Undoing Gender (26 page)

Once we think the self this way, one can begin to see how verb forms come closest to expressing this fundamental relationality.

Although common sense would have us ask: Is there not a self who identifies? A self who mourns? Don’t we all know that such a self exists? But here it seems that the conventional and precritical needs of grammar trump the demands of critical reflection. For it makes good sense to talk about a self, but are we sure it is intact prior to the act of splitting, and what does it mean to insist upon a subject who “performs” its splitting? Is there nothing from which a subject is split off at the outset that occasions the formation of the subject itself? Is there no production of the unconscious that happens concomitantly with the formation of the subject, understood as a self-determining activity?

And if it is a self who is already at a distance who splits itself, how are we to understand what splitting means for such a self? Yes, it is possible and necessary to say that the subject splits, but it does not follow from that formulation that the subject was a single whole or autonomous. For if the subject is both split and splitting, it will be necessary to know what kind of split was inaugurative, what kind is undergone as a contingent psychic event, and how those different levels of splitting relate to one another, if at all.

It is, then, one perspective on relationality derived from Hegel which claims that the self seeks and offers recognition to another, but it is another which claims that the very process of recognition reveals that the self is always already positioned outside itself. This is not a particularly “postmodern” insight, since it is derived from German Idealism and earlier medieval ecstatic traditions. It simply avows that that “we” who are relational do not stand apart from those relations and cannot think of ourselves outside of the decentering effects that that relationality entails. Moreover, when we consider that the relations by which we are defined are not dyadic, but always refer to a historical legacy and futural horizon that is not contained by the Other, but which constitutes something like the Other of the Other, then it seems to follow that who we “are” fundamentally is a subject in a temporal chain of desire that only occasionally and provisionally assumes the form of the dyad. I want to reiterate that displacing the binary model for thinking about relationality will also help us appreciate the triangulating echoes in heterosexual, homosexual, and bisexual desire, and complicate our understanding of the relation between sexuality and gender.

We have Jessica Benjamin to thank for beginning the most important dialogue on gender and sexuality that we have at the interstices of philosophy and psychoanalysis. Let us now begin to think again on what it might mean to recognize one another when it is a question of so much more than the two of us.

7. Quandaries of the Incest Taboo

I would like to address two issues that have not only caused some discontent for psychoanalysis, but that emerge as internal to psychoanalysis as its own proper sphere of discontent: incest and normative kinship. They are related, most prominently through the incest taboo, what the taboo forecloses on the one hand, what it inaugurates and legitimates on the other. I would like to make two separate remarks about incest and kinship: one having to do with contemporary debates on incest and how, and whether, it can be conceptualized; and the other, concerning the relation between the prohibition against incest and the institution of normative kinship arrangements that take a presumptively heterosexual form. What I hope to suggest is that psychoanalysis as a theory and a practice might well be rejuvenated by returning to the questions of incest and kinship, as well as to their interrelation.

On the one hand, psychoanalytic theory has assumed that the Oedipal drama in which the son’s incestuous love for the mother is fantasized and feared is followed by an interdiction that forces the son to love a woman other than his mother. The daughter’s incestuous passion is less fully explored in the Freudian corpus, but her renunciation for her desire for her father culminates in an identification with her mother and a turn to the child as a fetish or penis substitute. In the context of structuralist linguistics, this primary incest taboo becomes the way in which sexual positions are occupied, masculine and feminine are differentiated, and heterosexuality is secured. Even as psychoanalysis has charted for us this path through the normalization of gender and sexuality, it has also insisted from the start that the “development” which is described is in no sense secure. As a result, psychoanalysis gives us, and perhaps enacts for us, something of this drama of sexual normalization as well as its inevitable deviations.

In the developmental story, incest is generally described as a punish-able fantasy. And one of the main questions that emerges within the context of the contemporary social discussion of incest is whether it is real or whether it is fantasized, and how one might be able to determine epistemologically the difference between the two. For some, the answer to the epistemological quandary lies in whether there can be false memories, and what respect is to be given to first-person narrative accounts of experiences that are often attributed to early childhood. For others, the question of the “reality” of incest links up with broader questions in the historiography of memory, whether historical “events” can be confirmed apart from the interpretive field in which they appear and, whether, accordingly, something like the nondeniability of traumatic events, usually typified by the destruction of European Jewry, can be confidently asserted against revisionist historians.

These matters are complicated all the more now that trauma studies has emerged (Caruth, Felman, Laub) in which the argument prevails that trauma is, by definition, not capturable through representation or, indeed, recollection; it is precisely that which renders all memory false, we might say, and which is known through the gap that disrupts all efforts at narrative reconstruction.

With regard to incest, the question thus turns on the relations among memory, event, and desire: is it an event that
precedes
a memory? is it a memory that retroactively posits an event? is it a wish that takes the form of a memory? Those who want to underscore the prevalence of incest as an abusive family practice tend to insist that it is an event, and that insofar as it is a memory, it is a memory of an event. And sometimes this takes the form of a dogmatic premise: for it to be traumatic and real, incest must be understood as an event. This view is confounded, however, precisely by the trauma studies position mentioned above in which the sign of the trauma and its proof is precisely its resistance to the narrative structure of the event.

Those who worry about false allegations, and believe we are in the midst of a public rash of such false allegations, can speak against a psychoanalytic perspective or for one. They can, for instance, insist that incest is either a memory induced by therapy or, less often, a wish transmuted into false memory. One psychoanalytic approach asks whether incest is merely a wish or, derivatively, a wish transmuted into memory. This view suggests that the narrative report of incest correlates with a psychic event, but not an historical one, and that the two orders of event are clearly dissociable. A third position, however, is possible within psychoanalysis; it insists that trauma takes its toll on narrativity; that is, insofar as incest takes traumatic form, it is not recoverable as an event; as trauma, it cannot take the form of a remembered or narratable event. Thus, the claim on historical veracity is not secured through establishing the event-structure of incest. On the contrary, when and where incest is
not
figurable as an event, is where its very unfigurability testifies to its traumatic character. This would, of course, be “testimony” difficult to prove in a court of law that labors under standards that determine the empirical status of an event.

Trauma, on the contrary, takes its toll on empiricism as well.

Incestuous trauma, then, is variously figured as a brute imposition on the child’s body, as the exploitative incitation of the child’s desire, as the radically unrepresentable in the child’s experience or in the adult’s memory whose childhood is at issue. Moreover, to the extent that psychoanalysis attributes incestuous fantasy and its prohibition to the process by which gendered differentiation takes place (as well as the sexual ordering of gender), it remains difficult to distinguish between incest as a traumatic fantasy essential to sexual differentiation in the psyche, and incest as a trauma that ought clearly to be marked as abusive practice and in no sense essential to psychic and sexual development.

The opportunities for divisive debate are rife here. From a psychoanalytic view (which is, emphatically, not a unified and harmonious set of perspectives), the urgent questions seem to be these: how do we account for the more or less general persistence of the incest taboo and its traumatic consequences as part of the differentiation process that paves the way toward adult sexuality without demeaning the claims made about incestuous practice that clearly are traumatic in nonnecessary and unacceptable ways? The effort to reduce all claims about the reality of incest to the symptoms of disavowed fantasy is no more acceptable than the effort to presume the veracity of all incest claims.

The task will be to find out how the incestuous passions that are part of emerging childhood sexuality are exploited precisely through the practice of incest which overrides prohibitive boundaries that ought to be kept firmly in place. Moreover, to understand the trauma of that practice, it will be important not to dismiss the psychic register of pain, nor to read the absence of empirical evidence or narratable history as a sign that this trauma exists purely at the level of fantasy. If trauma theory is right to assert that trauma often leads to the impossibility of representation, then there is no way to decide questions of the psychic and social status of traumatic incest through direct recourse to its representation. One will have to become a reader of the ellipsis, the gap, the absence, and this means that psychoanalysis will have to relearn the skill of reading broken narratives.

There are two brief points I would like to recapitulate in relation to this epistemological set of quandaries that have emerged. The first is simply to remind us that the distinction between event and wish is not as clear as it is sometimes held to be. It is not necessary to figure parent-child incest as a unilateral impingement on the child by the parent, since whatever impingement takes place will also be registered within the sphere of fantasy. In fact, to understand the violation that incest can be—and also to distinguish between those occasions of incest that are violation and those that are not—it is unnecessary to figure the body of the child exclusively as a surface imposed upon from the outside. The fear, of course, is that if it emerges that the child’s desire has been exploited or incited by incest, this will somehow detract from our understanding of parent-child incest as a violation. The reification of the child’s body as passive surface would thus constitute, at a theoretical level, a further deprivation of the child: the deprivation of psychic life. It may also be said to perpetrate a deprivation of another order. After all, when we try to think of what kind of exploitation incest can be, it is often precisely the child’s love that is exploited in the scene of incest. By refusing to consider what happens to the child’s love and desire in the traumatic incestuous relation with an adult, we fail to describe the depth and psychic consequence of that trauma.

One might be tempted to conclude that the event is always psychically registered and as a result not, strictly speaking, separable from the psychic staging of the event: what is narrated, if it can be narrated, is precisely the mix of the two. But this solution does not address the nonnarratable, that for which there is no story, no report, no linguistic representation. For the trauma that is neither event nor memory, its relation to wish is not readily legible. To avow the seriousness of the violation, which is ethically imperative, it is not necessary to compel the subject to prove the historical veracity of the “event.” For it may be that the very sign of trauma is the loss of access to the terms that establish historical veracity, that is, where what is historical and what is true become unknowable or unthinkable.

It is always possible, from a clinical perspective, to claim that it does not matter whether trauma happened or did not, since the point is to interrogate the psychic meaning of a report without judging the question of its reality. But can we really dissociate the question of psychic meaning from that of the “event” if a certain fuzziness about the event having taken place is precisely part of its traumatic effect? It may be that what is unthinkable is precisely a fantasy that is disavowed, or it may be that what is unthinkable is the act that a parent performed (was willing to perform), or it may be that what is unthinkable is precisely their convergence in the event.

What constitutes the limit of the thinkable, the narratable, the intelligible? What constitutes
the limit of what can be thought as true
?

These are, I believe, questions that psychoanalysis has always interrogated precisely because it relies on a form of analytic listening and a form or “reading” which takes for granted that what is constituted as the thinkable realm is predicated on the exclusion (repression or foreclosure) of what remains difficult or impossible to think.

This is, of course, not to say that nothing is thought, that no story is told, and no representation made, but only to say that whatever story and representation emerge to account for this event, which is no event, will be subject to this same catachresis that I perform when I speak about it improperly as an event; it will be one that must be read for what it indicates, but cannot say, or for the unsayable in what is said. What remains crucial is a form of reading that does not try to find the truth of what happened, but, rather, asks, what has this non-happening done to the question of truth? For part of the effect of that violation, when it is one, is precisely to make the knowing of truth into an infinitely remote prospect; this is its epistemic violence. To insist, then, on verifying the truth is precisely to miss the effect of the violation in question, which is to put the knowability of truth into enduring crisis.