices.

Here’s a stab at Kierkegaard: Repetition and Practice in Christianity.

(A possible drawback of this type of elegant combination: only after reading nearly all of an author’s work can one understand precisely why the elegant combination gives one the “whole.”)

Il n’y a pas…

[A footnote, recently composed as part of my seminar paper on Judith Butler. The topic of the paper as a whole remains secret.]

As one whose understanding of Lacan has primarily been mediated through Slavoj Žižek and other members of the Slovenian Lacanian school, I was initially baffled by Butler’s critiques of Lacan in Gender Trouble, as well as the critique of Žižek in Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (New York: Routledge, 1993) and of Dolar in Psychic Life of Power. A crucial difference between Butler and the Slovenian school is not so much their interpretation of Lacan as such as their decision of “which” Lacan to privilege as the interpretative key for his widely variegated body of work—for the Slovenians, it is the “late” Lacan of the 1970s and 80s, whereas for Butler it is the “middle” or structuralist Lacan appropriated by American scholars (particularly feminists).

The Slovenian approach to sexual difference is based on the famous saying that “there is no sexual relationship [il n’y a pas de rapport sexuel].” It is not that there is some positive model that every concrete expression of sexual difference somehow fails to attain, but rather that every concrete expression is an attempt to cover over the fact that no particular instantiation of sexual difference can “work”—it is impossible to find some kind of ideal “complementary” relationship between the sexes, despite our attempt to define “gender roles” and stereotypical qualities, etc. This insight seems to me to be compatible with Butler’s overall project, and indeed, in his chapter “Judith Butler as a Reader of Freud” in The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Center of Political Ontology (New York: Verso, 1999), and in many other places, Žižek shows himself to be deeply sympathetic with Butler’s work.

The deadlock for Butler, which for me renders her critiques of Žižek and Dolar finally unconvincing, is that when she reads talk of “sexual difference” in these authors, she understands it to mean the immutable structuralist law of sexual difference that she (rightly) rejects as both implausible and damaging, whereas they understand it to mean a fundamental impossibility rendering every concrete instantiation of sexual difference illegitimate. Thus I would fault Butler for taking her own “structuralist” reading of Lacan for granted as an interpretative key for the Slovenian authors, especially given that Žižek has presented himself as “correcting” false impressions of Lacan (including, above all, the reception of Lacan among “postmodern” American academics) since The Sublime Object of Ideology (New York: Verso, 1989).

But in the last analysis, it may be more appropriate to attribute this non-encounter to the fact that il n’y a pas de théorie lacanienne—any reference to a unitary “Lacan” is marked by a constitutive failure.

“Underdeveloped”

A recent post over at Larval Subjects calls for a more fully developed account of agency. This is something that is frequently called for — indeed, one could have a successful career as a participant in academic seminars if one criticized literally every author for not “leaving enough room for agency” or, if they try to “leave room,” for not giving a good enough account of it. Absolutely no one does agency right, which leads me to wonder if there is something about the concept of agency that leaves it, as it were, intrinsically “underdeveloped.”

Let’s think about what we associate with the concept of agency (or free will, or subjectivity, or whatever else we call this). If we reduce it to choosing between options or weighing “reasons,” it somehow seems impoverished, but we don’t want it to be sheer arbitrarity. I think that Jean-Luc Nancy heads in the right direction in The Experience of Freedom by introducing the concept of surprise. Free agency is that which takes us by surprise. If we developed a robust account of it, it would no longer be surprising. That also seems to me to be what’s at stake in Butler’s attempt to show how interpellation misfires, etc. — that subjects, once formed, and even in the process of their formation, can do surprising things.

Sinthome, in his post and in the comment thread, seems to have a very specific idea of “materialism” in mind — he says that many accounts of agency seem to fall back on a kind of creatio ex nihilo, which true materialism cannot countenance. I wonder if this particular idea of “materialism,” however, might be front-loading things and artificially generating the problem of “where” we can locate agency. Even though modern science does not present us with a universe where such is the case, I think that when many of us think “materialism,” they think of a universe fully saturated by mechanical laws of causation. In such a universe, there simply doesn’t seem to be “room” for agency — and so we’re caught between the impossible poles of either giving a “mechanical” account of agency (which is intrinsically contradictory) or renouncing one of the most fundamental experiences of human existence (i.e., that we are not “robots”).

Here again, Nancy’s idea of freedom as going all the way down seems to me to be a great way of getting past this impasse. In many ways, Nancy’s thought here is very similar to Whitehead’s, which of course was attempting to respond philosophically to the advent of relativity theory and quantum mechanics. If we reject the idea that the universe is saturated by mechanical laws of causation (or say that “Being is freedom,” that is, Being is surprising), the presenting problem disappears. “Agency” then becomes the particular surprising ways in which a being of a high level of complexity and self-reflexivity can and does act.

Zizek’s appropriation of the Lacanian “non-all” also heads in this direction, and he engages directly with science, such as his analysis of quantum mechanics in The Indivisible Remainder (recently reissued) and of cognitive science in Parallax View — the latter giving an impressive account of how human agency arises in the course of the evolution of consciousness.

Of course, none of these accounts can give a positive grounding for surprise or for the openness/non-saturation of the laws of causation — they all make an end run around this problem precisely by placing surprise at the foundation (this is perhaps less true in the case of Butler). It is a paradigm shift whose time has come, and seems to me to be consistently materialist — perhaps more consistently materialist, in that it does not impose the dogmatic frame of fully saturated causality on the data.

It is admittedly difficult to call Whitehead a materialist — I would be interested, however, to see how his system works if we cut away what he (unfortunately) named “God” — but both Nancy and Zizek at least profess to be materialists. There seem to be no a priori grounds for excluding them, unless the secret handshake to get into the materialist club is to implicitly believe in an outmoded model of the universe as a gigantic billiards table.

Misinterpellated

Judith Butler has often noted that many of her earliest readers misunderstood her use of drag as an example of gender performativity. This discussion actually makes up a relatively brief portion of Gender Trouble, but it is of course the idea that gained her much of her initial notoreity.

One might entertain the possibility, then, that had they understood it properly, Butler might never have become such a major figure–that her fame is based in what amounts to an initial misunderstanding. But if such were the case, it literally could not fit better with Butler’s thought as a whole.

Activism and Scholarship

I have noticed a phenomenon that seems to be particularly intense at CTS, but I’m sure happens elsewhere. This is the phenomenon of being impatient with scholarship and theoretical work that does not appear to have an immediate practical application or to be immediately communicable to “common people.” Today this did not come up in class, since we were talking about a very topical book of Judith Butler’s (Precarious Life), but when discussing the idea of how an identitarian “we” very often ends up excluding some of those that it by all rights should include, this issue came to mind.

It seems to me that various types of activist movements, identitarian or not, and also religious movements tend to marginalize or exclude their more “intellectual” members. Hence when we get the impatient question, “But how does this play to the people on the streets/in the pews?,” it may represent a certain defensiveness among people who are seeking to be intellectuals who are faithful to the movements with which they identify. In rhetorically identifying with the “common person” — which the speaker, who is in this case enrolled in an advanced degree program, simply no longer is, whether they want to admit it or not — the speaker can make a double assertion:

1. The common people are right to be suspicious of some intellectual work, which really is useless at best or counterproductive at worst.
2. I, however, do not do that kind of intellectual work and am very suspicious of it myself.

This identification and distancing, then, can be a means of expiating a certain type of guilt for enjoying “useless” intellectual pursuits for their own sake. It is difficult for me to imagine that anyone would enter a PhD program without enjoying intellectual work for its own sake, even if the primary goal is, for instance, to document a neglected aspect of one’s cultural heritage or history, or to develop specific programs to help people, etc., etc. Even if one really is a “movement intellectual” in sincere solidarity with an activist or religious group, one is still an intellectual, which is always going to include at least some minimal slippage between one’s intellectual pursuits and the immediate needs (strategic of propagandistic) of the movement. One may take theological stances that one’s church body takes as disruptive of the training of ministers, or one may ask questions about sexuality that are experienced as attacking the unity of one’s identitarian movement — in any case, one’s identification is not complete. Even if that must necessarily be true for every member of a movement, it is much more of a “public” issue for the intellectual, whose role makes it much less easy to hide misgivings than is the case for a “private individual” in the rank and file.

What often results is a kind of imposed asceticism of the intellectual, who must in some sense deny a part of herself in order to be counted as faithful to the movement. In fact, this phenomenon is precisely why I myself am no longer an active part of a “movement” — after being marginalized in the Nazarene church for all my life due to my intelligence, I eventually came to understand that the apparently much more pro-intellectual Catholic Church to which I’d fled would also demand a certain sacrifice of the intellect.

It is of course not possible to view intellectuals as an oppressed group in the classical sense — and I am by no means making any such claim. Intellectuals, at least those who manage to make a career of it, are generally economically secure and enjoy a certain degree of social prestige. Beyond that, there is an inherent pleasure to intellectual work, at least for those who are particularly drawn to it. The question is how to build a community such that the pleasure of intellectual life is not viewed as a threat.

Good Theology

The standard does not seem to be convincing argument. Instead, it’s a matter of arrangement and emphasis — putting things in the correct order, drawing out the proper connections, choosing the doctrines that will be controlling points of reference for others. As though we could finally put the pieces together in just the right way, and then it would just speak for itself.

Or rather, we could put the pieces together in just the right way and suddenly the proper moral consequences would follow. People blame and credit theology for so much, or at least academic theologians do.

This is where putting Judith Butler into contact with theology might be productive — exactly what effects do we think doctrine has on people? What is the mechanism by which this effect operates? One could also think in terms of rhetoric: How can it possibly work for us to say out loud that we’re changing something in order to produce a particular response?

Perhaps we need a less conscious theology, one whose right hand doesn’t know what its left is doing.

A Possible Key to Judith Butler?

Track down all the places in her writings where she uses “work” as a transitive verb; decipher the logic of this usage, particularly the reasons why it is sometimes replaced by “rework.”