Undoing Gender (29 page)
The patient seems to be relieved by the act because now “his sense of guilt was at least attached to something.” Freud maintains that “the sense of guilt was present before the misdeed, that it did not arise from it, but conversely—the misdeed arose from the sense of guilt.” He then goes on to remark that this “obscure sense of guilt,” a guilt that does not know its reason for being, can be “derived from the Oedipus complex and was a reaction to the two great criminal intentions of killing the father and having sexual relations with the mother.” And he goes on to conjecture that “the conscience of mankind, which now appears as an inherited mental force, was acquired in connection with the Oedipus complex.” In a rare moment, Freud here refers to Nietzsche who classified those who committed misdeeds from a sense of guilt as “pale criminals,” but this is surely a connection to pursue on another occasion.
What seems of interest here, however, is that Freud assumes that the two great criminal intentions—killing the father, sleeping with the mother—are derived from Oedipus; but Antigone, who is also derived from Oedipus, has perhaps another sort of criminal intention at work, producing an obscure guilt for which death itself appears as the fitting punishment. Antigone, as we know, is in a bind when she cries out that she has performed her crime for her “most precious brother,” since her brother is not only Polyneices, but Eteocles, also slain, and Oedipus, son of her mother and his wife, Jocasta. She loves her brother, and so she buries him. But who is this brother? And is Polyneices, as her brother, overdetermined by the brother who is also dead, denied a proper burial, Oedipus himself? She loves her brother, says, in fact, she wants to “lie with him,” and so pursues death, which she also calls her “bridal chamber” in order to be with him forever. She is the child of incest, but how does incest run through her own desire?
And how is that criminal intention, as it were, occluded precisely by the crime that she does commit? Is there another crime, a specter of a crime, a premonition of a crime, a crime uncommitted, attested to by an obscure guilt? And does this guilt not make itself known at the same time that it continues to hide itself as she commits the criminal deed of burying Polyneices and then redoubles the deed by producing a confession that brings on her the death sentence she knew was waiting in store for her? Is it her own guilt for which she becomes punishable by death, or the guilt of her father? And is there any way finally to distinguish between them since they are both cursed in apparently similar ways? And is the punishment a way of atoning for the sin, or does it produce the possibility of a fantasmatic scenario in which she is, finally, freed from cultural taboo, free to lie with her brothers in eternity?
Although I began this chapter by focusing on the confession as an act that shifts the desire that it reports, especially when it takes place within the scene of analysis, I want to end the paper by remarking that the confession not only “changes the subject” from the misdeed in question, but can work as well to occlude and rationalize a sense of guilt that is derivable from no deed of one’s own. Antigone’s confession makes plain what she has done, but it does not transparently reveal her desire. And her confession is the means by which she submits to the punishment that Creon has laid out for her, thus hastening her own movement toward death. Although it reads as guiltless defiance, it seems in fact to be a suicidal act propelled by an obscure sense of guilt. The confession thus produces a set of consequences that in retrospect illuminate a desire for punishment, a final relief from guilt. How important then it must be for the analyst to know that the confession might well expect or solicit Creon.
Foucault was doubtless mistaken to think that the confession is only and always the occasion for the analyst to assume control and authority over the truth of one’s soul. But perhaps Foucault was articulating something about the fear of analysis, in which the analyst is projected as a pastor and judge, and the activity of the analysand, a confession that leads to inevitable and recurrent punishment. Of course, it is this very fantasy of analysis that must be brought into the analytic scene, read for its investments, especially its defensive one. The analyst is not Creon, but it probably remains true that the expectation of Creon’s punishment may well structure the desire for confession, at least, the desire for confession that Foucault imagines. The very speaking of the crime is thus another act, a new deed, one that either defies or submits to a punishing law, but which does not yet know how to subject that fantasy of the law to reflections. For the one for whom self-expression appears as confession, there may be, as there was with Antigone, an expectation that the punishment of guilt will be literalized and externalized. Guilt functions as a form of psychic punishment that preexists its deed and its confession, and it becomes writ large as the projected threat of judgment posed by the analyst. What seems clear, though, is that insofar as speech is structured as confession, it poses the question of whether the body will be condemned. Confession borne of that obscure guilt will be that form of speech that fears and solicits its own denunciation. All the more reason that the analyst who finds him or herself as confessor or, indeed, as Creon, must decline the honor, and take that speech as a solicitation to help undo the curse whose fatal consequences sometimes seem so sure.
Postscript on Speech Acts and the Transference Analytic speech tends to be rhetorical, and by that I mean that what is said in analysis is not always or only considered for what it purports to say, but also for what the saying says, what the very mode or speech says, what the very choice of words does. Of course, this is always a tricky business, since the analysand wants at some level to have his or her intentions honored, and yet a certain respectful dishonoring of intention takes place when the analyst calls attention to the mode of the speech act, the consequence of the speech act, its timing, or its tenor. By focusing on the rhetorical aspects of speech, the analyst finds meanings that exceed and sometimes confound intention, and I gather that the response to such speech runs the risk of doing something it does not mean to do, of exercising effects that exceed and sometimes confound the intentions of the analyst.
A speech act in the context of the transference thus might be said to attempt to communicate a content, but also to display or enact another set of meanings that may or may not have a relation to the content that is said. Of course, there are differences of opinions about how to deal with “content” or with the surface meaning of the utterance. But one thing seems clear, which is that the content, the intended meaning, cannot be fully overcome or transcended, since how one utters that content, or what the uttering of that content does, will probably comment on the content, will probably comment on the intention that bears the content along. So, in this sense, it is the constellation of intended meaning, mode of delivery, and unintended effect that must be considered as a particular kind of unity, even when each of these aspects of the speech act diverge in different relations.
One aspect of the speech act that becomes especially important in this context is the fact that speaking is a bodily act. It is a vocalization; it requires the larynx, the lungs, the lips, and the mouth. Whatever is said not only passes through the body but constitutes a certain presentation of the body. I am not talking about what the mouth looks like, though I can imagine that in some therapeutic sessions that may be relevant, especially if the client faces the therapist. But the speaking is a sounding forth of the body, its simple assertion, a stylized assertion of its presence. I am saying what I mean: but there is a body here, and there can be no saying without that body—a potentially humiliating and productive fact of life. Of course, there are ways of using speech that occlude the body as its condition, which act as if the meanings that are conveyed emanate from a disembodied mind and are addressed toward another disembodied mind. But that is, as it were, still a way of doing the body, a way of doing the body as disembodied.
In the case of sexual confession, the speaker is usually saying something about what the body has done, or what the body has undergone.
The saying becomes implicated in the act that it relays since saying is, of course, another way in which the body does something. Saying is, one might say, another bodily deed. And the body that speaks its deed is the same body that did its deed, which means that there is, in the saying, a presentation of that body, a bodying forth of the guilt, perhaps, in the saying itself. The speaker may be relaying a set of events in the past, but the speaker is doing something more: the speaker, in speaking, is presenting the body that did the deed, and is doing another deed at the same time, presenting the body in its action. And there is an implicit rhetorical question posed in such an instance, a question of whether that speech will be received, but since speech is an action of the body, there is an added question: will that body be received as well.
Transference is thus clearly a question of how language is exchanged, but because it is spoken, it is always a question of how bodies orchestrate an exchange, even when they are sitting or lying still. Spoken words are, strangely, bodily offerings: tentative or forceful, seductive or withholding, or both at once. The couch does not put the body out of play, but it does enforce a certain passivity of the body, an exposure and a receptivity, that implies that whatever act the body will be able to sustain in that position will be through speech itself.
If transference is a form of love or, minimally, an enactment of a certain relation to love, then we might say further that it is a love that takes place in language. This is not to say that language substitutes for the body, since that is not quite true. The spoken word is a bodily act at the same time that it forms a certain synecdoche of the body. The vocalizing larynx and mouth become the part of the body that stages the drama of the whole; what the body gives and receives is not a touch, but the psychic contours of a bodily exchange, a psychic contour that engages the body that it represents. Without this moment of exposure, a moment in which one displays something more than one intends, there is no transference. And of course, this display cannot be intentionally performed, since it is always at some critical distance from intention itself. We might see this as the confession at the core of psychoanalytic practice: the fact that we always show something more or different than what we mean, and that we hand this unknowing part of ourselves to another to return to us in ways that we cannot anticipate in advance. If this moment of confession is in psychoanalysis itself, then it is not the moment in which we necessarily become vulnerable to another’s control, as Foucault suggested in his earlier work. As Foucault realized in his account of Cassian, verbalization entails a certain dispossession, a severing of an attachment to the self, but not for that reason a sacrifice of attachment altogether.
The “relational” moment comes to structure the speaking, so that one is speaking to, in the presence of, sometimes in spite of, another. Moreover, the self in its priority is not being discovered at such a moment, but becoming elaborated, through speaking, in a new way, in the course of conversation. In these scenes of speech, both interlocutors find that what they say is to some extent beyond their control but not, for that reason, out of control. If saying is a form of doing, and part of what is getting done is the self, then conversation is a mode of doing something together and becoming otherwise; something will be accomplished in the course of this exchange, but no one will know what or who is being made until it is done.
9. The End of Sexual Difference?
I am not sure that the millennium is a significant way to mark time or, indeed, to mark the time of feminism. But it is always important to take stock of where feminism is, even as that effort at reflection is necessarily marred. No one stands in the perspective that might afford a global view of feminism. No one stands within a definition of feminism that would remain uncontested. I think it is fair to say that feminists everywhere seek a more substantial equality for women, and that they seek a more just arrangement of social and political institutions. But as we enter any room to consider what we mean, and how we might act, we are confronted quite quickly with the difficulty of the terms that we need to use. Differences emerge over whether equality means that men and women ought to be treated interchangeably. The Parity movement in France has argued that that is not an appropriate notion of equality, given the social disadvantages that women suffer under current political circumstances. We will surely argue as well over justice, and by what means it ought to be achieved.
Is it the same as “fair treatment”? Is it distinct from the conception of equality? What is its relation to freedom? And which freedoms are desired, how are they valued, and what do we make of serious disagreements among women on the question of how sexual freedom is to be defined, and whether it can receive a meaningful international formulation?
Add to these zones of contestation continuing questions about what a woman is, how we are to say “we,” who is to say it and in the name of whom? It seems that feminism is in a mess, unable to stabilize the terms that facilitate a meaningful agenda. Criticisms of feminism as inattentive to questions of race and to the conditions of global inequality that condition its Euro-American articulation continue to put into doubt the broad coalitional power of the movement. In the United States, the abuse of sexual harassment doctrine by the conservative Right in its persecutorial inquiries into sex in the workplace present a serious public-relations problem for feminists on the Left. Indeed, the relation between feminism
and
the Left is another thorny matter, since there are now pro-business forms of feminism that focus on actualizing women’s entrepreneurial potential, hijacking models of self-expression from an earlier, progressive period of the movement.