In an essay titled 'the ineffable and the ethical', Amia Srinivasan writes
A recurring theme of Judith Butler’s Senses of the Subject (2015) is that which exceeds language.
The theme of all language is that which exceeds it- viz. its users. It is merely something which evolved because it had survival value on a particular fitness landscape.
It is a difficult topic for something written in language.
It is the only topic for any writing which is not purely decorative.
If we say, as Butler does, that ‘the body’, ‘the subject’ or ‘the infinite’ cannot be fully represented in language, then what is it exactly that we think we are doing when we say so?
Stating the obvious in a pseudo-profound manner.
Either we are saying something that makes sense – in which case those things turn out not to exceed language after all –
sure they do. An actual dog exceeds the word dog.
or we are saying something that makes no sense, that is simply nonsense.
Nope. Nonsense would be to say 'hanguage exbleeds cruality' when asked for directions to the toilet.
Ramsey joked that ‘what we can’t say, we can’t say, and we can’t whistle...either’ .
I think Ramsey was moving towards some sort of Pragmatism. Anything at all can be the extension of any intension we express- whether it be by farting or whistling or talking or doing algebra.
His target was Wittgenstein’s apparent willingness to describe what, by Wittgenstein’s own account in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, could not be described, namely the fundamental preconditions of linguistic representation.
This is in fact being very well described by evolutionary biologists and other such STEM subject mavens. Linguistic representations are multiply realizable. They have no 'fundamental preconditions'.
This hostility to expressing the supposedly inexpressible – shared by Ramsey’s contemporaries Russell and Neurath
was foolish. Had Ramsey lived he'd have been Turing's interlocutor. Unlike, Witlesstein- who had returned to Philosophy having listened to a lecture by Brouwer but who was too stupid to understand choice sequences- Turing was smart enough to use, on Bearnay's suggestion, overlapping choice sequences to get at a class of computable numbers that was 'absolute' with respect to its representation in a formal system. But categoricity, or uniqueness, was lost. In other words, there was evolution or multiple realisability.
– has largely been inherited by later analytic philosophers.
What was inherited was stupidity and a refusal to keep up with mathematical developments in the Twenties and Thirties- forget about later on.
Indeed this is as good a way as any of marking where analytic philosophers take their leave from the so called ‘Continental’ tradition.
No. Anal-tickle shite started of as a conceptualism, became a logicism and then gave up. Had Ramsey lived, it may have kept up with Gentzen and Godel and Tarski and so forth. Perhaps not. Ramsey was hella bright. He could have developed a rival to Von Neumann/Morgenstern/Nash- maybe something like Aumann correlated equilibrium as a framework for Keynesianism. My guess is he'd have come up with something like Schelling focal points for coordination and discoordination games. That's it. It is all Pragmatism needs. We can all have different philosophies and different mathematics and different logics for different things. Some may be able to have only a single philosophy. But they may not be able to do anything save stand around with their thumb up their ass moaning about how fucking inconvenient this is.
The Continental tradition was shit because Husserl fucked up completely. Weyl, whose wife had studied under that tosser, moved in an Intuitionist direction thus paving the way for Martin Lof, Voevodsky and so forth.
Unlike Continental philosophers (the story goes) analytic philosophers pride themselves on confining their remarks to the coherent and non-paradoxical.
Sadly, they thought they had an ethical reason to believe an obviously false theory of truth. The Continentals were either doing 'history of concepts' in the most unhistorical way possible or had gone quietly mad.
But those who work outside the analytic tradition, like Butler, might very well think that Ramsey’s joke is on him.
Ramsey was a genius. These guys are low IQ pedants teaching imbeciles.
After all, if I’m unable to tell you in words just how delighted I am, an ecstatic whistle might do the trick.
Not if the other person has fucked the fuck off. Otherwise, what is involved is not expression but reception. You can't tell me in Chinese how delighted you are though if you say ' kuàilè' and grin every time something happens which is obviously greatly to your advantage then I can work out what the word means.
Ramsey’s metaphor is unfortunate, one might think, precisely because musical expression is the paradigm case of showing what cannot be said.
No. The paradigm case is pointing or drawing a fucking picture. There are whistling languages and conventions regarding whistling or blowing raspberries.
In Senses of the Subject, Butler suggests that we don’t have to employ non-representational forms of expression in order to get a grip on the inexpressible, that the work of music can be done with and through language itself: indeed, that it can be done by philosophy.
Wagner wrote philosophy. Oddly, it was actually slightly less shite than that of some of the Professors.
We see this in how Butler reads the historical figures with whom she is concerned, particularly Descartes and Kierkegaard,
whom Theists understand easily enough
and also in how she invites us to read her.
viz. as a smart person. But, since she teaches stupid shit, she fails.
This aspect of Butler’s work – her willingness to use language not only to represent, but also to gesture, enact, provoke
is like Trump's. The difference is Trump made a lot of money and became the most powerful man in the world. This is because he studied Business at Wharton. Also, he had a penis.
– has inspired much ire in analytic quarters.
Butler was associated with something real- viz. people being happy and forming partnerships and raising kids regardless of boring gender stereotypes. The trouble was, the thing became a nuisance.
Some claim it disqualifies Butler’s work from the category of genuine or respectable philosophy.
But that had turned to shit because only stupid people went in for it.
Such a verdict is unfortunate because it betrays our own disciplinary history – what are we to make, say, of Plato or Nietzsche
they wrote well. What they produced was literature.
if we insist that philosophical language can never do anything but assert? But Butler (as I read her) would further argue that a philosophy confined to saying only what can be coherently said is a philosophy that cannot serve ethics – for the ethical, properly understood, is grounded in the ineffable.
Ethics and Theology are part of philosophy. Every religion has one or more philosophies.
I will end my comments by saying something about why Butler thinks this is the case. First let me to turn to Butler’s treatment of those things that she suggests exceed language – the body, the subject, the infinite.
Language exceeds language- which is why it changes and evolves. But then everything exceeds everything including its own fart. Equally nothing exceeds language because language can say mean things about it and put it in its place.
Philosophy students are taught that Descartes’ preoccupation in the Meditations is the mind:
rather than the penis. Meditation involves the mind. Masturbation involves the penis. Apparently 'philosophy students' have to be taught this.
what the mind can be certain of,
nothing. We dream. Also, maybe the mind survives the death of the body. What Amia means is that Descartes thought that Reason could be certain of at least one thing. In that case maybe some second thing must also be certain by logical entailment and then a third and so forth. Ultimately you get to a mechanical method of cranking out all irrefragable truth- like Muslims will burn in Hell along with Hindus and Jews and so forth.
and how the world of the senses and objects might be rebuilt from its foundations.
Fuck that. What peeps want is a proof of God and the comfort of know all the heretics will burn in Hell Fire. Also, construction workers get paid quite well. There's no money in 'rebuilding the world of senses and objects'- even if the thing could be done.
Butler suggests that while this might have been Descartes’ preoccupation, it is nonetheless the body, and not the mind, that is the abiding preoccupation of Descartes’ text.
The mind is capable of doubt. The body isn't.
Descartes announces he will subject his body to doubt by imagining it to be an illusion perpetrated by an evil demon. And yet, Butler argues, Descartes’ body re-asserts itself, haunting the Meditations like an un-exorcisable ghost.
Butler is saying that the body can have a mind of its own. Also it can become a ghost. Descartes's mind was busy doubting the existence of an evil devil when suddenly the ghost of his hand slapped him silly. Then the ghost of his penis fucked him in the ghost of his ass.
For the text is produced by the physical fact of Descartes’ writing; the hand that he proposes to doubt is the very means of that doubt’s expression.
Unless he dictated it. Descartes's mind was the efficient cause. His hand wasn't. The question was whether different minds are different efficient causes or whether God is the only efficient cause. That is called 'Occasionalism'. God does everything.
Thus Descartes’ text works as a kind of reductio against the possibility of the thing it claims as its starting point.
No. It is a reductio against individual minds being efficient causes. He himself may have ben a dualist but his line of thinking, like Liebniz's, goes towards Occasionalism of the Islamic or Hindu sort.
In reply to Descartes’ famous question – ‘how can I doubt that these hands or this body are mine?’ – Butler offers the answer: I cannot.
Butler is wrong. We may have been hypnotized or may be mentally ill or under the influence of a drug. Moreover, there is such a thing as gender dysphoria. Some people think their penis ought not to be there. What should be there is a vagina. The same thing may be said of breasts. Some people may feel that their body ought not to have them. Their chest should be hairy. Their face should be bearded. They oughtn't to have to sit down to pee.
However, this has to do with the mind or brain, not the body. It isn't the case that the penis thinks it is attached to the wrong body or that it saves up money to go under the knife.
Whether we can really doubt the reality of the body matters for Butler
though medical science had established that some people have 'phantom limbs' while others have limbs which they believe ought not to be there.
because she has been accused of reducing the body (particularly the sexed body) to language: of saying that the body is a mere product of discourse, or (worse yet) that it is itself merely discourse.
She is right. My penis exceeds the language of my g.f who describes it as tiny. The truth is, it can knock the moon out of its orbit.
Butler agrees that there is something ‘scandalous’ in this version of constructivism , but denies that this is what her own view amounts to. Constructivism, she says, is no more successful in denying the reality of the body than Descartes is in entertaining the idea that his body might be mere fiction.
He was saying the world may be fiction. But so too could the mind. Maybe there was only God or some evil demiurge.
To say that body is constructed by language cannot be to say that it is wholly determined by, or simply is, language.
Sure it can? Any shite can be any shite by ex falso quodlibet.
For once we have said that the body is something constructed by language, we have already acknowledged its reality, that it is something after all.
Nope. If we say that flying unicorns which fart rainbows are constructed by language, we aren't acknowledging that they really exist.
Thus Descartes’ supposition of the irreality of his own body becomes an allegory for ‘a more general form of positing that is to be found in various forms of constructivism’ .
Suppositions may be allegories of other suppositions. But, allegorically, they may also be the suppository of their own suppositional suppuration as farting unicorns fed upon the ephemerality of their own rainbows.
Butler goes on: [I]n imaging the body, Descartes is at once referring to the body through an image or figure – his words – and also conjuring or inventing that body at the same time...
Nonsense! He refers to it directly. There is no conjuration or invention whatsoever.
Hence, for Descartes, the language in which the body is conjectured
there is no such language. Human hands are feet and arseholes aren't conjectured by human language. They are referred to directly. What type of hooves a flying unicorn might have is conjectural.
does not quite imply that the body is nothing other than an effect of language;
Nobody has ever suggested this. It is not the case that if you have cancer, this is the effect of the Doctor's language or that if you have a tiny penis, it is because your g.f. says mean things about you.
it means that conjecturing and supposing have to be understood as fictional exercises that are not devoid of referentiality (ibid 31-2).
which is how they have always been understood. Why not add that, for Descartes, language does not imply that cats are dogs? The assertion that my cat says bow bow should be understood as a lie.
Perhaps another way to put Butler’s thought here is this: constructivism about the body not only implies that the body is real (since constructed things exist)
not linguistically constructed things- e.g. cats which say bow wow.
but also that it has a reality beyond language.
This is a fucking useless thought on a par with the conjecture that arseholes have a reality beyond any farts they might emit.
For our language itself commits us to the extra-linguistic reality of the body.
It may do. It may not. Our language may be a schizophrenic word-salad because we are utterly mad. Furthermore, specific languages may refer only to other languages and thus aren't committed to anything extra-linguistic. What manages is whether there is Kripke type rigid designation to physical objects.
If we ask ourselves the question ‘if there were no one to speak about bodies, would there still be bodies?’, there would surely be something scandalous in answering ‘no’.
There is nothing scandalous about telling obvious lies. I'm not really going to the little boy's room. I'm going to the toilet where I'm going to take a huge big dump.
This might suggest that constructivism about the body collapses into realism about the body.
There is no such collapse involved in going to the little boy's room or pretending that the only reason I have a dick rather than a vagina is because people are referring to me using the wrong pronoun.
If our grasp on the body is necessarily mediated through language
then we could tug ourselves off merely by talking.
– if there is no getting outside our representations of the body – then are we not committed to the ontology that is contained within our representations, viz. a realist ontology of the body?
Talking shite doesn't commit us to shit.
In other words, isn’t constructivism about the body self-defeating, with realism the only resting point?
Sadly, lots of peeps can make a career out of spouting paranoid drivel.
Consider, by analogy, Hilary Putnam’s ‘internal realism’. According to Putnam, the radical indeterminacy of reference means that there is no sense to be made of the realist notion of a theory’s getting (or failing to get) onto the way the world really is (Putnam, 1981).
But there is cash to be made from having a better structural causal model which permits better predictions or better outcomes.
This leaves us with a radical, global constructivism according to which a word or concept can be said to correspond to an object only ‘within the conceptual scheme of [its] users’ .
Which is why people who speak foreign languages use foreign words to refer to things.
Objects, Putnam says, ‘do not exist independently of conceptual schemes. We cut up the world into objects when we introduce one or another scheme of description’ .
Putnam started off doing high IQ stuff. Then, over the course of the late Sixties and early Seventies, Philosophy turned to shit. Problems of computability, complexity, concurrency, categoricity etc. meant that everything it presupposed as necessary for thought was unattainable or inaccessible. Minds couldn't really be very different from other computational or representational devices.
As Millikan (1984) points out, this view of things falters on itself.
No. This view of things was shit. Philosophy could hold it, because it had turned to shit. The Math said its foundations were shit and those doing it should just fucking pull the flush already and go do something useful like deliver Pizzas. Putnam started praising 'normative econ' and pretending Amartya Sen wasn't a useless tosser. Come to think of it, both he and Graciella Chichilnisky decided QMT was totally wrong. In other words, they had gone quietly mad.
If we take seriously Putnam’s claim that there is no stepping outside our conceptual scheme, then surely we must say from within it: there is a mind-independent world, and some theories are better than others at getting onto it. Thus Putnam’s constructivism seems to give way to garden-variety realism.
It gave way to talking nonsense. Philosophers woke up to the fact that their discipline was attracting stupider and stupider people. There was no way it could compete with, or even comprehend, developments in STEM subjects. Maybe it could go in for 'ethics'? Fuck that. Just do 'Grievance Studies'. Why are disabled transgender penguins of colour so egregiously underrepresented on Philosophy faculties? Is it because of Neo-Liberalism? Probably.
Butler anticipates and resists this collapse of constructivism into realism:
To be fair, the gender stereotypes of the Fifties weren't realistic at all. There was also a lot of nonsense about how, if Mummy kisses you, you turn homosexual. If she doesn't kiss you and is a 'refrigerator parent', you become autistic. Also people without penises or those with a lot of melanin simply didn't have brains. There were even some 'scientists' who explained why Chinese people could never be great mathematicians because of the nature of their mother tongue!
Although the body depends on language to be known, the body also exceeds every possible linguistic effort of capture.
But, to the best of our knowledge, not any useful linguistic effort of capture.
It would be tempting to conclude that this means that the body exists outside of language,
Which it does. I can't find my body- or Beyonce's for that matter- in the Dictionary.
that it has an ontology separable from any linguistic one, and that we might be able to describe this separable ontology.
We can describe it, or anything else, by farting.
But this is where I would hesitate,
Amia is well brought up. She hesitates to fart. Iyengars are greatly deficient to Iyers in that respect.
perhaps permanently, for as we begin that description of what is outside language, the chiasm reappears: we have already contaminated, though not contained, the very body we seek to establish in its ontological purity.
She shat on it? Is that what she is saying? Iyengars can be very sneaky you know.
The body escapes its linguistic grasp,
by dying or getting very drunk.
but so, too, does it escape the subsequent effort to determine ontologically that very escape.
Sadly, nothing escapes ontological determination. Anyone is welcome to say that you are ontologically shit- provided they are bigger than you or at a safe distance.
Butler hesitates, ‘perhaps permanently’, at the realist thought that there exists a pre-linguistic, pre-representational body.
I don't. I say I am Beyonce. But I also say that my milk-shake brings all the boys to the yard. The women I say this to express scepticism. Mum goes further and threatens to slap the black off me.
For the constructivist thought (that the body is only given to us in language) pushes its way back in. Butler cannot bring herself to abandon it.
Because she teaches shit for a living.
Where does this leave us?
Up shit-creek if we have bothered to follow this line of reasoning
First we are told that a thorough-going constructivism is ‘scandalous’, unstable, in its denial of a body that exceeds language; then we are told to reject any realism that would posit an extra-linguistic body. We are left with a paradox: ‘The body....is and is not determined by...discourse’ .
This isn't a paradox. It is an obvious lie or piece of wishful thinking. It isn't really the case that 'discourse' is what causes me to have a fat, old, ugly body and face. On the other hand 'discourse' did cause Jews and homosexuals and so forth to be stigmatized. Kick that discourse in the goolies by all means. But why replace it with pseudo-academic nonsense?
Presumably what would also make such an answer ‘scandalous’ for Butler, though she doesn’t discuss the issue explicitly in these essays, is her commitment to the Foucauldian thesis that acts of conceptualisation and categorisation are always acts of power.
Impotence. Power has more rewarding ways of passing the time.
To say that there is no body that exceeds language might suggest that there is nothing that is harmed by such acts of power.
No. If no 'body' exceeds language then some linguistic 'act of power'- e.g. chanting a spell- can harm or help it to an infinite degree. Consider Dr. Magnus Mallard who exists only in my language. If I say Agnes Callard is shitting on his head, then he is being harmed. But if I say he is shitting on Agnes Callard's head, she is not harmed in any way. This is because Agnes Callard actually exists. Sticks and stones may break her bones. Calling her names, can't hurt her.
What does Butler think she is doing when she tells us that the body both is and is not determined by discourse?
The fact is, 'talking cures' can help some people. Others require lithium salts or other such medication. The good news is that nobody needs to feel they are damned. Ontological dysphoria is a different matter. We are welcome to believe that we have ben cast into the Universe. After death, we will return to where we will feel forever at home.
That the body exceeds language but that there is no extra-linguistic body?
or a soul which will either go to Heaven or Hell. It will be a bit of a blow to me if I'm stuck with this body in paradise. I'd like to have lots of arms like an octopus. Also wings like an eagle.
In “Kierkegaard’s Speculative Despair”,
which may simply be a medical condition treatable by appropriate medication. Alternatively, it could motivate a successful career in speculative fiction or virtual reality or octopus-porn or something of that sort.
Butler writes: Aware of this paradoxical task of trying to write about what cannot be delivered in language,
Which is what we do when we write about flying broomsticks which can't be delivered by Amazon Prime.
Kierkegaard insists upon the necessity of indirect communication, a kind of communication that knows its own limitations and by enacting those limits indirectly points the way to what cannot be communicated.
Kierkegaard was a successful writer because he could communicate well enough. Perhaps 'aporia' is what is meant- stuff like saying 'I doubt that even the greatest master of the English language could find a way to adequately describe the swinishness of my opponent'. The result is that we get the idea that the fellow is utterly horrible.
Like Butler, for whom the subject is simultaneously ‘acted on and acting’ (ibid 6),5 Kierkegaard thinks that the human subject is simultaneously finite and infinite.
Some Christians at that time thought they may be predestined for damnation. Also, they may have inherited a mental illness and thus were bound to have a miserable life. Psychiatric medicine has made great strides since then.
We are temporally bounded, embodied creatures who are subject to the laws of human reason and morality; and yet we are grounded in and answerable to that which transcends reason and the moral sphere.
It is, as St. Augustine says, a great mystery as to why of two babies alike in every observable respect, one is predestined for Heaven and the other for Hell. But, equally, we may ask why one person is struck down with a painful disease while another, who smokes and drinks and eats junk food remains perfectly healthy and lives to a great age.
For Kierkegaard it is not possible to think our way into this paradox –
It is a great mystery upon which the Christian Faith is founded.
indeed it is misleading to say, as I did, that Kierkegaard ‘thinks’ that the subject is at once finite and infinite. Thought, in its attempt to grasp the infinite, renders it finite, ‘negat[ing] what [it] seek[s] to affirm’ (ibid 122).
At around that time Cantor was discovering the opposite. We now have infinitely more infinite infinities then every before. Just recently two new infinities compatible with the axiom of choice have been discovered- viz. exacting and ultraexacting cardinals.
We exceed the finite, but this excess cannot be described.
Save by really smart mathematicians. It is foolish to say 'nobody can describe x' when there are scientists working on not just describing x but going beyond x to something yet more elementary or fundamental.
It can only be ‘indirectly’ gestured at, though a performance of language’s inability to grasp it squarely. Thus in Fear and Trembling Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous narrator Johannes de Silentio tells us that Abraham loved Isaac completely, and yet was willing to sacrifice him on God’s command, and that rather than this making Abraham a murderer, it revealed him as a ‘knight of faith’.
Back in those days, the idea was that the sacrificed animal or human goes straight to Heaven. Also, there was a prominent mercantile community in the region where fathers sacrificed their first born. The result was that people trusted them to keep their word in commercial transactions. Being ready to kill your own son is a 'costly signal' which gives rise to a 'separating equilibrium' such that 'high-trust' transactions burgeon.
It is not at all clear to Silentio how this could be true: a man who would kill his son for no reason could not really love him, indeed would be nothing but a common murderer.
A guy who has his baby son circumcised is not a mutilator of babies. He is following the rules of his Society so that his son will enjoy all its advantages.
The truth of Abraham is something that cannot be coherently thought, can only be disclosed through language that deliberately misfires, ‘forc[ing] a crisis in thought’ .
No. We can be disingenuous in our criticism of a social practice- e.g. pretending that parents are very cruel when they dress up little boys in boy's clothing while buying nice frocks for their daughters. But, we may also simply be crazy. Lying or lunacy don't give rise to linguistic paradoxes nor do they point to some hiatus valde deflendum between sense and reference.
So too, Butler might say, with the body. The body is at once determined by language
It isn't.
and exceeds it, and this thought, though it cannot be coherently thought – indeed, is a bit of nonsense, a nonthought – is nonetheless something that can be shown to be true.
by lying your head off? Mistresses of Misology may believe so. But they are wrong.
For Kierkegaard’s Silentio, Butler writes, ‘the questions repeat themselves insistently, exhausting language and opening out into the silent void of faith’ ).
Faith isn't silent at all. Go to Church. The pastor delivers a long sermon. Most people like it and feel refreshed by listening to it.
Thus the crisis in thought ignites ‘the advent of passion’. What passion does Butler hope might be ignited by her exploration of the ineffable contradictions of subjecthood?
She hopes people will think she is real smart and Hannah Arendt's true successor.
For Kierkegaard the appropriate attitude to take towards the ineffable, namely faith, is an attitude opposed to the ethical.
A fair point. A Utilitarian or Liberal/deontological ethics might make no room for Faith or Religion or the immortal soul. Existentialism might be seen as a defence against the ideas of Herbert Spenser or some other version of Positivist 'Scientism' or atheistic Marxism.
But for Butler, grasping the contradictions of the self – that our agency always presupposes others who act on us, that we are always in a sense ‘forced to be free’ – is fundamental to what she calls ‘ethical relationality’:
i.e. being a fucking nuisance and bullying everybody for using the wrong pronouns.
Misreadings of Butler’s Gender Trouble (1990) tend to emphasise one term in this formulation at the expense of the other.
Whereas reading that shite causes people to think third wave feminism is paranoid shite.
Kierkegaard’s main criticism of Hegel is precisely that Hegel thinks such a paradox can be resolved through reason.
For other people- not crazy ones. Yet the crazy dude may be on to something. During the Great War, most people thought Pacifists and Conscientious Objectors to be cowardly shirkers or Ivory Tower idealists. But they had a point. The Great War represented a colossal waste. It may have started out as 'the sport of Kings'- one Emperor trying to score off against his cousin- but it ended with the destruction of an entire social order and- in Russia- a class war of unprecedented ferocity.
Of course Kierkegaard doesn’t take himself to have an argument against this view: ‘If the issues he has with Hegel could be rationally decided, then Hegel would have won from the start. Kierkegaard’s texts counter Hegel...at the level of style’ .
We may say that the doctrine of Papal Infallibility is Hegelian in that there is a 'buck stopping' synthesis in the shape of the Pope rather than the Prussian State. Just as Brentano reacts to this with a theory of 'intentionality' which is phenomenological, so does the Protestant Kierkegaard come up with a Existential, Angst ridden, alternative. But both were blind alleys. It was developments in mathematics which would act as midwife to a new world view productive of new technologies and a possible horizon for humanity amongst the stars.
Amia highlights this passage from Butler
[A] certain demand or obligation impinges upon me,
only by prohairesis- i.e. a volitional predeliction. Thus a good Mum responds to her crying baby by feeding it. A bad Mother beats it so as to show it who is boss.
and the response relies on my capacity to affirm this having been acted on, formed into one who can respond to this or that call...I am only moved or unmoved by something outside that impinges upon me in a more or less involuntary way.
No. There is a previous volitional prohairesis. Suppose you studied to be a Doctor and took the Hippocratic oath. You might say 'I saved the life of the wounded man, though I knew he was evil, because I had no choice. As a Doctor, I am bound to save the lives of any injured person.'
This uneasy and promising relation cannot be easily denied, and if denial does prove possible, it comes at the cost of destroying a social and relational world.
A Doctor who refused to treat an injured person may face sanctions from the Medical Association. But an ordinary person who ran away would not face any sanction. He has no special skill or training. His instinct is to run away because he fears getting blamed or being roughly handled by the police.
I would say that we must affirm the way we are already and still acted on in order to affirm ourselves, but self-affirmation means affirming the world without which the self would not be, and that means affirming what I could never choose .
This is like saying 'we must affirm our duty of respiration which involves breathing in and then affirming our obligation to breathe out in a manner which is respectful of alterity and sympathetic to the demands of plurality, diversity, inclusivity, equity and saying 'boo to Netanyahu'.
The denial of our dependency on others is not only a metaphysical mistake (a failure to understand the ontological preconditions of the self) but also an ethical one (a withdrawal of the self from the ethical sphere).
Very true. If you deny that you are dependent on other people's anal sphincters for taking a dump, then your metaphysical mistake will leave you full of shit. This is very unethical. Everybody must recognize that only a disabled Palestinian Lesbian in Gaza is capable of taking the dump you so desperately need to take.
In “Sexual Difference as a Question of Ethics: Alterities of the Flesh in Irigiray and Merleau-Ponty”, Butler accuses Irigiray of both mistakes.
She had no training in Logic or Philosophy. Still, you can't say she wrote stupider shite than those she criticized. What mattered was that she didn't have a dick and thus was bound to be less 'phallocentric'.
For Irigiray, to relate ethically across the chasm of gender difference is to recognise the utter alterity of the other.
For her Mummy and Daddy relating ethically to each other meant kissing and cuddling and bringing a nice baby into the world. That's not ipseity vs alterity. That's a loving partnership.
Butler writes that for Irigiray ‘who are you?’ is ‘the paradigmatic ethical question...
For me, it is 'what are you drinking?'
in the sense that it seeks to cross the divide of sexual difference,
I suppose it is polite to ask the name of the person with whom you are bumping uglies.
to know what is different, but to know it in such a way that what is different is not, through being known, assimilated or reduced to the one who seeks to know’ .
Eating isn't knowing. What you eat is assimilated into your body. Knowing leaves that which is known separate and whole.
Irigiray’s foil here is Merleau-Ponty, whom Irigiray reads as advocating a mode of relating that strives to assimilate the other to the self, a mode that she charges with being characteristically ‘masculinist’ and ‘narcissistic’.
Daddy ate up Mummy after impregnating her. Then he shat her out and she gave birth to me. That's why I don't got a dick. Fuck you Daddy! Fuck you very much!
According to Butler, the first mistake here is a metaphysical one, ‘the faulty presumption that to be implicated in the Other or in the world that one seeks to know is to have that Other and that world be nothing more than a narcissistic reflection of oneself’ .
This is the mistake made by all these Mistresses of Misology. But it is also what gave them currency. You could get a PhD in not navel-gazing but screaming and shitting yourself because you didn't have a dick or weren't 'pretty' or 'smart' or had a 'sense of humour' or were a 'nice' person. Obviously, this is the fault of Phollocentric Neo-Liberalism and Joe Biden's refusal to undergo gender reassignment surgery every Tuesday.
Just because you and I depend on each other – just because I am myself only because you are you – does not make you nothing but me.
Also, if you depend on a pair of crutches to get around, you are not yourselves a pair of crutches. It is important that stupid people should get PhDs on the basis of such discoveries.
The second, more severe, mistake is ethical: ‘if the ‘Other’ is so fundamentally and ontologically foreign, then the ethical relation must be one of sanctimonious apprehension from a distance’ ).
Obviously. You want to be in New York, not Gaza, when you gas on about the sufferings of the Palestinians there.
And yet one might wonder if the ethics of ‘sanctimonious apprehension from a distance’ might not be preferable, in practice, to the ethics of mutual implication.
Amia isn't stupid. She knows which side her bread is buttered on. If you want to whine about being a darkie without a dick, do it in Oxford, not Mamta's Calcutta.
Liberal political philosophy is rife with calls for greater empathy and moral imagination.
and less and less empathy for the long suffering tax payer.
Such calls are alternately anodyne and presumptuous, commending us to do what is minimally required (think of others), or asking us to do what often cannot be done (think our way into the other). Indeed the founding thought experiment of contemporary political philosophy, Rawls’ original position (1971),
which he took over from Vickrey & Harsanyi. Sadly, he got the math wrong and arrived at an absurd conclusion.
presupposes that moderately idealised agents would be able to correctly evaluate what it would be like to live under various possible socio-political arrangements without first-hand experience of doing so.
He assumed there would be a good enough Social Science 'plug in'. In a sense he was right. Once Evolutionary Biologists explained why every society would have a percentage of Homosexual people, there was no reason to be nasty to them. They were no different from Heterosexuals than left-handed people are different from right-handed people. There is nothing 'sinister' about an Evolutionarily Stable Strategy having that sort of diversity.
Feminists have pushed hard against the idea that the moral imagination is as powerful as liberals tend to presume – that oppressors can simply place themselves in the shoes of the oppressed – in turn insisting that imaginative representation give way to actual political representation .
Sadly, this can lead to a collapse of the polity. What matters is 'incentive compatibility'. Without it the polity goes off a fiscal cliff.
Of course, Butler has little truck with liberalism’s ethics of empathy: [T]o be implicated elsewhere...suggests that the subject...is primarily an intersubjective being, finding itself as Other, finding its primary sociality in a set of relations that are never fully recoverable or traceable. This view stands in stark contrast...to the various forms of atomistic individualism derived from Cartesian and liberal philosophical traditions (ibid 168).
In a polity, the individual is primarily either a net contributor or a net beneficiary. It is simply a fact that there is an incentive to try to get out of the former class into the latter category. Crazy 'Mistresses of Misology' can be helpful to the Right who mobilize the masses against their bullying shibboleths- e.g. politically correct pronouns. The Republicans gained votes by claiming that ' "Kamala is for they/them, President Trump is for you."
My question is how possible is it for us to achieve this form of intersubjectivity, to recognise our mutual interdependence while resisting the self-assimilation or self-projection that is characteristic of much liberal thought.
It is possible for Mistresses of Misology to spark a backlash. Perhaps, that is why they were promoted in the first place.
Where should we look to see how such a possibility might be realised? In “To Sense What is Living in the Other: Hegel’s Early Love”, Butler takes as her subject an early essay fragment of Hegel’s entitled “Love”. In this fragment we see Hegel’s abiding concern with the oppositions of human existence, and in particular what Simone de Beauvoir calls consciousness’ ‘fundamental hostility towards every other consciousness’ .
At that time there was a mystical belief in some superior type of androgyny as attested to in Balzac and Malfatti. Hegel was aware of a mystical Christian tradition according to which, in the words of Julian of Norwich, 'Mother Jesus, on the Cross, gave birth to the World'.
Whereas in the Phenomenology of Spirit this antagonism is worked out through a fight to death and the establishment of the master/bondsman relationship, in “Love” Hegel suggests that it can be transcended through love’s accommodation with the impossibility of dissolving the self into the other, a dissolution for which love by its nature yearns.
In other words, there was a via media between the heretical prohairesis of the Christian mystics and the Civic requirement for an Established Church. Since Hegel was a 'beamte' of the Prussian State (Professors at Berlin University were automatically citizens of this type), he thought its Church was the 'synthesis' its people could all accept.
As Butler writes: Whatever union is achieved in love is not an absolute overcoming of difference,
it may be. The perfect disciple, after the Guru's death, may be accepted as his living voice.
the finitude by which two individuals are separated...The couple does not dissolve into life itself without dying, since each would have to relinquish its determinate living form. And yet as separate and existing forms, each is understood ‘to sense what is living in the other’ .
Or immortal in the other. We may say that both participate (methexis) in something univocal which is beyond their individuating principle.
The lovers achieve a reconciliation of what Hegel calls the ‘antagonism between...complete surrender...and a still subsisting independence’ .
Unless they don't. There is a story of the venerable Sheikh whom a particular Courtesan ceaselessly lampoons. The kotwal (police chief) goes to the Sheikh and demands the right to either punish the baggage or exile her from the town. The Sheikh says 'What I sensed is true. She loves me as I love her.' He dies. The kotwal is furious, he grabs his sword and rushes to the house of the courtesan determined to kill that child of Satan. But he is too late. When the Sheikh's soul left his body, so too did the soul of the courtesan quit this cruel brothel of a world.
They recognise and affirm both what unites and differentiates them. But Hegel reveals that this is at best a fleeting reconciliation; that which divides the lovers – in particular their proprietary relationships to material reality – inevitably becomes too much. In the end for Hegel the transcendence of the antagonism is not represented by the lovers, but by their offspring: ‘[a]fter their union the lovers separate again, but in the child their union has become unseparated’ (ibid 308).
It must be said, the Germans, from before the time of Tacitus, had loving nuclear families. Husband and wife stayed together though the children might have to leave home to marry of make a living.
It is left ambiguous, in Hegel’s fragment, just how successful this makes the lovers’ union.
Successful enough. Germans may have had some horrible leaders but they were and are decent enough people with strong family values.
We might ask: how hopeful is a model of relating that is by its nature temporary?
This is not the view of Amia's own ancestral sect. Marriage is a sacrament- a union of souls which presages union in the Godhead.
This is a question very much at stake in contemporary feminism,
i.e. Mistresses of Misology scratching each other's eyes out
one that divides those who aspire to a universalist grounds for feminist solidarity, and those (like Butler)12 who advocate for more shifting and provisional forms of political coalition.
i.e. ensuring Hilary or Kamala doesn't get elected and bullying J.K Rowling because she thinks male rapists shouldn't be sent to women's prisons.
A deleted line from Hegel’s fragment reads: ‘The child is the parents themselves’.
And the parents are the grandparents themselves.
One might further worry that to take Hegel’s discussion of love as a model for politics is to
be as stupid as fuck. Take Mills & Boons as your model for politics by all means. That way, you will be able to predict Melania divorcing the Donald so he can marry Ayatollah Khameni.
beg the pressing question. For Hegel, love presupposes equality: ‘[L]ove proper...exists only between living beings who are alike in power and thus in one another’s eyes living beings from every point of view; in no respect is either dead for the other’ (Hegel, 1963, 304).
It must be said Ahmed Gazzali's love dialectic between Sultan Mahmud and the Slave Ayaz is way better than Hegel's shite- or Kojeve's version of it.
Of course the lover tries to deaden the beloved, to render the beloved a mere object. When the lover cannot do this the result is rage, Hegel says, but this rage gives way to shame, as the lover realises it is her beloved she seeks to destroy. This is how the lover and beloved are able to achieve, albeit fleetingly, the intersubjectivity that Butler exhorts as the proper basis of ethics.
German psilosophy is the proper basis for the ideologies of Gangster regimes. The proper basis for ethics is actually doing first order good rather than demanding that everybody else do first order good.
But what are the prospects for such intersubjectivity where the urge to deaden is met with no shame, no psychic resistance?
e.g if you are married to a blow-up doll. My mistake was to fill it up with helium and then, carelessly, to leave the window open.
How much can the image of lovers help us when thinking about the possibilities for intersubjectivity across the divides of race or class or nationality?
It can't. Lovers are people who like holding hands and kissing each other. When trying to solve a labour dispute or negotiate a ceasefire, it doesn't help to think that what is really needed is candle-light and violin music and soft couches so that the contending parties end up having sex and getting married.
This is perhaps the most pressing question for any ethics that seeks to found itself not on general moral principles but on an ineffable movement of mutual recognition.
involving lots of lube and butt sex?
What happens when we cannot see each other, or better yet when one party is all too seen, and the other invisible?
No butt sex. Sad.
In the final essay of this collection, Butler discusses Sartre’s invitation to his fellow Europeans, in his preface to Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth, to eavesdrop on the book: Europeans, you must open this book and enter into it. After a few steps in the darkness you will see strangers gathered around a fire; come close, and listen, for they are talking of a destiny they will mete out...They will see you, perhaps, but they will be talking among themselves...This indifference strikes home (1967, 13).
What Sartre left unsaid was that those fuzzy wuzzies will throw you into the stew-pot and cook and eat you. It must be said, Fanon's Martinique was sensible enough to remain a part of France. His widow did remain in Algiers- till she killed herself.
Fanon’s text, Sartre explains to his readers, is not meant for them, but they should read it anyway, knowing that the text is indifferent to them.
His readers understood that Fanon was writing in Sartre's style because back then French Doctors wanted to be taken for men of letters and elected to the French Academy. Foucauld's psychiatrist, Jean Delay, who did good work with lithium salts, was driven out of Medicine by Maoists. He got his revenge by writing high falutin' shite and getting into the Academy.
For this experience of reversed indifference is, as Butler says, an ‘epistemological requirement for understanding the condition of colonization’ .
Nonsense! Martinique decided to remain a part of France. It produces great intellectuals, artists, Doctors etc. Fanon was shocked at how badly French Algerians treated Arab Algerians. There was nothing like that back home or in metropolitan France.
Here we have a promising way into mutual intelligibility in the face of radical power differentials, not least because, on this schema, the responsibility does not lie with the oppressed to make themselves understood.
Amia's parents are from India where 'radical power differentials' exist. She herself spent many years in rural parts of South India campaigning for the rights of starving untouchables. It isn't true that she can't speak Tamil and would find poor Tamil people completely unintelligible.
(This schema also presupposes what is surely in general right, namely that the oppressed often understand their oppressors all too well.)
No. They may not know their language or anything about their culture or technology. It is a different matter that some Professor of useless shite plays the race card or the gender card or the Lezza card or whatever so as to gain intellectual affirmative action.
And yet, Butler argues, Sartre’s treatment of Fanon is ultimately self-centring: the ‘scars and chains’ of colonialism are interesting to Sartre for what they reveal about European violence and European humanism.
Fuck off! Sartre understood that French Algerians were stupid, uneducated and smelled bad. He didn't really like Camus, you know. The last thing he wanted to do was go to fucking Algeria to observe things at first hand. Also, there was a good chance he would be killed. If those crazy fuckers kept trying to kill De Gaulle, fuck they would care about Sartre?
For Butler, this narcissism is an unsurprising result of Sartre’s insistence that Fanon is not speaking to Europeans.
Which is why he wrote in Swahili and Arabic rather than French.
In turn Butler insists that there is a more inclusive reading of Fanon’s ‘you’, for which she finds grounds in his Black Skin, White Masks.
By 'you' Fanon included photocopiers and fax machines.
That book closes with a meditation on what would be needed ‘to create the ideal conditions of existence for a human world’
abolish death. Fanon would have preferred not to fucking die.
: Why not the quite simple attempt to touch the other, to feel the other, to explain the other to myself?
Sadly, the other might beat the shit out of you before you get to finger them and explain to yourself that they really really like being fingered.
Was my freedom not given to me then in order to build the world of the You?
Freedom, sadly, isn't a gift. It costs money to maintain. France could keep it only because it acquired nuclear weapons. But it still had to give up Algeria. Martinique, however, had a good reason to remain French.
At the conclusion of this study, I want the world to recognize, with me, the open door of every consciousness.
In this case it is an open door through which we watch you shitting into your cupped hands and then eating your own shit. Please close your fucking door you coprophagous cunt!
Butler admits that she ‘seize[s] upon this call...precisely because it posits an alternative to the hyperresolute masculinism of anticolonial violence’ of The Wretched of the Earth.
Butler knew the Algerian Jews got the fuck out of Algeria the moment the French fucked off. Running away is the best response to hyper-resolute masculinism or feminism or trangenderism.
But (as Butler acknowledges) the lines on which she seizes were written by Fanon nine years earlier. In the later Wretched, Fanon concludes that the colonised subject’s consciousness can only be opened through a violent shutting down of the consciousness of the coloniser.
Martinique disagreed. Also, it turned out, Fanon had wasted his time studying the wrong sort of medicine in the wrong way. He had to go to America to get treatment for his leukemia. To be fair, he had first gone to the Soviet Union before getting the help of the CIA to gain admission to the N.I.H facility in Bethesda.
Butler hopes that Fanon’s earlier humanism can be reconciled with his later binarism:
Fanon was a silly man. He didn't live to see the great mass of Algerians turn against the 'revolutionary' kleptocracy under which they lived. The people of Martinique weren't silly. They stuck with France. Its per capita income is five times that of Algeria though Algeria has much greater natural resources. It must be said, Algerians are very bright and excel in STEM subjects just like people from Martinique.
'At the moment in which I do violence to an other
which is what you may be paid to do. Fanon, like many of his people, fought bravely against Hitler.
...then I make room not only for my own self-invention,
as a cat? Cats don't have to salute officers. They can say miaow and saunter off with their tails held high.
but for a new notion of the human that will not be based on racial or colonial oppression and violence'
It would have been nice if Fanon had come up with a new notion regarding the treatment of leukemia instead of writing stupid shit. Still, as a man of African heritage, it was nice that he showed such touching concern for Arabs given that it is more than likely that Arab slave traders had helped his people get the fuck out of the dark continent.
Even so, that would make Butler’s vision of mutual recognition a political goal, not a mode of politics.
A political own-goal. Mutual recognition, like mutual masturbation, has limited appeal if you happen to be as ugly as fuck.
Still, it must be said, the 'mode of politics' practiced by Mistresses of Misology has greatly helped Trump. Sad about Kamala, though. Come to think of it, Amia's people must be related to Kamala's maternal ancestors. Iyengars started off as Iyers, you know.
Fanon’s claim – that in conditions of great oppression violence is sometimes necessary – goes unanswered.
Independent researchers consider that approximately 937,000 people have died directly due to violence in the post-9/11 wars, including combatants and civilians. An estimated 3.6 to 3.7 million people have died as a result of the war's indirect consequences, such as lack of access to healthcare, food, and clean water, as well as the psychological toll of living in conflict zones. Tens of millions have been displaced. No doubt, Saddam and Gaddafi and Assad and ISIS were oppressive. The question is whether military violence has reduced or increased the misery of people in the region. What is beyond question is that Mistresses of Misology have contributed nothing useful in this connection.
