Continental
Deleuze again
”capitalism indeed the limit of all societies, insofar as it brngs about the decoding of the flows that the other social formations coded and overcoded. But it is the relative limit of every society; it effects relative breaks, because it substitutes for the codes an extremely rigorous axiomatic that maintains the energy of the flows in a bound state on the body of capital.”
desire, traditionally understood as intimate and private, is understood as something social and real.
”schizophrenia on the contrary is indeed the eabsolute limit that causes the flows to travel in a free state. Hence one can say that schizophrenia is the exterior limit of capitalism itself or the conclusion of its deepest tendency, but that capitalism..”
We have to breaking points of society. The relative limit, what capitalism can achieve. This is why capitalism is so potent. Capitalism has the capacity to create a progression and create new societies. And it can survive larger crises.
However, schizophrenia is the absolute limit of any society, as no society can allow it to remain in overflow. Capitalism stops half way with the destruction of society, schizophrenia goes all the way.
Capitalism is based on schizophrenia, but schizophrenia itself goes beyond capitalism, and will ultimately be what destroys capitalism. The true schizophrenic desire admits no configuration at all.
Based on this, they make ’schizo-analysis’ = the practice that brings to the fore the revolutionary force of our desire.
”Destroy, destroy. The task of schizoanalysis goes by way of destruction – a whole scouring of the unconscious, a complete curettage. Destroy Oedipus, the illusion of the ego, the puppet of the superego, guilt, the law, castration.”
It is an entirely negative endeavour. Its task is to produce something of which we cannot know what it is. This seems very difficult to put into practice, and no form of political contestation can be based on this kind of analysis because it has literally no goal. ’just be insane’.
Deleuze is a convinced spinozist. He wrote 2 books on spinoza. Spinoza and the problem of expression is the good one. Spinoza is a materialist, and so is Deleuze. They are both monists, they only accept one substance, or one kind of being, but which there is configurations of.
The construction of the machine, of which we are all part of, is the kind of spinozist insight they are reaching at in this work. ie. the natura naturans and natura naturata.
Feminism
First wave feminism was based on the insight that women are regarded as irrational creatures, and as such had no legal control over the vote, their bodies or their children. This was the motivation for women to begin a kind of revolt. ie. an internal revision of liberalism.
Liberalism = a belief in the importance and freedom of the individual, but the individual was only considered male. So there was a requirement for liberalism to be for both man and woman.
No critical deconstruction of liberalism itself has yet appeared. These feminists want to reconfigure liberalism internally.
In second wave feminism (simone de beauvoir): More specific equality, like workplace and economic equality (equal pay, materinity leave, access to jobs, education, contraception and abortion). In Simone de Beauvoir, if a woman lacks access to contraception, she is subjected to her sexual position, and the woman is the only one who is actually harmed by this. Bodily autonomy (marital-rape, sexual harassment, domestic violence). There was no understanding that marital rape was bad, it was impossible to go to court over such a matter, because a man had the right to have sex with his woman (sheesh).
Women should become entirely assimilated into the masculine model of life. Women should be granted the right to enter society as fully fledged legal subjects.
What is important for second wave, which still has representatives, is the appeal to universal womanhood. As a woman, all women are oppressed by the same kind of male oppression. As such there is a possibility for all women worldwide. [This is something Butler critiques. Women have to exist and recognise themselves as women in order to fight for feminist liberation].
Here is influenced by existentialism, phenomenology.
Third wave feminism:
Emphasis on intersectionality (how race, class, sexuality and gender influences the sex of women). Inclusion of women of color, LGBTQ+ and other marginalised individuals. Goes away from the idea of universal womanhood, but goes instead into the diversity of singular individuals.
The understanding of gender as fluid, or as a performance. There are as many genders as there are individuals.
Theoretical resources change: post-structuralism, postcolonial & queer theory.
What is sex?
There is a distinction between sexual practices and orientations (ie. sexuality, heterosexual, homosexual etc)
and sexual idenities such as man, woman or trans → sex
The difference between sexuality and sex is usually distinguished as between culture and natrue. Sexual practice is a cultural doing, whereas sex are organically based, anatomical and so on.
There is also gender which constitutes the cultural identity of the sex [the social process of dividing up people and social practices along the lines of sexed identities. This involves hierarchies between the divisions it enacts, and as such hierarchies of domination. The dichotomies reflect power relations. One or more categories of sexed identity are privieged or devalued.]
The binary nature of gender forces all social practices into two fields. Men = public life. Women = domestic life.
Sex-gender division: construed though and within other relations of power such as class, race/ethnicity or imperialism/colonialism.
Complementary fields of investigation, like gender studies, sexuality studies, masculinities studies, queer theory, but also race studies or black studies, as such feminism is merely a sub-field within the overall gender/sexuality field.
Sigmund Freud:
Strong psychoanalytic tendencies in postmodern feminism. The Freudian picture is very prevalent. This is astonishing given Freud’s general misoginy.
Feminists read Freud because:
they are dissatisfied with simple social learning or imitation models of the self (freud would never say that we become man or woman because we imitate our parents. Rather one asks how a woman is made.)
Freud doesn’t generally ask what a woman is, but how a woman is created. This for Freud always refers to how desire is shaped. How does it come to be the case that people have such flagrant differences in desire and sexual practices. It cannot simply be based on a normal psychological development in which people hand themselves over to social roles.
What is at the center in Freudian discourse, are about the unconscious drives that shape the desire of being either. He does not stress a list of predicates of a what a woman or man is, but shows rather the fragility of the process in which a lot of things can go wrong; which in turns shows that the process in and of itself is entirely wrong. For Freud, every becoming of a subject is a symptom of a problem. Nothing is normal. The becoming of any kind of subject is a really strange thing. A lot of things has to come to pass for a human being to sexually desire anything. So many things can happen in the trajectory of life that sexual diversity becomes a must in the analysis.
As such, Freud argues for the singularity of the project of the outcome, as every individual has a very singular and personal desire. Freud would say that there are no two completely alike sexual preferences, there is an infinite field of desire. From the very beginning, Freud does away with the idea of universal subject which is identical to all. On top of that, desire and sexuality come out on top: and this is still a kind of core, but only of our personality.
As such, we don’t become subjects which are born into the world, onto which we accidentally attach sexuality. No babies are sexualised from the start, and the question is rather about whether they develop a subject which is as it becomes. The core of the subject is a sexualised personality, as such not an accident.
Sexual identities are deeply internalised into the structure of one’s identity. Gender difference is the basis of the construction of identity itself. To become a self, one has to become man or woman. The question is how does this come about?
When people are born, they are not gendered, so how do they become as such? How can it be then, that we identify so strongly with such a crazy social role, which isn’t real (as in Lacan).
Freud is the first to understand that there is no neutral universal subject which is added a certain gender predicate.
This is not a way to reinstititute a dichotomic world-view, but as having a certain singularities.
Young children are amorphous sexual beings. They lack a morphe, a biological form. It can go in any direction. As such, going a long with a hyle. It is amorphous in the sense that it is distributed over the entire body, it is identical to their sensuality in general, a shapeless libido, wherein libido means a biologically based seuxal or life energy. The erotic feeling one can have of a caress, comes from the fact that libido invades the entire body, but as you grow older, is concentrated on certain parts of the body like the sexual organs. More and more you introduce shame and the fact that some parts of the body shouldn’t be shown, which influences the infants view of themselves. This is because of reasons to protect them of course, or generally at least.
PA operates constantly on the border between the body and the psyche, which is where desire exists.
Pre-oedipal period: The young infant has an unstructured and symbiotic to its care-giver. No organised boundary is conscious to the infant. As time progresses, the infant realises its seperateness to the mother. According to the theory, infants have no understanding of being different from its care-giver. [The feeding machine is the mouth and the breast, which is why the removal of the breast feels like direct bodily harm].
Throughout the first years: concentration of libido in genitals, beginning of self-recognition together with an increasing distinctness fom the caregiver.
This emerges into the oedipal period sees a more clearly defined bodily sense of self & sexual identity.
The ontological seperateness of the caregiver is the important part: it goes along with the father as a concurrent, a rival, who also desire the mother. The young child experiences itself as being distinct from the mother, but still loves the mother, and the love changes its physionomy from being a symbiotic enmeshment, but rather becomes a desire of being close to someone. The child wants to be around its mother. They are really in love with their caregivers. To understand the psychological condition of a child, you have to drink a bunch of beers, fall in love with someone and go to a city that you do not know. This is the everyday condition of a 5 year old child. Their love is sincere if the parents really take care of them.
The father stands for the impossibility of the endless experience of this love. So the father represents an end to the heavenly relationship of the caregiver. At the same time as the child become ontologically independent, they see the father as being the archetype of independency. The coming and going of the father represents the full autonomy of that person. The child who strives to be more and more independent will therefore strive to be like its father. The girl and the boy alike will strive to be like their father. They are both a concurrent and a model at that point.
Father represents seperateness (ie a seperate self), and the third term, which symbolically steps in between mother and child. Distinc selfhood then is symbolised by the one who bears a ’penis’.
Phallus then is the signifier of the mother’s desire which is for the child more and more a realisation that the mother has their own inclinations. It doesn’t matter what the phallus is physically, but it is as defined.
Mother/Father takes on the representation of masculinity and femininity in general, and has nothing to do with sex.
Entry into society requires the development of a distinct ’I’, the rejection of the mother (who you want, and as such denying of oneself) and the necessity to feel as if one has to go along with the father for the development of self. And apparently, as it turns out, the father has the phallus, the object of the mother’s desire.
This is the primordial identification with mother, but which is typically buried in the construction of the repressed unconscious. This gives a lot of energy into it. The self is split in two here, between conscious and unconscious.
As such, the psycho-libidinal development is differently experienced in boys and girls:
”During the phase of the normal oedipus complex we find the child tenderly attached to the parent of the opposite sex, while its relation to the parent of its own sex is predominantly hostile. In the case of a boy there is no difficulty in explaining this. His first love-object was his mother. She remains so; and, with the strengthening of his erotic desires and his deeper insight into the relations between his father and mother, the former is bound to become his rival. With the small girl it is different. Her first object, too, was her mother. How does she find her way to her father? How, when and wy does she detach herself from her mother?”
The father must become the rival of the son. The son does not alter the objective desire-relation, but transforms it from a symbiotic relation to a loving one. By withholding the object of desire, and admitting ontological seperateness, the child becomes a seperate being, understands that there is another one who loves the same object. Concurrence then in psychoanalysis is the expression of an unconscious identification. You hate nothing more than those that take the same place in the network of desires. This explanation is easy for Freud. The personality of the father, is the aim of education in general, the seperating of our individuality. If we remain in the symbiotic relationship you have become crazy, you cannot distinguish between another and oneself. Psychotic symptoms are expressions of a breakdown of an ontological seperateness. Everyone must transgress to the position of the father.
If your father beat up his wife, then you will do the same, as you learned that that his how to care about a loved object. This is how you compete; you must be at least as good as him in what he does.
Freud however does not see it as a simple task in which the girl switches the loved object to the father-figure. In order to transgress to the gendered position of a woman, she needs to love the father in a heterosexual framework. This is problematic. The young girl, in order to become autonomous, also must transgress to the position of the father. It is important ontologically. But at the same time, she cannot withhold the same loved object. It becomes a situation of impossibility. The boy can continue loving the mother, it is just a way to a form the continuity of the loved object.
This becomes a kind of ambivalence. This is where the PA idea that women do not know what they want comes from. They have to identify with the gendered mother, but also get out of the symbiotic relationship without loving the mother, as she would be a homosexual. For Freud there is a heteronormative matrix behind everything. But it is less about heterosexual or homosexual, but rather about whether or not the oedipus complex fails. Better to be configuring individuals as powerful neurotics, than useless psychotics. There must as such be repression of incestural desire, otherwise we open the gate to hell. Freud thought we then have to also avoid homosexuality and have straight individuals. Freud is misogynistic and homophobic.
Difficulty in the development of girls as the exchange of her original object – her mother – for her father. All children are required to move towards the father, because of the alignment of phallus with seperation or selfhood. Ie. as emergence of non-psychotic selves.
Boys see that they are like the father. Ie. they have a penis. And experience their primordial attahcment ot the mother as more and more dangerous. Because they feel as if they may lose their penis if they hang out with people on the side of the mother, of becoming a woman, of becoming emascualated.
For boys, the mother then represents the danger of self-lessness, of lack of self, of a primoridal undiffernitated self. Original attachment to the mother evolves towards a loving relationship (an object relationship).
To be an independent self is the condition to have an object. This is why in psychosis, the voice of the other is heard in my own head. It is not an object that I experience when I interact with another, but an extension of myself.
”A female’s first object, too, must be her mother: the primary conditions for a choice of objects are, of course, the same for all children. But at the end of her development, her father – man – should have become her new love-object.”
Girls discover their physical similarity with the mother:
continue to identify with mother
do not evolve out of hteir symbiotic attachment
difficulty in construing an object relation, as they do not fully occupy the relationship of the father by not loving the mother, they cannot fully develop an object relationship. They remain partly enmeshed in a symbiotic relationship. Their selfhood remains less distinct. Women have to be gay then in order to be proper selves.
Psychoanalysis, uses a lot of weird words, but a lot of it comes directly from his patients.
There is the case of Little Hans, who is afraid of horses. He has a phobic outburst when he sees a horse carriage, the horse falls down and dies and make strange movements of the legs. So Hans is very scared of the movement of the legs. There is an association with masturbation, and the horse is identified with the father, because the father has glasses and the horse has similar eye protectors. In the association of the horse, a lot of different signifiers has melted into it, like masturbation, the fear of becoming a woman, the father etc. Little Hans is in the middle of the oedipus complex and he projected his fears of being outcast into the horse, which is why he is afraid.
For all human beings, we believe that there is only one sex, and we produce the female sex by cutting of the penis of the girls. This comes from an unconscious overcoding of the society we live in, and not so much an essentialist theory.
”Indeed, we have to reckon with the possibility that a number of women remain arrested in their original attachment to their mother and never achieve a true change-over towards man”, towards the position of autonomy.
Women remain in a limbo between a symbiotic relationship and homosexuality.
Feminine selfhood is less distinct, less marked boundaries between self and other, a weaker sense of individual selfhood.
Problems with PA discourse:
Phallocentrism.
Oedipal story of the construction of self is based around a male’s response to his mother and to becoming a man. Male is the paradigmatic case out of which the female position is understood as a deviation. A wrong exit on the male’s trajectory.
Libido is identified as male. It is a phallocentric energy.
Freud always thought that one would be able to provide a biological basis for the idea of the unconscious. This means that ultimately, the libido and the gender roles would be possible to find in biological foundations. He shows that becoming female or man is a viscious process in which everything can go wrong, he still believed that we can find real differences. Considers the clitoris inferior. Why is masturbation with the penis so important? Because male masturbation always occurs at the threat of castration, whilst there is no such threat for females: and this threat is really important for the creation of the subject.
Freud has been important for feminism, because it offers the tools for understanding the fragility of sex. Altough Freud believes there is a normative way of doing it, he is very clear about the fact that every other outcome is possible and available.
Lacan replaces the biological stance of Freud with a more cultural perspective, not understanding as a physical individual but as a social position that symbolises independency and autonomy.
You cannot really control the psychic trajectory. We cannot know what events which will be the important events in the child’s developement as desiring subejcts. In every kind of family a lot of different individuals can pop up, because ultimately all individuals are free to experience different events as they like. The father might do everything to express his love, and the child might still think he is fundamentally evil.