Must desire be taken literally?

Parallax

Volumn 8, Issue 4, 2002, Pages 46-56

  Thomas, Calvin ^a  

^a GEORGIA STATE UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 61349189617     PISSN: 13534645     EISSN: 1460700X     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/1353464022000027957     Document Type: Review

References (46)

1. Leo Bersani, 'Is the Rectum a Grave?', October 43 (Winter 1987), p. 212.
2. These Bersanian tropes proliferate not only from his 'Rectum' but also from The Freudian Body: Psychoanalysis and Art (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986);
3. The Culture of Redemption (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990);
4. Homos (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995);
5. and from Tim Dean, Hal Foster, and Kaja Silverman, 'A Conversation with Leo Bersani', October 82 (Fall 1997), pp. 3-16.
6. For my misappropriations of Bersani, see Male Matters: Masculinity, Anxiety, and the Male Body on the Line (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1996);
7. my title essay in Calvin Thomas, Joseph O. Aimone, and Catherine A. F. MacGillivray [eds], Straight with a Twist: Queer Theory and the Subject of Heterosexuality (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999);
8. and 'Cultural Droppings: Bersani's Beckett', Twentieth Century Literature 47:2 (Summer 2001), pp. 169-96.
9. The talk has since been published as 'Re-enfleshing the Bright Boys: or, How Male Bodies Matter to Feminist Theory', in Judith Kegan Gardiner [ed], Masculinity Studies and Feminist Theory: New Directions, (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), pp. 60-89.
10. Rosi Braidotti, with Judith Butler, 'Feminism by Any Other Name', differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 6. 2 & 3 (1994), pp. 62-99;
11. Lee Edelman, 'Tearooms and Sympathy, or, the Epistemology of the Water Closet,' in Henry Abelove, Michèle Aina Barale, and David M. Halperin [eds], The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader (New York: Routledge 1993), pp. 553-76;
12. Galway Kinnell, Imperfect Thirst (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1994). References for Waldby and Pronger are given below.
13. Catherine Waldby, 'Destruction: Boundary Erotics and the Refigurations of the Heterosexual Male Body', in Elizabeth Grosz and Elspeth Probyn [eds], Sexy Bodies: The Strange Carnalities of Feminism (New York: Routledge, 1995), p. 266.
14. Catherine Waldby, 'Destruction: Boundary Erotics and the Refigurations of the Heterosexual Male Body', p. 267.
15. Catherine Waldby, 'Destruction: Boundary Erotics and the Reflgurations of the Heterosexual Male Body', p. 272.
16. Brian Pronger, 'On Your Knees: Carnal Knowledge, Masculine Dissolution, Doing Feminism', in Tom Digby [ed], Men Doing Feminism, (New York: Routledge, 1998), p. 69.
17. Brian Pronger, 'On Your Knees: Carnal Knowledge, Masculine Dissolution, Doing Feminism', pp. 72-73 [emphases added].
18. Stuart Hall, 'The Rediscovery of "Ideology"', in Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan [eds], Literary Theory: An Anthology, (New York: Blackwell, 1998), p. 1050.
19. Samuel Beckett, Disjecta: Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment, Ruby Cohn. [ed], (New York: Grove, 1984), p. 145.
20. Hélène Cixous, 'Sorties', in Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan [eds], Literary Theory: An Anthology, (New York: Blackwell, 1998), p. 583.
21. Leo Bersani, 'Is the Rectum a Grave?', p. 222.
22. Tim Dean, Beyond Sexuality, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), p. 267.
23. My allusion here is to Marx's 'In order to abolish the idea of private property, the idea of communism is completely sufficient. It takes actual communist action to abolish actual private property', Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, in Robert C. Tucker [ed], The Marx-Engels Reader, 2nd edition, (New York: Norton, 1978), p. 99.
24. Jacques Lacan, Écrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan, (New York: Norton, 1977), p. 256.
25. Jacques Lacan, Écrits: A Selection, pp. 146, 176n5.
26. Alexandre Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel: Lectures on The Phenomenology of Spirit, Allan Bloom [ed], trans. James H. Nichols, Jr. , (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1969), p. 5. This text collects the lectures on Hegel that Kojève delivered, and Lacan attended, at the École des Hautes Études from 1933 to 1939.
27. Maurice Blanchot, 'Le Paradoxe d'Aytre', Les Temps Modernes (June 1946): 1580.
28. Cited in Herbert Marcuse, Reason and Revolution: Hegel and the Rise of Social Theory, (Boston: Beacon, 1960), p. xi.
29. For a much less rudimentary, and much more queer-friendly, Lacan, see Tim Dean's important Beyond Sexuality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), particularly the chapter 'Lacan Meets Queer Theory', p. 215-268. In effect, Dean queers Lacan by privileging the Lacan of the real and the objet a over and against the Lacan (and the Lacanians) who stand(s) behind and support(s) the symbolic order.
30. For Lacan and Bataille, see Elizabeth Roudinesco, Jacques Lacan, trans. Barbara Bay, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997);
31. Carolyn Dean, The Self and Its Pleasures: Bataille, Lacan, and the History of the Decentred Subject (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992);
32. and Fred Botting and Scott Wilson, Bataille, (New York: Palgrave, 2001).
33. For an example of such messiness, consider the section called 'The Sacrifice of the Gibbon' in 'The Pineal Eye', in Allan Stoekl [ed], Visions of Excess: Selected Writing, 1927-1939 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), pp. 79-90.
34. Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), p. 208. My earlier sentence also tropes Kristeva: 'I expel myself, I spit myself out, I abject myself within the same motion through which "I" claim to establish myself', p. 3.
35. Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Alan Sheridan, (New York: Norton, 1981), p. 117. Further references cited in the text. I have to admit that I'm cheating a bit here, since in this passage Lacan is specifically talking about painting rather than writing, but I think that his comments about the painter as 'creator' can be applied to, or perhaps deposited on, the 'poubellished' writer as well.
36. Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, pp. 268-269.
37. For 'scatontology' vs. castration anxiety, see my Male Matters. On castration anxiety and heteronormativity, consider D. A. Miller, 'Anal Rope', in Inside/Out: Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories, ed. Diana Fuss, (New York: Routledge, 1991), p. 135-36: 'Aligned with [the] subject's heterosexualization (as what most brutally enforces it), castration anxiety may not finally be all that anxiogenic. For while such anxiety no doubt occasions considerable psychic distress, neither in the long run can it fail to be determined by the knowledge that it enjoys the highest social utility in tending to confirm heterosexual male identity in a world where, if this precious, but precarious identity is not exactly rewarded, the failure to assume it is less ambiguously punished. At the point where castration anxiety is taught to anticipate its redeeming social value, it immediately carries ultimate reassurance; its normalizing function allows it to be not just thought, but even lived, as normal itself'.
38. See Bataille, 'Two Fragments on Laughter', Guilty, trans. Bruce Boone, (Venice, CA: Lapis Press, 1988), p. 139. We have to distinguish: - Communication linking up two beings (laughter of a child to its mother, tickling, etc. ) - Communication, through death, with our beyond (essentially in sacrifice) - not with nothingness, still less with a supernatural being, but with a indefinite reality (which I sometimes call the impossible, that is: what can't be grasped (begreift) in any way, what we can't reach without dissolving ourselves, what's slavishly called God). If we need to we can define this reality (provisionally associating it with a finite element) at a higher (higher than the individual on a scale of composition of beings) social level as the sacred, God or created reality. Or else it can remain in an undefined state (in ordinary laughter, infinite laughter, or ecstasy in which the divine form melts like sugar in water). For my comments on the scatontological aspects of Bataillean laughter, see Male Matters.
39. See also Paul Hegary, Georges Bataille: Core Cultural Theorist (London: Sage, 2000).
40. Julia Kristeva, Powers of Honor: An Essay on Abjection, p. 9.
41. Friedrich Nietzsche, 'On Truth and Lying in an Non-Moral Sense', in Raymond Guess and Ronald Speirs [eds], Birth of Tragedy and Other Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 146.
42. Actually the exact wording is 'truths are illusions of which we have forgotten that they are illusions, metaphors which have become worn by frequent use and have lost all sensuous vigour'. For the will to truth as a will to death, see Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann, (New York: Vintage, 1974), p. 282.
43. Michel Foucault, 'Nietzsche, Freud, and Marx', in James D. Faubion [ed], Essential Works of Michel Foucault, 1954-1984: Volume Two: Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology (New York: The New Press, 1998), pp. 275, 278. Foucault's 'nothing to interpret' reminds me of Beckett's 'nothing to express', and, though it remains unexpressed, I think that there is implied in Foucault an 'obligation to interpret' that corresponds to Beckett's 'obligation to express'.
44. For Beckett's influence on Foucault, see James Miller, The Passion of Michel Foucault (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993).
45. Pierre Bourdieu, Masculine Domination, trans. Richard Nice (Stanford University Press, 2001).
46. Michel Foucault, The Archeology of Knowledge, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: 1972), p. 17.