Undoing Gender (25 page)

It is important to ask these questions in this way if what we want to do is offer recognition, if we believe that recognition is a reciprocal process that moves selves beyond their incorporative and destructive dispositions toward an understanding of another self whose difference from us is ethically imperative to mark. As I hope is clear, I do not have a problem with the norm of recognition as it functions in Benjamin’s work, and think, in fact, that it is an appropriate norm for psychoanalysis. But I do wonder whether an untenable hopefulness has entered into her descriptions of what is possible under the rubric of recognition. Moreover, as I indicated above, I question specifically whether overinclusiveness as she describes it can become the condition for the recognition of a separate Other, neither repudiated nor incorporated.

Let us turn first to the question of whether negation can be clearly separated from destruction, as Benjamin suggests. And then let us reconsider the Hegelian notion of recognition, emphasizing its ek-static structure and ask whether that is compatible with the model of overinclusiveness. How do such different models fare regarding the ethical question of whether they facilitate recognition, and in what form?

Finally, what are the implications of these different notions of recognition for thinking about the self in relation to identity.

Benjamin clearly states that it has been her position since the publication of
The Bonds of Love
that “negation is an equally vital moment in the movement of recognition. Nor can any appeal to the acceptance of otherness afford to leave out the inevitable breakdown of recognition into domination.”
¹⁴
This represents her position published in 1998. And yet, since then she has moved away from this “inevitable breakdown.” Whereas the earlier position seemed to claim that recognition presupposes negativity, her present one seems to imply that negativity is an occasional and contingent event that befalls recognition, but which in no sense defines it. She writes, for instance, that “we should expect breakdowns in recognition,” but that “destruction” can be surmounted: “destruction continues until survival becomes possible at a more authentic level.” Recognition is the name given to this authentic level, defined as the transcendence of the destructive itself. It is subsequently described as a “dialogic” process” in which externality is recognized. The analyst in such a situation is not an idealization, for that is still a failure to release the analyst from internality. It is the Other as he or she breaks through either the ideal or the persecutory image that marks the “authentic” emergence of a dialogic encounter and the creation of what Benjamin refers to as “intersubjective space.”

My question is whether intersubjective space, in its “authentic” mode, is really ever free of destruction? And if it is free of destruction, utterly, is it also beyond the psyche in a way that is no longer of use for psychoanalysis? If the “third” is redefined as the music or harmony of dialogic encounter, what happens to the other “thirds?” The child who interrupts the encounter, the former lover at the door or on the phone, the past that cannot be reversed, the future that cannot be contained, the unconscious itself as it rides the emergence of unanticipated circumstance? Surely, these are all negativities, even sources of “destruction” that cannot be fully overcome, sublated, resolved in the harmonious music of dialogue. What discord does that music drown out? What does it disavow in order to be? What if the music turns out to be Mahler? If we accept that the problem in relationship is not just a function of complementarity, of projecting onto another what belongs to the self, of incorporating another who ought properly to be regarded as separate, it will be hard to sustain the model of recognition that remains finally dyadic in structure. But if we accept that desire for the Other might be desire for the Other’s desire, and accept as well the myriad equivocal formulations of that position, then it seems to me that recognizing the Other requires assuming that the dyad is rarely, if ever, what it seems. If relations are primarily dyadic, then I remain at the center of the Other’s desire, and narcissism is, by definition, satisfied. But if desire works through relays that are not always easy to trace, then who I am for the Other will be, by definition, at risk of displacement. Can one find the Other whom one loves apart from all the Others who have come to lodge at the site of that Other? Can one free the Other, as it were, from the entire history of psychic condensation and displacement or, indeed, from the precipitate of abandoned object-relations that form the ego itself? Or is part of what it means to “recognize” the Other to recognize that he or she comes, of necessity, with a history which does not have oneself as its center? Is this not part of the humility necessary in all recognition, and part of the recognition that is involved in love?

I believe that Benjamin might say that when one recognizes that one is not at the center of the Other’s history, one is recognizing difference. And if one does not respond to that recognition with aggression, with omnipotent destruction, then one is in a position to recognize difference as such and to understand this distinguishing feature of the Other as a relation of “negation” (not-me) that does not resolve into destruction. Negation is destruction that is survived. But if this is her response, it seems to me to entail a further recognition of the necessary breakdown of the dyadic into something that cannot be contained or suppressed within that limited structure. The dyad is an achievement, not a presupposition. Part of the difficulty of making it work is precisely caused by the fact that it is achieved within a psychic horizon that is fundamentally indifferent to it. If negation is destruction that is survived, in what does “survival” consist? Certainly, the formulation implies that “destruction” is somehow overcome, even overcome once and for all. But is this ever really possible—for humans, that is?

And would we trust those who claimed to have overcome destructiveness for the harmonious dyad once and for all? I, for one, would be wary.

We do not need to accept a drive theory that claims that aggression is there for all times, constitutive of who we are, in order to accept that destructiveness poses itself continually as a risk. That risk is a perennial and irresolvable aspect of human psychic life. As a result, any therapeutic norm that seeks to overcome destructiveness seems to be basing itself on an impossible premise. Now, it may be that the ethical imperative that Benjamin wishes to derive from her distinction between destruction and negation is that the former must continually be survived as negation, that this is an incessant task. But the temporal dynamism she invokes is not that of a struggle that repeats itself, a laboring with destructiveness that must continually be restaged, a relationship where forms of breakdown are expected and inevitable; it is, rather, a dialogue that sustains tension as a “goal in itself,” a teleological movement, in other words, where the overcoming of destruction is the final end.

When Hegel introduces the notion of recognition in the section on lordship and bondage in
The Phenomenology of Spirit
, he narrates the primary encounter with the Other in terms of self-loss. “Self-consciousness… has
come out of itself
…. it has lost itself, for it finds itself as an
other
being” (111). One might understand Hegel to be describing merely a pathological state in which a fantasy of absorption by the Other constitutes an early or primitive experience. But he is saying something more. He is suggesting that whatever consciousness is, whatever the self is, will find itself only though a reflection of itself in another. To be itself, it must pass through self-loss, and when it passes through, it will never be “returned” to what it was. To be reflected in or as another will have a double significance for consciousness, however, since consciousness will, through the reflection, regain itself in some way. But it will, by virtue of the external status of the reflection, regain itself as external to itself and, hence, continue to lose itself.

Thus, the relationship to the Other will be, invariably, ambivalent. The price of self-knowledge will be self-loss, and the Other poses the possibility of both securing and undermining self-knowledge. What becomes clear, though, is that the self never returns to itself free of the Other, that its “relationality” becomes constitutive of who the self is.

On this last point Benjamin and I agree. Where we differ, I believe, is how we understand this relationality. In my view, Hegel has given us an ek-static notion of the self, one which is, of necessity, outside itself, not self-identical, differentiated from the start. It is the self over here who considers its reflection over there, but it is equally over there, reflected, and reflecting. Its ontology is precisely to be divided and spanned in irrecoverable ways. Indeed, whatever self emerges in the course of the
Phenomenology of the Spirit
is always at a temporal remove from its former appearance; it is transformed through its encounter with alterity, not in order to return to itself, but to become a self it never was. Difference casts it forth into an irreversible future.

To be a self is, on these terms, to be at a distance from who one is, not to enjoy the prerogative of self-identity (what Hegel calls self-certainty), but to be cast, always, outside oneself, Other to oneself. I believe that this conception of the self emphasizes a different Hegel from the one found in Benjamin’s work. It is surely one for which the metaphor of “inclusion,” as in “the inclusive self” would not quite work. I’ll try to explain why.

In the chapter titled “The Shadow of the Other Subject,” Benjamin offers a sustained discussion, possibly the most important published discussion that exists, on the volume
Feminist Contentions
, which I co-wrote with four other feminist philosophers. She worries that I subscribe to a notion of the self that requires exclusion (102), and that I lack a complementary term for “inclusion.” She suggests that if I object to certain ways in which the subject is formed through exclusion, it would make sense that I embrace a normative ideal in which exclusion would be overcome: “only inclusion, the avowal of what was disavowed, in short
owning
, could allow that otherness a place outside the self in the realm of externality, could grant it recognition separate from self” (103). A metaphorical problem emerges, of course, insofar as “inclusion” names the process by which the “external” is recognized. But is this more than a metaphorical difficulty or, rather, does the metaphorical difficulty trace the outlines for us of a more problematic theoretical question at hand? Benjamin offers “inclusion” as the complementary opposite to the negative form of exclusion or abjection that I discuss in
Bodies that Matter
, but she also reserves the term “external” for the aspect of the Other that appears under conditions of authentic dialogue. So, exclusion, in the sense of expulsion or abjection or disavowal, remains within the orbit of a complementary form of splitting, in her view, one that fully eclipses the Other with a disavowed projection. The Other emerges as “external,” then, only when it is no longer “excluded.” But is the Other “owned” at such a moment, or is there a certain dispossession that takes place that allows the Other to appear to begin with? This would be Laplanche’s point, and it would certainly be that of Levinas and Drucilla Cornell as well.
¹⁵
It is precisely the movement beyond the logic of owning and disowning that takes the Other out of the narcissistic circuit of the subject. Indeed, for Laplanche, alterity emerges, one might say, beyond any question of owning.
¹⁶

I would suggest that the ek-static notion of the self in Hegel resonates in some ways with this notion of the self that invariably loses itself in the Other who secures that self’s existence. The “self” here is not the same as the subject, which is a conceit of autonomous self-determination. The self in Hegel is marked by a primary enthrallment with the Other, one in which that self is put at risk. The moment in “Lordship and Bondage” when the two self-consciousnesses come to recognize one another is, accordingly, in the “life and death struggle,” the moment in which they each see the shared power they have to annihilate the Other and, thereby, destroy the condition of their own self-reflection. Thus, it is at a moment of fundamental vulnerability that recognition becomes possible, and need becomes self-conscious.

What recognition does at such a moment is, to be sure, to hold destruction in check. But what it also means is that the self is not its own, that it is given over to the Other in advance of any further relation, but in such a way that the Other does not own it either. And the ethical content of its relationship to the Other is to be found in this fundamental and reciprocal state of being “given over.” In Hegel, it would only be partially true to say that the self comes to “include” the Other.

(Benjamin would distinguish here between “inclusion” and “incorporation” and, indeed, pose them as opposites.) For the self is always other to itself, and so not a “container” or unity that might “include”

Others within its scope. On the contrary, the self is always finding itself as the Other, becoming Other to itself, and this is another way of marking the opposite of “incorporation.” It does not take the Other in; it finds itself transported outside of itself in an irreversible relation of alterity. In a sense, the self “is” this relation to alterity.

Although Benjamin sometimes refers to “postmodern” conceptions of the self that presume its “split” and “decentered” character, we do not come to know what precisely is meant by these terms. It will not do to say that there is first a self and then it engages in splitting, since the self as I am outlining it here is beyond itself from the start, and defined by this ontological ek-stasis, this fundamental relation to the Other in which it finds itself ambiguously installed outside itself. This model is, I would suggest, one way of disputing any claim concerning the self-sufficiency of the subject or, indeed, the incorporative character of all identification. And in this sense, it is not so far from Benjamin’s position. This may not be “splitting” in the precise psychoanalytic sense, but it may be an ontological dividedness that the psychoanalytic notion of splitting relies upon and elaborates. If we assume that the self exists and then it splits, we assume that the ontological status of the self is self-sufficient before it undergoes its splitting (an Aristophanic myth, we might say, resurrected within the metapsychology of ego psychology). But this is not to understand the ontological primacy of relationality itself and its consequences for thinking the self in its necessary (and ethically consequential) disunity.