The Edinburgh Companion to Poststructuralism 9780748653690

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The Edinburgh Companion to Poststructuralism

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The Edinburgh Companion to Poststructuralism Edited by

Benoît Dillet, Iain MacKenzie and Robert Porter

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© editorial matter and organization Benoît Dillet, Iain MacKenzie and Robert Porter, 2013 © the chapters their several authors, 2013 Edinburgh University Press Ltd 22 George Square, Edinburgh EH8 9LF www.euppublishing.com Typeset in 11 on 13 Ehrhardt by Iolaire Typesetting, Newtonmore and printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 0 7486 4122 2 (hardback) ISBN 978 0 7486 5369 0 (webready PDF) ISBN 978 0 7486 5371 3 (epub) The right of the contributors to be identified as authors of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 and the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498)

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Contents

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Acknowledgements

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Preface

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Introduction Benoît Dillet, Iain MacKenzie and Robert Porter

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Part I: Emergence 1. Poststructuralism and Modern European Philosophy Simon Lumsden 2. From Marxism to Poststructuralism Simon Choat

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3. From Structuralism to Poststructuralism Craig Lundy

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Part II: Methods 4. A History of the Method: Examining Foucault’s Research Methodology Nick Hardy

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5. Derrida, Deconstruction and Method John W. Phillips

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6. Écriture Féminine Zoë Brigley Thompson

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7. Schizoanalysis: An Incomplete Project Ian Buchanan

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Part III: Themes Structure and subject 8. Structure and Subject Caroline Williams 9. How do we Recognise the Subject? Nathan Widder

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10. Foucault: The Culture of Self, Subjectivity and Truth-telling Practices A. C. (Tina) Besley

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Language and text 11. Derrida’s Language: Play, Différance and (Con)text Nicole Anderson

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12. Hélène Cixous and the Play of Language Tara Puri

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13. Luce Irigaray: An Ode to A-(Luce) Yvette Russell

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Form and institution 14. Photography and Poststructuralism: The Indexical and Iconic Sign System Sarah Edge 15. Deleuze and the Image of Film Theory Conn Holohan

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16. The Museum of Now Anna Cutler

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17. Institutions, Semiotics and the Politics of Subjectivity Michael A. Peters

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Resistance and limit 18. ‘Here and Nowhere’: Poststructuralism, Resistance and Utopia George Sotiropoulos

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19. The Powers of the Outside in Deleuze and Cixous Véronique Bergen

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20. Politics in-between Nihilism and History Corinne Enaudeau

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Part IV: Trajectories 21. The Receptions of Poststructuralism Paul Bowman

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22. From Liberation Theory to Postcolonial Theory: The Poststructuralist Turn Caroline Rooney

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23. The Pharmacology of Poststructuralism: An Interview with Bernard Stiegler Bernard Stiegler and Benoît Dillet

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Conclusion: Poststructuralism Today? Benoît Dillet, Iain MacKenzie and Robert Porter

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Notes on the Contributors Index

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A c k n ow l e d ge m e n t s

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Our thanks to Nicola Ramsey, Jenny Daly and Michelle Houston of Edinburgh University Press for their inspiration, patience and attention to detail: this book would not have happened without them. We thank Surasti Puri for the cover photo. We acknowledge and thank Presses universitaires de France (PUF) and Corinne Enaudeau for permission to publish a translation of her text on Lyotard. This text was originally published as ‘La politique entre nihilisme et histoire’, Cités, Vol. 45, No. 1, 2011, pp. 103–15. And on a personal note: Tara for her inspiration; Anna, Kathryn, Sam, Kerry-Ann, Jess and wee Anna, such loving companions in life.

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P re f a c e

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We think of a companion as a friendly guide and comrade on a shared journey. In the case of this collection, it is a journey into the rich intellectual landscape of poststructuralism. We recognise, however, that there is no single entry point into this landscape, nor any single path through, and that there are those already making their own way into poststructuralism as well as those that are standing on the edge wondering if the journey is going to be worth the effort. Whatever one’s interest in poststructuralism and hopes for the journey, and whether a seasoned wanderer or embarking on this trip for the first time, we aim to have produced a good guide to accompany you on your way. A good guide, we venture, is not only one that is able to lead you across a territory in ways that have already been well signposted but also one that is open to new paths and alternate routes. Knowledgeable but not dogmatic, the good guide will map a landscape full of potential rather than retrace well-worn journeys. It is in this sense that the guide should also be a comrade, a fellow traveler into new regions. But also a comrade in the sense that we recognise that all journeys have a political dimension to them; evaluating and choosing together as the journey unfolds, travelling with a companion is an attempt to map out a territory and pathways in common but with many possible destinations. Given this, we have collected a wide assortment of texts for an array of different readers. Broadly speaking, though, for those new to poststructuralism we recommend starting at either the beginning or the end. The Introduction and Part I provide alternate accounts of the emergence of poststructuralism that can ease the first steps into this territory by articulating its relationship to other traditions in intellectual inquiry. Equally, Part IV and the Conclusion link poststructuralism to a wide range of current concerns that may be a suitable point of departure for orienting oneself in the world of poststructuralist ideas. From whatever disciplinary home one comes, the texts at the

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beginning and end reveal the thresholds of poststructuralism, its moments of influence and contestation with other traditions of inquiry that enable the traveller to learn what may be ahead if a prolonged foray into the world of poststructuralism is to be undertaken. The more experienced reader may wish to delve straight into the middle, into Part II on methods and Part III which contains a large number of essays on key themes in poststructuralism. Here they will find new ways of thinking about the journey they thought they already knew: new ways of thinking about the methodological impact of poststructuralism as well as new ways of conceiving of subject, structure, writing, image, institution and politics (and much else besides). It has been our aim in these parts to guide the experienced reader beyond the clichés that have become such a dominant aspect of contemporary discussions of poststructuralist approaches. Of course, these are only recommendations and they must be considered as tentative ways of finding one’s feet in the many pages that follow. Moreover, the seasoned traveller will also find that revisiting the places one thought one already knew, retracing the steps that led to the emergence of poststructuralism for example, will prove rewarding. It is often as one returns to familiar haunts that one realises that they are not the same place at all. Similarly, once the novice finds his or her feet and delves into the heartlands of poststructuralist methods and themes we suggest an occasional glance back because we are sure that the point of departure will not look the same once one has journeyed the highways and byways of poststructuralist approaches. It is one of the great pleasures of travelling that if one moves through the landscape with an open–minded approach to new experiences then one will never simply colonise the known world but become aware of its endless potential to surprise. In this sense, the journey into poststructuralism that we offer through this volume is not the passive survey of thinkers and concepts but an active engagement with a diverse body of work that has the capacity to change both the traveller and the landscape. This is a theme we pick up in the Introduction as we consider the emergence of poststructuralism as an event in intellectual and institutional life. Thinking of poststructuralism as something that happened, a richly textured body of ideas that emerged as the result of complex forces in the milieu of French intellectual life in the mid-1960s that combined to bring something new into existence, and not simply a distanced reflection on the history of ideas. Rather, it is to recognise that, as an event, poststructuralism continues to impact on our lives and it continues to contain the possibility, as all events do, that it can be activated anew, albeit differently, today. An event opens a new field of possibilities. The good guide and comrade, therefore,

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knows that we must always learn again the journey we have made, and that we must always be attentive to the changes both within us, around us and under our feet as we travel. To journey is to make things happen and the good guide enables this by returning to their own process of engagement with the terrain, in order to return differently. This collection, therefore, is not intended to commemorate certain figures but to demonstrate that poststructuralism has returned, differently. The etymology of the word companion suggests that it once meant ‘one with whom one eats bread’. In this sense, a companion is not only a guide and fellow traveller but also one with whom one can pause for sustenance. Collecting together the essays that make up this volume has, in this sense, also been about pausing on the journey into poststructuralism. At such moments of reflection, one can ask: ‘where have we got to, today?’, ‘how much distance have we travelled?’, ‘what have we learnt?’, and ‘how shall we approach tomorrow?’ This collection, therefore, has offered a chance to take stock of the poststructuralist event; not so that it may be simply accounted for within the academic balance sheet of costs and benefits but so that we may consider what it means for us today with a view to mapping out the journey tomorrow. Benoît Dillet, Iain MacKenzie and Robert Porter

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I n t ro d u c t i o n

Benoît Dillet, Iain MacKenzie and Robert Porter

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What can be more joyful than a spirit of the time? [Quoi de plus gai qu’un air du temps?] (Deleuze 2004a: 142, translation modified) In a given culture and at any given moment, there is always only one episteme that defines the conditions of possibility of all knowledge, whether expressed in a theory or silently invested in a practice. (Foucault 1970: 168) It would appear that we know poststructuralism. It has long since become an uncontroversial feature of conference proceedings and a wide range of scholarly publications, almost to the point, in some circles at least, that not to mention it is seen as a dereliction of one’s academic duties. More often than not, across many disciplines in the humanities and social sciences, convenors of academic modules and programmes are obliged to have a week on poststructuralism, usually alongside feminism, toward the end of the lecture series. That it has a well-established set of criticisms that accompany it also gives poststructuralism an air of academic respectability. While it was not entirely clear what poststructuralism really amounted to, it had a veneer of danger that attracted and repelled in equal amounts. That it is now another academic badge that can be worn on the scholarly kitbag, with all the symbolic potency of a Che Guevara tee shirt, means that it is simply another ‘ism’ in a long list, each with their ‘pros and cons’. It has even spawned a vocabulary that has made its way out of purely academic settings, into policy reports and the Sunday supplements. The most spectacular example of this can be seen in the innumerable mentions of ‘deconstruction’ one finds peppering the world of reportage and the blogosphere. That these uses have virtually nothing to do with Derrida’s sense of the term is less important for now than that it signals clearly that poststructuralism has become safe

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and accepted as part of the mainstream. In some sense, this Companion is yet another such signal. And yet, it is in precisely this context that we wish to announce that we have to rethink what we know about poststructuralism; to rethink what it was and what it can become, today. All of the texts in this collection contribute to this project of rethinking poststructuralism, and in this introduction we will set the tone for this project by proposing a different account of its emergence in the intellectual and institutional world within which it has now become so deeply embroiled. What do we think we know about poststructuralism? The list of claims is relatively easy to compose: poststructuralism simply comes after structuralism; it is a form of relativism; it celebrates the death of the subject; it is a post-metaphysical form of inquiry that has utterly displaced the idea of truth; it is stylistically obtuse; it refuses all claims to normativity; and it transforms critical practice into textual play. Associatively, the criticisms of poststructuralism can be easily stated: it is empirically insightful but normatively confused; unable to perceive the performative contradictions of its own analyses; it lacks emancipatory potential and has lost sense of the central role of critical agency; and, as some Marxists often portray poststructuralism, it is a form of dogmatic thought in league with the consumerist society of late capitalism. While these ‘pros and cons’ make for easy PowerPoint slides in lectures and snapshot caricatures in scholarly works that must pay their dues to poststructuralism, they do not capture the complexity of its emergence nor of its current position in the academy and beyond. The focus in this introduction is on the former so that we may return to the latter in the conclusion. The approach that animates our rethinking of poststructuralism is that we should not dwell too much on the features of poststructuralism as simply another ‘ism’ on the already defined map of philosophical and political perspectives, but rather understand what happened such that it (whatever happened, that is) came to be known as poststructuralism. In this sense, we define poststructuralism as a social and political event in thought in the beginning of the 1960s (starting with the publication of Deleuze’s Nietzsche and Philosophy in 1962) until the mid- or late-1970s (its original intensity fading around the time of Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition in 1979). As part of this definition, it is important for us to delineate the group of philosophers associated with poststructuralism. We have decided to give a restrictive definition by primarily (though not exclusively) focusing on seven writers: Hélène Cixous, Luce Irigaray, Félix Guattari, Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, Jean-François Lyotard and Jacques Derrida. Although we must remember the influence of a broader range of theorists who were vital to

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its foundation and development – including Lévi-Strauss, Althusser, Lacan, Serres, Barthes, Baudrillard, Kristeva, Rancière and Balibar – it is our view that including these and other thinkers would veer too close to dissolving the specificity of poststructuralism within broader currents of French thought. This is equally true of our sense that the experimental university of Vincennes gave institutional expression to the project of poststructuralism, while also including a range of scholars and activists that drew their inspiration from elsewhere. Similarly, although we recognise that ‘lines of flight’ continued the poststructuralist projects after the period we identify, we remain committed to the idea that the high-point of its articulation was between the mid-1960s and the mid-1970s, with 1968 not insignificantly operating as a sort of chiasm between the 1960s and the 1970s. Treating it as an event, therefore, has two important consequences: first, it enables a certain specificity to the task of summarising what happened such that we came to refer to these thinkers as poststructuralists without then attempting to provide an overview of all the thinkers that have since claimed the label poststructuralism; secondly, it means that we aim to avoid reifying this moment in intellectual and institutional life as a historical moment that can be safely tucked away in the past. The event of poststructuralism may have its specificity but, as an event, it also has the potential to disrupt its historical treatment by becoming revitalised, or re-eventalised, in the present. In the contributions to this volume and the choices about how to structure these, we hope that this delicate balance of historical specificity and critical potential can be evidenced throughout.1 And yet, this book is placed under the label of poststructuralism. It is acknowledged that doing so may entail all kinds of problems and polemics associated with what we think we know about what this label signifies. Nonetheless, all the contributors to this volume have accepted the label as part of a common decision to make the intellectual and institutional event it names accessible. Philosophy and theory in general are complicated enough without rejecting labels, for they do bring some clarity to this all-too-obscure (and all-too-secure) environment. Admittedly, this can perhaps come as a surprise to anyone who is even partly familiar with any of the poststructuralists that we have identified, most of whom at one point or another disowned the label. Accepting that this selection and our approach may be questioned we nonetheless attempt the presentation of a proposition or a hypothesis; that is, an act of placement, as the etymology of ‘thesis’ reminds us. This volume can be thought of as a place, a platform or footing, where an institutional battle of ideas has ‘taken place’ and where the old strategies and tactics can be ‘replaced’ with new intellectual and institutional configurations. There

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is always something of the battle in an event; the contestation, displacement and reconfiguration of a terrain. With that in mind, this Companion serves as both a reminder of the problematics that have composed what we know of poststructuralism, and as a warning that the battle around the ideas and the name remains. Poststructuralists have raised some problems in thought (and not only in philosophy) that remain alive today and they form the ‘the impassable horizon of our time’, as Sartre once put it when speaking of Marxism. Yet is there not still the risk of simplifying the formidable heritage of the body of work produced by the poststructuralists? While the difficulty of ‘naming’ and ‘labelling’ is itself polemical and political, this volume accepts the ‘label’ poststructuralism to concentrate on concepts and debates, inherited by poststructuralists, which find a political resonance today. In this sense, the poststructuralist event can never simply be understood as one unified project as it remains forever open to contemporary challenges and changing times. But, nor is it right to say that there are many poststructuralisms as to claim this is to reduce the complexity of the poststructuralist event to a surreptitious unity; the one that must be operative if we are to characterise the many forms poststructuralism takes. Rather, as an event, poststructuralism is always already a multiplicity, a project that expresses the quality of its own internal differences and momentum without a transcendent principle of identity. This is why we hope that we have resisted the temptation to ‘canonise’ the uncanonisable; the poststructuralists were those who rejected the monuments of history, intellectuals who spoke against the voice of universality and fixed identities of any nature. Instead of canonising, this book aims at signalling the effects of poststructuralism in the humanities and social sciences. To do this idea justice, we suggest, it is necessary to treat poststructuralism as an intellectual and institutional event.

Poststructuralism as a Meaningful Event While treating poststructuralism as an event should ward us off reifying it as a unified body of work or dismissing any idea of unity in the name of a pseudo plurality, this does not mean that all we can say about it is that ‘something happened’ in the years 1962–79. Indeed, for poststructuralists, events are bearers of significance and meaning such that one of the tasks of analysing them is to consider the new relationships they forge between phenomena and the meanings we attach to them. In this respect, the poststructuralist project can be discerned while remaining true to the multiple nature of the event it signifies, and we agree with James Williams that the concept of ‘limit’ is one

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such discernible feature of the project of poststructuralism (Williams 2005: 2–4). Indeed, that every form of poststructuralist thought is a relentless attempt to contest limits is consistent with the idea that poststructuralism is nonetheless an event with multiple sources and effects. In general, the poststructuralist philosophy of the limit is the uncovering of fixed structures of knowledge, truths and values that belong to certain classical and traditional forms of philosophical and political inquiry. The specificity resides in asking: what kind of limit? For Deleuze, this process of recognising the deeply held assumptions regarding philosophical activity itself (what he calls ‘the dogmatic image of thought’) is the precondition for a new way of thinking about thought. For Foucault, once the idea of ‘Man’ has been erased from the shores of the human sciences then we are able to rethink our relationship to ourselves, outside of the norms they have established through institutional formations. With Derrida we must think at the limits of the texts bequeathed to us through the tradition in order to see the aporia that structure their regimes of meaning. In Cixous, the limits of masculine codes and structures must be exposed in order to explore and experiment with feminine forms of writing that escape the norms of femininity associated with patriarchal dominance. For Lyotard, there is a desire to go beyond the discourse to find the figural. In each of these examples, and many more could be mentioned, the limits are articulated and analysed in the service of creative and critical gestures that expose the contingency of the given and, thereby, the potential it contains for different ways of constituting the relationship between thought and being. Indeed, its positioning in productive relationship to older forms of thought is fundamental to the practices that animate the diversity of poststructuralist thought; a productivity that makes it meaningful to gather these diverse practices under the label poststructuralist. Hence, poststructuralism is not simply against this and for that – once and for all. It is ‘for the affirmation of an inexhaustible productive power of limits’ (Williams 2005: 4). The poststructuralist event opened a new space of critical practice that focused on the limits of existing knowledge, truths and values where ‘pluridisciplinarity’ was the only rule. It is in this sense that we can speak of a poststructuralist event: the foundations of Western knowledge were shifted and questioned in ways particular to the domains from within which each poststructuralist adopted their limit-attitude. The ground underneath our feet has trembled. Such pluridisciplinarity, however, does not mean that critical practices within the poststructuralist event were simply chaotic or inventive for their own sake; rather they were conditioned, in large measure, by their relationship to traditional forms of philosophical inquiry. This can be seen in several

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different respects, as the contributions to this volume make patently clear. Indeed, there was a broad set of other ‘moments’ in the history of thought that dealt with the nature of the limit from which poststructuralists drew inspiration and which they developed from within, so to speak. Existentialism, for instance, was already a radical turning away from ‘traditional philosophy’ and a way of bringing philosophy to bear upon the frontiers of human life – especially in the case of Sartre, who did so much for the idea that a philosopher ought to be a public intellectual rather than a loner in the vacant rooms of libraries reading dusty books.2 Poststructuralism, we find, is not oriented simply toward the negation of theoretical foundations, but rather toward the exploration of new grounds for philosophical and political enquiry; it is involved not simply in the rejection of the tradition of political and philosophical discourse, but more importantly in the articulation and affirmation of alternative lineages that arise from within the tradition itself. (Hardt 1993: ix) In that sense, poststructuralism is a kind of existentialism, it continued and furthered what Sartre’s existentialism and Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology had sought to achieve; to open philosophy to its outside and accept that after Hegel, that is after philosophy had been systematised and after the death of God, theory had to be democratised and opened to a wider field of possibilities (Lawlor 2003). Equally, poststructuralism is a kind of Marxism. We could go so far as to claim, controversially perhaps, that poststructuralists realised what Althusser put forward as one of the crucial tasks of communism, ‘to conquer for science the majority of human sciences’ (Althusser 2001: 5), albeit that this was not done ‘for science’ but for the development of theory generally. For example, Foucault, at the same time that Althusser was writing, was deploring the lack of theorisation of the French Communist Party (PCF) and found commonalities with Althusser in their respective projects (Foucault 1998: 422–3). And in this sense, Althusser’s legacy is still very much present in poststructuralist thought.3 While for Althusser, philosophy is the class struggle in theory (2001: 6, 7), for poststructuralists, theory is the practical realm of critique and reflection that philosophy could not allow since it remained constrained in conservative institutions. While poststructuralists resisted the conservative apparatus of the university and of philosophy as an institution, they also resisted the temptation to provide a clear blueprint for a political revolution or political reforms – by no means were they reformists! They called for a more subtle and nuanced understanding of politics and political praxis; at least partly inspired by Althusser. For

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Althusser, ‘the class struggle’ is a process without end and without a subject; although poststructuralists do not use the expression ‘the class struggle’ since the identification of classes and their ‘consciousness’ does not make sense for them, they agree that the battle against the dominant totalisation is without a subject and, rather, to be understood as an aleatory process.4 In their manifesto-like dialogue, Foucault and Deleuze famously elaborated a critique of the traditional understanding of theory and praxis arguing that theory should either be applied in praxis or that a certain kind of practical experience could be theorised. For them, the relation between theory and practice needed to be thought in a new way, at that time, so that theory would become a multiplicity of local knowledges and practice would turn into ‘the indignity to speak for others’ (Deleuze and Foucault 2004: 208).5 Moreover, one of the primary political limits that poststructuralists sought to work through and beyond was the idea that all contemporary opinion was of the same worth such that thought itself could be reduced to the primacy of consensus that defines parliamentary politics. Poststructuralists did not simply fight in the private domain of things, they are not simply private ironists as Rorty (1989) suggests, rather they all attempted to untangle and diagnose the complex order of the social and the political in ways that problematised the parliamentary gesture. And in this sense, each of the poststructuralist ‘figures’ had a complicated relationship to the political and philosophical tendencies that helped shape twentieth-century thought. This is certainly true of their relationship to Marx and Marxist political thought (Garo 2011; Choat 2010); Simon Choat explores this further in his chapter. Equally, while Caroline Rooney in her chapter presents a compelling argument that poststructuralism is not at the origin of postcolonial theory, she nonetheless points out that all the key poststructuralists were either born abroad, were of foreign origins or taught abroad and this gave them the ability to reflect on the problem of difference and the unthought. While postcolonial thought cannot be simply reduced to an application of poststructuralist thought, it does present a stunning borrowing and extending of some poststructuralist concepts and themes revealing that it was both informed by the postcolonial experience and in turn informed attempts to understand that experience. In a similar way, poststructuralism’s relation to psychoanalysis and phenomenology is more complicated and refined than usually assumed. We know that poststructuralists did not simply reject psychoanalysis and phenomenology, but they worked at ‘renovating psychoanalysis’ (Buchanan 2008: 27–37), and when phenomenology is abandoned by poststructuralists, it is only to avoid it ‘as the only way to truth or essence’ (Williams 2005: 8). The relationship between poststructuralism and phenomenology and psychoanalysis is less a

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break or a rupture than a distancing, a work of deconstruction and ‘renovation’. In these motifs, one can locate the meaning of the poststructuralist event. It was the attempt to work with and beyond the elements of the tradition that had already sought out the limits of institutional philosophy and its political manifestations. Nowhere was this more evident than in its relationship to structuralism; a relationship so internal to its constitution that it is not entirely clear what difference the ‘post’ in poststructuralism really makes. It is to this theme that we now turn.

What is ‘Post’ in Poststructuralism? Saussure is generally credited as establishing the terrain of the structuralist project as one focused on scientific studies of language. The most common interpretation of Saussure argues that he created the foundation for general grammar, also called general linguistics. A certain group of ‘first’ structuralists could be defined as part of a positivist project, one aimed at furthering a productive dialogue between natural and social sciences (Rabouin 2011). The main representatives of this group were the structural linguists Saussure, Chomsky and Greimas, as well as the structural mathematician Bourbaki, and the structural psychologist Jean Piaget; also included in group, though in an ambivalent way, was the ethnologist Lévi-Strauss. Some of the first readings of poststructuralists insisted on their break with structuralism understood in this way. Pitted against the tendency to formalisation within these first structuralists, poststructuralism can seem a united movement aimed at overcoming the temptation to use analytical (or ‘cognitive’) models to map all forms of life. In the 1960s, Piaget, Goldmann, Granger and others believed that a ‘serious’ structuralism (a scientific structuralism) could be opposed to a ‘delirious’ structuralism (or literary structuralism), but as Rabouin argues, this dialogue between structural mathematics and structural philosophy did not happen, and this constitutive opposition between Bourbaki’s algebra and the human sciences of Saussure (or LéviStrauss) was then repeated within mathematics and within human sciences: Bourbakists from the 1930s were ‘radicalised’ by the Bourbakists from the 1960s, such that the first generation of structuralists in the early twentieth century were challenged by a second generation of the 1960s; these were the poststructuralists. Hence today many scholars claim that the seeds for transformations, variations and differences were already there inside structuralism, and that poststructuralism is only a development of the modes of problematising introduced by the early structuralists (Balibar 1997, 2005; Maniglier 2005, 2006).

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If this is the case then how can we recognise poststructuralism and contrast it with structuralism? In most readings of structuralism, the founding text is not Saussure’s Course on General Linguistics (1916) but Lévi-Strauss’s doctoral thesis Elementary Structures of Kinship (1949), since it already offered a reading of Saussure and Jakobson in order to establish structuralism as a method in the social sciences (in this case ethnology). Lévi-Strauss famously writes: The diversity of the historical and geographical modalities of the rules of kinship and marriage have appeared to us to exhaust all possible methods for ensuring the integration of biological families within the social group. We have thus established that superficially complicated and arbitrary rules may be reduced to a small number. There are only three possible elementary kinship structures; these three structures are constructed by means of two forms of exchange; and these two forms of exchange themselves depend upon a single differential characteristic, namely the harmonic or disharmonic character of the regime considered … The progress of our analysis is thus close to that of the phonological linguist. (Lévi-Strauss 1969: 494; our emphasis) This quotation shows Lévi-Strauss’s enthusiasm for the new scientific methods developed in his work, or even other disciplines in the social sciences. While discovering this single derivative rule as the epicentre governing complex social organisations and phenomena, recent studies by Frédéric Keck (Keck 2004, 2008) have shown the break between the early Lévi-Strauss of Elementary Structures of Kinship up to Totemism and The Savage Mind both published in 1962, from his Mythologiques series (1964–71). The 1962 volumes in many respects work as a kind of turning point, which opens the way for his enterprise of radicalising structuralism and is for understanding the decision taken by Lévi-Strauss to turn away from the sensible world to explore the mental structures of different cultures, as well as his increasing retraction to his own self (the comparison with Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whom he very much admired, is striking). Why is it important to come back to Lévi-Strauss to define ‘poststructuralism’? We do not necessarily disagree with the contemporary readings of Lévi-Strauss that include him as part of poststructuralism, or in other words, that value the inner transformations his work underwent, but we believe that Foucault’s, Derrida’s and Deleuze’s readings of Lévi-Strauss, for instance, have really taken his work to a new level of conceptualisation.6 Hence, what defines poststructuralism for us is the second generation of

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structuralism, and this is why we decided not to include Lévi-Strauss, Lacan and Althusser, who wrote before most of the authors we recognise as ‘poststructuralists’. The most common way to distinguish between structuralism and poststructuralism has been to emphasise their different relations with the sciences. Following this argument, structuralism had always been closer to the sciences and structural thought always had the pretension to become a form of scientific thought in its own right. Yet this simplistic and antagonistic reading has been challenged more and more over the past twenty years or so. It was not simply a lack of dialogue between the sciences and human sciences, but rather a non-dialogue, or a cacophony, an excess of voices with a lack of harmony; this does not mean that there was, on the part of the poststructuralists, an absence of knowledge of the contemporary debates in mathematics, physics and biology, or analytical philosophy for that matter. Lyotard was heavily influenced by Frege and Wittgenstein, Foucault knew the work of François Jacob very well, Derrida coined the term ‘intersciences’ and Deleuze was certainly the one most engaged with the debates in mathematics (through his interpretation of Lautman) and biology (through his early reading of and interest in Simondon’s work and the continuity of the living in technical objects). Yet, as Patrice Maniglier recently pointed out, Saussure never wanted to ground a positivist study of linguistics, rather he questioned the very nature of such an enterprise (Maniglier 2006: 45). In this new reading of Saussure, Maniglier demonstrates that Saussure announced already the philosophers of difference – the poststructuralists – by refusing the reductive nature of logical classification and thereby revealing the transformative nature of language. As soon as one speaks, words are changing, and the structure disintegrates. This refutes the simplistic reading of Saussurian linguistics as privileging synchrony over diachrony, but it also entails the ontological treatment of signs and problems from the very beginning of structuralism. For the last few years, Saussure seems to be rediscovered. This is in fact not the first time: his name followed all the turbulences of the history of structuralism, first as the brilliant founder of a new scientific method, Thales of phonology (of Trubetzkoy, Jakobson, Hjelmslev, Martinet, etc.), Galileo of semiology (of Lévi-Strauss, Barthes, Greimas, etc.), author of The Courses on General Linguistics that was considered as the gate to modernity in human sciences; but also on the other hand, as the one who, in his secret research on anagrams, knew best the interminable drift of the signs, the delight and anxiety of ‘deconstruction’, which was

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no more a symbol of the triumphant march of reason but on the contrary of the imminent proximity of madness … (Maniglier 2006: 18) This argument undermines a simplistic understanding of poststructuralism as an overcoming of structuralism, and instead asks us to consider the full nature of the structuralist project, the Saussurian enigmatic life of signs where the words under the words take on a virtual dimension (a similar reading can be found in Normand 2004), or Lévi-Strauss’s early text on Marcel Mauss, where mana is analysed as an empty signifier, ‘fill[ing] a gap between the signifier and the signified’ (Lévi-Strauss 1987: 56). Although structuralism started in the human sciences with linguistics, its development in other disciplines such as anthropology, sociology, psychoanalysis and history demonstrated that what matters is not so much language but signs, and how reality can be coded with signs. The method of ‘reading’ is then to be understood as uncovering the signs residing in everyday practices and everyday speech. For poststructuralism, change is less methodological, and takes an ontological status. This is why when Maniglier argues that to have found less a methodological programme but more an ontology (of signs) (2006: 12–23), we do not contest his important ‘re-writing’ of Saussure’s fragmentary text but nonetheless believe that he is undertaking a poststructuralist reading of Saussure. When for instance Deleuze writes in 1968 that ‘to ground is to metamorphose’ (1994: 172), we should not think of poststructuralism as being opposed to structuralism, nor does it denote an attempt to go beyond or coming after structuralism, but it is a reflection on the limits of positivity. Questioning the limits of positivity led Foucault to find not a metalanguage but positivities in discourses such as natural history, political economy and clinical medicine (Foucault 2002: 142, see also 141). But as Derrida (1992: 191) explained, there was a kind of fetishism in the treatment of epistemology as a project and a method during the structuralist period in 1965 and 1966, with the beginning of the Cahier pour l’analyse. Milner (2008) sees in structuralism a new scientific paradigm as well as a doxa. While recognising the important research that has established these complicated lineages between structuralism and poststructuralism, we want to hold on to the term ‘poststructuralism’, instead of blending it into structuralism, since at the core of poststructuralism is a certain Anglo-American invention and reading. After all, the meaning of any event must be traced subtly through the contexts of reception that shape what occurred. Thus, the problem of defining poststructuralism persists when looking at the voluminous quantity of publications from the 1960s and the 1970s on structuralism

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in France, but also in Germany and in the English-speaking world. One argument that is now accepted is that ‘poststructuralism’ is a certain AngloAmerican reading of French thought from the 1960s and 1970s. Instead of denying this added value, or treating it as an academic by-product, part of the success and the relevance of poststructuralism had to do with its AngloAmerican effect and resonance. Poststructuralism can therefore only be understood as an object when the effects on the Anglo-American academic discourse are traced and recognised, even though sometimes these effects have ended up in fetishism rather than a thorough and rigorous engagement with the poststructuralists, and so become converted into another strand of identity politics.7 The fetishistic version of poststructuralism, often simply called French Theory, has been content with simply repeating slogans and predetermined arguments but rather than using this as reason to discount poststructuralism as inherently problematic it should remind us that the thought of the limit can equally be characterised as a ‘right to problems’ (Deleuze 1994: 168) and this right is central to poststructuralist political thought.8 Even the recent invocations of communism by Alain Badiou and Slavoj Žižek could only be articulated by referring to this right to problems so central to poststructuralism;9 in this sense, it is a communism after poststructuralism. On the other hand, the fetishisation of theory is a false problem, in the sense that it is only the recuperation of radical poststructuralist thought into common sense. Yet this is the problem of poststructuralism that we are facing: the recuperation, the use and misuse of poststructuralism. Not that we could claim a ‘better’ way to know or use poststructuralism, but one cannot deny the misuses and stereotypes poststructuralism has gone through for the past forty years. It is the problem of poststructuralism and this should lead to a better understanding of it. As Deleuze explains: A problem is always reflected in false problems while it is being solved, so that the solution is generally perverted by an inseparable falsity. For example, according to Marx, fetishism is indeed an absurdity … There are those for whom the whole of differenciated social existence is tied to the false problems which enable them to live, and others for whom social existence is entirely contained in the false problems of which they occupy the fraudulent positions, and from which they suffer. (Deleuze 1994: 207–8) But these false problems can only be identified once one does justice to the true problems, and understands their significance. ‘Only problems count, not the solutions’; this stands as a guiding element to poststructuralism,

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by granting problems an ontological status. This results in the significant claim by poststructuralists, against liberalism and Marxism, that there is no way out of problems, that being is a problem, and the promise of final emancipation can only be a mythical discourse. Practical struggle never proceeds by way of the negative but by way of difference and its power of affirmation, and the war of the righteous is for the conquest of the highest power, that of deciding problems by restoring them to their truth, by evaluating that truth beyond the representations of consciousness and the forms of the negative, and by acceding at last to the imperatives on which they depend. (Deleuze 1994: 208) By granting problems an ontological status, Deleuze does not attempt to find a given ontology that politics should follow, but rather he politicises ontology: ‘the job of the Left, whether in or out of power, is to uncover the sort of problem that the Right wants at all costs to hide’ (Deleuze 1995: 127). One of the defining features, therefore, of the poststructuralist event is that since its emergence we are required, if we are to be worthy of the event itself, to diagnose problems and live side by side with them. This is why, in addition to the concept of the event, the concept of problem (and all its variations) should be deemed central to poststructuralists.

The Event of Poststructuralism The notion of ‘event’ is a more adequate word to qualify poststructuralism than ‘moment’. Frédéric Worms (2009) has used the term ‘moment’ to designate a certain method in the history of philosophy. There are moments in the history of French philosophy, he claims, that can be thematically organised and regrouped in terms of philosophers that share common problematics. It is our view, however, that the singularity of poststructuralism is such that the term ‘event’ seems more appropriate. Antoine Compagnon (2011) recently called 1966 the miraculous year in French thought and, indeed, no superlative is enough to qualify the exceptionality of poststructuralist thought; not least because, despite the available riches, a wealth of work still remains to be done. Furthermore, we propose a definition of poststructuralism as an event in thought in the sense poststructuralists gave to the term ‘event’. While not disavowing the distinct lineages that composed the various uses of the term ‘event’ in poststructuralist thought, it is clear that each of the thinkers we focus on treated events as both the appearance of the radically new (never ex nihilo but radically new nonetheless) and, by virtue of such novelty, as

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occurrences that must always be treated as containing an excess in relation to their conditions and manifestations in the present. In this sense, events may have happened but they are also always about ‘to come’, albeit differently. Poststructuralism then can be treated as an event that contains within itself the potential for a ‘poststructuralism to come’; its constitution, we may say, as a live event once more. In today’s ‘conjuncture’ (if we speak with Althusser), we have inherited the set of political and philosophical problems left by the poststructuralists, and part of the rationale of the book is to introduce these problems so that they can be taken up and furthered in the clearest possible way to work in other political and philosophical situations. It was by bearing this in mind that the question about the direct translation of poststructuralism into a real form of politics was asked to Bernard Stiegler at the end of the volume, in an attempt to diagnose the real effects of this group of authors on contemporary society. He agreed on the richness of the conceptual legacy left by these thinkers though he could not help but witness the apparent ‘conceptual disarmament of the new social movements’ of the recent times, the ‘occupy’ movements, from Wall Street to the City in London, and in other highly localised symbolic places of the world’s financial hubs. The call to theorise and the democratisation of theory have at least provided a resurgence of the belief in words and ideas in a cynical world that is too often based on consumption and mindless work. The development of control societies, with surveillance, health and safety paranoia (especially in the United Kingdom), micromanagement of lives and constant monitoring, has asked citizen-consumers to remain increasingly silent and complicit in a becoming-homogeneous environment (what Hardt and Negri called ‘smooth space’, borrowing it from Deleuze and Guattari while displacing its meaning). Smooth space has to be resisted and overturned but not by micro-protest and commodified slogans or signs, but by collective actions. These are the limits of poststructuralism, but Deleuze was perfectly aware of these limits soon after 1968,10 and it almost seems as if nothing has changed since then – at least not for the better. The crushing of unions and the increasing limitation and marginalisation of strikes and protests attest that, on the contrary, the situation has worsened. As Stiegler explains, we are increasingly proletarianised; if we do not know how to protest and strike anymore (even when the university is being privatised under our nose), it is because of our increasing loss of knowledge (savoir-faire, or the know-how of general strikes and demonstrations) and the insufficient care we give to the processes of learning that condition such knowledge. Deleuze in 1990 also discussed the evolution of political resistance:

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It’s true that, even before control societies are fully in place, forms of delinquency or resistance (two different things) are also appearing. Computer piracy and viruses, for example, will replace strikes and what the nineteenth century called ‘sabotage’ (‘clogging’ the machinery). You ask whether control or communication societies will lead to forms of resistance that might reopen the way for a communism understood as the ‘transversal organization of free individuals.’ Maybe, I don’t know. But it would be nothing to do with minorities speaking out. Maybe speech and communication have been corrupted. They’re thoroughly permeated by money – and not by accident but by their very nature. We’ve got to hijack speech. Creating has always been something different from communicating. The key thing may be to create vacuoles of noncommunication, circuit breakers, so we can elude control. (Deleuze 1995: 175) What exactly is involved in creating circuit breakers that elude control cannot be said in advance, but that is the point; Deleuze refused to reify what we call the poststructuralist event, aiming instead to revivify it by inviting us to construct our own problems. This is, we propose, the motif of the poststructuralist event, its signature: problems, real problems, can never be wholly accommodated within the institutions of contemporary life, appropriated by Western rationalism, nor consumed by liberal parliamentary capitalism. In this sense, and in companionship with the contributors to this volume, we announce that the event of poststructuralism is still to come.

Notes 1. Other recent publications chose different perspectives and therefore constructed their objects in different ways. In Schrift (2010a), we find a multiplicity of thinkers that are not included in this volume and could be read alongside this companion. It also includes two chapters by Schrift (2010b) and Nealon (2010), on French Nietzscheanism and the Yale deconstructionist school that are particularly relevant to this present companion. Differently, Elliott and Attridge (2011) present the vitality of theory today against those arguing that the state of the academy has moved beyond theory, but also against those who continue to celebrate the 1970s as the only ‘time of theory’. Finally, in France, Maniglier (2011) insists on the philosophical dimension of the 1960s by including Lévi-Strauss and Althusser (though surprisingly he does not include Lacan, Foucault or the French feminists in his cartography of significant moments: ‘Lévi-Strauss 1962’, ‘Althusser 1965’, ‘Derrida 1967’, ‘Lyotard 1971’). 2. ‘Existentialism is not a philosophy but a label for several widely different revolts against traditional philosophy … the refusal to belong to any school of thought,

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i n t ro d u c t i o n the repudiation of the adequacy of any body of beliefs whatever, and especially of systems, and a marked dissatisfaction with traditional philosophy as superficial, academic, and remote from life – that is the heart of existentialism’ (Kaufmann 1975: 11, 12). Consider, for example, the book series entitled ‘Théorie’ that Althusser edited from 1965 in which he published For Marx, Reading Capital and the work of his students (Badiou, Macherey, Lecourt, Balibar, Rancière). The term ‘theory’ also refers to (or draws from) the work of the Frankfurt School, especially from the 1940s and 1950s, and in this sense, poststructuralism could equally be analysed as a response to the wave of enthusiasm spread by the critical theory of the Frankfurt School (mostly Marcuse, Adorno and Horkheimer). Bernard Stiegler also shares this argument, as evident in his interview included at the end of this volume. In more recent literature we note that Eagleton’s distinction between theory and philosophy seems inherited from Althusser and Althusserianism as well as poststructuralism. ‘The critique of universal necessity implied in dialectical materialism opens the path, in Althusser and Deleuze, to a valorisation of the specific and fragmented regions of political activity where the becoming of conflicts as well as the identity of the actors obey variable laws that are never predetermined. In raising totalisation as their common enemy, Althusser and Deleuze wish to leave to the multitudes the chance to self-determine and to express their constitutive powers independently from all external representations existing in hegemonic regimes’ (Beaulieu 2003: 174, our translation). This text, ‘Intellectuals and Power’, echoes Adorno and Horkheimer’s attempt in 1956 to conceptualise in new ways the relation between theory and practice: ‘It can be seen that there is something deluded about the separation of theory and practice. Separating these two elements is actually ideology’ (Adorno and Horkheimer 2011: 70, see also 75–81). See for example Eduardo Viveiros de Castro’s recent illuminating commentary on Deleuze and Guattari’s reading of Lévi-Strauss in Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus (Viveiros de Castro 2010). ‘Clearly, at this point the philosophy of difference must be wary of turning into the discourse of beautiful souls: differences, nothing but differences, in a peaceful coexistence in the Idea of social places and functions … but the name of Marx is sufficient to save it from this danger’ (Deleuze 1994: 208). Derrida shares this warning: ‘I did not read [Marx] enough. No one reads enough Marx’ (1992: 195). Derrida for instance once affirmed, ‘I think good politics never comes from a limitation on questioning or on the demand of thought’ (Derrida 1992: 197). For instance, Žižek wrote ‘more than a solution to the problems we are facing today, communism is itself the name of a problem’ (2009: 129). ‘As we know, the revolutionary problem today is to find some unity in our various struggles without falling back on the despotic and bureaucratic organization of

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the party or State apparatus: we want a war-machine that would not recreate a State apparatus, a nomadic unity in relation with the Outside, that would not recreate the despotic internal unity’ (Deleuze 2004b: 260).

References Adorno, Theodor and Max Horkheimer (2011), Towards a New Manifesto, trans. Rodney Livingstone, London: Verso. Althusser, Louis (2001), ‘Philosophy as a revolutionary weapon’, in Louis Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster, New York, NY: Monthly Review Press, pp. 1–9. Balibar, Étienne (1997), ‘Le Struturalisme: méthode ou subversion des sciences sociales?’ in Structure, système, champ et théorie du sujet, ed. Tony Andréani and Menahem Rosen, Paris: L’Harmattan, pp. 223–36. Balibar, Étienne (2005), ‘Le Structuralisme: une destitution du sujet?’, Revue de métaphysique et de morale, 25: 1, 5–22. Beaulieu, Alain (2003), ‘La politique de Gilles Deleuze et le matérialisme aléatoire du dernier Althusser’, Actuel Marx, 34: 2, 161–74. Benoist, Jean-Marie ([1975] 1980), La Révolution structurale, Paris: Denoël/ Gonthier. Buchanan, Ian (2008), Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus, London: Continuum. Choat, Simon (2010), Marx Through Post-Structuralism: Lyotard, Derrida, Foucault, Deleuze, London: Continuum. Compagnon, Antoine (2011), ‘1966 Annus mirabilis’, Collège de France lectures, available online at http://www.college-de-france.fr/default/EN/all/lit_cont/ audio_video.jsp. Cros, Edmond (2003), ‘Redéfinir la notion d’idiologème’, in La Sociocritique, Paris: L’Harmatthan, pp. 161–81. Deleuze, Gilles (1994), Difference and Repetition, London: Athlone. Deleuze, Gilles (1995), Negotiations 1972–1990, trans. Martin Joughin, New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Deleuze, Gilles (2004a), ‘On Nietzsche and the image of thought’, in Gilles Deleuze, Desert Islands and other Texts 1953–1973, ed. David Lapoujade, trans. Michael Taormina, Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e), pp. 135–42. Deleuze, Gilles (2004b), ‘Nomadic thought’, in Gilles Deleuze, Desert Islands and other Texts 1953–1973, ed. David Lapoujade, trans. Michael Taormina, Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e), pp. 252–61. Deleuze, Gilles and Michel Foucault (2004), ‘Intellectuals and power’, in Gilles Deleuze, Desert Islands and other Texts 1953–1973, ed. David Lapoujade, trans. Michael Taormina, Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e), pp. 206–13. Derrida, Jacques (1992), ‘Politics and friendship’ (Interview with Michael Sprinker), in E. Ann Kaplan and Michael Sprinker (eds), The Althusserian Legacy, London: Verso, pp. 183–232.

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Dews, Peter (2007), The Logic of Disintegration. Poststructuralist Thought and the Claims for Critical Theory, London: Verso. Elliott, Jane and Derek Attridge (eds) (2011), Theory after ‘Theory’, London: Routledge. ffrench, Patrick (2006), ‘The fetishization of theory and the prefixes “post” and “after” ’, Paragraph, 29: 3, 105–14. Foucault, Michel (1970), The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, New York, NY: Vintage Books. Foucault, Michel (1998), ‘Return to history’, in Michel Foucault, Aesthetics, Method and Epistemology: Essential Works of Foucault 1954–1984, Volume 2, ed. James D. Faubion, trans. Robert Hurley and others, New York, NY: New Press, pp. 419–32. Foucault, Michel (2002), Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith, London: Routledge. Garo, Isabelle (2011), Foucault, Deleuze, Althusser & Marx. La politique dans la philosophie, Paris: Demopolis. Genette, Gérard (1966), Figures 1, Paris: Le Seuil. Hardt, Michael (1993), Gilles Deleuze: An Apprenticeship in Philosophy, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Kambouchner, Gérard (2009), ‘Lévi-Strauss and the question of humanism’, The Cambridge Companion to Lévi-Strauss, ed. Boris Wiseman, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kaufmann, Walter (1975), Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre, revised and expanded, New York, NY: Penguin. Keck, Frédéric (2004), Lévi-Strauss et la pensée sauvage, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Keck, Frédéric (2008), Claude Lévi-Strauss. Une introduction, Paris: Pocket. Lawlor, Leonard (2003), Thinking Through French Philosophy. The Being of the Question, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Lévi-Strauss, Claude ([1949, in French] 1969), The Elementary Structures of Kinship, trans. J. H. Belle, J. R. von Sturmer and R. Needham, Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Lévi-Strauss, Claude (1987), Introduction to the Work of Marcel Mauss, trans. F. Baker, London: Routledge. Maniglier, Patrice (2000), ‘L’humanisme interminable de Lévi-Strauss’, Les temps modernes, 609, 216–41. Maniglier, Patrice (2005), ‘Des us et des signes. Lévi-Strauss : philosophie pratique’, Revue de métaphysique et de morale, 45: 1, 89–108. Maniglier, Patrice (2006), La vie énigmatique des signes: Saussure et la naissance du structuralisme, Paris: Léo Scheer. Maniglier, Patrice (ed.) (2011), Le moment philosophique des années 1960 en France, Paris: Presses Universitaire de France. Matonti, Frédérique (2005), ‘La politisation du structuralisme. Une crise dans la théorie’, Raisons politiques, 18: 2, 49–71.

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Milner, Jean-Claude (2008), Le Périple structural: Figures et paradigme, Paris:Verdier. Nealon, Jeffrey T. (2010), ‘Deconstruction and the Yale School of Literary Theory’, in Alan D. Schrift (ed.), The History of Continental Philosophy, Volume 6: Poststructuralism and Critical Theory’s Second Generation, Durham: Acumen. Normand, Claudine (2004), ‘System, arbitrariness, value’, in Carol Sanders (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Saussure, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 88–104. Pouillon, Jean (2002), ‘Le Structuralisme aujourd’hui’, L’Homme, 164: 4, 9–16 [originally published in 1983 in Revue des Sciences morales et politiques]. Rabouin, David (2011), ‘Structuralisme et comparatisme en sciences humaines et en mathématiques: un malentendu?’, in Patrice Maniglier (ed.), Le Moment philosophique des années 1960 en France, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, pp. 37–57. Rorty, Richard (1989), Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ross, Kristin (2002), May ’68 and its Afterlives, London: Chicago University Press. Schrift, Alan D. (ed.) (2010a), The History of Continental Philosophy, Volume 6: Poststructuralism and Critical Theory’s Second Generation, Durham: Acumen. Schrift, Alan D. (2010b), ‘French Nietzscheanism’, in Alan D. Schrift (ed.), The History of Continental Philosophy, Volume 6: Poststructuralism and Critical Theory’s Second Generation, Durham: Acumen. Smith, Daniel W. (2011), ‘Flow, code and stock: a note on Deleuze’s political philosophy’, Deleuze Studies, 5: supplement, 36–55. Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo (2010), ‘Intensive filiation and demonic alliance’, in Casper Brunn Jensen and Kjetil Rödje (eds), Deleuzian Intersections: Science, Technology, Anthropology, Oxford: Berghahn Books, pp. 219–54. Wahl, François ([1968] 1973), Qu’est-ce que le structuralisme? Vol. 5: La Philosophie, Paris: Le Seuil. White, Stephen K. (1991), Politics and Postmodernism, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Williams, James (2005), Understanding Poststructuralism, Stocksfield: Acumen. Worms, Frédéric (2009), La philosophie en France au XXe siècle: Moments, Paris: Gallimard. Žižek, Slavoj (2009), First as Tragedy, then as Farce, London: Verso.

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Pa r t I E m e r ge n c e

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In Chapter 1, ‘Poststructuralism and Modern European Philosophy’, Lumsden emphasises the connection between poststructuralism and postKantian idealism, Hegel in particular. Key here is Heidegger’s reading of the history of philosophy and how it has, implicitly and explicitly, functioned as the interpretative frame through which poststructuralism itself approaches the history of philosophy. This, for Lumsden, explains why Hegel, at least in the case of Deleuze and Derrida, is the confluence and culmination of all the problematic strains that run through modern philosophy. In Chapter 2, ‘From Marxism to Poststructuralism’, Choat shifts the focus away from Hegel to his most celebrated student Marx, showing how poststructuralism is neither pro- nor anti-Marx, but rather, expresses an endless confrontation with, discussion on, and reinterpretation of Marx and Marxism. Arguing that there is a fragmentation of Marxism that is both a condition and an effect of its use by poststructuralism, Choat claims that attempts to portray poststructuralism as a rejection of Marxism are deeply flawed: to the contrary, Marxism should be considered a crucial influence on poststructuralism, and even where it is critical, poststructuralism offers an illuminating and innovative reading of Marxism. In this respect, poststructuralism thus implores us both to rethink Marxism and to acknowledge its continued relevance. In the third chapter, ‘From Structuralism to Poststructuralism’, Lundy aims to outline the significance of what he calls ‘the image of structuralism’ and how that image allows for a fuller understanding of the shift from structuralism to poststructuralism. However, this, as Lundy points out and clearly shows, is a rather problematic enterprise. For if we are to make sense of the shift from structuralism to poststructuralism, and if we are to make sense of the shifts and movements between poststructuralism and any other

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‘ism’ (German Idealism, Marxism, Postmodernism or whatever), then the manner in which we make sense will itself require analysis and critique. In this regard, Lundy’s chapter explicitly and helpfully brings into focus some important and broader questions (questions already implicit in the previous two chapters): namely, what is it that drives us to think about and theorise the emergence of poststructuralism in the way we do, and what is the significance of the notion of poststructuralism for us today? This is a question that we will again pick up on in the final and concluding chapters.

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Chapter 1 Po s t s t r u c t u r a l i s m a n d M o d e r n E u ro p e a n P h i l o s o p hy Simon Lumsden

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The relation of poststructuralism to modern philosophy is an enormous topic. The sheer number of poststructuralist figures and the even more diverse range of modern philosophers make it difficult to do justice to the complex and diverse nature of the relation. One thing that is central to poststructuralist thought, as it is in the other great strand of twentieth-century European thought, hermeneutics, is a mindfulness that the concepts and approaches it has developed cannot be understood in isolation from the philosophical tradition. Gadamer sees his thought on a continuum with the tradition; his own philosophical innovations have to be understood as an ongoing conversation with prior developments (Gadamer 1997). Moreover, that tradition creates the philosophical ground framing all contemporary discussion and interpretation. Poststructuralism does not see itself as on a continuum with the philosophical tradition in the way that Gadamer’s hermeneutics does, nevertheless it recognises philosophical and literary precursors and accepts the Heideggerian argument as to the fundamentally embedded character of all understanding. This is not to say that poststructuralism simply appropriates Heidegger’s hermeneutical schema in the way that Gadamer does. This is certainly not the case. However, poststructuralism does accept Heidegger’s rejection of there being some kind of metaphysically given way in which the world is and also Heidegger’s rejection of a subject who could distance herself or make transparent all the conditions that frame her understanding. That is, for poststructuralism as with philosophical hermeneutics, there is no point outside of the discursive horizon in which we find ourselves from which one could take an objective or reflective view and pass judgement on ourselves and the world unencumbered by history and language. Such reflective distance is impossible. However, poststructuralism adopts a number of distinctive strategies in relation to the tradition and of

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course presents a different view of experience, knowledge and tradition to the standard hermeneutical approach. Where the standard modern approach to its own history aspires to disclose to ourselves the previously disguised conditions that make us and our world what it is, the poststructuralist view is neither concerned with a transparent self-understanding nor does it think this could be possible. Foucault, for example, takes the Kantian claim that there is a set of universal and necessary conditions, to which we could appeal in order to explain ourselves, to be exclusive of a variety of alternative histories and pathologies that are in fact able to give a much better account of the full richness of our historicity. Derrida, while less concerned with the multiplicities of our historicity, shares a similar questioning of the ideals of a unitary and comprehensive knowledge, and strives at every turn to show how that programme is always undermined by what it excludes, by determinations that the philosophical systems do not have the resources to explain and which expose the limits of thought. His is a philosophical programme that announces the passing of philosophy as a grand unitary and systematic project. Deleuze too offers a counter-narrative to this grand metaphysical project that fits neatly within the poststructuralist fold because he has similar concerns about the philosophical tradition. However, his approach shares much more in common with standard metaphysics than Foucault or Derrida to the extent that his project is concerned to give expression to the multiplicity of being. He develops a set of concepts, stripped of the anthropocentricism of modern philosophy, which attempt to capture being in its diversity and multiplicity.1 He presents a philosophical programme that is not stable and coherent but rather that is able to capture the openness, movement, flow and heterogeneity of thought. In so doing he sets up the conditions by which his project can be genuinely creative rather than reactive. What all these thinkers have in common is a strategic relation to the tradition. None have the modernist hubris that would take their view to be the next step in the linear progress of history’s self-correcting path. That is, poststructuralism considers the canonical thinkers and concepts that have defined modern philosophy to be unsurpassable in such a straightforwardly modern manner. The relation they take to the tradition is ambivalent, playful, supplemental, while at the same time undermining the coherence and integrity of the modern narrative. Understanding the relation of poststructuralism to modern philosophy requires the exploration of the poststructuralist reception of some of the key themes that run through the modern tradition: self-consciousness, autonomy, self-determination, reason, tradition, identity, difference and

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historical teleology. Rather than examining the nature of the relation of poststructuralism to the modern tradition as such for the purposes of this chapter I have instead concentrated on the relation of poststructuralism to post-Kantian idealism, and Hegel in particular. There are a number of reasons for this, practically, to make this a manageable project, but there are also good reasons for focusing on the relation of poststructuralism to German idealism. First, Kant and German idealism from the perspective of poststructuralism represent the culmination of modern philosophy and metaphysics; secondly, because the debates, tensions and dualisms (the concept-intuition distinction, the limits of reason, the rational legitimation of norms and so on) that emerge in the wake of Kant’s critical thought are the defining problematics for much of what follows in both German idealism and poststructuralism. However, to understand why poststructuralism takes German idealism as both the fulfilment and the denouement of metaphysics cannot be told without discussing the influence of Heidegger.2 It is the contention of this chapter that Heidegger’s reading of the history of philosophy is for the most part the interpretative frame through which poststructuralism approaches the history of philosophy and explains why Hegel, at least in the case of Deleuze and Derrida, is the confluence and culmination of all the problematic strains that run through modern philosophy. Despite the diversity of approaches of poststructuralism there is a common ground. My approach in examining this relation has been threefold: to focus on modernity itself as a defining problem for poststructuralist thought, secondly to examine the relation of key poststructuralist thinkers to Kant and German idealism, and thirdly, an examination of the critique of the subject. This latter point brings together the previous two points since the role subjectivity plays is peculiarly modern. What modernity considers meaningful is not the given or a world created by God but a meaningfulness which is always subject relative. The authoritative subject is the way the enlightenment anchors meaning in a world it has set in motion and stripped of all its pre-modern certainties. As we will see, the reason this critique of the metaphysics of the subject is the defining frame through which poststructuralism approaches modern philosophy is because of the influence of Heidegger.

Enlightenment and Disenchantment Enlightenment thought is commonly argued to have disenchanted the world.3 It put to rest forever the idea that there was a given cosmic order that in and of itself gave meaning to nature and human life. Nature became

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quite literally meaningless in this context, stripped of any teleology or divinely ordained organisation it comes to be understood instead for the empirical sciences and much of philosophy as just the causal play of forces. In contemporary philosophy it is often characterised as the ‘space of causes’.4 The disenchantment of nature and the enlightenment challenge to the established orthodoxies in social, political and religious life did not automatically produce a new authority able to take the place of traditional authorities. The cultivation of an alternative and unifying authority was the great challenge of the enlightenment project, without which a malaise of scepticism and nihilism might be the only outcome of the undermining of established authority. Only reason was put forward as capable of giving any meaning or structure to the natural world and human life itself. But the authority of reason was simply assumed. The standards by which it sought to legitimate its authority – self-determined freedom, causation, science, coherence, universality and so on – were not reflectively established as the standard bearers of secular truth. It was not until Kant that the authority of reason itself was critically examined. He attempted to place reason under the same kind of critical lens with which the enlightenment had examined everything else. The enlightenment had released belief, norms, values and the basis of judgement from their secure mooring in the established orthodoxies of religion and tradition. However, in order for the enlightenment’s knowledge claims to be justified as well as the capacity for reason to establish moral claims, reason itself had to be self-authorising. That is, reason had to be able, by its own resources, to reflectively establish its own authority and claims. Reason in short had to be self-grounding. Enlightenment reason had set us adrift from faith, tradition and dogmatic authority but it had not yet shown that it could secure its own claims. The enlightenment had removed the foundations of belief systems, and had in effect set the world in motion, but the disenchanted world had to be anchored in reason without which the enlightenment claims for freedom would be ungrounded and human life would be forever at sea. Kant’s critical philosophy attempted the self-grounding of reason itself as the way to solve this problem. Reason for many early modern and enlightenment figures paradoxically was simply assumed to be able to make sense of the natural order. Early modern thinkers had in effect argued that there was a given way in which the world was that reason had access to and over which reason had epistemic authority. Kant made no such assumption. For Kant reason could only make such a claim if it was itself self-grounding and aware of its own limits. Only then could reason claim for itself the capacity to ground the categories by which we make judgements and the norms of our social world.

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Reason’s capacity for self-legitimation has become central to modernity’s own self-understanding (Pippin 1991). It is not the place here for a detailed examination of these legitimation claims and especially not of the complex means by which Kant claimed reason, conceptuality and normativity could be self-authorising. The important issue is that he thought reason, concepts and norms had to be able to ground themselves without appeal to anything beyond their human determination. The project of expanding and legitimating the character of self-determined freedom, which underwrites the enlightenment and idealist programme, was taken up by Fichte and Hegel (see Pinkard 2002). As we will see shortly, poststructuralism’s dissatisfaction with their more robust articulation of self-determination was instrumental in defining its philosophical identity. Despite its disenchantment of nature and the questioning of established beliefs, the enlightenment’s metaphysical and epistemological assessment of the world was continuous with pre-modern thought in so far as it also still seemed to assume the idea of an ordered whole. It is the methodological, ethical and metaphysical features of that whole that poststructuralism contests. Despite the German idealist transformation of the enlightenment project poststructuralism still takes its concerns to be continuous with the traditional metaphysical assumption that there is an ordered whole. German idealism simply shifts the metaphysical perspective from the object to the subject. The way reason, the whole and its legitimation were conceived precluded difference, singularity, grace, otherness and so on. There were of course precursors to this poststructuralist critique of modernity. The exclusivity of the enlightenment and Kantian approaches, which appeared to allow for nothing other than a rational and human determination of the world, had been challenged by Romanticism, especially in the thought of Schelling and Jacobi (Beiser 1987). The romantics offered a comprehensive and cogent contestation of core elements of the enlightenment programme. The romantic critique of the enlightenment is not for the most part a direct reference point for poststructuralism, though it does have a direct influence on poststructuralism through Heidegger.5 Romanticism accepted many of the core innovations of Kantianism; for example, they rejected empiricism on essentially Kantian grounds: the sensed world could not be known in its immediacy (Larmore 1996). While the romantic view of life, nature, society and state challenges the Kantian view it does so without making appeal to a natural given or by invoking a pre-modern harmony or order. The romantics contested the centrality of autonomy, for them the focus on a rational self-determining subject as the sole domain of freedom was asserted at the price of belonging and being

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at home. The enhancement of individualism that is the result of modern freedom comes at the price of our alienation from history, culture and nature. Romanticism proposes a new ideal of home and of a harmonious life as a way of overcoming this alienation and of reclaiming the diverse non-rational ways in which we are embedded in the world. Our allegiances to various forms of life, norms and values – or to put it otherwise, the various ways in which we orientate ourselves in and towards the world – cannot be understood as rational choices or acts of rational self-legitimation (Larmore 1996: 38–9). Moreover the focus on autonomy appeared to reject forms of life or ways of being-in-the-world that did not accord with abstract rational principles. The romantics wanted to reclaim and reassert the value of shared forms of life that were not and could not be rationally legitimated in this sense. While Romanticism is not one of the sustaining traditions of poststructuralism many of its core concerns do resonate with the poststructuralist critique of the philosophical tradition. The romantic concern with homecoming has a political expression in the way it tries to reclaim human belonging by seeking to align the individual to the nation state and tradition. Poststructuralism would contest this strategy as a viable or desirable corrective to the homelessness of modernity. The irony, plurality, scepticism about progress and self-determination as well as and their sensitivity to the nonrational nature of much decision-making (which have to be seen as for the most part embodied in and motivated by tradition and community and not rational choices) shares much in common with poststructuralist thought. It is however Heidegger’s thought above all that frames the poststructuralist orientation to the modern philosophical tradition.

Heidegger and the Critique of the Subject A number of figures challenged this ordering and unifying of the world in its enlightenment and idealist trajectory. Nietzsche and Kierkegaard are the towering nineteenth-century critics of enlightenment and German idealist thought. Both of them are central to rendering problematic many of modernity’s ideals. Nietzsche in particular is essential to the development of the poststructuralist counter-narrative to the standard modern philosophical self-understanding and especially in the development of the form this alternative mode of philosophical inquiry takes. While Nietzsche has been a figure of ongoing inspiration for poststructuralist thought the most potent figure in determining the poststructuralist understanding of the philosophical tradition is Heidegger. His thought, especially for deconstruction and

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Deleuze but one can also see this in Foucault,6 provides the most comprehensive, sustained and systematic critique of the philosophical tradition, as well as a determined path for its transformation. Heidegger’s criticism of the philosophical tradition is explicit in Derrida, while Deleuze’s indebtedness is acknowledged but is less explicit.7 Before undertaking a more general discussion of the relation of poststructuralism to the tradition in the next section I want first to give some explanation for why the critique of the subject becomes such a defining problematic for poststructuralism. Three important theoretical developments in the nineteenth and the early twenieth centuries began a wholesale destabilising and interrogation of the modern subject. Poststructuralism draws all three strands together in the development of its own critique of the subject, which is one of the centrepieces of its intellectual innovation and it is also one of the defining lenses through which it sees its relation to the philosophical tradition. Structuralism responded to the self-determining subject of modernity by arguing that it could not be the locus of semantic authority since meaning was determined by linguistic structures over which the subject could have neither transparent understanding nor control. The structures that provide unity to the various semantic fields (texts, discourse, speech and so on) could not be understood as products of a self-determining subject. While structuralism had abandoned the subject as a way to escape the problems of metaphysics it had not however banished the logic of metaphysics, the idea of there being a fixed, unifying and coherent structure that could be discovered with the appropriate ‘scientific’ method. Banishing the subject was not therefore enough, indeed despite the displacement of the subject as the centre of meaning determination the issue of there being some given way in which the world was that could be explained was not abandoned. Poststructuralism argued that structuralism simply preserved the defects of metaphysics but without a subject. That is, the structuralist programme had simply replaced the determining metaphysical subject with a determining systematic centre that structures all meaning. Structuralism had responded to the subjectivism of modernity by asserting non-subjective structures of meaning but from the poststructuralist point of view the subjectless system it described had simply transposed the stability of the modern subject into a wider system of meaning determination. Against this position poststructuralism challenges the very idea of systematicity and the assumption of there being a determining unified centre at all.8 The second intellectual strand to undermine the cogency of the modern subject emanated from Nietzsche and Freud. This critique took hold much more comprehensively within philosophy and was ultimately a far more

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potent critique of the subject than structuralism.9 The basis of this critique centred on the reflective character of the Cartesian subject, about which we will have more to say in the next section. It questioned the underlying assumption that a subject could understand itself transparently. Freud and Nietzsche described determinations of subjectivity, drives and life forces, that were determinative of human subjectivity but which could not be understood as self-determined achievements and were certainly not aspects of the self over which it could have anything like transparent self-understanding. Structuralism had offered an alternative to the authoritative subject of modernity, which had proposed a systematised structure of meaning systems that was just as tyrannical and exclusive as the enlightenment model of subjectivity that it sought to replace. Nevertheless, structuralism (despite its limits), Freud and Nietzsche had already provided powerful arguments for the displacement of subjectivity. Prima facie it would seem that this critique did not need reasserting and yet the problem of the subject has been one of the defining issues of poststructuralism. Why the critique of subjectivity rears its head so cogently in poststructuralism cannot be understood without understanding Heidegger’s influence on poststructuralist thought, since for the most part his thought is instrumental in framing the poststructuralist relation to the tradition. Clearly Nietzsche, Freud and key structuralists like Saussure are important in framing the response of poststructuralism to the traditional model of subjectivity (Gutting 2001); it is however Heidegger’s thought that is pivotal in explaining why the critique of the subject becomes such a central issue in poststructuralism. The emergence of the critique of the subject has to be understood in the context of the poststructuralist confrontation with the logic of idealism and a set of problems poststructuralism took to be endemic to metaphysical thought, all of which have their origin in Heidegger’s thought. It is the range, force and rigour of Heidegger’s examination of modern subjectivity that is central to understanding why the poststructuralist critique has caused a crisis in modern subjectivity. This formidable and sustained critique is critical to poststructuralism, since the way he frames the problem of metaphysics and particularly its inability to think the meaning of being, is attributed to the way subjectivity is conceived in modern philosophy. The metaphysics of subjectivity is taken by poststructuralism as emblematic of the failures and limits of the philosophical tradition. In order to understand just why Heidegger’s thought is so central to the poststructuralist’s interpretation of the tradition and in the development and projection of their own more specific concerns we need to look briefly at Heidegger’s treatment of the metaphysics of the subject.

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For Heidegger, to put it very bluntly, philosophy is concerned with the examination of the meaning of being, specifically the being of beings (Seiendes). His approach in Being and Time is primarily occupied with a revolutionary and detailed examination of the character of human existence and the conditions that make that existence possible. The text is not concerned with describing the diverse forms of human existence, but rather with describing the distinctive way in which human existence is defined by the questioning of the meaning of being. In order to capture the ontologically appropriate horizon by which to describe this uniquely human mode of existence Heidegger first has to clear the decks of inadequate and corrupt approaches to understanding being. Pre-modern philosophy, in both Antiquity and Medieval philosophy understood being as substance.10 Substance in this sense is the way in which entities (beings) are in themselves. Accordingly, being and substance come to be understood as cognate terms, though substance preserves its sense as the ground that makes beings or what is (Seiendes)11 possible. For pre-modern metaphysics everything is an expression of an underlying substance, which it is the job of philosophy to discern. The primary issue here is that the meaning of being comes to be understood in terms of substance, ultimately culminating, as we will see, in Hegel’s claim of substance as subject. The founding myth of modern philosophy is that Descartes’ philosophical innovations mark a new era and represent a radical break with previous philosophy. His scepticism, the grounding of the system on the cogito, and the scientific method are all supposed to mark a new beginning, a beginning that sets itself up by marking all previous philosophy as dogmatic metaphysics. Heidegger contests the history of modernity’s own self-understanding. Descartes’ thought, he argues, does not mark a radical new beginning. The ontological concepts Descartes employed were continuous with and drawn from his pre-modern forebears such as Duns Scotus and Aquinas. The significance of the Cartesian innovation is really just a shift in emphasis rather than a revolutionary reorientation of thought. The Cartesian approach accentuates the distinction between subject and object, that is, between thought and the extended object. In pre-modern thought subjectum (hupokeimenon) meant: that about which an assertion is concerned. The subjectum was not explicitly tied to an ego or self. The decisive shift that Descartes makes is that subjectum becomes the subject, a subject that is marked by being the determiner of the meaning of being. Descartes’ thought initiates this reconfiguration of the subject-object relation by placing the subject at the centre of all experience and meaning. The rise of the modern subject brought with it the emergence of representational

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thinking, which becomes for Heidegger the mark of modernity. In modern philosophy what is has meaning only by virtue of being made available for a subject as a representation (Heidegger 2002). This representational model of mind assumes there is some non-cognitive domain of objects (the external world) that is represented in the non-sensual internal workings of the mind as ideas, laws and so on (Derrida 1982a). Kant’s thought, as Heidegger understands it, is decisive in the continuation, indeed the proliferation of this approach. Kant’s Copernican revolution places the knowing subject at the very centre of the universe. His approach to the self-world relation defines much of subsequent philosophy. When we first began our consideration of the Kantian analysis of the ego, we saw that he defines the ego as subjectum in the sense of hupokeimenon, that which lies present there for determinations. In conformity with the ancient view of being, beings are understood fundamentally as being extant. Ousia, that which is in the strict and proper sense, is what is in its own sense available, pro-duced, present constantly for itself, lying present there, the hupokeimenon, subjectum, substance. (Heidegger 1982: 147–8) While there are moments in Kant’s thought where Heidegger thinks he almost achieves insight into the nature of Dasein, he is, however, incapable of developing his insights because his thought is weighed down by a residual Cartesian approach to being, which explains experience entirely in terms of a knowing subject and a knowable substance. The quoted passage is a compressed summary of many of Heidegger’s historical and linguistic preoccupations. But the salient issue for our concern is that it indicates the features of both the philosophical tradition and the subject that poststructuralism adopts in the development of their own key concerns and in their own critique of the philosophical tradition. Heidegger’s complex critique of metaphysics and the philosophical tradition has come to be described as the metaphysics of the subject. This label is a short-hand way of referring to the philosophical historical process by which the object comes to be defined as substance, a substance that is determined only in relation to a knowing I. Clearly there is not an assumed identity of subject and object in this relation. The object (Gegenstand) that stands over and against the subject is not something that is known immediately as it is in itself nor is it something set up as simply an expression of the subject. The object must have an otherness without which it could not be over and against the subject but would be identical to it. Nevertheless the ‘otherness’ of the object is determined

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only in so far as it relates to the subject, that is, by how it is determined by the subject. This model of the subject is the base around which many of the core modern concepts of philosophy are built, notably spontaneity and self-determination. For poststructuralism this stable and reflective subject is synonymous with the culmination of metaphysics and it is Hegel’s thought above all that epitomises that tradition. Poststructuralism has Heidegger to thank for this image of thought of Hegel as the figure for whom all the systematising and subjectivising tendencies of the philosophical tradition reach their apotheosis (Heidegger 1998). The representational approach to mindedness brings with it an attendant view of knowledge and of the subject. The relation of subject to object is by virtue of its Cartesian ancestry framed in terms of a knowing relation. This is discussed at length in the early sections of Being and Time, in which Cartesianism is criticised for conceiving the subject-object relation exclusively as knower and known. The way of being of the Cartesian subject, the sum of the cogito, was one of knowing. This is carried into subsequent developments in the tradition as the defining feature of the subject: reason, principles and categories are all now tied to the knowing subject and not to being. Kant has a strategic role to play in the transformation of this subject. While Heidegger has far from a simply condemnatory view of him, in the end Kant is still but a step on the way to Hegel. In the philosophy of Descartes, the ego becomes the authoritative subjectum, i.e., that which already lies before. However, this subject is first taken hold of in the right way – namely in the Kantian sense, transcendentally and completely, i.e., in the sense of subjective idealism, when the whole structure and movement of subjectivity of the subject unfolds and is taken up into absolute self-knowing. In knowing itself as this knowing that conditions all objectivity, the subject is, as this knowing, the absolute itself. (Heidegger 1998: 325) Hegel develops Kant’s apperceptive subject, about which we will have more to say shortly. In apperception experience is necessarily framed by the structure of human cognition such that there is no way in which the object can be considered as contributing anything salient to the objectivity of experience. The objectivity, or what can be claimed to be known of any object, is necessarily conceptual and the product of human mindedness. For Heidegger, Hegel’s absolute knowing takes this view to the next step: all of being is made available or present to the subject in such a way that the object contributes nothing. Objects only are in so far as they are known.

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Hegel’s core concepts such as the dialectic are all developments from this over-inflated self-consciousness (Heidegger 1998: 325). Deleuze describes this as the dogmatic image of thought. It is a metaphysical trajectory from Descartes to Hegel that understands being only in terms of a very narrow range of concepts, which it imposes on the world, and it is capable only of recognising these concepts in the world. It is dogmatic because it can only recognise in the world, which is supposed to be other to it, what it itself has produced. By so doing Deleuze argues that it is cut off from the empirical world and difference (Deleuze 1994: 130–8). Deleuze and Derrida take from Heidegger many of the specifics of his critique of the tradition and especially of Hegel, but what marks the rise of poststructuralism is a claim that the animating concepts of modernity have run their course, that the defining concepts of modernity, dialectic, autonomy, self-determination, self-consciousness and so on, are indicative of a shape of life grown old, of a set of concepts that are no longer adequate for post-1968 Europe. Part of the difficulty of the poststructuralist programme is that while those concepts are indicative of a form of spirit whose best days have past, nevertheless modernity is not past and to think it could be overcome and supplanted by a new set of concepts would never escape from the modernist assumptions of self-correction and progress. Accordingly, the strategy of poststructuralism is to contest the core ideas of modernity by undermining the exclusivity of their claims to authority. It does this not by positioning itself as the next philosophical era that corrects the prior one but by a supplementing of the existing concepts with a new suite of concepts and by showing that the putative coherence of this philosophical programme presupposes a suite of concepts and relations that undermine its coherence and the universality of its claims. It also brings to light a set of discarded concepts that the tradition has used to construct its own image of itself and employs certain ‘minor writings’ that both supplement and contest modernity’s own self-understanding.

German Idealism and Poststructuralism One of the defining motifs of poststructuralism is its contestation of core idealist concepts. The reason that Hegel in particular is such an important philosopher can in part be told biographically. If Alexander Kojève and Jean Wahl had in the 1930s given Hegel respectability as a counter to the dominant neo-Kantianism of the era it was Jean Hyppolite who used Hegel to put French philosophy on a new post-war path (see Butler 1987; Roth 1988; Baugh 2003). Hyppolite was a towering figure in French intellectual life in the

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aftermath of World War II. Deleuze, Derrida and Foucault had all been his students. The force of Hyppolite’s thought served to mark the significance of Hegel for all these thinkers, though it is especially pronounced in Deleuze and Derrida. Hyppolite’s seminal work, Logic and Existence, is a pivotal text in the development of poststructuralism. In this work Hyppolite plants his own seeds of doubt about the Hegelian system. His qualified reservations of Hegel’s system were given a life of their own in the thought of his famous students. If the import of Hegel for poststructuralist thought was created by Hyppolite, it was Heidegger’s thought that made these thinkers challenge the power and authority of the ‘father’ and impelled them to put thought on a new footing without the metaphysical assumptions of prior philosophy. We have already seen something of Heidegger’s argument as to the ways in which presence comes to be redefined as the modern subject and the way this comes to be understood exclusively in epistemic terms. But we need to say something about the way in which experience comes to be truncated in modern philosophy, since an expansion and reappraisal of experience is a central tenant of poststructuralism. In order to tell this story we need to look at the role of reflection and the spontaneous subject in modern philosophy. Early modern philosophy conceived self-consciousness on the model of self-reflection. This was a theory devised to capture the character of human self-awareness. This attentiveness to self, its perceptions and reflective selfawareness was also taken to be the condition for the experience of objects. This approach retrospectively comes to be described as the representational theory of mind, because in both its empiricist and rationalist incarnations the mind described has no direct experience of objects but only of impressions or ideas of objects. For both rationalism and empiricism consciousness and self-consciousness occur simultaneously. We are not first aware of objects and then afterwards aware of our object attentiveness. These qualities are concurrent, that is, the experience of objects has with it a simultaneous selfawareness. While the early modern approach did not grant the immediate experience of objects, it did grant the immediate reflective experience of the self. That is, the model of self-awareness it assumed was of a division between subject (I) and object (self) of which there was a direct apprehension. This way of framing the problem tied subsequent philosophy up in knots in attempting to discern how to conceive of the relation of consciousness to object and self. How could the I recognise the self as itself if there was not some prior familiarity, and if this was the case then what was this prior familiarity? The difficulties of escaping from this problem were most vividly displayed in Fichte’s torturously complex self-positing I. But in its pre-Kantian manifestations exactly how the I could provide the reflective

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condition for self-awareness was a pressing problem since it seemed to be just assumed that it had mental states of which it was aware. At the epistemic level this approach raised innumerable problems; particularly, how exactly the representations of objects in our mind match up with objects in the world. It is just this account of self-awareness that Kant contests. He takes a very different approach arguing that there can be no given objects of experience as either an external object or an inner self. Rather he framed the issue in terms of the apperceptive character of consciousness ‘the transcendental unity of apperception’. This apperceiving subject, the I that must be able to accompany all my representations, is a single subject who can hold together over time all her experiences, judgements and representations as her own. This does not assume some inner object (self) of which it is aware. The issue of apperceptive self-consciousness is enormously complex and is one of the most contentious issues in Kant scholarship. What matters in this context, however, is the spontaneity of mindedness that this model assumed. Rather than there being some set of impressions or ideas that mediate between ourselves and the world, and which therefore allows us to have experience, in Kant’s account all experience is underwritten by a fundamentally active mind. There is no direct apprehension of objects either in the world or of our self, they are determined by the structure of human mindedness and there is no other way in which objects can be experienced.12 These conditions make it possible for the experience of any objects. All sensing, experiencing and intending had to be conceived as judging. There is not a world of laws and structures internal to the mind that have somehow to connect to the world to make it something that can be experienced. Describing the subject as primarily apperceptive was meant to capture the activity of consciousness, or to put it otherwise, the experiences of consciousness always involve judgement. The full implications of Kant’s account of spontaneity are developed by his heirs, notably Fichte and Hegel. These figures accepted the basic insight of the subject as active but they were unconvinced by more fundamental theoretical claims in Kant’s system, especially what they took to be the failure of reason to legitimate itself. Another intractable problem was that the content of experience was delivered passively by the senses.13 In their hands the way out of these dilemmas was to expand the role for the self-determining subject such that it is responsible for far more of experience than Kant could envisage. In general, however, the way that Kant, Fichte and then Hegel refined the idea of the reflective subject was to strip it for the most part of its representational relation to the world and focus on the subjective character of the experience. For

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idealists like Hegel there was little point trying to explain how an external object connects with the conceptual or discursive world of the subject. This was a dead end since one could never grant the object world the capacity to explain anything in its own terms, since all explanation was necessarily discursive and therefore tied to the subject. In order therefore to understand just how the world can be meaningful we need to understand the character of the subject’s spontaneity, that is, how it is able to alter its understanding, realign its commitments to a different norm and so on. In general Hegel is less concerned with the spontaneity of the individual subject (though he certainly does grant it the reflective capacity to change its values, beliefs and commitments) than he is with understanding the whole as self-determined such that it can be seen as setting the conditions and parameters by which a subject can change its self-understanding. The broad issue was how to conceive of the self-determined character of subjectivity. The fundamental point that Hegel takes from Kant was that reason cannot appeal to a transcendent realm of ideas, such as a Platonic idea or a thing-in-itself; spirit must instead be conceived as reflecting, determining its own norms by virtue of reason’s capacity for self-correction. Spirit therefore is essentially self-producing (Hegel 1977, §15). The traditional metaphysical view of Hegel took this self-producing spirit to be a description of some god-like attribute in which mind and world were reconciled because they were an expression of the same substance. In contrast to this strongly metaphysical view, Hegel’s self-producing spirit is better understood as his attempt to elaborate in great detail the sociality of reason. This notion is intended to capture the diverse ways human beings produce and transform meaning, create norms, hold themselves and others to norms through complex intersubjective, linguistic and institutional structures; structures which are themselves collective human achievements (see Pippin 1997; Pinkard 2002). Kant’s thought and the set of problems that his immediate heirs responded to are a central influence on poststructuralism; for example, Kant’s entire critical philosophy is a sustained point of reference for Deleuze, and Kant’s Critique of Judgment is central to Lyotard’s reappraisal of creativity (Lyotard 1994). As with German idealism, poststructuralism acknowledges the postKantian problematics to be defining for the modern age in every field of philosophical inquiry from aesthetic to politics. The cluster of problems associated with Kant’s account of autonomy, experience and the sublime frame much of the concerns of subsequent philosophy. Figures like Schulze and Maimon, the leading figures in the first wave of the reception of Kant’s critical philosophy, were his most powerful and perceptive critics. They

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raised a set of problems with Kant’s programme that in many ways set the agenda for post-Kantian idealism (Beiser 2002). German idealism in effect establishes itself by responding to these criticisms. This Kantian legacy is critical for Deleuze, who takes Maimon’s critique of Kant to have been inadequately addressed by German idealism (Smith 2010). Maimon argued that Kant’s reliance on passively delivered sensory material sets up a dichotomy between the given content of intuition and our discursive capacities. We cannot discuss the details of this here, since it takes us to the very thorny issues of the concept-intuition distinction in Kant’s thought (see Pinkard 2002). The important point is that Maimon argues that Kant’s critical philosophy failed to bridge the dualism of the empirical world and discursivity of mind. Deleuze claims that Hegel failed to learn the lesson of Maimon’s critique of Kant, since he argues Hegel only resolves this dualism by banishing the empirical (Lumsden 2002). Part of Deleuze’s project, inspired by Maimon and in reaction to Hegel, is a reclaiming of a legitimate role for the empirical. Poststructuralism does not accept the possibility of a broadly postKantian Hegel.14 The poststructuralist suspicion is that the enlightenment disenchantment of nature was not exactly a revolution in thought if an allknowing god, whose spirit animated the natural world, was simply replaced with an all-knowing spontaneous subject (Deleuze 1994: 58). The spontaneity of the subject, its activity in creating or self-causing a meaningful world, is just as exclusive of other narratives and places just as many homogenising strictures, if indeed not more, on experience as pre-enlightenment thought. The price of placing the subject at the centre of all meaning determination is the loss of the immediate, the failure to think the singular in an un-mediated form (Deleuze), the elimination of difference (Derrida), the suppression of any alternative historicity other than the historical order issuing from the spontaneous subject (Foucault 1972; Gutting 2010). The problem as poststructuralism sees it is that the trajectory of self-consciousness from Descartes to its apogee in Hegel has been one in which there is an increasing consolidation of a model of subjectivity that predetermines and constrains experience. The poststructuralist strategy at every turn, in both their analysis of the tradition and in the positive ideas they develop, is to decentre experience. Modern philosophy conceives experience, in its early modern representational form or its spontaneous form in Kant and German idealism, exclusively in terms of a synthesising process. We have already seen something of the character of this experience in the discussion of reflection. Experience is progressively colonised and codified by a fixed architectonic of concepts and even more rigid models of thought such as the dialectic, all of which simply express the character of self-consciousness at

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the expense of alternative ways of thinking of experience and the self-world relation, it is especially exclusive of forms of experience that are not able to be understood as discursively mediated through universals. Accordingly, singularity, multiplicity and so on are lost on the self-correcting path of spirit towards absolute self-consciousness. Much of the way poststructuralism conceives its relation to the tradition, though this is most pronounced in Derrida and Deleuze, is by setting up Hegel as the figure that is emblematic of the whole trajectory of metaphysics. The underlying idea of Heidegger’s discussion of being as presence is one of a unifying self-consciousness that is master, controller and determiner. The control and containment that marks the history of metaphysics comes to its highest expression in Hegel’s thought in which absolute knowing is taken as the complete understanding of the conditions of self-consciousness and there is an identity of this self-consciousness with the whole.15 Dialectic is presented as the philosophical form by which this project can realise its goal of complete self-understanding. Both Derrida and Deleuze see Hegel’s dialectic as the attempt to capture the movement of thought in a restrictive and distorted form by presenting the movement of thought as the negative, which brings to light contradictions that are resolved or suspended (aufgehoben). Hegel’s dialectic presents a succinct marker of differentiation from poststructuralist thought. As Deleuze puts it: ‘[Critique after Kant] became an art by which spirit, selfconsciousness, the critic himself adapted themselves to things and ideas; or an art by which man reappropriated determinations which he claims to have been deprived of: in short, the dialectic’ (Deleuze 1988: 88). The movement of the dialectic transforms everything experienced into something available for the knowing subject, every object and point of difference is internalised and is ultimately something that the subject will recognise as an expression of itself. ‘Hegel betrays and distorts the immediate in order to ground his dialectic in that incomprehension, and to introduce mediation in a movement which is no more than that of his own thought and its generalities’ (Deleuze 1994: 10). The dialectic as both the form of thought and as the expression of history’s self-correcting enterprise presents everything in a predetermined intelligible form. The subject is the focal point through which all otherness is made conceptual, that is made into a form that the subject can recognise as its own. Ultimately Hegel’s equation of concept and consciousness allows the subject to be identical with the world, since the concepts by which it knows the world are just an expression of itself, thus the whole can be the subject writ large (Derrida 1982b: 73). For Deleuze the dialectic is a reactive force. Far from extending the impetus

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of the promise of activity in Kant’s critical thought (because it comes to be tied to the subject) it is simply indicative of ‘the reactive forces which are expressed in man, self-consciousness, reason, morality and religion’ (Deleuze 1983: 89). The forces that this activity might have harnessed, forces other than this rational-anthropocentric domain, are in fact further suppressed by the reactive and appropriative power of the dialectic. Derrida offers a very similar critique of the dialectic, arguing it is the unifying and hegemonic form for the organisation of man (Derrida 1982b: 121). Différance is in fact defined against sublation (Aufhebung); sublation is Hegel’s way of describing just what is involved in the dialectical movement of the negative. Sublation is what occurs when the negative breaks things apart and the moments are then resolved into a more rational unity. Derrida remarks: ‘if there were a definition of différance, it would be precisely the limit, the interruption of the Hegelian relève [sublation] wherever it operates’ (Derrida 1981: 40–1). For Derrida the dialectic resolves contradiction by overcoming otherness and ordering differences. Différance is not a straightforward term to describe, however, what it does strive to capture is something other to thought that could not be appropriated. Différance is a point of resistance to the standard dualisms, for example, between the sensible and the intelligible by which philosophy seeks to render the world comprehensible. It is developed in part as a counter to the movement of thought that is typical of the tradition, and purified in the dialectic, that is, a relentless process of pointing out what is other to thought and then through the movement of the dialectic and the concepts developed from it relentlessly moulding that otherness into the form of universal concepts. Différance is not a primordial domain of meaning determination that would provide a view of the world that might, for example, allow a false statement to be corrected or made coherent. It is not a metaphysical home in which Man can find solace; it has instead only a quasi-transcendental status. The canonical terms of deconstruction such as singularity, trace and play are essential concepts in understanding différance, and they serve as the condition for all meaning. However, they cannot be made present, they are not the frame of a structure or a set of conditions that can be known and schematised. They are the conditions for thinking and experience but they are not available to consciousness as conditions of which it could have some kind of transparent understanding because they are unstable and always deferred. In poststructuralism there is a general displacement of man and systematic approaches in favour of alternatives to standard articulations of philosophical concerns and the form those concerns are expressed in. It is in this

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context that Nietzsche is such an important thinker for poststructuralist thought. He offers a way of understanding epistemology, as the ideology of a purely human set of concerns, which cannot in any way hope to capture the objective world. But more importantly he offers an alternative approach to the standard philosophical questions since his thought pursues philosophical understanding without claims to systematicity, universality or definitive knowledge. Moreover he gives philosophical writing a playful form that captures exactly that approach, allowing it to engage with the natural, the living and the singular such that it cannot be reincorporated back into a grand systematic enterprise.

Conclusion In conclusion, it can be remarked that for the most part poststructuralism’s defining interlocutor – Hegel – is misunderstood. The standard poststructuralist picture goes something like this: Hegel’s system is totalising because the methodology of the dialectic strives to banish all difference in the service of an unfolding of a god-like self-consciousness, which is coming to complete self-knowledge in and through the unfolding of human history. Much of their criticism of Hegel serves to truncate the possibility of a real exchange between the two traditions. What Hegel is concerned with is two-fold: a project of self-comprehension, how we have got to where we are through the course of human history, and to give that self-understanding adequate philosophical expression. Of course there are many contestable assumptions along the way about the self-correcting character of history and how this is the progressive realisation of freedom. We may wonder why it is that a particular set of circumstances in western Europe in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries created the conditions for the highest satisfaction of human freedom and that the norms and concepts that define collective human self-understanding and which provides the meanings for our lives are collective human achievements. However, what animates Hegel’s philosophical project is not a delusional replacement of Man for God; he is above all concerned with how forms of human self-understanding become inadequate and are transformed into more adequate ones. Hegel creates a barrage of tightly woven conceptual armoury to develop his ideas and these strive to be as internally consistent as they can be but this does not make them totalising and motivated by the breadth of psychopathological motivations attributed to Hegel by poststructuralism. Hegel’s system is predominantly a response to a specific set of post-Kantian problematics. When these are understood, as well as the full depth of his historical concerns, then the

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standard poststructuralist picture, which has its genesis in a skewed picture of the history of philosophy, can be seen as in error, and consequently makes some of the deconstructive and Deleuzian strategies to avoid the relentless power of the Aufhebung seem misplaced. Hegel takes knowledge to be dependent on conditions, conditions that are thrashed out collectively over the course of human history. They have to be understood as collectively determined, largely because this was the only way Hegel thought Kant’s dualism of concept and intuition could be resolved. We cannot explore why this dualism is so defining for post-Kantian philosophy here. Nevertheless, what is significant is the way Hegel resolves this issue, namely by asserting that the norms by which we make sense of the world and the conditions of experience have to be understood as collectively produced, as products of ‘the space of reasons’ or the domain of human discursivity. The animating norms and concepts of a shape of spirit are produced collectively but they can be understood at specific times in history, usually at the point at which a shape of life has grown old. When a shape of spirit has started to fracture its core, concepts show themselves clearly, precisely at the point of the decay of an epoch. Philosophical self-understanding comes on the scene just at the point that history moves forward and these concepts have begun to lose their explanatory cogency.16 If this is the case then autonomy and the power of the monolithic subject must be qualified since these conditions could not be understood, because any grasp we could have of ourselves over our own cognition and the concepts that frame human experience are always moving forward beyond any finite comprehension of them. The norms that frame self-understanding move forward with human history but our grasp of them is always retrospective. The net effect is a cognitive dissonance that renders any complete understanding of those norms impossible. Poststructuralism fails to understand the significance of the post-Kantian problematics that define Hegel’s project, and this failure of understanding gets in the way of a genuine dialogue between Hegel and poststructuralism. However, at another level the poststructuralist critique is completely correct. Hegel’s thought is of its time. His project is an attempt to express and comprehend the philosophical and historical developments that have lead to the present and to give that era a philosophical form adequate to modernity itself. Moreover Hegel thinks he can provide a complete self-understanding and examination of that shape of life. While modernity may not have exhausted all its animating concerns, they are no longer sacred; its core concepts’ – reason, self-determination, autonomy, dialectic – best days are behind them. Such concepts are not anachronistic, like virtue or honor, but they are contested and they are limited as explanations of the contemporary

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world. The poststructuralist relation to tradition reflects just this dynamic since it does not abandon these concepts in totality but is concerned to show that their claims to legitimacy are inadequate and the concepts themselves limited. The genesis of the development of these concepts indicates other sources that the concepts and methods themselves are unable to recognise. It is just these sources that allow the ongoing transformation of human and philosophical self-understanding, but a self-understanding that is adequate to the time, that can embrace the singular, the fractures, threads and traces that disrupt the coherence of modern self-understanding and which can embrace the diversity of the empirical world in a way that is adequate to this shape of life. Whether or not poststructuralist concepts are up to the job only time will tell.

Notes 1. ‘That philosophy must be ontology means first of all that it is not anthropology.’ Gilles Deleuze (1954), ‘Review of Jean Hyppolite, Logique et Existence’, p. 191. Printed as an appendix in Hyppolite (1997: 191–5). 2. For a different approach to the importance of Heidegger to poststructuralism see James Williams (2005). Bruce Baugh (2003), while also emphasising the importance of German idealism for poststructuralism, argues that the interpretation of Hegel’s ‘Unhappy consciousness’ section of the Phenomenology is the defining influence. 3. Most famously by Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (2001). 4. Originally a term associated with Wilfred Sellars but in recent philosophy it is most associated with the thought of John McDowell (1994). 5. The exception is of course Derrida’s heirs Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, The Literary Absolute (1988). 6. For an analysis of Heidegger’s influence on Foucault see Rayner (2004) and Dreyfus (1996). 7. See Daniel W. Smith’s ‘The Doctrine of Univocity’ (2001) for a discussion of the Deleuze-Heidegger connection. 8. See Derrida’s Of Grammatology (1976) and ‘Structure, sign and play’ in Writing and Difference (1978). 9. See Honneth (1995), chapter 16. Honneth is right to trace these two trajectories but he does not see the importance of Heidegger for the centrality of this problematic in poststructuralism. 10. It should be said that for Heidegger reading Antiquity this way is a retrospective construction of Ousia as substance, a reading that he contests. See Heidegger (2000: 209). 11. Seiendes in German is singular.

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12. See Pippin (1989), chapter 2. 13. This raises the problem of how Hegel responds to the concept-intuition distinction in Kant. For a discussion see Pinkard (2002). 14. An exception is Jean-Luc Nancy’s Hegel (2002). I discuss his approach in Lumsden (2005). 15. For an analysis of absolute knowing that avoids these characterisations, see Lumsden (1998). 16. For a detailed discussion of this, see Lumsden (2009).

References Baugh, B. (2003), French Hegel, London: Routledge. Beiser, F. (1987), The Fate of Reason: German Philosophy from Kant to Fichte, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Beiser, F. (2002), German Idealism: The Struggle Against Subjectivism, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Butler, J. (1987), Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth Century France, New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Dahlstrom, D. (2005), ‘Heidegger and German Idealism’, in H. Dreyfus and M. Wrathall (eds), A Companion to Heidegger, Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 65–80. Deleuze, G. (1983), Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. H. Tomlinson, New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Deleuze, Gilles (1988), Bergsonism, New York, NY: Zone Books. Deleuze, G. (1994), Difference and Repetition, trans. P. Patton, New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Derrida, J. (1973), Speech and Phenomena, trans. D. Allison, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Derrida, J. (1976), Of Grammatology, trans. G. C. Spivak, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Derrida, J. (1978), Writing and Difference, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Derrida, J. (1981), Positions, trans. Alan Bass, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Derrida, J. (1982a), ‘Sending: On Representation’, Social Research, 49: 2, 294–326. Derrida, J. (1982b), Margins of Philosophy, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Dreyfus, H. (1996), ‘Being and power: Heidegger and Foucault’, International Journal of Philosophical Studies 4: 1, 1–16. Foucault, M. (1972), The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A. Sheridan, New York, NY: Harper and Row. Foucault, M. (1973), The Order of Things, New York, NY: Vintage. Gadamer, H.-G. (1997), Truth and Method, revised trans. J. Weinsheimer and D. Marshall, New York, NY: Continuum. Gutting, G. (2001), French Philosophy in the Twentieth Century, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Gutting, G. (2010), ‘Foucault, Hegel, and philosophy’, in T. O’Leary and C. Falzon (eds), Foucault and Philosophy, Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 19–36. Hegel, G. W. F. (1975a), Lectures on the Philosophy of World History: Introduction, trans. H. B. Nisbet, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hegel, G. W. F. (1975b), Philosophy of Mind, trans. A. V. Miller and W. Wallace, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hegel, G. W. F. (1977), Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hegel, G. W. F. (1991), Elements of the Philosophy of Right, trans. H. B. Nisbet, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Heidegger, M. (1962), Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson, Oxford: Blackwell. Heidegger, M. (1982), Basic Problems of Phenomenology, trans. Albert Hofstadter, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Heidegger, M. (1998), ‘Hegel and the Greeks’, in Pathmarks, ed. and trans. W. McNeill, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Heidegger, M. (2000), Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. G. Fried and R. Polt, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Heidegger, M. (2002), ‘The Age of the World Picture’, in Off the Beaten Track, ed. and trans. J. Young and K. Haynes, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Honneth, A. (1995), The Fragmented World of the Social: Essays in Social and Political Philosophy, ed. C. Wright, Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Hyppolite, J. (1997), Logic and Existence, trans. L. Lawlor and A. Sen, Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Lacoue-Labarthe, P. and J.-L. Nancy (1988), The Literary Absolute: The Theory of Literature in German Romanticism, trans. P. Barnard and C. Lester, Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Larmore, C. (1996), The Romantic Legacy, New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Linck, M. S. (2009), ‘Deleuze’s difference’, International Journal of Philosophical Studies, 16: 4, 509–32. Lumsden, S. (1998), ‘Absolute knowing’, The Owl of Minerva, 30: 1, 3–32. Lumsden, S. (2002), ‘Deleuze, Hegel and the transformation of subjectivity’, The Philosophical Forum, 33: 2, 143–58. Lumsden, S. (2005), ‘Reason and the restlessness of the speculative: Jean-Luc Nancy’s reading of Hegel’, Critical Horizons: Journal of Social & Critical Theory, 6: 2, 215–35. Lumsden, S. (2009), ‘Philosophy and the logic of modernity: Hegel’s dissatisfied spirit’, The Review of Metaphysics, 65: 1, 55–89. Lyotard, J.-F. (1994), Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime, trans. E. Rottenberg, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. McDowell, J. (1994), Mind and World, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Nancy, J.-L. (2002), Hegel: the Restlessness of the Negative, trans. Jason Smith and Steven Miller, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

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Pinkard, T. (1994), Hegel’s Phenomenology: the Sociality of Reason, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pinkard, T. (2002), German Philosophy 1760–1860, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pippin, R. (1989), Hegel’s Idealism, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pippin, R. (1991), Modernism as a Philosophical Problem: On the Dissatisfactions of European High Culture, Oxford: Blackwell. Pippin, R. (1997), Idealism as Modernism, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rayner, T. (2004), ‘On questioning being: Foucault’s Heideggerian turn’, International Journal of Philosophical Studies, 12: 4, 419–38. Ross, A. (2004), ‘Historical undecidability: the Kantian background to Derrida’s politics’, International Journal of Philosophical Studies, 12: 4, 375–93. Ross, A. (2005), ‘The art of the sublime: Lyotard and the politics of the avantgarde’, Philosophy Today, 49: 1, 34–47. Roth, M. S. (1988), Knowing and History: Appropriations of Hegel in Twentieth Century France Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Sinnerbrink, R. (2007), Understanding Hegelianism, Chesham: Acumen Press. Smith, D. W. (2001), ‘The doctrine of univocity: Deleuze’s ontology of immanence’, in M. Bryden (ed.), Deleuze and Religion, London: Routledge. Smith, D. W. (2010), ‘Genesis and difference: Deleuze, Maimon, and the postKantian reading of Leibniz’, in S. Tuinen and N. McDonnell (eds), Deleuze and the Fold: A Critical Reader, London, Palgrave Macmillan. Weber, M. (2001), The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. T. Parsons, London: Rouledge. Williams, J. (2005), Understanding Poststructuralism, Chesham: Acumen Press.

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Chapter 2 Fro m M a r x i s m t o Po s t s t r u c t u r a l i s m Simon Choat

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Any intellectual movement that emerged in France between about 1945 and 1970 had to reckon with Marxism. The importance and influence that Marxism held in France during this period was atypical, however: from the early 1970s onwards Marxism faced a violent backlash, and in today’s intellectual and political scene it has little influence, while before the Second World War it had been rather marginal, both philosophically and organisationally. France’s theoretical culture has traditionally been dominated by a rationalism that is at odds with the socially and historically specific analyses of Marxism (Descartes is not necessarily a natural bedfellow of Marx). Although there is a strong heritage of politicised, even radical philosophy in France, this work has tended to be either republican or liberal in orientation. The country’s labour movement, meanwhile, was active and often revolutionary, but drew inspiration from sources other than Marxism – thinkers like Fourier, Blanqui and Proudhon, who may be close to Marxism in various ways, but are also quite distinct from it. The importance that Marxism achieved after 1945 was instead a result of more immediate political and institutional causes: the French Communist Party (PCF) played an important role in the wartime Resistance movement, giving Marxism a certain reflected prestige and making the Party, for a while at least, a centre of gravity for radical politics. The brevity of the period in which Marxism exercised authority seemed at once to intensify its impact and in the postwar period it was impossible to ignore Marxism. This does not mean that every intellectual or activist acquiesced to an all-conquering Marxism – but Marxism had to be addressed, even if only to be rejected. While ‘poststructuralism’ may in effect be an American invention, its key thinkers are all French. Yet though they began to produce significant work in the 1960s, the poststructuralists really came to prominence in the wake of May 1968 (which saw millions of workers and students across France

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engaged in strikes, occupations and demonstrations that almost brought down the government). As such, their relation to Marxism is complicated: amongst other things, 1968 could be said to mark a moment of transition for French Marxism, the point at which its influence began to wane – or, more accurately, the point at which its already waning influence was confirmed. This decline in Marxism’s importance can arguably be seen in the writings of individual poststructuralists: the Marxist inflections of Barthes’ Mythologies (2000), for example, are much less evident in his 1970s’ writings. With other poststructuralists the transition is even more obvious: the early works of Lyotard and Baudrillard are strongly influenced by Marxism (though in different ways and to varying degrees) yet in the 1970s both men produced books – Libidinal Economy and The Mirror of Production, respectively – that can easily be read as polemical assaults on Marx. The task of determining the exact links between poststructuralism and Marxism is further complicated by other factors. Both Marxism and poststructuralism are extremely diverse currents of thought, and as such the relations between them are varied, subtle and intricate: certain poststructuralist thinkers remain closer to Marxism than others and certain types of Marxism are more readily accepted than others. The wide range of poststructuralist engagements with Marxism, each one of which was complex and changing, has led commentators to invent a range of imaginative appellations in order to try to map individual positions, from Barthes’ ‘flippant quasi-Marxism’ (Lecercle 2008: 72) to Deleuze’s ‘hyper-Marxism’ (Donzelot 1977: 35). It does not help that poststructuralist writers rarely engaged explicitly with Marxist thinkers: the major figures of Western Marxism – Lukács, Gramsci, Sartre, Adorno, and so on – are barely ever mentioned in poststructuralist texts, despite the fact that fruitful parallels could be drawn (Foucault (2001: 273), for example, suggested that the Frankfurt School anticipated many of the themes and insights of his own work). References to Soviet Marxists are just are sparse, if not even fewer. Marx himself is cited – but often only so he can be criticised. A glance at Marx’s appearances in poststructuralist texts does not necessarily lend encouragement to the idea that there might be important links between poststructuralism and Marxism. Kristeva could plausibly be grouped with Barthes, Baudrillard and Lyotard as a thinker whose early enthusiasm for Marx gave way to something much more ambivalent. References to Marx in Cixous’s work are almost non-existent, and while he appears a little more frequently in Foucault and Irigaray, these two thinkers tend to discuss Marx in ambiguous, playful and sometimes almost mocking terms. Discussions of Marx found in Deleuze and Derrida are more productive – but Derrida’s comments on Marx come mainly in

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Specters of Marx, a book that was written only as a response to a conference invitation and after several decades of near-silence on Marx, while in Deleuze’s case the discussions come mainly in the books co-authored by Félix Guattari, leading some to suspect that in those co-authored works the praise given to Marx comes from Guattari rather than Deleuze. Direct references to Marx in Guattari’s solo writings, however, are not much more frequent, or less oblique, than those found in Deleuze’s work. This picture – of apostasy, indifference, irony or tribute produced only under pressure from outside parties – has led many to the conclusion that poststructuralism is fundamentally incompatible with, and perhaps deeply opposed to, Marxism. Indeed, the apparent anti-Marxism – or at least non-Marxism – of poststructuralism strongly influenced its reception in the Anglophone world. On the one hand, Marxist critics were often intensely hostile, accusing poststructuralism of a defeatist or conservative complicity with capitalism: a retreat into a reactionary idealism prompted in part by post-1968 political disillusionment (Callinicos 1989; Norris 1993; Eagleton 1997; Anderson 1998). On the other hand, poststructuralism was welcomed as an alternative to a Marxism that many thought had been wholly discredited, and helped to inspire and nourish a series of movements and developments in Britain and North America that were at best ambivalent towards Marxism, from the elitist textualism of the Yale deconstructionists (Bloom et al. 2004) to forms of identity politics and ‘post-Marxism’ that seemed to abandon the key categories and arguments of Marxism altogether (Laclau and Mouffe 1985). The sense that poststructuralism is somehow an anti-Marxist creed is only reinforced by the fact that today it continues to be criticised by those, such as Alain Badiou (1999, 2001) and Slavoj Žižek (1989), who draw on the traditions and rhetoric of Marxist militancy. Badiou and Žižek follow other thinkers who have argued that in its emphasis on heterogeneity, fragmentation and discontinuity, poststructuralism merely acts as a mirror of late capitalism (Jameson 1993; Harvey 1989). A look at poststructuralism’s homeland complicates this picture further, however: François Cusset (2008: xv) notes that while in the United States poststructuralism was received by many as an anti-Marxist alternative, in France the same thinkers were rejected precisely because they were seen to be too Marxist. Moreover, in the Anglophone world there has in recent years been an effort to combine the insights of Marxism and poststructuralism – perhaps most obviously in the work of Hardt and Negri (2000, 2004, 2009), but also in lesser known, though in many ways more successful, works (Gibson-Graham et al. 2000; Read 2003; Lecercle 2005; Resnick and Wolff 2006).

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The intricacies of this landscape mean that easy definitions and judgements are impossible. As Cusset (2008: xv) correctly claims, poststructuralism is neither pro- nor anti-Marx, but rather ‘an endless confrontation with, discussion on, reinterpretation of Marxism’. Poststructuralism is not a type or species of Marxism, and poststructuralists have proved to be some of the most incisive critics of Marxism. Yet far from being a rejection of Marxism, poststructuralism is deeply and explicitly indebted to Marxism. If this connection is not easily appreciated or perceived, it may be because the nature of the debt – the precise use of Marxism that is made by poststructuralist thinkers – makes it difficult to continue to talk of ‘Marxism’. There is a fragmentation of Marxism that is both a condition and an effect of its use by poststructuralism: poststructuralist thinkers only draw upon Marxism on the understanding that it is not a monolithic system which one must either accept or reject, while at the same time it is poststructuralist insights themselves that encourage us to view Marxism as a fluid and open reservoir of concepts and arguments, as a kind of toolbox that allows, and even demands, selection rather than simple approval or dismissal. Poststructuralism thus implores us both to rethink Marxism and to acknowledge its continued relevance. In order to unravel the relations between Marxism and poststructuralism, we shall look first at the contextual background – the positions that Marxism held in political and intellectual life in postwar France – before going on to examine the ways in which poststructuralist thinkers both distanced themselves from and embraced Marxism. My central claim is that attempts to portray poststructuralism as a rejection of Marxism are deeply flawed: to the contrary, Marxism is a key influence on poststructuralism and, even where it is critical, poststructuralism offers an illuminating and innovative reading of Marxism.

Contexts: Institutional, Political, Theoretical Poststructuralism developed within a context characterised in part by the decline of Marxism. In particular, the fading influence of the Communist Party opened up a space in which more unorthodox readings of Marx – like those of the poststructuralists – could thrive. Leftist intellectuals had never offered unquestioning support to the PCF, which attracted fidelity and disdain in equal measures. Nonetheless, the Party was valued as a symbol of resistance to fascism, and of potential resistance to capitalism, and hence many intellectuals felt a debt of loyalty to the Party, even while disagreeing with many of its policies and actions. This tension was well captured by

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Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1969: xxi), who in 1947 claimed: ‘It is impossible to be an anti-Communist and it is not possible to be a Communist’. For the generation of poststructuralists, some of whom were still only children when the Liberation occurred, the dilemma presented by Merleau-Ponty was less pressing, perhaps non-existent: the shine of Resistance heroism was wearing off and the PCF was increasingly viewed as a conventional, bourgeois-parliamentary party. Guattari (1984: 196–7) was in 1966 already claiming that the Party had become integrated into the system, administering capitalism rather than calling for revolution, ‘busily adjusting itself ’ to reformism. In addition, the realities of Soviet life – both banal and horrific – were becoming impossible to ignore, making the Party’s submission to Moscow increasingly unpalatable. As such, the poststructuralists did not have the same attachments as the previous generation. This meant that May ’68 – which dealt a severe blow to both the PCF and Marxism – could be experienced with a sense of liberation rather than of confusion or regret. The student demonstrators of 1968 may have drawn inspiration from Marxists (from the practical example of revolutionaries like Che Guevara, Castro and Mao, as well as from theorists like Marcuse), but the demonstrations themselves tended to undermine the credibility of Marxism both as a potential vehicle of revolutionary change and as an instrument of social and political analysis. While the events and their aftermath saw an explosion of far-Left Trotskyist and Maoist ‘groupuscules’, this explosion was really only testament to the collapse of a coherent Marxist project – the final, fevered gasp of a dying movement. The aims and strategies pursued by the May protestors differed significantly from those articulated by conventional Marxism. The main Marxist party – the PCF – saw its remaining claims to radicalism effectively destroyed by its response to the events: it alienated students by distancing itself from university occupations, characterising them as petty-bourgeois opportunism, and although initially supportive of workers’ strikes, the Party and its unions in the end helped to restore order, accepting Gaullist concessions over wages and hours and calling for an end to remaining protests (Caute 1988). Modest electoral success continued, but by failing to support, let alone lead, the greatest political upheaval in France since the Second World War, the Party did great damage to its reputation. Equally, May ’68 seemed to expose the theoretical weaknesses of Marxism: the events that took place were not readily assimilable to Marxist explanations. Although it would be quite possible to provide a Marxist analysis of what happened, the protests did not follow a conventional Marxist narrative: working-class involvement was widespread, but the revolt was initiated by

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students rather than the proletariat – and far from being the motor of the revolution, the official representative of the French working class, namely the PCF, refused to sanction the revolt and played a major part in bringing it to an end. The events of 1968 thus gave rise to a sense of renewed possibility: they offered a non-Marxist form of political action and revolt – or at least a form of revolt that did not need, and was even opposed to, the official Communist Party. The grip that Marxism held on French theoretical culture was loosened. In truth, however, 1968 was the culmination rather than the start of a process of the disintegration of Marxism in France. Even the PCF itself had been opening up to different ideas prior to 1968. The Party had been dogmatically Stalinist, but Khrushchev’s ‘Secret Speech’ of 1956 had initiated a period of de-Stalinisation that opened up the theoretical terrain of the Left, producing a variety of Marxist and Marxisant positions that could be reconciled with a number of different theories and arguments. Under the guidance of its primary intellectual Roger Garaudy, the post-Khrushchev PCF adopted a humanist Marxism that emphasised the centrality of Man to Marx’s theories, against the rigid economic determinism of the now-discredited Stalinism. Garaudy’s work reflected trends elsewhere and humanist Marxism became for a while the dominant form of Marxism both within and without the Party. It drew its nourishment both from imported works – the writings of Lukács, Korsch and Marcuse had recently been translated into French – and from native sources: in the 1930s and 1940s Alexandre Kojève and Jean Hyppolite had offered anthropologised readings of Hegel that chimed with the recent publication of Marx’s early, more humanist writings and influenced a whole generation of French thinkers. Both Merleau-Ponty and Jean-Paul Sartre sought, in different ways, to fuse Marxism with existentialist and phenomenological themes and arguments – seeking, in Sartre’s words, ‘to reconquer man within Marxism’ (Sartre 1963: 83). Alongside this Marxist humanism a number of other eclectic Leftist positions were developed: Henri Lefebvre (2002), Cornelius Castoriadis (1993) and Guy Debord (1994) all offered innovative analyses that drew upon Marxism in unorthodox ways. Perhaps the major theoretical innovation in French Marxism in the 1960s, however, was that produced by Louis Althusser and his collaborators. Althusser is a key figure, not simply because he was arguably the most inventive Marxist philosopher of the twentieth century, but because he provides an important link – almost a bridge – between Marxism and poststructuralism. If May ’68 had helped to confirm that radical alternatives to Marxism were available, Althusser helped to show that alternative

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possibilities existed within Marxism itself. A teacher, colleague and friend to many of the poststructuralists, Althusser demonstrated that Marxism could be detached from the humanism to which all the poststructuralists were opposed. Unlike many of his contemporaries, Althusser remained a member of the Communist Party, though he did not accept either Stalinism or Garaudy’s humanist alternative: he sought to challenge Party orthodoxy from within and more generally to challenge the Hegelian-historicism of the Western Marxist tradition, reinvigorating Marxism by initiating a rereading of Marx that emphasised Marx’s novelty. Althusser sought to distinguish Marx from his predecessors in at least three ways. First, he tried to separate Marx from his historicist interpreters such as Lukács and Gramsci. For Althusser, Marxist theory is not simply a product of its particular historical epoch. Instead, Althusser affirms that Marxism is a science. It is the scientific status of Marxism, Althusser argues, that distinguishes it from other, ideological forms of knowledge. Second, Althusser claims that Marx’s work is radically distinct from the anthropologism of classical political economy: instead of beginning from the needs of a supposedly universal human subject, Marx starts from the forces and relations of production, irreducible to human relations and not reliant on any notion of human nature. Marx, according to Althusser, has no concept of Man in general: ‘each society has its own individuals, historically and socially determined’ (Althusser 1976: 53). Finally, for Althusser Marx’s work must be distinguished from that of Hegel. Althusser believed that Hegelian interpretations of Marx were simply the mirror of economistic readings: both reduced complex, multiple and differentiated social forces to a single, fundamental contradiction. Marx’s dialectic, Althusser argues, recognises the complexity of the social structure in a way that neither Hegelianism nor economism do. For Marx, every contradiction is ‘overdetermined’: each is inseparable from the total structure of the whole, and in each is reflected its relations with all the other contradictions and its own conditions of existence (Althusser 1969; Althusser and Balibar 1970). Althusser was constantly reworking his arguments, so these theorems and concepts cannot necessarily be found throughout his work. They are, however, the key ideas that he advances in his work of the 1960s: the scientific status of Marxism; its anti-humanism; and a concept of overdetermination that is used to escape both Hegelianism and a crude economic reductionism. Althusser’s membership of the Party marks an important distinction between him and his poststructuralist successors. While Foucault and Guattari had both (briefly) been members of the Party, most of the central figures of poststructuralism were never directly affiliated to the PCF. The

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avant-garde journal Tel Quel, whose editorial committee included Kristeva and which published work by Barthes, Derrida, Foucault and Irigaray, did enter into a pragmatic alliance with the PCF from 1967, but it broke with the Party in 1971, turning first to Maoism and then flirting with religious mysticism (ffrench 1995). However, this distance from institutional Marxism does not entail distance from Marxism per se. After 1968, a new breed of French liberals – many of them ex-Maoists – turned on Marxism with a vengeance, as media-friendly ‘nouveaux philosophes’ such as Bernard-Henri Levy (1979) and Jean-Marie Benoist (1970) lined up to condemn communist ‘totalitarianism’. Despite Tel Quel’s flirtation with these thinkers, and Foucault’s occasional praise for their work (Christofferson 2004: 198–207), they cannot be aligned with the poststructuralists. (Deleuze (2006: 139–47) in particular attacked the nouveaux philosophes in scathing terms.) The poststructuralist relation to Marxism is far more subtle and interesting. Instead of repudiating Marxism altogether, they took the opportunity to rethink Marxism – to interrogate and reshape it while nonetheless continuing to use its insights, at once setting themselves against Marxism and seeking to draw from it.

Against Marxism The key themes of the poststructuralist critique of Marxism are concisely captured in some comments from Foucault about ideology. In an interview given in the 1970s, Foucault (1980: 118) gives three grounds on which to be suspicious of this concept: first, because it seems to depend upon an opposing concept of scientific truth; second, it implies a pre-given subject; finally, it is always secondary in relation to a determinant economic infrastructure. Foucault’s remarks in this interview are brief and a little restricted, but they have wider resonance. In the first place, his suspicions tell us something about his attitude to Marxism in general. While ‘ideology’ is not an exclusively Marxist concept, it is a term that touches on a set of concerns which, taken together, are distinctively Marxist: class interests and conflict, relations between ideas and material conditions, the mystification of social relations, and so forth. Secondly, Foucault’s reservations are typically poststructuralist; they echo similar misgivings expressed by other poststructuralists. Deleuze and Guattari’s (1988) ‘assemblage’ and Barthes’ (2005: 86–95) ‘ideosphere’ could both be seen as attempts to formulate an alternative to the Marxist concept of ideology, while Derrida spends much of Specters of Marx deconstructing the concept. Finally, Foucault’s suspicions also neatly mirror Althusser’s concerns as outlined above: the status of Marxism and its relation to science; its notion of subjectivity; and the

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nature of its analyses and the place of the economic within them. Hence, without assigning any special privilege either to Foucault or to the concept of ideology, we can generalise his doubts about this concept in order to frame the following examination of wider poststructuralist suspicions of Marxism, addressing in turn each of the issues raised by Foucault. First, then, the status of Marxism itself. Foucault claims that the notion of ideology requires as its opposite a notion of scientific truth. In order to understand Foucault’s claim here, we need to think about the ways in which Marxists propose to criticise ideology. There is no agreed definition within Marxism of the concept of ideology, which has been used in a variety of ways by different Marxists. At its simplest, however, use of the concept implies that class domination cannot be sustained by force alone; though force can always be used as a last resort, class rule must also be facilitated and legitimated by certain ideas and practices, but in such a way that ‘the very logic of legitimizing the relation of domination must remain concealed if it is to be effective’ (Žižek 1994: 8). If we are to expose this logic – in order to escape its grasp and challenge class domination – then we need a place outside ideology, a place from which the distortions of ideology can be revealed and criticised and it becomes possible to disclose the true nature and functioning of society. The problem for Foucault and other poststructuralists is that this implies that we can achieve an objective, undistorted perspective on social reality and hence that social relations can attain an ultimate transparency – that we can, as Marx claims in Capital, reach a moment ‘when the practical relations of everyday life between man and man, and man and nature, generally present themselves to him in a transparent and rational form’ (Marx 1976: 173). For the poststructuralists, this utopian vision of unmediated access to social reality is naive. Some Marxist thinkers have recognised that the dream of transparency is unattainable. Althusser (1971), for example, argues that the structure of society can never be fully transparent to us: ideology is a necessary and permanent feature of human existence rather than an illusion foisted on us by a dominant social class. This makes Althusser immune from poststructuralist suspicions about the transparency of social relations – yet the question remains: from where can we recognise and criticise ideology? Indeed, this question now becomes even more pressing, because in Althusser’s theory ideology is effectively coextensive with the social field, and hence it seems as if there can be no escape from ideology at all. Althusser’s response, as we saw above, is that one field of knowledge lies outside ideology: science marks a radical break from ideology. It is from the perspective of science that the existence and operation of ideology can be analysed.

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This attempt to elevate Marxism to the status of a science troubles many of the poststructuralists. It is not that they think truly scientific knowledge is unattainable, nor that they think Marxism is not or cannot be truly scientific; rather, they simply question why Marxism would want to be scientific in the first place. Foucault’s (1980: 85) answer is that it is an attempt to draw upon the authority that science, since medieval times, has claimed over other forms of knowledge. But to claim the authority of science in opposition to the illusions of ideology, Foucault suggests, is merely to beg the question of how the truth of science itself is verified. Rather than opposing scientific truth to ideology, for poststructuralism it is better to question how ‘truth’ is produced in the first place, and with what forms of power relations the production of truth is entwined. Foucault doubtless has Althusser in mind when he questions the opposition between science and ideology, but the question does not apply only to Althusser: there is a long lineage of thinkers eager to establish Marxism’s scientific credentials, a lineage that begins with Marx and Engels (1998) and the distinction that they make between their own ‘scientific socialism’ and the utopian, reactionary, or conservative socialism of others. So the poststructuralists are not anti-science, but want instead to question Marxism’s self-understanding. They are ‘against scientistic ideology that often, in the name of Science or Theory as Science, had attempted to unify or purify the “good” text of Marx’ (Derrida 1994: 33). The poststructuralists do not want to identify the ‘good’ text of Marx, but to draw upon Marxism selectively. They suspect that scientistic interpretations, in contrast, offer Marxism as a comprehensive and exhaustive explanatory and analytical worldview that can be applied to all events and actions, and that determines in advance what can be said and done. In other words, they suspect that Marxism is being posited as what Lyotard (1984) calls a ‘grand narrative’. Lyotard (1997) rejects grand narratives partly because they are teleological – they posit an end to history, such as the emancipation of the proletariat – and thus they cannot account for the arrival of a future that is unexpected: they cannot account for the ‘event’, or that which cannot be predicted. Likewise, Derrida (1994) rejects Marxism’s teleological inclinations, in the name of a messianicity open to events. These criticisms of the status that Marxism claims for itself – of its scientistic, teleological and metaphysical pretensions – are in turn linked to criticisms of the specific analyses offered by Marxism: for the poststructuralists, Marxism’s metaphysics manifests itself not only in its systematic and teleological claims, but also in the analytical tools it develops. In particular, it is evident in Marxism’s conceptualisation of subjectivity. Foucault’s second objection to the concept of ideology is that it requires a particular notion

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of the subject. The assumption here, Foucault (2001: 15) suggests, is that there is a given subject whose natural relation to truth is then obscured from without by certain political and economic conditions. For Foucault, in contrast, the subject is never given: all his work has instead been directed at examining how different subjects are produced (Foucault 2001: 326). Foucault’s position is typical of poststructuralism in its anti-humanism – that is to say, in its rejection of the idea of the human subject as a unity possessing certain essential and inherent properties, transparent to itself and in command of itself and its environment. This anti-humanism necessarily affects poststructuralism’s attitude towards Marxism – not simply because the dominant forms of Marxism in post-war France were humanist, but also because there is a strong strain of humanism within Marx’s own work. The whole theme of alienation – so important to Marx’s early work and to the Marxist tradition as a whole – is dependent upon a humanist problematic: man is alienated because his essential powers and capacities have become alien to him, and he can only be reconciled with himself if society is transformed. The category of alienation is extremely important to certain varieties of Marxism, providing them with both a standard with which to criticise the capitalist mode of production – condemned because it prevents man from realising his true potential – and a vision of a potential future – wherein man’s labour is truly free and his life free from alienation: ‘the real appropriation of the human essence by and for man’ (Marx 1975: 296). By rejecting humanism, poststructuralism effectively repudiates the notion of alienation as well, and thus challenges much of the Marxist canon. It is true that alienation does become a marginalised theme in Marx’s later writings, but those writings are not immune to the poststructuralist critique of humanism: it is arguable that even Marx’s later work retains a humanist tendency, albeit displaced from the thematic of ‘alienation’. The discussion of commodity fetishism in the opening chapter of Capital, Volume One differs in important ways from the earlier critique of alienation, yet several of the central themes of commodity fetishism – the loss of man’s control, the mystification of social relations, the dominance over man by the products he has made – echo the earlier, more explicitly humanist critique, and Marx (1976: 165) himself makes the comparison with religious alienation. More generally, it could be argued that the humanist subject of Marx’s earlier work does not disappear in the later works, but is rather universalised into the collective subject of the proletariat, with the humanist themes of unity, transparency and control displaced ‘into the notion of the proletariat as the way towards total mastery and the absence of human conflict’ (Kristeva 1998: 136).

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Some poststructuralists have criticised Marxism not for retaining an essentialist notion of the subject, but for effacing the subject entirely. Kristeva (1986: 31), for example, elsewhere claims: ‘There is no subject in the economic rationality of Marxism’. The argument is that whereas poststructuralism analyses the (libidinal, textual and political) practices and processes that constitute the subject, Marxism in effect dissolves the subject into the (economic) structures that determine it. Marxism is thus accused by poststructuralism of wavering between two positions: either relying on a conventional humanist subject whose capacities are determined in advance, or reducing the subject to a secondary and almost irrelevant by-product of an underlying economic foundation. Suspicions about the ‘economic rationality of Marxism’ go beyond the question of the subject to encompass the broader nature of Marxism’s analyses. Foucault’s third and final objection to ideology is that it depends upon the notion of a determinant economic structure. This criticism is highly significant, because it goes to the heart of the Marxist analysis of society. In the most programmatic presentation of his ideas, Marx claims: In the social production of their life, men enter into definite relations that are indispensable and independent of their will, relations of production which correspond to a definite stage of development of their material productive forces. The sum total of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which rises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. (Marx 2000: 425) For Foucault and the other poststructuralists, there are at least two (related) problems here. First, it implies that there is a realm of ideas, culture, sexuality, subjectivity, politics, and so on that is only ever a pallid reflection of a more real, substantial economic order. Poststructuralism will reject this kind of depth-surface model and emphasise the role of ideas, cultural practices, and so on in structuring reality itself. Second, it implies that in any situation it is always economic factors that are determinant – even if it is only a ‘determination in the last instance’, to use Althusser’s (1969: 111) phrase. For Foucault and other poststructuralists, in contrast, it cannot be assumed in advance that the economy is the determining factor: the relative weight and balance of forces in any situation must be analysed in their specificity. An uncharitable interpretation might characterise this poststructuralist critique of economism as a retreat into textualism or psychologism – an obsession with language and desire, to the neglect of concrete socio-economic

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factors. This interpretation would miss the mark however, for rather than merely rejecting Marxism’s economism, the poststructuralists carefully examine and undermine its assumptions. For many of the poststructuralists, the problems start with Marx himself: they claim that he failed to offer a radical enough challenge to classical political economy, remaining caught within its categories and concepts. In The Order of Things, Foucault (1970: 260–262) suggests that Marx’s work is essentially little more than a minor modification of the work of Smith and Ricardo. Foucault’s discussion of Marx in The Order of Things is both extremely brief and deliberately provocative, but it does anticipate more sustained critiques from other poststructuralist thinkers. Baudrillard (1975: 50) puts it like this: ‘Marx made a radical critique of political economy, but still in the form of political economy.’ For Baudrillard, Derrida and Lyotard, it is Marx’s distinction between use-value and exchange-value that is particularly problematic. Baudrillard’s critique is interesting because he links Marx’s economic theories to what he sees as Marx’s residual humanism. According to Baudrillard, Marx thinks that man will be liberated when he is freed from the alienations of exchange-value and can fulfil his natural, human needs in the enjoyment of simple use-values. But for Baudrillard (1981: 132) this whole claim is part of an ‘anthropological illusion’ inherited from classical political economy: the notion of a simple relation between the individual, his needs and the proper function of objects is all part of a rational metaphysic of utility that Marx never questioned. As an alternative to Marx’s humanist metaphysic of needs, Baudrillard turns to the symbolic order and the idea of an exchange of objects that has nothing to do with needs and cannot be conceived in terms of exchange-value or use-value. In his deconstruction of the notion of use-value, Derrida similarly turns to the logic of the gift beyond exchange in order to unravel Marx’s conceptual framework. For Derrida, the distinction between use-value and exchange-value is more complicated than Marx supposes. There can be no pure use-value uncontaminated by exchange, Derrida argues, because the potential to be exchanged is itself a condition of possibility for the concept of use-value: a use-value can only be a use-value if it is always-already inscribed by the possibility of being used by others at another time, in other words of entering into the circuits of exchange and commerce. Moreover, exchange-value itself ‘is likewise inscribed and excluded by a promise of the gift beyond exchange’ (Derrida 1994: 160). Derrida’s argument in short is that Marx’s conceptual apparatus is determined by a metaphysical ontology. For Lyotard (1993: 107), the distinction between use-value and exchangevalue reflects Marx’s nostalgia for a ‘lost consubstantiality of men amongst

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themselves and with nature’. The notion of use-value, Lyotard argues, provides Marx with a vision of lost naturality, a vision that both motivates and orients his critique. In place of this pious search for an uncorrupted region outside capitalism, Lyotard urges us instead to recognise the pleasures and desires that capitalism generates and incites, asking us to work within capitalism, pressing it to its limits and beyond. The strategy supported by Lyotard is very similar to that proposed in Anti-Oedipus by Deleuze and Guattari (1977: 239), who suggest that the ‘revolutionary path’ may lie not in withdrawing from the capitalist market but in pushing it further. In Deleuze and Guattari’s (1994: 101) terminology, ‘revolution is absolute deterritorialization’: instead of trying to contain capitalism and put a stop to its ceaseless undermining of traditional customs, beliefs and processes, any revolutionary strategy should aim to accelerate these ‘deterritorializations’. It is perhaps Baudrillard (1994: 152–3) who advances this line of thinking the furthest: ‘The challenge capital directs at us in its delirium … must be raised to an insanely higher level’. It is in part the advocacy of strategies like these that has led critics to portray poststructuralism as an apologia for capitalism. But the poststructuralists are led to these strategies not because they do not want to criticise capitalism, but because they are wary of basing any critique on nostalgia for pre-capitalist economic forms. Evidence of Marxism’s preoccupation with economic factors is found by poststructuralism not only in the tools used by Marxism and the strategies it puts forward, but also in what we might call the scope of its analyses. For Marxism, history is the history of class struggle: its social and political critique focuses on the exploitation of the proletariat under the capitalist mode of production. The poststructuralists do not deny the importance of capitalism and class – but they are concerned about what is excluded by a too-narrow focus on class. In part this is a question of historical development: since Marx’s day there has been a ‘multiplication of antagonisms’ that are ‘transversal’ to class struggle (Guattari 2000: 32–3), and so although class oppression cannot be ignored, it cannot be the sole frame of reference for analysis today. Yet there is in addition a question here not only about Marxism’s contemporary relevance – the extent to which categories first developed in the mid-nineteenth century are still relevant – but also about its theoretical coherence – the extent to which these categories were ever tenable. For Irigaray (1985: 184), for example, the Marxist focus on class obscures a more fundamental form of oppression, namely that of women by men. It is the exchange of women that makes possible the (patriarchal) social order, the circulation of women enabling men to establish relations with each other whilst simultaneously excluding women themselves from

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the social order that they make possible. Patriarchal exploitation is prior to class exploitation. Irigaray’s work is a good example of the way in which poststructuralism has tried to highlight the plurality of power relations irreducible to economic relations of exploitation.

From Marxism There was, then, a conscious effort on the part of poststructuralists to distance themselves from Marxism. They rejected what they saw as its scientific pretensions, its humanist assumptions and its economistic leanings. It should not be assumed, however, that poststructuralist criticisms are fatal for Marxism, nor that the poststructuralists intended to destroy Marxism. The diversity and flexibility of Marxism makes it robust enough to withstand many criticisms. A repudiation of Marxist humanism, for example, may rule out the Marxism of someone like Lukács, but it concurs with Althusserian Marxism. In addition, the poststructuralists do not just reject Marxism: they undertake a careful critique that in itself is a kind of use of Marxism, and their criticisms must be taken as a serious engagement with Marxism, quite different from the kind of facile dismissal offered by the nouveaux philosophes. It could even be said that the poststructuralist subversion of Marxism takes its bearings and resources from Marxism. For example, when Marxism is criticised for maintaining certain anthropological assumptions in its concept of value, the charge might be read as an accusation that Marxism has failed to live up to its own standards: it has naturalised that which must be socially and historically contextualised – ‘it takes for granted what it is supposed to explain’, as Marx (1975: 271) himself said of classical political economy. Finally, poststructuralist thinkers are not uniform in outlook or attitude: what is rejected by one thinker is sometimes embraced by another, and certain thinkers change their minds over time. For these reasons, the points of conflict listed above can be counterposed by points of contiguity: the status of Marxism, its approach to subjectivity and the nature of its analyses are all the focus of poststructuralist criticisms – yet they are also, in different ways, a source of inspiration for poststructuralism. As I have suggested, this is in part because there is no single poststructuralist take on Marxism. So although some poststructuralists are suspicious of Marxism’s claims to scientificity – because it seems to draw on the authority of science without interrogating the nature of scientific truth – others have sought to emulate the science of Marxism. For example, Kristeva (1986: 79) claims that semiotics ‘unites with the scientific practice of Marx to the extent that it rejects an absolute system (including a scientific one), but retains a

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scientific approach, that is, a development of models doubled by the theory underlying the very same models’. Kristeva thus takes Marxism not as a ‘grand narrative’, but as a critical, reflexive science, and thus as an appropriate model for the type of semiotics she wishes to develop and defend. At the same time, Marxism itself does not offer a uniform model. Alongside its claims to be a science – with all the implications of detachment, objectivity and systematicity that this carries with it – Marxism has claimed to be a political philosophy, with the aim not of producing a disengaged set of truths but of responding to and inspiring material and revolutionary struggles – not of interpreting the world but of changing it. Marxism undertakes a radical politicisation, in at least two ways. It exposes the relations of power and domination inherent in supposedly ‘natural’ processes and institutions – challenging, for example, the bourgeois notion of the free market as a realm of spontaneous harmony. At the same time, Marxism acknowledges its own historical contingency and explicitly offers itself as a form of political commitment. In this sense, poststructuralism is very much in the tradition of Marxism: poststructuralism offers a re-politicisation of theoretical discourse that both denaturalises and interrogates various concepts and themes (gender, the body, language, etc.) and recognises its own contingent and politicised status. Derrida (1994: 87; 1999: 221) suggests that this re-politicisation, and even politics itself, will be impossible if we are not ‘faithful to a spirit of Marxism’ – a fidelity which in turn demands a re-politicisation of Marxism and the legacy of Marx. In seeking to reaffirm the political character of Marxism (against its scientistic interpreters), Derrida thus calls for a particular reading of Marx’s texts and the Marxist canon – not as totalising theory that we must apply wholesale, but as a series of political interventions that provide us with a range of sometimes contradictory positions and theses from which we can select. There are many Marxisms and we have to choose between them. There is, for instance, more than one model of subjectivity to be found in Marxism: Althusser’s work makes it clear that there are other alternatives to Marxist humanism. Althusser’s entire output could be characterised as an attempt to forge an anti-humanist Marxism, and in this sense he clears the ground for a poststructuralist engagement with Marx. Althusser’s work on subjectivity also has limitations, however: if it can be described as a ground-clearing exercise then this is not only because its novelty opens up new possibilities, but also because it seems more concerned with dethroning the sovereignty of the humanist subject than with developing its own alternative theory of the subject, destroying existing preconceptions without necessarily erecting anything in their place. It can be said that in Althusser’s work the subject

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is eliminated rather than rethought: he claims, after all, that the merit of the dialectic that Marx inherits from Hegel is precisely that it is a ‘process without a subject’ (Althusser 1972: 185). When Althusser does consider the constitution of subjectivity, rather than its simple effacement, he does so in a curiously ahistorical manner – or, rather, in the ahistorical manner typical of structuralism. In his well-known essay on ideological state apparatuses, Althusser (1971: 160–2) claims that the function of ideology is to constitute concrete individuals as subjects, and that it does this by hailing or interpellating the individual. But not only is there a lack of detail about how the process of interpellation works, Althusser has already made it clear that ideology in general has no history: its ‘structure and functioning are immutable’ (Althusser 1971: 152). As such, in Althusser’s work the process of subject formation is divorced from historical considerations. In poststructuralism, in contrast, far more attention is paid to the historical conditions and processes necessary for the constitution of subjectivity. It could be argued that it is the poststructuralist – rather than the Althusserian – conception of subjectivity that is closest to Marx: unlike Althusser, Marx does not simply displace or dissolve the traditional humanist subject; instead, he investigates the ways in which different types of subject are produced, which is exactly what poststructuralism will do. The references and tributes to Marx found in Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus (1977), with its genealogy of the Oedipal subject, and in Foucault’s Discipline and Punish (1977), with its analysis of the obedient yet productive subject, are thus entirely appropriate: both books follow in the footsteps of Marx’s Capital, which traces the creation of the different types of individual that are required for the capitalist mode of production to function. It is not only a concept of the subject that poststructuralism takes from Marxism. Critical of the economistic tendencies of Marxism’s analyses, poststructuralism does nonetheless draw upon those analyses in other ways. Baudrillard (1975) argues that Marx remains tied to a concept of production that he never adequately criticises. Other poststructuralists, however, have accepted the model of production and have sought to adapt or extend it. Kristeva (1986: 85) posits a ‘semiotics of production’ that will ‘emphasize the dynamics of production over the actual product’: an analysis of production prior to exchange or meaning. Kristeva offers this in explicit contrast to Marx, whom she claims examined production only from the perspective of a final product that is circulated and exchanged as a value. Yet at the same time this is a kind of immanent critique of Marx, for according to Kristeva (1986: 82) it is Marx himself who ‘clearly outlines another possibility: another space where work can be apprehended without any consideration of value’.

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So Kristeva departs from Marx, but she presents this departure as the development of an unrealised possibility within Marx’s own work. What is offered by Kristeva as an immanent potential within Marx’s work is affirmed with greater force by Deleuze and Guattari (1977: 24), who argue that what we find in Marx is precisely an examination of the processes of production prior to the product: an analysis in which ‘the specificity of the product tends to evaporate’. Drawing heavily on Marx, Anti-Oedipus foregrounds the concept of production, with the authors claiming that ‘everything is production’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1977: 4). Deleuze and Guattari also draw upon Marxism’s specific analysis of capitalism. Rather than simply condemning capitalism, as other socialists have done, Marx recognised that capitalism is a revolutionary as well as a reactionary social form: it destroys ancient prejudices and ties of bondage, yet in their place it enforces ever more brutal relations of exploitation. Capitalism is thus to be welcomed and condemned. As the Marxist critic Fredric Jameson (1993: 47) has put it, for Marx ‘capitalism is at one and the same time the best thing that has ever happened to the human race, and the worst’. It is Marx’s theorisation of the unique dynamic of capitalism that is picked up by Deleuze and Guattari – but instead of understanding it in dialectical terms (as a thinker like Jameson might), Deleuze and Guattari (1977) transcribe the insight into their own terms: capitalism is constantly deterritorialising – sweeping away traditional beliefs and institutions – and reterritorialising – desperately trying to control and rechannel the forces unleashed by the market. This fundamentally Marxist insight is also evident in Lyotard’s (1993) claim that capitalism has both a destructive drive (towards innovation and speculation, creating new desires) and a reproductive drive (towards repetition and reproduction, annulling desires in a law of exchange). Viewed in this light, it can be seen that the poststructuralist strategies outlined above – pushing capitalism to its limits and beyond – are not so distant from Marxism. Far from offering an endorsement of capitalism, those strategies can be located within the Marxist tradition. It can be said that for both Marx and the poststructuralists, the aim is not to place restrictions on capitalism by the reinstating of the traditions, privileges or institutions that capitalism has swept away; the aim rather is to develop the possibilities immanent to capitalism. This does not mean, of course, that any of the poststructuralists were Marxists (although Deleuze (1995: 171), at least, was happy to accept this label). It is clear that poststructuralism offers a strong challenge to Marxism – and not merely to its Stalinist variations: the poststructuralists repudiate

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concepts and theses found in many kinds of Marxism, as well as in the work of Marx himself. At the same time, however, poststructuralism takes much from Marxism. In its anti-humanism and its materialism, its politicisation of philosophy and its subversion of supposedly ‘natural’ and ‘eternal’ institutions, and in its commitment to the possibility of political and social change, poststructuralism is very much the heir of Marxism. This is why many of the poststructuralists explicitly affirm the contemporary significance of Marx and Marxism. An adequate understanding of poststructuralism cannot be reached unless its profound debt to Marxism is acknowledged. In addition, and despite what some of its detractors claim, poststructuralism continues to criticise capitalism, and in doing so it draws upon the arguments and analyses put forward by Marx. The phrase ‘from Marxism to poststructuralism’, then, should be read in two senses: there is a definite movement away from Marxism to poststructuralism, as the latter develops alternative concepts and strategies; yet there is also and at the same time a transfer of concepts and strategies from Marxism to poststructuralism, as the latter draws and expands upon the theoretical and political resources bequeathed by the former. Poststructuralism neither rejects Marxism nor merely repeats or applies its insights. It offers an interpretation of Marxism – but it is what Derrida (1994: 51) calls a ‘performative interpretation, that is … an interpretation that transforms the very thing that it interprets’. As Derrida notes, it is Marx himself, in his eleventh thesis on Feuerbach, who calls for us to move beyond mere interpretation. If after poststructuralism it becomes difficult to talk of ‘Marxism’, this is not because the poststructuralists have rendered Marxist insights redundant; rather, it is because their own insights have transformed Marxism. In short, rather than simply offering a rereading of Marxism, the poststructuralists put Marxism to use – a use which in the end is more ‘Marxist’ than those of many Marxists.

References Althusser, Louis (1969), For Marx, trans. Ben Brewster, London: NLB. Althusser, Louis (1971), ‘Ideology and ideological state apparatuses (notes towards an investigation)’, in Lenin and Philosophy and other essays, trans. Ben Brewster, London: NLB. Althusser, Louis (1972), Montesquieu, Rousseau, Marx: Politics and History, trans. Ben Brewster, London: Verso. Althusser, Louis (1976), Essays in Self-Criticism, trans. Grahame Lock, London: NLB.

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Althusser, Louis and Étienne Balibar (1970), Reading Capital, trans. Ben Brewster, London: NLB. Anderson, Perry (1998), The Origins of Postmodernity, London: Verso. Badiou, Alain (1999), Manifesto for Philosophy, trans. and ed. Norman Madarasz, Albany, NY: State University of New York. Badiou, Alain (2001), Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, trans. Peter Hallward, London: Verso. Barthes, Roland (2000), Mythologies, trans. Annette Laver, London: Vintage. Barthes, Roland (2005), The Neutral: Lecture Course at the Collège de France (1977– 1978), trans. Rosalind E. Krauss and Denis Hollier, New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Baudrillard, Jean (1975), The Mirror of Production, trans. Mark Poster, St Louis, MO: Telos Press. Baudrillard, Jean (1981), For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign, trans. Charles Levin, St Louis, MO: Telos Press. Baudrillard, Jean (1994), Simulacra and Simulation, trans. Sheila Faria Glaser, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. Benoist, Jean-Marie (1970), Marx est mort, Paris: Éditions Gallimard. Bloom, Harold, Paul de Man, Jacques Derrida, Geoffrey H. Hartman and J. Hillis Miller (2004), Deconstruction and Criticism, New York, NY: Continuum. Callinicos, Alex (1989), Against Postmodernism: A Marxist Critique, Cambridge: Polity Press. Castoriadis, Cornelius, (1993), Political and Social Writings. Volume Three, 1961– 1979: Recommencing the Revolution: From Socialism to the Autonomous Society, trans. and ed. David Ames Curtis, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Caute, David (1988), Sixty-Eight: The Year of the Barricades, London: Paladin Books. Christofferson, Michael Scott (2004), French Intellectuals Against the Left: The Antitotalitarian Moment of the 1970s, New York, NY: Berghahn Books. Cusset, François (2008), French Theory: How Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, & Co. Transformed the Intellectual Life of the United States, trans. Jeff Fort, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Debord, Guy (1994), The Society of the Spectacle, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith, New York, NY: Zone Books. Deleuze, Gilles (1995), Negotiations 1972–1990, trans. Martin Joughin, New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Deleuze, Gilles (2006), Two Regimes of Madness: Texts and Interviews 1975–1995, ed. David Lapoujade, trans. Ames Hodges and Michael Taormina, Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e). Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari (1977), Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem and Helen R. Lane, New York, NY: Viking Press.

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Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari (1988), A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi, London: Athlone Press. Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari (1994), What is Philosophy?, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchill, London: Verso. Derrida, Jacques (1994), Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf, New York, NY: Routledge. Derrida, Jacques (1999), ‘Marx & Sons’, in Michael Sprinker (ed.), Ghostly Demarcations: A Symposium on Jacques Derrida’s Spectres of Marx, London: Verso. Donzelot, Jacques (1977), ‘An Anti-Sociology’, trans. Mark Seem, Semiotext(e), 2: 3, 27–44. Eagleton, Terry (1997), The Illusions of Postmodernism, Oxford: Basil Blackwell. ffrench, Patrick (1995), The Time of Theory: A History of Tel Quel (1960–1983), Oxford: Clarendon Press. Foucault, Michel (1970), The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, London: Tavistock Publications. Foucault, Michel (1977), Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan, London: Allen Lane. Foucault, Michel (1980), Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972–1977, ed. Colin Gordon, trans. Colin Gordon et al., New York, NY: Pantheon Books. Foucault, Michel (2001), Power: Essential Works of Foucault 1954–1984, Volume 3, ed. James D. Faubion, trans. Robert Hurley et al., Harmondsworth: Allen Lane Penguin Press. Gibson-Graham, J. K., Stephen A. Resnick and Richard D. Wolff (eds) (2000), Class and Its Others, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Guattari, Félix (1984), Molecular Revolution: Psychiatry and Politics, trans. Rosemary Sheed, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. Guattari, Félix (2000), The Three Ecologies, trans. Ian Pindar and Paul Sutton, London: Athlone Press. Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri (2000), Empire, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri (2004), Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire, New York, NY: Penguin Press. Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri (2009), Commonwealth, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Harvey, David (1989), The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change, Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Irigaray, Luce (1985), This Sex Which is Not One, trans. Catherine Porter with Carolyn Burke, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Jameson, Fredric (1993), Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, London: Verso. Kristeva, Julia (1986), The Kristeva Reader, ed. Toril Moi, Oxford: Basil Blackwell.

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Kristeva, Julia (1998), ‘The subject in process’, in Patrick ffrench and RolandFrançois Lack (eds), The Tel Quel Reader, London: Routledge. Laclau, Ernesto and Chantal Mouffe (1985), Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics, trans. Winston Moore and Paul Cammack, London: Verso. Lecercle, Jean-Jacques (2005), ‘Deleuze, Guattari and Marxism’, Historical Materialism, 13: 3, 35–55. Lecercle, Jean-Jacques (2008), ‘Barthes without Althusser: a different style of Marxism’, Paragraph, 31, 72–83. Lefebvre, Henri (2002), Critique of Everyday Life. Volume Two: Foundations for a Sociology of the Everyday, trans. John Moore, London: Verso. Levy, Bernard-Henri (1979), Barbarism with a Human Face, trans. George Holoch, New York, NY: Harper and Row. Lyotard, Jean-François (1984), The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Lyotard, Jean-François (1993), Libidinal Economy, trans. Iain Hamilton Grant, London: Athlone Press. Lyotard, Jean-François (1997), Postmodern Fables, trans. Georges Van Den Abbeele, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Marx, Karl (1975), ‘Economic and philosophic manuscripts of 1844’, in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Collected Works, vol. 3, London: Lawrence and Wishart. Marx, Karl (1976), Capital: A Critique of Political Economy Volume One, trans. Ben Fowkes, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. Marx, Karl (2000), ‘Preface to A Critique of Political Economy’, in Karl Marx, Selected Writings, ed. David McLellan, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engels (1998), The Communist Manifesto, ed. David McLellan, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice (1969), Humanism and Terror: An Essay on the Communist Problem, trans. John O’Neill, Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Norris, Christopher (1993), The Truth About Postmodernism, Oxford: Blackwell. Read, Jason (2003), The Micro-Politics of Capital: Marx and the Prehistory of the Present, Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Resnick, Stephen A. and Richard D. Wolff (eds) (2006), New Departures in Marxist Theory, London: Routledge. Sartre, Jean-Paul (1963), The Problem of Method, trans. Hazel E. Barnes, London: Methuen & Co. Ltd. Žižek, Slavoj (1989), The Sublime Object of Ideology, London: Verso. Žižek, Slavoj (1994), ‘The spectre of ideology’, in Slavoj Žižek (ed.), Mapping Ideology, London: Verso.

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Chapter 3 Fro m S t r u c t u r a l i s m t o Po s t s t r u c t u r a l i s m Craig Lundy

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Introduction: Identifying and Differentiating As the immediate precursor to poststructuralism, the movement or paradigm of structuralism was naturally responsible for determining many of poststructuralism’s salient features. But what was structuralism, and how are we to understand its transformation into poststructuralism? In this chapter I will address these issues by first outlining the contours of what might be called the image of structuralism. An appreciation of this image is necessary for a full understanding of the shift from structuralism to poststructuralism. Nevertheless, an acknowledgement of its limitations, of the inconsistencies it suppresses and the inaccuracies it perpetrates, is equally necessary. As I will therefore demonstrate, alongside the formation and propagation of the classical structuralist image runs a history of its transformation – a history of those aspects and individuals who subverted the image of structuralism in one way or other, as it was in the process of emerging. Many of these aspects and individuals will in time be collected under the banner of ‘poststructuralism’. But as we will see, this raises several problems. Firstly, how are we to comprehend and categorise these various proto-developments? Are they properly poststructuralist, or merely a different kind of structuralism? If the former, how can poststructuralism preexist its own emergence, and if the latter, then what is it that distinguishes structuralism from poststructuralism? Such considerations are made even more difficult by the fact that almost none of the thinkers identified today as ‘poststructuralist’ ever used the term, let alone self-identified with it. These issues, however, belie a larger problem that has been of concern to structuralists and poststructuralists alike: the problematic nature of transformation. If we are to make sense of the shift from structuralism to poststructuralism, the manner in which we make sense will itself require analysis and critique. A

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historical analysis of the relation between structuralism and poststructuralism will thus arguably take us only so far. In addition to this history, what will also be required is an analysis of the particular problematics from which our investigation garners its imperative force. By considering the problematic nature of the transformation from structuralism to poststructuralism in conjunction with its history, a final and perhaps more pressing question will be raised: what is it that drives our interest in the shift from structuralism to poststructuralism, and what is the importance of these two terms for us today?

The Image of Structuralism Structuralism was a largely French intellectual movement that began in the 1950s and rose to great prominence throughout the 1960s and ’70s. At its height, structuralism was the leading intellectual paradigm in France, with advocates to be found in a vast range of disciplines. Influential thinkers who were associated with the movement at one point or another included Claude Lévi-Strauss, Roland Barthes, Jacques Lacan, Michel Foucault, Louis Althusser, Nicos Poulantzas, Algirdas Julien Greimas, Tzvetan Todorov, Jacques Derrida and Pierre Bourdieu. Structuralism promised to unlock the mysteries of human culture by suggesting new ways for looking at and approaching social relations. Much of the impetus for these new techniques and insights originated from disciplines in the social sciences such as anthropology, linguistics, semiology, psychoanalysis and sociology. Although more traditional disciplines such as philosophy and history would in time come to make enormous contributions to the nature and success of structuralism, at its inception structuralism was wedded to the post-World War II rise of the social sciences and their explicit critique of venerated academic institutions (such as the Sorbonne) and their traditionally favoured disciplinary agendas. Structuralism, as such, was an eminently modern movement that sought to break away from previous academic constraints by entirely recasting the terms and conditions for understanding human existence. Central to this intellectual revolution was the quest for scientificity. Due to its strong affiliation with science and scientific method, early structuralism was able to radically distinguish itself from traditional approaches to society in the humanities and consequently position itself between (if not above) the sciences and the arts. As François Wahl put it in his introduction to Qu’est-ce que le structuralisme?, structuralism had a specifically ‘scientific vocation’ (Wahl 1968: 7). This vocation provided structuralism with an immensely seductive programme that purported to replace subjective conjecture with

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objective truth in the social domain. The desire for social disciplines to partake in the successes of science was of course hardly a new phenomenon. History, to name just one example, had carried out a similar appropriation of science in the second half of the nineteenth century, when it attempted to detach itself from philosophy and literature in order to recast its method as astutely objective.1 But like history before it, this quest for scientificity in the social realm would ultimately fail, despite its great advances; in time, the validity of structuralism’s scientific credentials would be exposed by critics and modified or abandoned by poststructuralists, leaving classical structuralism adrift between the port it had left and the promised land it never quite reached. Part of the desire to attain scientificity was driven by the widespread disillusionment with ideology in the mid to late 1950s. In the period following the end of WWII, French culture and politics were dominated by Marxism and existentialism. Political events would, however, come to severely undermine the popularity and credibility of these movements. In 1956, Nikita Khrushchev delivered a report to the Twentieth Party Congress, titled ‘On the Personality Cult and its Consequences’, in which he catalogued the extensive crimes committed by Stalin. Although Khrushchev’s speech was largely motivated by party politics, its delivery would have far-reaching consequences for Soviet sympathisers throughout the West. When combined with the violent repression of the Hungarian revolution of the same year, Stalinism became untenable and Marxism tainted for many Western intellectuals of the Left. Structuralism, with its scientific rather than ideological premises, offered an attractive way out of this quandary for many. This was achieved through a number of further key attributes, objectives and objections. To begin with, structuralism distanced itself from the diachronic methodology of Marxist thought, and more broadly Hegelian dialectics, through an insistence upon synchronicity. As a scientific method for analysing the relations within and between structures/series, structuralism developed and employed synchronic models in which all of the structural and inter-structural relations for a given situation were simultaneously present, or more specifically, coexistent (even if particular elements were themselves obscured). Synchronicity thus allowed for the inner logic of a structure or series to be revealed in its entirety at once, without having to wait for the diachronic development of past or future defining elements that may be unknown or unidentifiable at present. This synchronic methodology effectively amounted to a challenge of history and the historical form of explanation. Understanding, according to structuralism, was not gained through an analysis of diachronic development,

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nor was a system to be explained by the evolution of its elements over time. Instead, structuralism maintained that in order to fully understand a system, whether it is language or some other system, the entirety of its relations needed to be simultaneously considered in order to ‘see’ what was hidden from view and ‘hear’ what was unspoken. Structuralism, however, did not merely claim that synchronic and ahistorical models provided for greater systematic understanding: more profoundly, it argued that these structures were in fact universal. For instance, structural linguists did not devise a linguistic system that applied to one language alone. Rather, they compared the continuities and discontinuities between different language systems in order to devise synchronic models that could be applied to many languages, both similar and disparate. Such models, once constructed, were thus universally applicable. Structural psychoanalysis, to give another example, was not created as a theory and practice that corresponded to only some people. On the contrary, psychoanalysis identifies principles and procedures that should be of pertinence to everyone, regardless of time and place, due to the scientifically verifiable status of its universal methods and claims. These aspects of classical structuralism (scientificity, synchronicity, ahistoricism, universalism and a withdrawal from the immediately preceding political climate) were most clearly reflected in the work of Claude LéviStrauss – the father of structuralism. Lévi-Strauss was an anthropologist who sought to provide his discipline with a new grounding. As François Dosse explains in his peerless History of Structuralism, in the mid-1940s anthropology was in desperate need of renewal. French anthropology had for some time been dominated by naturalist and biological predilections, such as the search for Man’s natural foundations (Dosse 1997a: 16–17). By the close of WWII, however, the racist undertones of these traditional investigations were no longer palatable, and anthropology required a new direction capable of severing ties with the past. Lévi-Strauss duly obliged. According to Simone de Beauvoir, the urgency of the situation was such that resistance from the anthropological establishment to Lévi-Strauss’ new ideas was virtually non-existent: ‘The historical liquidation of physical anthropology had made theoretical debate unnecessary. Claude Lévi-Strauss arrived on the spot that history had prepared for him’ (de Beauvoir quoted in Dosse 1997a: 16). Lévi-Strauss capitalised upon this golden opportunity by adopting a particular strand of linguistic theory for his anthropological work. This, again, was made possible in part by accidental circumstances involving WWII. Following the French capitulation to the Nazi’s in 1940, Lévi-Strauss fled to New York City where he took up a position at the New School. While in

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New York, Lévi-Strauss was introduced by Alexandre Koyré to the Russian linguist Roman Jakobson, who in turn introduced Lévi-Strauss to linguistics and Saussurian phonology in particular (Lévi-Strauss and Eribon 1991: 41). According to this linguistic theory, elements of a language, and in particular phonological differences, can only be appropriately understood through a consideration of their interrelationships. Saussure’s linguistic theory, as conveyed to Lévi-Strauss by Jakobson (who had developed his linguistic theory with Nikolai Trubetzkoy), thus advanced and relied upon a synchronic notion of system in order to extract constants within and between languages from which general laws could then be constructed. Lévi-Strauss seized upon this insight: in the same way that Saussurian linguistics provided a universal method and model for analysing spoken languages from contemporary Europe to colonial Africa, so too, Lévi-Strauss claimed, should the same structural techniques be applied to the analysis of human society. As Lévi-Strauss would later clarify: [Structural linguistics] must also welcome psychologists, sociologists, and anthropologists eager to learn from modern linguistics the road which leads to the empirical knowledge of social phenomena. (Lévi-Strauss 1963: 31) As a method for revealing hidden aspects within a system through the application of general laws and universal constants, structural anthropology provided a means to extract and explain that which was unapparent and unconscious: ‘The linguist provides the anthropologist with etymologies which permit him to establish between certain kinship terms relationships that were not immediately apparent’ (Lévi-Strauss 1963: 32). Because of this, although the structuralist method was overtly empirical, it was by no means constrained by apparent facts and conscious statements. On the contrary, Lévi-Strauss’ structural anthropology consistently refused to explain social phenomena by deferring to the conscious statements of a speaking subject. At all times, what was of greater significance were the structural constants to which such statements corresponded, in turn eliciting their true meaning. The lessons Lévi-Strauss drew from linguistics for the establishment of his structural programme were thus as follows: First, structural linguistics shifts from the study of conscious linguistic phenomena to study of their unconscious infrastructure; second, it does not treat terms as independent entities, taking instead as its basis of analysis the relations between terms; third, it introduces the concept of system …;

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finally, structural linguistics aims at discovering general laws … (LéviStrauss 1963: 33) These lessons could well have been recited by two other giants of early structuralism: Jacques Lacan and Roland Barthes. Perhaps more so than any other structuralist, Lacan’s theory and practice of psychoanalysis was predicated upon the importance of the unapparent and unconscious aspects of subjective experience: ‘nothing could be more misleading for the analyst than to seek to guide himself by some supposed “contact” he experiences with the subject’s reality’ (Lacan 2006: 210). As with Lévi-Strauss, Lacan’s work was quite heavily influenced by structural linguistics. In 1953, Lacan delivered an address known as the ‘Rome Report’ in which he set out the parameters of psychoanalytic method explicitly along structuralist lines: Linguistics can serve us as a guide here, since that is the vanguard role it is given by contemporary anthropology, and we cannot remain indifferent to it … It is up to us to adopt this approach to discover how it intersects with our own field, just as ethnography, which follows a course parallel to our own, is already doing by deciphering myths according to the synchrony of mythemes. Isn’t it striking that Lévi-Strauss – in suggesting the involvement in myths of language structures and of those social laws that regulate marriage ties and kinship – is already conquering the very terrain in which Freud situates the unconscious? (Lacan 2006: 235–6) Lacan was particularly attracted to the scientistic credibility that structural linguistics could bestow upon his discipline. Freud, of course, had himself always insisted that he was a scientist and not a philosopher or mystic. But by the mid-twentieth century, the scientific credentials of psychoanalysis were in need of re-certification. Recognising the revolution that was afoot in structural linguistics and anthropology, Lacan took the opportunity to attach psychoanalysis to this modern movement: Today, however, the conjectural sciences are discovering once again the age-old notion of science, forcing us to revise the classification of the sciences we have inherited from the nineteenth century in a direction clearly indicated by the most lucid thinkers. (Lacan 2006: 235) Lacan’s ‘Rome Report’ thus served as a manifesto for psychoanalytic renovation that was to parallel the successes of Lévi-Strauss’ overhaul of anthropology. By rereading Freud through structural linguistics, Lacan erected

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a psychoanalytic theory and practice that was able to elicit and interpret phenomena on the basis of a synchronic and generalisable unconscious infrastructure of relations. The renowned literary theorist Roland Barthes also worked in and on the realm of the unconscious by adopting the structuralist paradigm. His role within the movement was, however, slightly different to that of LéviStrauss and Lacan. Barthes was the great synthesiser and advocate of early structuralism. Although he shared in the pursuit for scientificity and the application of a synchronic and generalisable method for the analysis of texts and society, as a consummate writer Barthes’ work retained a literary flourish that was distinct from these aims. The attraction of his work, as such, was not so much derived from its scientific promise as it was from its artistic merit. In later years Barthes would abandon his pursuit for scientificity, but in the 1950s and early ’60s Barthes work was characterised by a resolute adherence to the structuralist programme and a commitment to extending its scope and popularity. Whereas Lévi-Strauss investigated kinship relations in human societies and Lacan explored the psychoanalytic unconscious, Barthes subjected objects of the everyday to structural analysis: ‘The goal of all structuralist activity … is to reconstitute an object in such a way as to reveal the rules by which the object functions’ (Barthes 1964: 214). Barthes’ extraordinary analyses, however, were not garnered from fieldwork with indigenous cultures or repeated therapeutic sessions with paying clients, nor were they confined to these disciplinary settings. His application of the structuralist methodology was instead far more eclectic than many of his structuralist contemporaries. As just one example, Barthes’ understanding and application of ‘signs’ encompassed practically everything that had any meaning (Dosse 1997a: 77). This metaphorical usage allowed Barthes to draw all kinds of novel and creative connections, helping to facilitate structuralism’s profusion. But by the same token, it also took structuralism away from the controlled phonetic parameters that it had initially been set, in turn bringing its status into question. This status would be directly challenged by a number of thinkers closely associated with structuralism. The structuralist paradigm, as such, would be subjected almost immediately to an internal critique that would later contribute to the materialisation of poststructuralism. Alongside the emergence of the structuralist image can therefore be traced a parallel history of its transformation to poststructuralism.

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From Structuralism to Poststructuralism: The History of Transformation As the structuralist paradigm was in the process of taking shape, key contributions were made from a number of thinkers who departed from the structuralist norm. Chief among these were Michel Foucault, Louis Althusser and Jacques Derrida. In their own ways, these three thinkers contested, modified and/or failed to adhere to various aspects of the classical structuralist image. For starters, all three were philosophers by trade and tradition. Thus while they each held a keen interest in the new developments coming from the social sciences, their objective was not exactly to dethrone the discipline of philosophy per se, but to reassess its foundations and suggest new directions. As a result, these three thinkers, each in their own way, used structuralism in order to reinvigorate philosophy rather than usurp it. Michel Foucault’s work had the added effect of reconciling history (or more specifically, a particular form of history) with the structuralist movement. While structuralists such as Lévi-Strauss were dispensing with history in favour of science, Foucault was busy subjecting science to one of the most radical critiques it had ever faced – a critique, no less, that was largely mounted upon historical grounds. Foucault therefore could not fully share in the scientistic aspirations of structuralism or its condemnation of historical investigations in toto. This is not to say that Foucault was opposed to or dismissive of science. As a protégé of Georges Canguilhem, one of the great French philosophers of science, Foucault was extremely well informed about and interested in the nature and epistemology of science. Indeed, in his introduction to Canguilhem’s The Normal and the Pathological, Foucault contrasts two lineages of philosophical thought in France largely on the issue of science: on the one hand, as Foucault identifies, there is ‘a philosophy of knowledge, of rationality and of concept’, which he associates with Bachelard, Cavaillès and Canguilhem (and himself); while on the other hand, Foucault claims that there is a quite distinct ‘philosophy of experience, of sense and of subject’, of which Sartre and Merleau-Ponty are the main French proponents (Foucault 1991: 8). This distinction of Foucault’s, furthermore, is not merely motivated by scientific and epistemological concerns; there is also an implicit political point in Foucault’s opposition. While Cavaillès and Canguilhem were staunch members of the Resistance during the Nazi occupation of France (the former gave his life to the cause), Sartre’s involvement was rather questionable, in turn casting an unfavourable light on his post-war Marxism and political activism. Foucault’s self-association with the likes of Cavaillès and Canguilhem as opposed to Sartre was thus entirely

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consistent with the emerging intellectual trend in France that contrasted itself with the traditions of existentialism, humanism and their dubious political record in France. Recognising the similarities that he shared with structuralism, Foucault wasted no time in positioning himself as a leading light of the movement. With the publication of History of Madness in 1961, Foucault announced a new direction for structuralist thought. As Dosse recounts: ‘Barthes hailed this work as the first application of structuralism to history’ (Dosse 1997a: 155). On the one hand, History of Madness was decidedly structuralist: it sought to elicit the vital role that the unapparent (in this case madness) played in the operation of apparent norms (in this case reason) through a consideration of their structural relations and systematic consistencies. The debt here to Canguilhem’s analysis of the normal and pathological was evident, but so too was the new structuralist agenda with which Foucault’s analysis affiliated itself. On the other hand, however, History of Madness was a history. Much of its persuasive force was thus derived through historical contextualisation, historical interpretation, and more specifically, the historicisation of structures: ‘This structure of the experience of madness, which is history through and through, but whose seat is at its margins, where its decisions are made, is the object of this study’ (Foucault 2006: xxxii, emphasis added). Foucault’s contribution to structuralism, therefore, would be to not only strengthen the movement, but also subject it to transformations such as the above from a very early stage. The work of Louis Althusser also had a profound effect upon the complexion of structuralism. As French Marxists and intellectuals of the Left came to terms with the revelations of Soviet repression and recalibrated their positions accordingly, Althusser offered many of them an attractive alternative to Sartre’s Marxist-humanism. This alternative was predicated, to a large extent, on a turning away from established Marxist doctrine and its various contingent applications in order to facilitate and focus on a return to Marx himself. Reading Capital, first published by Althusser in 1965 with contributions from his students at the École Normale Supérieure (including Étienne Balibar, Roger Establet, Jacques Rancière and Pierre Macherey), would demonstrate the full power of this ‘return’ to the writings of Marx. As noted by his early readers (though later disputed by the author), Althusser’s ‘reading’ of Capital was coordinate with several principle traits of structuralism: his exegesis of Marx’s writings was highly analytic, anti-humanistic, marked by its appreciation of scientificity and largely synchronic in method (in so far as Althusser’s reading of Capital was guided by ‘the conception of the specific relations that exist between the different

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elements and the different structures of the structure of the whole’ and ‘the knowledge of the relations of dependence and articulation which make it an organic whole, a system’ (Althusser and Balibar 1970: 107)). Like a structure of social kinship or a linguistic system, Althusser approached Marx’s texts as a hermetically sealed set that imbued its own logic (or in some cases several). This logic, moreover, could not be solely constructed from the readily apparent alone; if anything, the genius of Althusser’s return to Marx was that he did not just return to what Marx said, but what Marx did not say in what he said. This way of reading Marx was derived by Althusser from none other than the very texts to which it was being applied. As Althusser noted, Marx did not only comment on what was explicitly ‘said’ by classical political economists; he more profoundly extracted critical points that were ‘unspoken’ in their texts, thus raising problematics that had been as yet unrecognised. An appropriate appraisal of capitalism was thus only made possible through an examination of the structural relations between the seen and the unseen, or more exactly, the blindness that lies at the heart of vision: ‘non-vision is therefore inside vision, it is a form of vision and hence has a necessary relationship with vision’ (Althusser and Balibar 1970: 21). In Althusser’s terminology, such forms of examination are ‘symptomatic’ in method: ‘A “symptomatic” reading is necessary to … identify behind the spoken words the discourse of the silence, which, emerging in the verbal discourse, induces these blanks in it, blanks which are failures in its rigour, or the outer limits of its effort’ (Althusser and Balibar 1970: 86). Althusser made the intellectual sources for this notion of ‘absence’ and his ‘symptomatic’ form of reading explicit. Aside from Marx and Nietzsche, he asserted that only since Freud have we begun to suspect what listening, and hence what speaking (and keeping silent), means (veut dire); that this ‘meaning’ (vouloir dire) of speaking and listening reveals beneath the innocence of speech and hearing the culpable depth of a second, quite different discourse, the discourse of the unconscious. (Althusser and Balibar 1970: 16) In a footnote attached to this claim, Althusser went on to credit this reading of Freud to Lacan, and furthermore ‘our masters in reading learned works, once Gaston Bachelard and Jean Cavaillès and now Georges Canguilhem and Michel Foucault’ (Althusser and Balibar 1970: 16). Althusser thus firmly placed himself within the same structural and philosophical nexus as Foucault. Despite his fraught relationship with the French Communist Party

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(of which he was a long-time member) due to his deviation from Party orthodoxy, Althusser’s ‘symptomatic’ method of reading Marx would enjoy great success amongst the Left. It would also considerably strengthen the structuralist movement by adding to its ranks a significant portion of the Marxist intelligentsia in France. By doing so, however, structuralism would never be the same: by facilitating a détente between structuralism and Marxism within the French intellectual scene (intended or not), the ideal of an apolitical social-scientific method would be exposed as naive. But perhaps more importantly, the presentation of Marx as a founder of structuralist thinking and reading would ultimately accentuate the growing disparities between this fast-growing brand of structuralism and the classical image as envisioned by Lévi-Strauss and his linguistic associates. The early 1960s also witnessed the emergence of a third discordant structuralist philosopher: Jacques Derrida. Of all the thinkers associated with structuralism, Derrida’s position was perhaps the most ambiguous. This is because, from as early as 1963, Derrida advanced an explicit critique of structuralism that would later be labelled as poststructuralist. In a lecture presented in March of that year, titled ‘Cogito and the History of Madness’, Derrida subjected Foucault’s structuralist history to a scathing attack. The crux of this critique was to ask of Foucault the following: from what privileged position does Foucault carry out his history of silence and the repressed? In his words: Is not an archaeology, even of silence, a logic, that is, an organized language, a project, an order, a sentence, a syntax, a work? Would not the archaeology of silence be the most efficacious and subtle restoration, the repetition, in the most irreducibly ambiguous meaning of the word, of the act perpetrated against madness – and be so at the very moment when this act is denounced? (Derrida 1978: 41) Derrida’s intention, in short, was to cast doubt on the grounds from which Foucault’s analysis derived its authority. This point was simple, yet effective. It was also applicable to the rest of the structuralist movement. In 1966, three years after delivering his critique of Foucault’s History of Madness, Derrida took part in one of the most significant moments in the history of structuralism: the colloquium The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man, held at Johns Hopkins University. This colloquium – attended by Lacan, Barthes, Todorov, Goldmann, Vernant and Derrida among others – served as a primer to French structuralism for the American academic market. Derrida’s contribution, however, would serve as an announcement

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of the paradigm’s underside. In his lecture, ‘Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences’, Derrida repeated his critique of Foucault, but this time with respect to Lévi-Strauss: When Lévi-Strauss says in the preface to The Raw and the Cooked that he has ‘sought to transcend the opposition between the sensible and the intelligible by operating from the outset at the level of signs’, the necessity, force, and legitimacy of his act cannot make us forget that the concept of the sign cannot in itself surpass this opposition between the sensible and the intelligible. (Derrida 1978: 355) Following this remark Derrida proceeded to deconstruct Lévi-Strauss’ programme and, consequently, reinfuse his structural edifice with ‘what we might call the play of the structure’ (Derrida 1978: 352). Structuralism’s deconstruction therefore coincided with its arrival on the big stage. As the structuralist image was in the process of mass exportation, Derrida attempted to destabilise its centre of gravity by raising and unravelling its metaphysical presuppositions. Far from effectuating a break with philosophy, Derrida demonstrated how many structuralists perpetuated some of the most pervasive trends in the history of philosophy, such as the privileging of speech over writing that Lévi-Strauss and Jakobson both indulge in (see Derrida 1976). Nevertheless, Derrida was by no means an opponent or even outsider to the structuralist paradigm, as his involvement in the Johns Hopkins colloquium indicated. Rather, in accordance with his methodological approach, Derrida inhabited structuralism, so as to deconstruct it from within (Derrida 1976: 24). This approach was strategic in more ways than one: irrespective of the dictates of his deconstructive method, Derrida knew full well that structuralism at the time was on a path to glory. He was therefore quite content, like others, to be grouped under the structuralist sign for the time being, despite the obvious discontinuities between himself and various other structuralists. As Derrida admitted at one point: ‘Since we take nourishment from the fecundity of structuralism, it is too soon to dispel our dream’ (Derrida 1978: 3).2 In the mid 1960s, structuralism was yet to be fully consecrated, and poststructuralism was but a glimmer in the eye of the English-speaking world. Thus, while Derrida pursued an internal transformation of structuralism from the early 1960s on, the culmination and recognition of this metamorphosis would have to wait for a more propitious external moment. This moment arrived in May of 1968. By 1968 structuralism had transformed itself from a marginalised method of the social sciences to a

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multifaceted movement that permeated numerous disciplines, including stalwarts of the humanities such as philosophy and history. Structuralism was enjoying a level of public success akin to the heyday of Sartre and de Beauvoir, and on the back of this fervour structuralists were preparing for their anointment by academic institutions at all levels, from the Sorbonne down to regional lycées. The uprising of May ’68 in Paris would accelerate this process, but in doing so it would also expose the movement’s redundancy and help facilitate its overcoming. As the student occupiers of the Sorbonne made clear, the spirit of ’68 was not structuralist: ‘Structures’, read a famous slogan, ‘don’t take to the streets’ (Dosse 1997b: 116). This hostility towards structuralism exhibited by elements of the failed revolution is perhaps best explained by the untimely nature of May ’68. If May ’68 was a profound social and political event, it was in large part due to its inexplicable nature. Nearly everyone, including most significantly the structuralist avant-garde, did not see the uprising coming. Moreover, the uprising did not neatly correspond to the expectations of the French Left who had been long preparing for (and bickering over) the revolution: white middle-class university students were not exactly the designated revolutionary class. As such, May ’68 was in many ways not a product of its times, but rather an untimely eruption that would only later be re-contextualised. Its participants, for the most part, were not well organised or agreed on what they hoped to achieve, other than to bring down the system. With this in mind, it is unsurprising that structuralism, itself the eminent ‘sign of the times’, would be out of sync with this untimely rupture. The incompatibility of structuralism with the dissident mentality of May ’68 was further emphasised by the fact that structuralism effectively promoted unitary and inescapable systems which demanded strict obedience to a method or procedure, whether that meant swearing fealty to Lacan, science or some other master principle/al; following the rules and giving oneself over to a universal and irresistible system was not exactly a feature of the spirit of ’68. And yet, despite this reaction against the rise of structuralism, May ’68 also offered structuralism the chance to crown its recent successes with institutional recognition. As Lévi-Strauss and other early structuralists had long recognised, the institutions of French academia were in drastic need of modernisation. May ’68 brought this process to immediate fulfilment. As the epitome of modern intellectual theory and practice, structuralism was perfectly placed to capitalise upon the academic shake-up necessitated by May ’68 and convert its popular success into positions of institutional power. Thus while structuralism was too conservative and stifling for many of the

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radical students that instigated the May ’68 uprising, it was sufficiently modern-yet-respectable to satisfy the demands for institutional reform. Among the many institutional advances that structuralists made in the aftermath of May ’68 (such as the appointment of Foucault, and later Barthes, to the Collège de France), none were more pronounced than the creation of the experimental university at Vincennes (Université de Paris VIII). This institution of learning located on the outskirts of Paris was established on a structuralist mandate that May ’68 had helped make possible. Foucault, the leading figurehead of structuralism at the time following his extraordinarily successful The Order of Things (which at one point had the subtitle An Archaeology of Structuralism), was asked to form the Philosophy Department, while the structural linguist Jean Dubois was charged with establishing the university’s Linguistic Department (Dubois was in fact initially asked to be Dean of Vincennes, which he declined). Vincennes also inaugurated the first Department of Psychoanalysis, headed by Serge Leclaire – an important disciple of Lacan. But despite these structuralist overtones, it must be said that in reality Vincennes was far too cutting edge to be simply structuralist – a movement that even young students knew by that time was old-hat. Thus while it might not have been clear to university administrators, May ’68 demonstrated to the structuralist thinkers that the game was up. In the period following May ’68, nearly all of the major structuralist thinkers embarked upon an overhaul of their work or attempted to distance themselves from the structuralist paradigm (Kurzweil 1996: xii–xiii). To cite an example, when Foucault’s next book, The Archaeology of Knowledge, appeared in 1969, he made it clear in no uncertain terms that he was not a mere structuralist: In order to avoid misunderstanding, I should like to begin with a few observations. – My aim is not to transfer to the field of history, and more particularly to the history of knowledge (connaissances), a structuralist method that has proved valuable in other fields of analysis. My aim is to uncover the principles and consequences of an autochthonous transformation that is taking place in the field of historical knowledge. It may well be that this transformation, the problems that it raises, the tools that it uses, the concepts that emerge from it, and the results that it obtains are not entirely foreign to what is called structural analysis. But this kind of analysis is not specifically used … In short, this book, like those that preceded it, does not belong – at least directly, or in the first instance – to the debate on structure (as opposed to genesis, history, development); it belongs to that field in which the questions of the human

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being, consciousness, origin, and the subject emerge, interest, mingle, and separate off. But it would probably not be incorrect to say that the problem of structure arose there too. (Foucault 2002: 17–18) Althusser, too, would be at pains around this time to clear up any such ‘misunderstandings’. On the release of the Italian edition of Reading Capital in 1968, he would take the opportunity to add the following disclaimer in a brief preface: Despite the precautions we took to distinguish ourselves from the ‘structuralist’ ideology (we said very clearly that the ‘combination’ to be found in Marx ‘has nothing to do with a combinatory’), despite the decisive intervention of categories foreign to ‘structuralism’ (determination in the last instance, domination, overdetermination, production process, etc.), the terminology we employed was too close in many respects to the ‘structuralist’ terminology not to give rise to an ambiguity. With a very few exceptions (some very perceptive critics have made the distinction), our interpretation of Marx has generally been recognized and judged, in homage to the current fashion, as ‘structuralist’. We believe that despite the terminological ambiguity, the profound tendency of our texts was not attached to the ‘structuralist’ ideology. It is our hope that the reader will be able to bear this claim in mind, to verify it and to subscribe to it. (Althusser and Balibar 1970: 7) When Althusser and Foucault suggest that they were never really structuralists, even if there are resonances between their work and structuralism, we can certainly take them at their word. After all, which serious thinker that was associated with structuralism at one time or another did not have aspects of their work that were incongruous with the classical structuralist image? Nevertheless, it is undeniable that Althusser, and especially Foucault, only really felt it necessary to explicitly point out their distance from structuralism once the movement was on the wane. As F. Scott Fitzgerald might have put it, by the end of the 1960s it was clear to those intellectuals involved that the structuralist plate had cracked, and the only thing left for it was to consummate a clean break as best one can, and quickly (Fitzgerald 1945: 81–4). In light of this, although structuralism during this period was reaching the summit of institutional and popular success, at the ground level of academic work structuralism was in severe decline, if not already extinct: structuralism in this period, to put it one way, was like an exploding star that shines forth most brightly long after it has ceased producing new light.

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The list of academics at Vincennes confirms this shift. While there was certainly a strong structuralist presence at Vincennes, including some of the movement’s recognised superstars, the majority of academics were not card-carrying structuralists, and many of those who were so tainted were beating a fast retreat. Among the intellectuals who walked the corridors of Vincennes during the late ’60s and early ’70s (at one point or another) were Barthes, Dumézil, Foucault, Deleuze, Guattari, Derrida, Lyotard, Irigaray, Cixious, Poulantzas, Negri, de Certeau, Balibar, Badiou, Rancière, Judith Miller (Lacan’s daughter) and her husband JacquesAlain Miller. Despite their debt to structuralism, this roster of thinkers did not collectively promote a classical structuralist agenda. In fact, if anything, what they all shared was a tendency to push beyond the previous established parameters of structuralism in order to inhabit its margins and address its blind spots. Vincennes, as such, was not exactly structuralist, but poststructuralist. This, however, raises the crucial problem mooted at the start of this investigation: if even the crowning institution of structuralism was more accurately poststructuralist, where does one end and the other begin? And more significantly; from what position do we determine this problematic, let alone its resolution?

From Structuralism to Poststructuralism: The Problem of Transformation Just as Derrida questioned Foucault in 1963, we must ask ourselves now: in the name of what authority does this history of the transformation from structuralism to poststructuralism proceed? Given that other thinkers associated with poststructuralism, such as Gilles Deleuze, pose similar sorts of questions,3 we might consider this to be a pre-eminently poststructuralist problematic. As it happens, ‘problem’ is precisely the right word when it comes to Deleuze. During the 1950s and ’60s, Deleuze produced a series of monographs on individual thinkers, including Hume, Bergson, Proust, Nietzsche, Spinoza and Kant. As established scholars from the academic field of each thinker would concur, Deleuze’s readings of these thinkers are highly idiosyncratic and at times perverse. This is because in each case Deleuze attempts to elicit what he believes are the critical problems articulated by the oeuvre of each thinker – problems that may not always be explicitly apparent in the text, but traverse them throughout and provide the source of their vitality. As a consequence, Deleuze is never that interested in debating points of contention with his

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contemporaries. His intention is to rather distil the problematic of each great thinker that produces something worth knowing. As he explains in an interview of 1968: When you are facing such a work of genius, there’s no point saying you disagree. First you have to know how to admire; you have to rediscover the problems he poses, his particular machinery. It is through admiration that you will come to genuine critique. The mania of people today is not knowing how to admire anything: either they’re ‘against’, or they situate everything at their own level while they chit-chat and scrutinize. That’s no way to go about it. You have to work your way back to those problems which an author of genius has posed, all the way back to that which he does not say in what he says, in order to extract something that still belongs to him, though you also turn it against him. You have to be inspired, visited by the geniuses you denounce. (Deleuze 2004: 139) There are clear resonances here between Deleuze’s problematic approach to the history of philosophy and Althusser’s interpretation of Marx’s method of reading: ‘To understand this necessary and paradoxical identity of nonvision and vision within vision itself is very exactly to pose our problem (the problem of the necessary connexion which unites the visible and the invisible), and to pose it properly is to give ourselves a chance of solving it’ (Althusser and Balibar 1970: 21). But while Marx’s problematic philosophy is no doubt influential on Deleuze, the emergence of Deleuze’s concern for the problem can be traced to another source: Henri Bergson. In his book Bergsonism (1966), Deleuze contends that Bergsonian intuition – the concept in Bergson’s philosophy that was notoriously parodied by Bertrand Russell for its vagueness – is a supremely rigorous and precise method (Deleuze 1991: 13). This method, moreover, is ‘an essentially problematizing method’ (Deleuze 1991, 35). Drawing heavily from an essay in Bergson’s Creative Mind (‘Introduction II: Stating of the Problems’), Deleuze notes that from an early age people are trained to search for solutions to problems that they have been given – problems that are, in other words, ‘ready made’. Many of these problems, however, are false, either because they are ‘nonexistent’ or ‘badly stated’. This is to say that such inherited problems no longer fit the circumstances in which they find themselves, and are thus in need of restating in a manner that is more appropriate. Because solutions are always respective to the problems they are solutions of, Bergson argues that a ‘problem is solved as soon as it is properly stated’ (Bergson 2007: 37). When this is done, false problems evaporate (rather than become ‘solved’)

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and the problems that remain are ones that we truly deserve – they are our problems, not someone else’s.4 Deleuze’s Bergsonism, in a way, perfectly illustrates what our problem is at present: while innovative social scientists and philosophers/historians attentive to their developments were busy during the 1950s promoting the new intellectual vogue that was structuralism, Deleuze was off studying philosophers such as Bergson and Hume – philosophers that were hardly fashionable in Parisian coffee houses at the time. Deleuze therefore did not take part in the structuralist wave in the same manner that many of his contemporaries did, such as Foucault and Derrida. This little fact, as Bergson would say, is big with meaning. How are we to understand the contribution of a figure such as Deleuze to the problematic of poststructuralism and its relation to structuralism? For instance, it is not uncommon for Deleuze to be categorised as a ‘new’ or ‘late’ poststructuralist (as opposed to ‘early’ ones like Derrida).5 On one level – the factual level – such descriptions are simply false: Deleuze did not come ‘after’ Derrida in time or in conceptual progression. Indeed, many of Deleuze’s most enduring and critical ideas (such as the theory of multiplicity developed from Bergson) were already fully formed in the 1950s, and are thus contemporaneous with structuralism, let alone ‘early’ poststructuralism. But on another level, such descriptions are not necessarily the product of a false problem. If Deleuze is presented as coming ‘after’ Derrida, it is not only because the wider public became aware of Deleuze after Derrida,6 but also because the problematic of poststructuralism, according to the manner in which it was first constructed, demands that this is the case. Deleuze is therefore an interesting figure for our analysis of the transformation from structuralism to poststructuralism for he complicates our chronology and requires that we consider the problematic through which we perceive his work. As with most other French intellectuals who lived through the age of structuralism, Deleuze was hardly unaffected by the movement. His The Logic of Sense and Anti-Oedipus, for example, contain crucial engagements with Lacanian psychoanalysis, while he references nearly all the other major structuralists at some point in his career. Deleuze even wrote an essay in 1967 titled ‘How do we recognise structuralism?’7 But as this essay reveals, it is difficult to articulate Deleuze’s relationship to structuralism. Much like his treatment of individual philosophers in previous works, the essay on structuralism does not summarise or provide a description of a widely recognisable classical image of structuralism. Instead, it attempts to extract a novel and creative force that has an uncanny similarity to Deleuze’s own philosophy. Perhaps it is for this reason that the essay is often considered

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to be more poststructuralist than structuralist, or at least structuralism ‘in a very radical guise’ (Williams 2005: 53). But if this is so, and if Deleuze’s approach to the essay and indeed many of the concepts expressed in it are contiguous with his monographs of the 1950s, then we would have to say that those monographs are also poststructuralist. If this were the case, what would it mean to suggest that some poststructuralist works, such as Deleuze’s Empiricism and Subjectivity (1953) and his groundbreaking essays on Bergson in the mid 1950s, predate the publication of some of the major structuralist works, such as Lévi-Strauss’ Structural Anthropology (1958) and Foucault’s History of Madness (1961)? Such a suggestion is only rendered sensible when directed through the problematics of structuralism, poststructuralism and the transformation between them. Deleuze’s early concepts that are propelled throughout his later works can then, at best, be described as untimely – the sign of a ‘time to come’ (Nietzsche 1983: 60), since they do not sufficiently align with the structuralist sign of the times. The problematic is then restated to incorporate the following: what is the relation between an untimely rupture, the time in which it occurs, and the time in which it is retrospectively recognised as untimely? Nevertheless, in the case of some thinkers other than Deleuze whose careers spanned structuralism and poststructuralism, the transformation between the two paradigms is arguably much more straightforward. Unlike Foucault and Althusser, who would come to downplay their involvement with structuralism, or Derrida, who could claim with some legitimacy that he was always on the edge of the paradigm (the limit within the centre), Barthes’ fidelity to the structuralist programme during the 1950s and early ’60s was most explicit and undeniable. So too was the moment that he abandoned the classical structuralist programme. In 1970, the publication of Barthes’ S/Z heralded a new phase in his career that markedly deviated from his previous classical structuralist positions. In its opening passage, S/Z derides those analysts who would ‘see all the world’s stories (and there have been ever so many) within a single structure’, for such an approach disregards the irreducible difference in and of each text – the ‘difference of which each text is the return’ (Barthes 1974: 3).8 This new direction, as Barthes acknowledged, was heavily influenced by a set of thinkers that would later be called poststructuralist.9 Julia Kristeva, in particular, was largely responsible for this change in tack by Barthes. As a recent Bulgarian émigré in Paris, Kristeva brought with her fresh ideas about language and literary analysis that would radically challenge aspects of the existing structuralist doctrine. In 1966 she delivered a lecture that employed the work of Mikhail Bakhtin – a largely unknown figure in France at the time – for the purposes

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of reconfiguring structuralism. Her goal, as with Derrida, was to give ‘dynamism to structuralism’,10 and thus replace the staid and synchronic nature of classical structuralism with a genuinely dynamic model that imbued perpetual genesis. Upon hearing this lecture, Barthes reassessed his position and almost immediately adopted elements of Kristeva’s approach, such as her ‘intertextual’ methodology.11 A relatively clear case, such as Barthes’, can tell us much about the ‘on the ground’ theoretical issues that indicate a shift from structuralism to poststructuralism. Meticulous analysis of the relevant texts and interviews should dispel many erroneous generalisations and regurgitated inaccuracies (some of which have been necessarily repeated in this chapter). But despite, or perhaps more accurately, aside from the value of careful reading, it must be acknowledged that the problem of the transformation from structuralism to poststructuralism does not only concern what this or that thinker said, nor can it be exhausted or resolved by settling upon a ‘correct’ reading of their corpus. This is because the problems at hand are far greater than the thinkers themselves. The reality of their various poststructuralisms, therefore, cannot be reduced to textual interpretation, regardless of how faithful or impressive the analysis may be. In an excellent work on poststructuralism, James Williams warns against reducing the work of thinkers such as Derrida and Foucault to the problem of poststructuralism. Poststructuralism, in his view, is rather defined by these great works (Williams 2005: 25–6). An understanding of poststructuralism, in other words, can be accumulated through an investigation of Derrida’s method of deconstruction, Deleuze’s philosophy of difference, and so on, but poststructuralism must not be presumptively deployed as a means for constructing an understanding of those thinkers. Williams’ sentiment is a good one: as Althusser showed in the case of Marxism, any ‘ism’ can arguably benefit from a return to what the relevant thinkers actually said (or what is not said in what they say). But it is also wilfully limited. As pointed out above, Althusser’s return to the texts was in part motivated by a desire to turn away from realities in the East and respond to new challenges in the West. This allowed for much creative ‘Theory’, but it also compromised the work, for it denied to a large extent the active involvement of extratextual elements in the constitution of the problematic. It is questionable, therefore, how far Williams can turn away from extratextual realities in the West that contributed to the formation of poststructuralism, if the objective is to gain an understanding of poststructuralism, including its seminal texts. Poststructuralism, as it is currently understood and deployed, may contain many assertions that have been derived from lazy readings of Derrida or

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too little familiarity with Deleuze’s solo works, but this problematic still has very real effects in the world of academia and beyond. Like Deleuze and Guattari say of capitalism, its contradictions do not necessarily harm it, but perhaps make it stronger, for better or worse (Deleuze and Guattari 1984: 151). This was indeed precisely the case with structuralism: if Lévi-Strauss had been consistently read in the way that he wanted, it is probable that structuralism would not have spread as it did or led to poststructuralism.12 This is not to say that all misreadings are good, or that what a thinker writes is necessarily of secondary importance to the circumstance of the reader. It is also not to say that one necessarily needs to understand poststructuralism in order to understand Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition. But it is to insist upon a recognition of the importance that extratextual elements play in the determination of poststructuralism, including the texts this problematic embraces, if one wishes to fully understand poststructuralism, as opposed to analyse the texts of Deleuze, Derrida, and so on. So, what exactly is this poststructuralist problematic? Or as Deleuze might have modified, how do we recognise this problem across a number of divergent works and locales? What are its singularities, critical points of change and indeterminacies? Who is it that employs the term, where, when and why? I will leave these questions for others in this volume to ascertain more fully. But as a way of concluding my contribution, I would suggest that the following be borne in mind when pursuing these issues: to understand poststructuralism requires that an attempt be made to articulate both its history and its problematic structure (accompanied, of course, by a reading of the relevant texts). On the one hand, an analysis of the former will illustrate how a historical transformation occurs from structuralism to poststructuralism – a historical transformation, furthermore, that occurs on both a theoretical level (such as the structuralist elevation of the unapparent/unconscious that is then taken up, modified and/or discarded by poststructuralists), and an extratextual level (such as the contribution of May ’68 to the contours of poststructuralist theories and their popular success). On the other hand, an analysis of the latter will remind us that it matters a great deal what we presuppose and obscure in the pursuit of this history; that it matters where we begin and hope to arrive. For what would poststructuralism be if we began with Deleuze and then added Derrida (or not)? And what does structuralism become when it is played off the presumption of a later poststructuralism? Could it not be that it is only in this retrospective moment of ‘radical’, ‘ultra’ or ‘post’ structuralism that the ‘classical’ image first appears? This double reminder might reconstitute the original structuralist battle between genesis and structure, historical origins and synchronic laws, or as poststructuralists might reconfigure, Being and

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Becoming; a conflict, moreover, that can no doubt be located throughout the history of philosophy, and thus responded to in a number of ways. But provided that we make this problem our own, there is every chance that it will make a valuable contribution to the world today.

Notes 1. See Lundy (2009: 189–91). 2. Derrida was not the only one aware of the benefits to be had at the time by associating oneself with the structuralist brand. When Julian Greimas went to publish a book in 1966, tentatively titled Semantics, he was told by Jean Dubois: ‘You will sell a thousand more copies if you add the word structural’ (Algirdas J. Greimas, quoted by Jean-Claude Chevalier and Pierre Encreve, Langue française, p. 97, as found in Dosse 1997a: 317). 3. ‘History’, Deleuze and Guattari contend, ‘is one with the triumph of States’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 394). 4. At this point in the text Deleuze in fact refers to Marx, noting that ‘We might compare the last sentence of this extract from Bergson with Marx’s formulation, which is valid for practice itself: “Humanity only sets itself problems that it is capable of solving” ’ (Deleuze 1991: 16). 5. See, for example, Sarup (1993: 4). 6. Although well known amongst intellectual circles in France from the 1950s, Deleuze did not become a widely recognisable figure until the publication of Anti-Oedipus (1972) with Félix Guattari. Furthermore, the English-speaking world would have to wait until 1994 before a translation of his magnum opus Difference and Repetition appeared, thus contributing to his ‘late’ arrival. 7. This essay was published in 1972 in a collection on the history of philosophy compiled by François Châtelet (Histoire de la philosophie, vol. VIII: Le XXe Siècle, ed. F. Châtelet, Paris: Hachette, pp. 299–335). In the opening to the piece, however, Deleuze indicates that it was written around 1967. 8. Although present in the work of several poststructuralists, Deleuze is perhaps most responsible for promoting this notion of the ‘return of difference’. According to Deleuze’s interpretation of Nietzsche’s eternal return in his Nietzsche and Philosophy (1962), it is not the same that eternally returns (as argued by Heidegger) but difference: ‘Every time we understand the eternal return as the return of a particular arrangement of things after all the other arrangements have been realised, every time we interpret the eternal return as the return of the identical or the same, we replace Nietzsche’s thought with childish hypotheses. No one extended the critique of all forms of identity further than Nietzsche’ (Deleuze 1986: xi–xii). 9. In an interview with Raymon Bellour printed in Les Lettres françaises (May 20, 1970), Barthes cites the conceptual creditors of S/Z as ‘Lacan, Julia Kristeva, Sollers, Derrida, Deleuze, Serres, among others’ (Barthes 1985: 78).

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10. Julia Kristeva, ‘Le mot, le dialogue et le roman’ (1966); reprinted in Semiotke, recherches pour une semanalyse, as found in Dosse (1997b: 55). 11. When pressed on his distancing from a semiology that ‘reveals a structure’ in favour of one that ‘produces a structuration’, Barthes asserted that ‘one must go beyond the statics of the first semiology, which tried precisely to discover structures, structure-products, object-spaces in a text, in order to discover what Julia Kristeva calls a productivity – i.e., a working of the text, a junction, a coupling into the shifting infinity of language’ (Barthes 1985: 73). 12. In fact, Lévi-Strauss welcomed the demise of the structuralist vogue, since he considered many of the developments made in its name to be unhelpful perversions of his original structuralist programme. As he remarked in 1973, ‘structuralism, happily, has not been in style since 1968’ (Dosse 1997b: 115).

References Althusser, L. and É. Balibar ([1965] 1970), Reading Capital, trans. B. Brewster, London: NLB. Barthes, R. (1964), Essais Critiques, Paris: Éditions du Seuil. Barthes, R. ([1970] 1974), S/Z, trans. Richard Miller, Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Barthes, R. ([1981] 1985), The Grain of the Voice: Interviews 1962–1980, trans. L Coverdale, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Bergson, H. (2007), The Creative Mind: An Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. M. L. Andison, Mineola, NY: Dover Publications. Deleuze, G. ([1962] 1986), Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. H. Tomlinson, London: Continuum. Deleuze, G. ([1966] 1991), Bergsonism, trans. H. Tomlinson and B. Habberjam, New York, NY: Zone Books. Deleuze, G. (1994), Difference and Repetition, London: Athlone. Deleuze, G. (2004), Desert Islands and Other Texts: 1953–1974, ed. D. Lapoujade, trans. M. Taormina, Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e). Deleuze, G. and F. Guattari ([1972] 1984), Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. R. Hurley, M. Seem and H. R. Lane, London: Continuum. Deleuze, G. and F. Guattari ([1980] 1987), A Thousand Plateaus, trans. B Massumi, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Derrida, J. ([1967] 1976), Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Derrida, J. ([1967] 1978), Writing and Difference, trans. A. Bass, London: Routledge. Dosse, F. ([1991] 1997a), History of Structuralism: Volume I: The Rising Sign, 1945–1966, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Dosse, F. ([1992] 1997b), History of Structuralism: Volume II: The Sign Sets, 1967– Present, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Fitzgerald, F. S. ([1931] 1945), The Crack-Up, New York, NY: New Directions.

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Foucault, M. ([1978] 1991), ‘Introduction’, in G. Canguilhem, The Normal and the Pathological, New York, NY: Zone Books. Foucault, M. ([1969] 2002), The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith, London: Routledge. Foucault, M. ([1961] 2006), History of Madness, trans. J. Murphy and J. Khalfa, ed. J Khalfa, London: Routledge. Kurzweil, K. ([1980] 1996), The Age of Structuralism: From Lévi-Strauss to Foucault, New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers. Lacan, J. ([1966] 2006), Écrits, trans. B. Fink with H. Find and R. Grigg, London: W. W. Norton & Company. Lévi-Strauss, C. ([1958] 1963), Structural Anthropology, trans. C. Jacobson and B. Grundfest Schoepf, London: Penguin Books. Lévi-Strauss, C. and D. Eribon ([1988] 1991), Conversations with Claude LéviStrauss, trans. P. Wissing, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Lundy, C. (2009), ‘Deleuze untimely: uses and abuses in the appropriation of Nietzsche’, in Deleuze and History, eds Jeffrey Bell and Claire Colebrook, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Nietzsche, F. ([1874] 1983), ‘On the uses and disadvantages of history for life’, in Untimely Meditations, trans. R. J. Hollingdale, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sarup, M. (1993), An Introductory Guide to Post-structuralism and Postmodernism, Harlow: Harvester Wheatsheaf. Wahl, F. (1968), Qu’est-ce que le structuralisme? Paris: Éditions du Seuil. Williams, J. (2005), Understanding Poststructuralism, Chesham: Acumen.

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Pa r t I I Methods

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In Chapter 4, ‘A History of the Method: Examining Foucault’s Research Methodology’, Hardy provides a survey of the key research methodologies developed by Foucault across his life and work. For Hardy, it is important to distinguish between the particular methods that Foucault actually used for undertaking research (say, for example, collecting data through archival research) and what could be more broadly termed ‘Foucault’s methodology’ as such: namely, the particular theoretical frameworks he created to order and interrogate his collected data. To this end, Hardy focuses his attention mainly on the two innovative theoretical frameworks that Foucault is most famous for: ‘archaeology’ and ‘genealogy’. In Chapter 5, ‘Derrida, Deconstruction and Method’, Phillips concentrates on the formative work of Derrida, the name most associated with deconstruction, with the aim of outlining some of the basic principles of this method (also see Anderson in Chapter 11). At the heart of deconstruction, Phillips argues, lies the question of reading, which henceforth will be difficult to distinguish absolutely from writing. When a person reads, a kind of writing takes place: repeating, revising, decontextualising, recontextualising and so on. In certain cases this ‘taking place’ attains the status of an ‘event’. In an important respect, then, for Phillips, the methodological aim of deconstruction is to produce such an event: a meta-methodological event of ‘reading-as-writing’ that can be put to work in the critique of method in any activity whatsoever (scientific, critical, philosophical, ethical and so on). In Chapter 6, ‘Écriture Féminine’, Brigley Thompson explores some of the problems raised in and through Cixous’ notion of écriture féminine (see also Puri in Chapter 12), while also seeking to unravel some of misunderstandings and misconceptions associated with this method. The chapter begins

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by outlining the first formulations of écriture féminine in Cixous’s essays ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’ and ‘Sorties’. From such beginnings, Brigley Thompson then goes on to consider in more detail the related concepts of écriture féminine and féminité, offering an account of the key characteristics of the method. Though complex and necessarily in a state of constant reinvention, the concepts and methodological practices associated with écriture féminine and féminité are always, Brigley Thompson insists, conditioned or brought to life in the opening up to otherness and in the creation of a space where otherness can dwell. In Chapter 7, ‘Schizoanalysis: An Incomplete Project’, Buchanan argues that Deleuze and Guattari’s method of schizoanalysis is best understood as a project which is in a state of permanent revolution. Pointing out that Deleuze and Guattari were unwilling to provide any kind of ‘formula’ or ‘model’ that would enable us to simply ‘do’ schizoanalysis as a simple tick-box exercise, and emphasising how Deleuze and Guattari observe a quite deliberate strategy of providing multiple answers to the questions their methods and work raises, Buchanan nonetheless insists and shows that schizoanalysis is not incoherent, impractical or without specific focus, as many of its detractors are quick to claim. Indeed, what Buchanan infers specifically from Deleuze and Guattari’s methodological practices or body of work is a clear attempt to give us a new topography of the psyche.

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Chapter 4 A History of the Method: Examining Fo u c a u l t ’ s Re s e a rch M e t h o d o l o g y Nick Hardy

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Introduction Since Foucault started publishing in the early 1960s much ink has been spilled by both his detractors and supporters alike.1 An interesting point to note, however, is that each tends to assign to Foucault’s work a level of coherence and/or integration that is overall quite difficult to substantiate. One of the most famous of the supportive texts is by Dreyfus and Rabinow (1982), gained from their discussions and interviews with Foucault during his annual research trips to the University of California, Berkeley. Dreyfus and Rabinow appoint to Foucault’s work a definite methodological evolution that clearly separates his ‘archaeological’ and ‘genealogical’ periods. Other writers attempt to move away from this dichotomy, arguing that Foucault’s later work (much of which was posthumously published) shows that he understood it as maintaining a continuum and not involving a break at all. However, in different ways both of these positions disregard one of Foucault’s own theoretical and methodological warnings: never treat an author or their works as a complete and integrated whole (Foucault [1969] 2003b). This may at first seem paradoxical, for is not the author of a work also in overall command of that work? Foucault convincingly argued that the ‘author function’ is in fact just a discursive device, used as a means of separating the desirable from the undesirable (e.g. a scholar’s books from her laundry lists) but also as operating to give wider coherence to a range of texts (Foucault [1969] 2003b: 379, 384). Foucault’s point is that ‘the author’ exists as both a changeable set of pre-existing rules but also as implying a false coherence. It is also not without some irony, then, that there are instances where Foucault himself re-examines his previous works and, in effect, assigns to them an author function (see also Shumway 1989: 1–13). The inconsistencies, the

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breaks, the problems that Foucault had during his research career are a large part of the fruitfulness that he offers to those scholars who read him. To paper over the cracks, so to speak, is to turn his work into a sheer edifice and to deny the intellectual accomplishments he achieved when changing his research in light of perceived methodological problems. In terms of method and methodology, it is especially important to maintain a balanced perspective on what Foucault actually produced, compared to what is claimed he produced. If reinterpretations are taken at face value then the richness of his earlier works become obscured – or, more importantly, alternate theoretical and methodological paths lost. It is important to establish at this point that Foucault did not single-handedly generate new methods for undertaking research; his actual method was nothing more than extensive archival research. These are the kind of research skills most often used by the historian: finding, accessing and extracting information buried deep within an archive of documents. It was Foucault’s methodology – the particular theoretical frameworks he used to order and interrogate his collected data – that was so innovative and particular to him. In this way he aided the development of what would now be termed discourse analysis: the interrogation of a series of related statements in order to discern the overt or covert assumptions, generalisations or prescriptions that they contain. The two main theoretical frameworks Foucault developed he termed ‘archaeology’ and ‘genealogy’. These were responses to the ontological and epistemological concerns he developed during the course of his intellectual career. The ‘archaeology’ includes the texts History of Madness ([1961] 2006a), The Birth of the Clinic ([1963] 1994a), The Order of Things ([1966] 1994b) and The Archaeology of Knowledge ([1969] 1972). The ‘genealogy’ includes the article ‘Nietzsche, genealogy, history’ ([1971] 2003c), and the books Discipline and Punish ([1975] 1995) and History of Sexuality, Vol. 1 ([1976] 1990a).2 Before moving on to discuss each, it is important to briefly note that Foucault took for granted his readers knowledge of Ferdinand de Saussure’s ‘structural linguistics’, a theory which broke the link between language and the objects language describes. Saussure argued that language consists of signs, the linking together of words (the signifier) and concepts (the signified) ([1915] 1986: 65–7). Language is understood as a system of interconnected associations rather than a form of direct representation of ‘real’ things. Later developments to Saussure’s work demonstrated the malleability of the connection between a signifier and the signified. The effect was not only that language was shown to be a system in its own right but, in specific social circumstances, the connections between signifiers and signifieds was open to change.

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Archaeology: What is it? Foucault only formally gave a detailed account of his archaeological method in the Archaeology of Knowledge ([1969] 1972) that, somewhat ironically, marks the end-point of his own explicitly archaeological research. However, he did partially outline archaeology prior to this. In an interview (unhelpfully later titled ‘The Order of Things’) Foucault gives an answer to what he considers archaeology to be: By ‘archaeology’ I would like to designate not exactly a discipline but a domain of research, which would be the following: in a society, different bodies of learning, philosophical texts, everyday opinions, but also institutions, commercial practices and police activities, mores – all refer to a certain implicit knowledge [savoir] special to this society. This knowledge is profoundly different from the bodies of learning [des connaissances] that one can find in scientific books, philosophical theories, and religious justifications, but it is what makes possible at a given moment the appearance of a theory, an opinion, a practice … It’s this knowledge that I wanted to investigate, as the conditions of possibility of knowledge [connaissance], of institutions, of practices. (Foucault [1966] 1998: 261–2) The focus in archaeology is on explaining the background knowledge, the perspectives, and the orderings that allow for particular knowledges to develop. Archaeology aims to investigate and understand this abstracted and removed meta-knowledge (savoir) because it is what provides the parameters for generating specific knowledges (connaissances). Identifying savoir is important because it brings to light the common discursive structures within which other, seemingly autonomous, discourses incorporate shared assumptions and principles. However, archaeological research is not meant to uncover the ‘hidden meanings’ behind knowledge, nor is it a ‘philosophical hermeneutics’ that aims to decipher what has been said (Foucault 1983; Bove n.d.). Foucault is adamant that archaeology can only investigate the structure of savoirs and connaissances, showing what they are and how they interconnect. Structure can be identified, meaning cannot. Archaeology does not, therefore, attempt to uncover the ‘hidden meanings’ within old discourses – for not only is it impossible to do, it is also pointless as the speaker/writer/subject is constrained within a particular set of discursive rules anyway. It is the form and effect of these discursive structures that Foucault argues is important to discover.

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Key Concepts in Archaeology: Statements The smallest possible ‘object’ of inquiry using an archaeological approach is what Foucault terms a statement. For Foucault, they are the ‘elementary units of discourse’ (AK: 80) and he understands them differently to their common usage as verbal or written pronouncements. Within a discourse statements function as means of delineating and defining particular aspects or parts of the discourse itself. They cut ‘across a domain of [discursive] structures and possible unities’ and reveal the ‘concrete contents, in time and space’ of that discursive structure (AK: 87). Foucault uses the example of his (French) typewriter and the accompanying typewriting manual: his keyboard, arranged A, Z, E, R, T, is not a statement, while his manual – which lists A, Z, E, R, T, as the correct key arrangement – is a statement (AK: 86). The distinction is that statements are manifestations of the particular ‘structures and possible unities’ that form a particular discourse: by examining a number of statements, it is possible to determine what the discursive rules are for their formation in the first place. The typewriting manual, which contains the determination of the key layout, is the set of rules from which the typewriter is then constructed; the typewriter itself is merely a replication of the statement (AK: 86). The importance of a statement, Foucault argues, is that it operates within particular forms of enunciation. The ‘enunciative function’ has a four-fold property: (1) it refers to a particular set of rules, relations, and a means of differentiation that enable particular statements to be made or not; (2) it possesses a particular relation to the subject who is able to produce a statement; (3) it operates without the need for ‘adjacent’ physical or discursive supports – i.e. statements are understood as being ‘self-evident’ within a discourse, they do not need immediate supports to ‘make them’ into statements; (4) a statement must have material existence – i.e. it must have taken place at a particular time, place, and take a material form (AK: 91–2, 95, 96, 98, 100). By identifying how statements are developed and produced – ‘enunciated’ – through these four mutually constituting components, it becomes possible to isolate the particular structure to a discourse.

Key Concepts in Archaeology: Discourses Discourse, for Foucault, does not mean mere everyday ‘speech’ (parole). Speech necessarily takes place within discourse(s) – structured, as speech is, by the various discursively defined concepts that it uses – but discourse means something much more specific for Foucault.

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A discourse … is the always-finite and temporarily limited ensemble of those statements alone which were formulated … The description of discourse asks … how is it that this statement appeared, rather than some other one in its place? (Foucault [1968] 2003a: 400; see also Foucault [1968] 1991) A discourse is constituted by the statements it contains; but a discourse operates to structure and link together this ‘ensemble’ of statements: it gives them context and wider meaning. The structure of a discourse limits the relations between its elements, restricting interpretations of their – and its – meaning. By identifying the structure of a discourse, it becomes possible to shift the focus of the archaeological research toward examining the larger premises that made that particular discourse possible in the first place. It is also worth noting that discourse is not synonymous with ‘language’ (also distinct from ‘speech’). Language ‘constitutes a system for possible statements[,] it is a finite ensemble of rules which authorise an infinite number of performances’ (Foucault [1968] 2003a: 400, emphasis added). A discourse is a specific use of language that links together a number of elements in order to generate a particular meaning. An analogy can be made to chess: the rules of chess (like language) are set and finite, but this does not mean that every particular chess game (like a discourse) is either predetermined or the same every time. There are multiple possibilities for different games of chess contained within those finite rules.

Key Concepts in Archaeology: Discursive Formations But in an archaeological investigation discourses are not the object of overall inquiry. Discourses are themselves only possible within a wider set of parameters that enable them to be formed in the first place. These wider discursive relations Foucault terms discursive formations.3 These he describes as: Whenever one can describe between a number of statements, such a system of dispersion, whenever, between objects, type of statement, concepts, or thematic choices, one can define a regularity (an order, correlations, positions and functionings, transformations), we will say … that we are dealing with a discursive formation … The conditions to which the elements of this division (objects, modes of statement, concepts, thematic choices) are subjected to we shall call the rules of formation. The rules of formation are conditions of existence (but also of coexistence, maintenance, modification and disappearance) in a given discursive division. (AK: 38)

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A discursive formation orders the four elements that constitute it: things (objects), things said (types of statement), ideas (concepts) and groupings (thematic choices). Objects emerge through a combination of ‘surfaces of emergence’, for example, the family, workplace, prisons, etc.; ‘authorities of delimitation’, experts such as doctors or priests; and ‘grids of specification’, where objects are typologised and related to one another, for example, hysteria, melancholia, etc. (AK: 41–2). Enunciative modalities govern ‘what can be said’ and are structured by ‘who is speaking’, ‘the position of the subject’ and ‘the institutional sites’ from where the specialist produces discourse (AK: 50–2). Concepts are structured through ‘forms of succession’, the processes by which statements (as part of concepts) follow and are followed by other statements; ‘forms of coexistence’, how similar statements are placed together; and ‘procedures of intervention’, where some statements are judged to be continuous, whilst others are discontinuous (AK: 56–9). Strategies, finally, relate to fissures – sometimes intentional, sometimes not – generated within a discursive formation by the manoeuvring of different factions. Strategies are constrained by ‘points of diffraction of discourse’, aspects of contention or similarity; ‘the economy of the discursive constellation’, the particular ‘rules and customs’ of a particular sub-set of knowledge; and ‘the function … [the discourse] must carry out in the field of non-discursive practices’, for example, psychiatry enacted upon ‘the mad’ (AK: 65–8). Every discursive formation is different because each has particular rules of formation, dictating what can and cannot be said, whom or what has the ability to speak, what is determined/identified to exist or not exist, and what can or cannot change within its boundaries. For example, the rules of formation for science as a discursive formation does not allow for the ‘soul’ as an object; religious discursive formations, however, do. A discursive framework structures what is and what is not ‘allowed’ to take place within it. Importantly, discursive formations are not static entities. They give structure to both generalised knowledges (savoirs) or as one of the multiple operationalised, specific knowledges (connaissances) that are linked to savoirs. Two forms of change are possible: first, the central savoir can alter the associated connaissances that are in relation to it; second, both the connaissances and a savoir can incorporate elements of the other, although for a connaissance they become particularised and for the savoir they become generalised. An example of both types of change is the move of medicine from a religious to a scientific savoir: ‘medicine’ saw a corresponding change in its methods, concepts and objects as well as science changing due to new knowledge generated from medicine.

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Key Concepts in Archaeology: Connaissance, Savoir and Épistémè Pinning down Foucault’s understanding of connaissance and savoir is notoriously difficult. A translator’s note inserted into AK quotes Foucault as defining the two: By connaissance I mean the relation of the subject to the object and the formal rules that govern it. Savoir refers to the conditions that are necessary in a particular period for this or that type of object to be given to the connaissance and for this or that enunciation to be formulated. (AK: 15 fn.2) Connaissances, therefore, appear as the specific knowledges that regulate (‘that govern’) the placement and interaction (‘the relation’) between a knowing subject, for example, a doctor, and an object, for example, a patient. Savoirs operate a level once-removed from connaissances: savoirs are more generalised and abstract – but still ordered – knowledges that predefine the range of subjects and objects possible for a connaissance to investigate. To give an example, Foucault argues that in the Classical period the savoir of madness contained a very small medical connaissance and had much larger connaissances of jurisprudence, casuistics (the study of the causes of disease) and police regulation. It was not until the nineteenth century that the connaissance of the medical knowledge of madness, that is, psychiatry, began to take a dominant role and successfully excluded many of the other connaissances (AK: 184–5). A problem, however, is that it appears Foucault is making a tautological argument: savoirs define the overall parameters of connaissances, but connaissances feed into savoirs and so also define them – but which comes first? The response to this may initially appear to sidestep the question, but it is central to the problem Foucault began to address in his later work and which, arguably, generated ‘genealogy’ as a methodology. The difference between savoirs and connaissances has the appearance of being a hierarchy – with savoirs dictating the operation of connaissances – but upon closer analysis the two are seen to mutually constitute one another. An established savoir is the set of principles that define a field of knowledge and a connaissance is the engagement by a particular subject (enabled through a particular set of institutions) in the examination of a particular object. Here Faubion’s (1998: xxiv–xxxi) clarification on the difference between savoir and connaissance in the French language is helpful. Savoir means ‘to know’ or ‘knowledge’, or

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even ‘awareness’ or ‘cognisance’. Connaissance, depending on the context, can mean simple ‘acquaintance’, or ‘know-how’,‘learning’ and ‘mastery’, or possibly even ‘expertise’. The emphasis, however, is on the sense of familiarity present between the (inquiring) subject and the (examined) object, an emphasis that is not contained within the definition of savoir, which implies a ‘certainty’ to knowledge. The development of a savoir and its associated connaissances, therefore, can be understood as an immanent process – that is, both the savoir and the connaissance constantly affect each other. The savoir is a set of continually reassessed principles, the connaissance is a particular form of ‘knowledgeas-practice’ that ‘applies’ the savoir but also generates new knowledge as a result. To go back to Foucault’s earlier connaissance examples, jurisprudence was madness-as-known-legally; casuistics, the now defunct quasi-medical knowledge, was madness-as-known-by-origin. What happened was that through a series of discursive and extra-discursive events, the medical knowledge of madness later became the dominant connaissance within the savoir of madness – and in so doing also began to define the savoir of madness to a greater and greater extent.4 However, this answer only half-sidesteps the potential problem of tautology. Both the savoir of madness and the connaissance of medicine were already established and Foucault is merely describing the adoption – and subsequent adaptation – of medicine into madness. So where did they originally come from? Without wishing to engage in the age-old search for ‘origins’ – which Foucault himself so despised and for which there is no real answer – Foucault stated that a discursive formation must go through a series of transitions if it is to attain the status of a widely accepted knowledge. In AK (186–9), Foucault describes four distinct ‘thresholds’ that a discourse can move through: positivity, changing from a discourse to a discursive formation; epistemologisation, the discursive formation defines objects and becomes a reference point amongst competing knowledge claims; scientificity, the development of internal formal rules for producing knowledge propositions; and formalisation, the discursive formation becomes an axiom, a self-evident truth. Only a few discursive formations go through all of these thresholds, but it is from this process that new knowledge-practices can form into connaissances and then maybe finally become formalised into selfevident truths. It might be beneficial to very briefly outline Foucault’s more general understanding of ‘knowledge’. Foucault is not concerned with finding the true metaphysics of the world – ontologically what is really ‘out there’ – as his interest lies in examining the structures and relations which enable

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different knowledge claims to be made in the first place. On this understanding, as Allen (2010: 144–5) argues, Foucault views knowledge to be nothing more than the rules and the system(s) that create it. He does not make the distinction between ‘accurate’ or ‘inaccurate’ knowledge – the only criteria for judging what counts as ‘knowledge’ is whether or not it was produced from within the discursive structures of that time. (This does not mean Foucault believes that these structures therefore create true and accurate knowledge, only that this is how knowledge comes to be judged as ‘accurate’.) As Datta (2007) argues, this position does not necessarily relegate Foucault to relativism (there are criteria upon which knowledge can be judged) but it creates a Kantian paradox of epistemic fallacy: that is, Foucault is only ever able to ‘know’ knowledge (and not, for instance, the extra-discursive world) for he cannot ever escape the discursive construction of knowledge (on this subject, see Elder-Vass 2011; Hardy 2011). An épistémè, for Foucault, appears to denote the particular discursive forms that either have or promote a rational or (proto-)scientific emphasis. His most detailed discussion is in his book The Order of Things, where he investigates the ‘human sciences’. I am not concerned, therefore, to describe the progress of knowledge towards an objectivity in which today’s science can finally be recognised; what I am attempting to bring to light is the epistemological field, the episteme in which knowledge, envisaged apart from all criteria having reference to its rational value or to its objective forms, grounds its positivity and thereby manifests a history which is not that of its growing perfection, but rather that of its conditions of possibility. (OT: xxii) However, in AK Foucault argues that an épistémè is ‘not a form of connaissance or type of rationality’ but is instead the ‘totality of relations that can be discovered, for a given period, between the sciences when one analyses them at the level of discursive regularities’ (AK: 191). In an exceedingly dense paragraph, Foucault argues that an épistémè is the set of relations between ‘sciences, epistemological figures, positivities, and discursive practices’ and that the épistémè ‘makes it possible to grasp the set of constraints and limitations which, at a given moment are imposed upon discourse’ (AK: 192). While the épistémè can certainly change – OT (xxii) investigates the change in the épistémè from the Classical age to the current Modern age – Foucault appears to use it specifically to signify various forms of ‘epistemological inquiry’, which arguably most readily equate to the ‘rational’ scientific and proto-scientific discourses most evident since the 1600s.5 ‘Is an orientation toward the épistémè the only

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one open to archaeology? Must archaeology be – exclusively – a certain way of questioning the sciences?’ (AK: 192, emphasis added).

Examples of Archaeological Studies It is easiest to give examples of archaeological studies using Foucault’s own work. As stated earlier he only set out in detail his archaeological methodology in AK; although he used the term as far back as HM: The language of psychiatry, which is a monologue by reason about madness, could only have come into existence in … a silence [on the part of madness]. My intention was not to write the history of that language, but rather to draw up an archaeology of that silence. (HM: xxviii, emphasis in original) The attempt to produce an ‘archaeology of that silence’ prompted an illtempered exchange between Jacques Derrida and Foucault (see Derrida [1963] 2004; Foucault [1972] 2006b, [1972] 2006c), which focused on whether it was possible to speak on behalf of the mad. Even if that was Foucault’s intention when originally writing HM, the work can certainly stand separate from it. Covering the development of different discursive constructs of ‘madness’ from the early 1400s to the late 1800s, HM shows how important the interconnectedness is between the discursive and the extra-discursive (the material world) in Foucault’s thought. The Birth of the Clinic (BC: [1963] 1994a) – Foucault’s inquiry into ‘the development of modern medicine from the previous “medicine of types” ’ (Han 2002: 46) – has a strong focus upon the two-fold ‘spatialisation’ and ‘verbalisation’ of medical practice (BC: xi). Medical discourse is understood by Foucault to heavily involve both the physical environment and the discursive environment. Doctors initially introduced ‘clinics’ to act as sites for specimen collection: ‘in the clinic … one is dealing with diseases that happen to be afflicting this or that patient: what is present is the disease itself, in the body that it appropriate to it, which is not that of the patient, but that of [the diseases’] truth’ (BC: 59). Foucault’s archaeological account of medical discourse catalogues the series of complex interactions that occurred between medicine and a material world that was now (re-)presented to it through the form of the clinic. The clinic is not, therefore, that mythical landscape in which diseases appear of their own accord, completely revealed; [the clinic] makes

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possible the integration, in experience, of the [already established] hospital modification of constant form … By means of the endless play of modifications and repetitions, the hospital clinic makes possible … the setting aside of the extrinsic. (BC: 110) What was previously problematic to medical discourse – and what it latently found beneficial after the formation of the clinic – was precisely that the material world did not conform to existing discursive typologies. Foucault demonstrates, through his archaeological account, that the space of the ‘clinic’ enabled new ‘reorganizations’ of the ‘knowing subject’. Indeed, it is a result of this lack of conformity that Foucault relates the shift of the medical discourse surrounding ‘disease’ away from the religious/supernatural and instead to nature/death (BC: 196). The Order of Things (OT: [1966] 1994b) is arguably Foucault’s most detailed archaeological work. In it, he outlines the processes involved in the production of ‘Man’ as an object of inquiry. It begins with an example of a particular taxonomy for classifying animals that Borges took from an old Chinese encyclopaedia. Animals are divided into: (a) belonging to the Emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) tame, (d) sucking pigs, (e) sirens, (f) fabulous, (g) stray dogs, (h) included in the present classification, (i) frenzied, (j) innumerable, (k) drawn with a very fine camel hair brush, (l) et cetera, (m) having just broken the water pitcher, (n) that from a long way off look like flies. (OT: xv) This (apparently ridiculous) structure of classifying animals led Foucault to pose a question: what makes other systems of classification any different in terms of their ‘truth’, accuracy, or universalisability? To produce an answer Foucault conducted an archaeological study into three areas within Western thought: political economy (which later turned into economics), natural history (which later turned into biology) and general grammar. He picks these three because they appear vastly different to one another, yet all undertook a similar change. He identifies a fifty-year period – 1775–1825 – when Western thought underwent a fundamental change in its épistémè. Inquiry moved away from using the Classical taxonomical forms of knowledge and instead moved toward new discourses, epistemologies and concepts formed on the basis of empirical analysis; it was from this that the Modern era formed (OT: 220). Foucault argues that this change reordered the various ‘positivities’, that is, the key concepts, in the three domains. The positivities kept their role as both

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designation (classification) and articulation (use), but their relations to other concepts were fundamentally altered – and all because of the move toward empirical methods of inquiry (OT: 250). Moving the borders of knowledge away from the Classical formulae of tables and taxinomia, there was a shift towards ‘an obscure verticality’ that prompted European culture … inventing for itself a depth in which what matters is no longer identities, distinctive characters, permanent tables with all their possible paths and routes, but great hidden forces developed on the basis of their primitive and inaccessible nucleus, origin, causality and history. (OT: 251) In the Classical age, knowledge was formulated according to pre-established categories and objects were examined solely to determine ‘where’ they fit into these predetermined categories. From the changes that resulted from the rise of the ‘inquiring Modern subject’, the ‘source’ of knowledge began to be understood as existing in the object itself and, thus, was only obtainable through inquiry into that object. What is important to note is the emphasis Foucault places upon what he calls the ‘dense archaeological layers’ of knowledge (OT: 253, and e.g. xiii, 232, 274). The rise of ‘Man’, that is, humans coming to be seen as entities separate from the wider cosmic order, results from changes to the placement of humans in a particular discursive position: from ‘taxonomical’ to ‘empirical’. This shows that discourses always partially construct their ‘objects’ of inquiry. Humans were, of course, present in discourse before the appearance of Man as a concept, but it is through this new discursive construction of Man that humans came to be understood as being objects independent from any particular ‘set place’ in a wider ordering. Man becomes a meta-category that (i) reifies humans as inquiring agents discovering knowledge but, importantly, also (ii) as possible objects of discoverable knowledge themselves – that is, they too have knowable attributes which are not pre-given truths. In this context the Modern épistémè can be understood as consisting of a number of discursive positions that place humans as things within nature, yet are separate from it. For Foucault, this discursive construction of Man led to the particular forms of inquiry that have shaped our recent past. But equally, it also means that as the archaeology of our thought clearly shows, man is an invention of recent date. And one perhaps nearing its end.

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If those arrangements [of knowledge] were to disappear as they appeared, if some event … were to cause them to crumble, as the ground of Classical thought did, at the end of the eighteenth century, then one can certainly wager that man would be erased, like a face drawn in the sand at the edge of the sea. (OT: 387)

The Discourse on Language (1970–1, the Collège de France inaugural lecture) Foucault’s fame as a scholar was already well established by the time he was appointed to the Collège de France, France’s most prestigious academic institution. Collège lectures were open to the public and, consequently, multiple recordings were made and it is from these and copies of Foucault’s lecture notes that verbatim transcriptions of his lectures are now being published as books. Backed by strong editorial and referencing support, the lectures give rich additional accounts of Foucault’s thinking. Collège rules demanded that the lectures contain current research topics, so the lectures operate as spaces where Foucault articulates changes to his present thinking, revisions to his previous work, and ruminates on possible future studies. Importantly, there are also times where he gives accounts of how he understands his change from archaeology to genealogy. Some caution, however, is still necessary when reading and using the Collège lectures. Deleuze, in a related argument, states that Foucault’s books and interviews operate in two separate ways: the books as precise ‘historical problematisations’ and the interviews as the contemporary extensions of these analyses (Deleuze [1988] 1992: 175, [1986] 2006: 115). In this light, Foucault’s lectures can be seen to stand somewhere between the measured precision of his books and the applied critique of his interviews. They are examples of ‘works in progress’ – precisely the point behind the Collège de France requiring its members to lecture on their current research – but are not Foucault’s definitive position on matters.6 Foucault’s inaugural lecture, published soon afterwards as The Discourse on Language ([1970] 1972), contains many predictions for his future research trajectory as well as a number of methodological alternations. Indeed, Han (2002) argues that Foucault’s turn to genealogy began with this lecture. She argues that the change in his focus toward truth (Han 2002: 79–84) is the first indication of a change of emphasis from the archaeological structure of discourse to outlining the emergence of discourses in general. By investigating how certain discursive formations go on to construct ‘truths’ – with an effect beyond their general set of internal relations and rules of formation

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– Foucault introduces an emphasis that was not present in the same way during the archaeologies (on this point, see also Johnston 1990). Introducing an emphasis towards power relations, Foucault argues that his focus now is to examine [how] in every society the production of discourse is at once controlled, selected, organised, and redistributed according to a certain number of procedures, whose role is to avert its powers and its dangers, to cope with chance events, to evade its ponderous, awesome materiality. (DL: 216) Foucault lays out three sets of rules that he understands discourses to be subject to: rules of exclusion (DL: 216), rules of limitation (DL: 220) and rules of employment (DL: 224).7 After discussing each in some detail, Foucault then outlines his assessment of the four ‘methodological demands’ that will be facing him over his coming research career: the principles of reversal, discontinuity, specifics and exteriority (DL: 229; Macey 1993: 243–5). Reversal, he argues, is linked to his ‘critical’ work that he has accomplished so far (DL: 231). The next three – discontinuity, specifics and exteriority – are linked to a new methodological requirement: ‘genealogy’ (DL: 232). The difference between the ‘critical and the genealogical enterprise is not one of object or field, but point of attack, perspective and delimitation’ (DL: 233, emphasis added). It is thus that critical and genealogical descriptions are to alternate, support, and complete each other. The critical side of the analysis deals with the systems [sic] enveloping discourse; attempting to mark out and distinguish the principles of ordering, exclusion, and rarity in discourse … The genealogical side of discourse … deals with series [sic] of effective formation of discourse: it attempts to grasp it in its power of affirmation … the power of constituting domains of objects, in relation to what one can affirm or deny true or false propositions. (DL: 234) Han (2002) was here possibly too quick to interpret Foucault’s rejection of archaeology. If one substitutes the term ‘archaeology’ for ‘critical’ – and Foucault himself makes this allusion when stating that he has already investigated the disjunction between madness and reason (DL: 232) – then it appears that genealogy does not eclipse archaeology but is, instead, being incorporated as the other side of the methodological coin. Shumway (1989: 107) argues that DL represents a ‘significant break’ – maybe even coming

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close to a ‘rupture’ – with the methodological emphasis contained within AK; although this would appear to be too strong a position to take.

Genealogy: What is it? Genealogy rejects the notion that history develops along some kind of predetermined path. For the genealogist, each historical event is a particular (and peculiar) instance that takes place within the social relations framing it at that time.8 But Foucault’s genealogy asks the user – and the reader of a genealogical study – to accept that there is no internal essence to events. To investigate a topic using genealogy is to reject viewing events as somehow being meant to happen; instead genealogy examines the circumstances surrounding what did happen. The emphasis is upon examining and explaining how social relations shape, even produce, the event in the first place. Foucault opens his most detailed discussion of genealogy (NGH: [1971] 2003c) with the following: Genealogy is grey, meticulous, and patiently documentary. It operates on a field of entangled and confused parchments, on documents that have been scratched over and recopied many times. … [I]t must record the singularity of events outside of any monotonous finality; it must seek them in the most unpromising places, in what we tend to feel is without history – in sentiments, love, conscience, instincts; it must be sensitive to their recurrence, not in order to trace the gradual curve of their evolution but to isolate the different scenes where they engaged in different roles. Finally, genealogy must define even those instances where they are absent, the moment they remained unrealised … [Genealogy] opposes itself to the search for origins. (NGH: 351–2) As Rajchman (1985: 115–17) highlights, genealogy also marks another shift in Foucault’s thinking: knowledge begins to be examined in terms of power. It is important to stress that analyses of power were not absent from Foucault’s archaeological investigations, but through genealogy power is examined as a key factor in both the installation of different knowledges as well as in forming social relations and events. But as Dupont and Pearce (2001: 134) argue, some of the precision characterising the archaeological analysis becomes lost in the genealogies. The focus on power also clearly shows Foucault’s continuing links to Nietzsche’s conception of genealogy and domination. For Foucault, genealogy brings to light the

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endlessly repeated play of dominations … Humanity does not gradually progress from combat to combat until it arrives at universal reciprocity, where the rule of law finally replaces warfare; humanity installs each of its violences in a system of rules and thus proceeds from domination to domination. (NGH: 358) Each event that takes place within social relations is understood to have been produced partly from the power relations constituted by these very social relations. This is not to say that each event is willed, desired or knowingly manufactured by self-conscious social agents, but Foucault’s emphasis is to show how the particular form of event can be explained by examining the social circumstances surrounding it. Genealogy is the analysis of how various elements within social relations produce a particular event that would otherwise have manifested in a different form – or may not have manifested at all.

Key Concepts in Genealogy: Eventalisation In the interview ‘Questions of Method’ ([1978] 2003g, also known as ‘The Impossible Prison’), Foucault partly expanded upon his genealogical method. He argues that genealogy involves the investigation of two complementary elements that, together, are the study of ‘what one might call “eventalisation” ’ (QM: 249). The first investigates ‘singularities’ which are responsible for ‘breach[es] of self-evidence’; the second is ‘rediscovering the connections, encounters, supports, blockages, plays of forces, strategies, and so on’ that establish what later becomes considered as ‘self-evident’ (QM: 249). Eventalisation analyses the three distinct factors, which Foucault calls the ‘polymorphism’, of an event: elements, relations and domains (QM: 249–50). Using penal incarceration as an example, Foucault begins by stating that the elements included ‘pedagogical practices, the formation of professional armies, British empirical philosophy, techniques of use of firearms [in the army], [and] new methods of the division of labour’. The changes to relations involve moving technical models (e.g. of surveillance architectures) from one area to another, calculated tactical responses to specific circumstances (e.g. banditry, public disorder after executions) and the application of different theoretical schemas (e.g. the utilitarian conception of behaviour) to new or different areas. Finally, the domains of reference change since the elements and relations find new objects upon which to turn their focus, for example, from small technical matters to large-scale interventions into the newly emerging capitalist economy (QM: 249–50).

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Understanding penal incarceration as an event, therefore, is to examine how pre-existing forms of internment had overtly penalising aspects introduced into them. Similarly, how did carceralisation become one of the accepted forms of punishment and correction? To see these as ‘self-evident’ is to exist in a world where the event of penal incarceration – with its reformulating and reconstituting effects – has already taken place. Genealogical inquiry as ‘eventalisation’ asks how, when and why these changes occurred. By inquiring in sufficient depth, Foucault argues, the genealogist can ‘construct the external relations of intelligibility’ (QM: 250) and so show the various elements, their relations and the domains that they effect. This is then used to determine how an event becomes established as a ‘self-evident’ truth. By arguing that, methodologically, events should be examined using this process of eventalisation Foucault is in effect arguing that events are only possible to know post hoc. Predicting the occurrence or constitution of these events is impossible – there is no way that it could have been known that the disciplinary techniques developed in the army and the school (DP: 136) could have had such impact upon the penal system. The important element of Foucault’s argument, however, is that it is even possible to formulate an account of how the seemingly ‘self-evident’ present came to exist together at all.

Key Concepts in Genealogy: History of the Present Not usually understood as a genealogical category, it is worth briefly covering here because of the interest generated by this pithy phrase. The history of the present is a term Foucault used in Discipline and Punish to illustrate his particular form of historical inquiry. That punishment in general and the prison in particular belong to a political technology of the body is a lesson that I have learnt not so much from history as from the present … I would like to write the history of this prison, with all the political investments of the body that it gathers together in its closed architecture. Why? Simply because I am interested in the past? No, if one means by that writing a history of the past in terms of the present. Yes, if one means writing the history of the present. (DP: 30–1) The emphasis of this perspective is upon understanding how present circumstances came to form, that is, the events that went into their

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establishment. It firmly rejects gazing backward from the present and using discursive categories and concepts to define previous historical circumstances. Inquires should seek the particular discursive, power and social context surrounding each particular moment of change. In this way it is possible to pick apart what may appear to be an important moment in history and find that, in fact, the moment was itself the result of other, less obvious factors. Discussed further below, the development of the ‘disciplinary’ prison is just one such example of this technique and serves as the best example in Foucault’s work.

Key Concepts in Genealogy: Domination Nietzsche’s influence upon Foucault’s concept of domination is clear. The fact that the various ‘connections, encounters, …’ identified as being present in an event ‘establish what subsequently counts as being self-evident, universal and necessary’ (QM: 249, emphasis added) is an important phrasing. The ‘subsequent establishment’ relates to the ability of a particular group, the particular dominant group, to impose the outcome(s) of an event as selfevident – that is, as normal, acceptable or even as desirable. Genealogy’s task is to uncover and map these disjointed moments, showing where ‘selfevidence’ is freshly imposed on a particular set of social relations. Foucault is sometimes (maybe even intentionally) vague in stating how a particular dominant group can be constituted. However, there are instances where he does list dominant groups and they are different within different social spheres: for example, doctors and psychiatrists in the asylums ([1976] 2003e: 7, [1974] 2006d), or the bourgeoisie in the factories and employment (DP: 87, 279–80; [1973] 2000). A dominant group is able to exert influence upon social relations – and even to partially (re)structure them after they have formed (HS I: 83, 94). Foucault’s conception also includes another aspect: by altering social relations and discourses post-event, a dominant group can create ‘accurate’ knowledge of that change. Foucault is not arguing that this is an‘ideological’ development – that is, a mask obscuring a true reality – but it is instead the ability to structure and focus knowledge toward a particular discursive world view. Domination enables the dominant group to exclude alternative discourses, usually those from subjugated groups who occupy the same social spheres (e.g. in asylums and factories, etc.), which are equally as ‘true’ as that of the dominant discourse.

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Key Concepts in Genealogy: Truth Foucault’s genealogical work is not just focused on disjunctive events and their absorption into dominant discourses. What makes the absorption so important is that the event becomes incorporated into a construction of truth. In the genealogies truth is understood to be the product of a particular ‘regime of truth’ (Foucault [1977] 1990a: 111–12; Han 2002: 122–8; Weir 2008). In the interview ‘Truth and Power’ Foucault writes: Truth is a thing of this world: it is produced only by virtue of multiple forms of constraint … Each society has its regime of truth, its ‘general politics’ of truth – that is, the types of discourse it accepts and makes function as true; the mechanisms and instances that enable one to distinguish true and false statements; the means by which each is sanctioned; the techniques and procedures accorded value in the acquisition of truth; the status of those who are charged with saying what counts as true. (Foucault [1976] 2003f: 316) Foucault’s emphasis is on making clear the ability of dominant groups to instil a conception of what is ‘true’ – reason over madness, discipline over variation, heterosexuality over homosexuality, and so on – creating a discursive and social environment that promotes a particular discursive position against others that are deemed ‘false’. Foucault’s concern is not to argue that the underdog is somehow more truthful, or ‘is’ truthful, compared to the ‘ideological’ position of the dominant group. His concern in genealogy is to show how dominant discourses necessarily exclude alternatives and actively work to produce social relations that normalise (DP: 183, HS 1: 87, 144) certain discourses and social relations. Establishing the grounds of ‘truth’ allows a dominant group to impose these criteria upon others who do not conform to them. ‘The political question, to sum up, is not error, illusion, alienated consciousness, or ideology; it is truth itself. Hence the importance of Nietzsche’ (Foucault [1976] 2003f: 318).

Examples of Genealogical Works Foucault only produced two explicit in-depth studies that use his genealogical approach, published as the books Discipline and Punish (DP) and History of Sexuality: Volume 1 (HS I). He also edited an intriguing collection of essays concerning a documented case of parricide, entitled I, Pierre Rivière, having slaughtered my mother, my sister, and my brother… ([1973] 1975). There

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are also examples of his genealogies found in a number of the lecture series that Foucault gave during this period (cf. [1975] 2003d, [1976] 2003e; [1974] 2006d, [1978] 2007). Due to space constraints only Discipline and Punish will be discussed here. In DP Foucault looks to develop a genealogy of the changing form and effects of social punishment. Originally operating as the mechanism of vengeance for a wronged sovereign (DP: 47–50), punishment focused upon demonstrating the power of the sovereign over the wrongdoer. Torture was also routinely utilised in order to extract the admission of culpability from the accused; evidence may corroborate (and was enough to convict) but it was through extracting the performance of an admission that ‘truth’ was demonstrated (DP: 39–40). But, Foucault argues, beginning in the late eighteenth century punishment started to change its ‘object’ of concern: no longer was it a case of imposing the sovereign’s mark upon a human body (torture, execution, etc.), now punishment was arrayed toward the fictional object of ‘the soul’ (DP: 19, 29). It would be wrong to say that the soul is an illusion, or an ideological effect. On the contrary, it exists, it has a reality, it is produced permanently around, on, within the body by the functioning of a power that is exercised on those punished – and, in a more general way, on those one supervises, trains and corrects, over madmen, children at home and at school, the colonised, over those who are stuck at a machine and supervised for the rest of their lives. This is the historical reality of this soul, which, unlike the soul represented by Christian theology, is not born in sin and subject to punishment, but is born rather out of methods of punishment, supervision and constraint. (DP: 29, emphasis added) This focus upon ‘the soul’ in punishment is a direct consequence, Foucault argues, of the new techniques of disciplining that were developing separately in schools, the army and workhouses. There was a growing realisation that through disciplinary techniques huge numbers of people – who previously would have required direct oversight to be kept under control – were now controllable through a ‘micro-physics’ of power (DP: 26, 29, 139, 149, 160). This micro-physics not only led to a new form of punishment in prisons – now focused on the (completely reified) notion of ‘the soul’ as the instigator behind acts of punishable behaviour – but to the attempt to establish a new form of wider social organisation based around disciplinary principles. The overall success of discipline is debatable; for instance, see Foucault’s discussion of ‘delinquency’ as an unintended, but captured and utilised,

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consequence of disciplinary techniques (DP: 257–93). However, what is clear from reading DP is that the establishment of this new form of power led, in Foucault’s terms, to positivities that created new social and discursive relations within which subjects were/are ‘formed’.

Society Must Be Defended (1975–6, Collège de France lectures) Published in English in 1980 and widely known simply as the Two Lectures (Foucault 1980: 78–108), it was not until twenty-three years later that the full text of the lecture series Society Must Be Defended became available (Foucault [1976] 2003e: 1–41, hereafter SMBD). Delivered at the same time as the publication of DP, SMBD contains revisions to his understanding of genealogy and of power. Genealogy is defined as an ‘antiscience’ or, more precisely, as a rejection of the ‘centralising power-effects that are bound up with the institutionalisation and workings of any scientific discourse organised in a society such as ours’ (SMBD: 9). Foucault is not promoting ‘the lyrical right to be ignorant,’ the ‘rejection of knowledge’, or the primacy of some ‘immediate experience that has yet to be captured by knowledge’ (SMBD: 9). Instead genealogy operates as a means of destabilising scientific discourses precisely because science operates to exclude other related knowledges, which Foucault terms ‘subjugated knowledges’ (SMBD: 7). He also offers a reformulation of his work since 1970, arguing that it has been about trying to establish the ‘how’ of power. He likens this to a triangle containing three relations held in tension: mechanisms of power, the rules of right and truth-effects (SMBD: 24). The means of power (i.e. the mechanisms) rest between their formal delineation in the rules of right, but also find constitution through the establishment of different truths. To be a ‘truth’ is to become an axiom, something that is never questioned because it does not need to be questioned; and through its effect of being ‘a truth’ increasingly forms the world around it. (N.b. Compare this to Foucault’s earlier argument in AK that a discursive formation passing through the threshold of ‘formalisation’ becomes a self-evident axiomatic truth.) Foucault also gives five ‘methodological precautions’ when studying power: (1) to understand the effects of power through its most regionalised forms; (2) to study power as it is in practice, not as it is in intention; (3) that power is not homogenous or centralised, instead it varies in form and always circulates through networks; (4) power is not evenly distributed and to analyse it requires an ascending analysis, from the bottom up; (5) that ideologies exist but are not produced from one central point, ideologies

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are the product of localised practices and are – quite possibly – unavoidable (SMBD: 27–34). Although not general methodological rules, they are specific to the study of power, these ‘precautions’ give additional insight to Foucault’s approach.

The Government of Self and Others (1982–3, Collège de France lectures) In his (unknowingly) penultimate lecture series, The Government of Self and Others (Foucault [1983] 2010, hereafter GSO), Foucault again revisits and reassesses his previous work and methodology. He summarises his earlier work as studying three distinct areas: (1) the formation of forms of knowledge, (2) normative matrices of behaviour, and (3) the subject’s mode of being (GSO: 4). He relates the first to his archaeological texts, the second to his work on criminality and discipline, and the third to his work on sexuality (although it should be noted that at this time volumes II and III of HS were still not yet published). Replacing the history of knowledge with the historical analysis of forms of veridiction, replacing the history of domination with the historical analysis of procedures of governmentality, and replacing the theory of the subject or the history of subjectivity with the historical analysis of the pragmatics of self and the forms it has taken, are the different approaches by which I have tried to define to some degree the possibility of the history of what could be called ‘experiences’. The experience of madness, the experience of disease, the experience of criminality, the experience of sexuality are … important focal points of experiences in our culture. (GSO: 5) It is interesting to note that whilst most certainly volumes II and III of HS did examine in great detail the formation of a subject’s subjectivity through various technologies of the self (i.e. the process of subjectivation), it is arguable that HS I did not include this to anything like the same extent. Indeed, HS I is much closer to DP in content and form than to either HS II or III.

Selected Additional Sources and Conclusion A good overview of Foucault’s ‘methodological’ work can be found in Scheurich and McKenzie (2005). Kendall and Wickham (1999) examine

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Foucault’s methodology with a strong focus on science studies (although their conversational writing style will delight or dismay readers in equal number). Those emphasising genealogy include Prado (1995), who offers a rich and critically detailed reading of Foucault’s work. Mahon (1992) also provides a detailed study of Foucault’s genealogical links to Nietzsche, with May (1993) offering an assessment of Foucault’s move to genealogy. I agree with Scheurich and McKenzie (2005: 850, 858–9) that Dreyfus and Rabinow (1982) are too uncritical in their valourisation of genealogy as ‘superseding’ archaeology, but their work remains a good resource. A very detailed and engaging philosophical reassessment of Foucault – arguing that his work is almost wholly an inquiry to find a suitable historical a priori – is found in Han (2002). Examples of archaeological applications include Frauley’s (2007) article, which is a good examination of the problems facing genealogies that attempt to avoid archaeological considerations. Dupont and Pearce (2001) have a similarly well-developed critique. Pearce and Tombs (1998: chapter 4) use ‘discursive formations’ to explain assumptions made in the chemical industry. Vigo de Lima (2010) has used archaeology to examine political economy; and Gutting (1991) has a (now) classic work looking at Foucault’s archaeological assessment of the sciences. Until the end of Foucault’s work (Foucault [1984] 1990c, [1978] 2003h: 275–8, [1984] 2003i: 56) he still strongly associated himself with both his archaeological and genealogical work – and certainly did not appear to see genealogy as excluding archaeology. When using Foucault’s methodologies, therefore, archaeology operates to delineate a field within which objects, concepts and subjects are formed and are given meaning. Genealogy operates to destabilise the assumptions of continuity, origin and ‘progress’ and to show the series of radical alterations that power can produce, along with the different relations of domination that are its effects.

Notes 1. The author would like to thank Frank Pearce and Mira Bachvarova for their comments on earlier drafts of this chapter. All mistakes, of course, remain the author’s alone. 2. To save repeating the full names of publications the following abbreviations will be used from here on: History of Madness (HM ), Birth of the Clinic (BC ), Order of Things (OT ), Archaeology of Knowledge (AK ), Discourse on Language (‘The Order of Discourse’) (DL), Nietzsche, Genealogy, History (NGH ), Questions of Method (QM), Discipline and Punish (DP ), and History of Sexuality, Vol.1 (HS I ).

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3. The following four paragraphs borrow from Hardy (2011). 4. An example of this change can be found in Foucault’s edited book I, Pierre Rivière… 5. My formulation here would appear to be somewhat contra to Han’s (2002: 60–4). 6. It is hard to imagine, for instance, that Foucault would have published a book that so radically changed topic mid-stream as his 1978–9 The Birth of Biopolitics lectures. Here he moves from biopolitics to analysing (neo-)liberalism as political and economic systems. 7. N.b. All are my terminology. 8. That may sound axiomatic – do not all social instances necessary take place within social relations? And, of course, they do. But for the genealogist those relations are a partially determining factor as well.

References Allen, B. (2010), ‘Foucault’s theory of knowledge’, in T. O’Leary and C. Falzon (eds), Foucault and Philosophy, Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, pp. 143–62 Bove, A. (n.d.), ‘Foucault replies to questions from the audience at Berkeley’s History Department in 1983’. Retrieved 27 February, 2011, from http://www. generation-online.org/p/fpfoucault4.htm. Datta, R. P. (2007), ‘From Foucault’s genealogy to aleatory materialism: realism, nominalism and politics’, in F. Pearce and J. Frauley (eds), Critical Realism and the Social Sciences: Heterodox Elaborations, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, pp. 273–95. Deleuze, G. ([1988] 1992), ‘What is a dispositif ?’, in Michel Foucault: Philosopher, ed. T. Armstrong, London: Routledge, pp. 159–68. Deleuze, G. ([1986] 2006), Foucault, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Derrida, J. ([1963] 2004), ‘Cogito and the history of madness’, in The Postmodern Reader – Foundation Texts, ed. M. Drolet, London : Routledge, pp. 86–111. Dreyfus, H. L. and P. Rabinow (1982), Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, Chicago. IL: University of Chicago Press. Dupont, D. and F. Pearce (2001), ‘Foucault contra Foucault: rereading the “Governmentality” papers’, Theoretical Criminology, 5: 2, 123–58. Elder-Vass, D. (2011), ‘The causal power of discourse’, Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour, 41: 2, 143–60. Faubion, J. D. (1998), ‘Introduction’, in J. D. Faubion (ed.), Aesthetics, Method and Epistemology, New York, NY: New Press, pp. xi–xliii. Foucault, M. ([1969] 1972), ‘The discourse on language’, in The Archaeology of Knowledge, New York, NY: Pantheon Books, pp. 215–37. Foucault, M. ([1973] 1975), I, Pierre Riviere, having slaughtered my mother, my sister,

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and my brother… : a case of parricide in the 19th century, New York, NY: Pantheon Books. Foucault, M. (1980), Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977, New York, NY: Pantheon Books. Foucault, M. (1983), ‘The Culture of the Self: Introduction and Program Part II and Discussion’. Retrieved 27 February, 2011, from http://dpg.lib.berkeley. edu/webdb/mrc/search_vod?keyword=foucault. Foucault, M. ([1976] 1990a), The History of Sexuality, Vol.1, New York, NY: Vintage Books. Foucault, M. ([1977] 1990b), ‘Power and sex’, in Politics, Philosophy, Culture: Interviews and Other Writings, 1977–1984, ed. L. D. Kritzman, New York, NY: Routledge, pp. 110–24. Foucault, M. ([1984] 1990c), The Use of Pleasure: The History of Sexuality, Vol.2, New York, NY: Vintage Books. Foucault, M. ([1968] 1991), ‘Politics and the study of discourse’, in The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, ed. G. Burchell, C. Gordon and P. Miller, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, p. x. Foucault, M. ([1963] 1994a), The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception, New York, NY: Vintage Books. Foucault, M. ([1966] 1994b), The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, New York, NY: Vintage Books. Foucault, M. ([1975] 1995), ‘The body of the condemned’, in Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. A Sheridan, London: Penguin, pp. 3–31. Foucault, M. ([1966] 1998), ‘The order of things’, in Aesthetics, Method and Epistemology, ed. J. D. Faubion, New York, NY: New Press, pp. 261–7. Foucault, M. ([1973] 2000), ‘Truth and juridical forms’, in Power: The Essential Works of Foucault, 1954–1984, ed. J. D. Faubion, New York, NY: New Press, pp. 1–89. Foucault, M. ([1968] 2003a), ‘On the archaeology of the sciences: response to the epistemological circle’, in The Essential Foucault, ed. P. Rabinow and N. S. Rose, New York, NY: New Press, pp. 392–422. Foucault, M. ([1969] 2003b), ‘What is an author?’, in The Essential Foucault, ed. P. Rabinow and N. S. Rose, New York, NY: New Press, pp. 377–91. Foucault, M. ([1971] 2003c), ‘Nietzsche, genealogy, history’, in The Essential Foucault, ed. P. Rabinow and N. S. Rose, New York, NY: New Press, pp. 351–69. Foucault, M. ([1975] 2003d), Abnormal: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1974–1975, New York, NY: Picador. Foucault, M. ([1976] 2003e), Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–76, New York, NY: Picador. Foucault, M. ([1976] 2003f), ‘Truth and power’, in The Essential Foucault, ed. P. Rabinow and N. S. Rose, New York, NY: New Press, pp. 300–18. Foucault, M. ([1978] 2003g), ‘Questions of method’, in The Essential Foucault, ed. P. Rabinow and N. S. Rose, New York, NY: New Press, pp. 246–58.

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Foucault, M. ([1978] 2003h), ‘What is critique?’, in The Essential Foucault, ed. P. Rabinow and N. S. Rose, New York, NY: New Press, pp. 263–78. Foucault, M. ([1984] 2003i), ‘What is Enlightenment?’, in The Essential Foucault, ed. P. Rabinow and N. S. Rose, New York, NY: New Press, pp. 351–69. Foucault, M. ([1961] 2006a), History of Madness, London: Routledge. Foucault, M. ([1972] 2006b), ‘My body, this paper, this fire’, in History of Madness, ed. J. Khalfa, London: Routledge, pp. 550–74. Foucault, M. ([1972] 2006c), ‘Reply to Derrida’, in History of Madness, ed. J. Khalfa, London: Routledge, pp. 575–90. Foucault, M. ([1974] 2006d), Psychiatric Power: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1973–74, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Foucault, M. ([1978] 2007), Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977–1978, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Foucault, M. ([1983] 2010), The Government of Self and Others, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Frauley, J. (2007), ‘Towards an archaeological-realist Foucauldian analytics of government’, British Journal of Criminology, 47: 4, 617–33. Gutting, G. (1991), Michel Foucault’s Archaeology of Scientific Reason, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Han, B. (2002), Foucault’s Critical Project: Between the Transcendental and the Historical, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Hardy, N. (2011), ‘Foucault, genealogy, emergence: re-examining the extra-discursive’, Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour, 41: 1, 68–91. Johnston, J. (1990), ‘Discourse as event: Foucault, writing, and literature’, in Modern Language Notes, 105: 4, 800–18. Kendall, G. and G. Wickham (1999), Using Foucault’s Methods, London: Sage. Macey, D. (1993), The Lives of Michel Foucault, London: Hutchinson. Mahon, M. (1992), Foucault’s Nietzschean Genealogy: Truth, Power, and the Subject, Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. May, T. (1993), Between Genealogy and Epistemology: Psychology, Politics, and Knowledge in the Thought of Michel Foucault, University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press. Pearce, F. and S. Tombs (1998), Toxic Capitalism: Corporate Crime and the Chemical Industry, Aldershot: Ashgate/Dartmouth. Prado, C. G. (1995), Starting with Foucault: an Introduction to Genealogy, Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Rajchman, J. (1985), Michel Foucault: the Freedom of Philosophy, New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Saussure, F. D. ([1915] 1986), Course in General Linguistics, Chicago, IL: Open Court. Scheurich, J. and K. McKenzie (2005), ‘Foucault’s methodologies: archaeology and genealogy’, in The Sage Handbook of Qualitative Research, ed. N. K. Denzin and Y. S. Lincoln, Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, pp. 841–68.

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Shumway, D. R. (1989), Michel Foucault, Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia. Vigo De Lima, I. (2010), Foucault’s Archaeology of Political Economy, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Weir, L. (2008), ‘The concept of truth regime’, Canadian Journal of Sociology, 33: 2, 367–89.

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Chapter 5 Derrida, Deconstruction and Method John W. Phillips

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The problem of the relationship between words and things and, within the word, the difference between word and idea, has exercised more than twentyfive centuries of thought. The problem in grasping what is at stake in these relations and the differences that animate them lies in the fact that the only way to approach them is through the inherited concepts themselves: word, thing, idea. Couplings like form and matter, form and meaning, syntax and semantics, signifier and signified all owe their senses (we must not I suppose exclude sense and reference) to this ancient framework. Words like ‘sense’ and ‘word’ mean what they mean by virtue of a supposed division within them into sensible and intelligible strata; with no evidence beyond these strata (which are, after all, historical) that any such division in fact pertains. Our evidence amounts to phenomena of the following kind: different words may be used (synonymously or figuratively) for the same sense; the same word may apply to different senses. An apparently accidental property of language allows it to be what it always is. The situation only becomes a problem if one attempts either to formalise language exhaustively or to reduce it as a derivative and potentially misleading operation in the service of some other purer experience (of thought or meaning). In each case the value of pure presence arises against whatever is thought to limit it. The operations that we have come to know by the name deconstruction are those that take an interest in the paradoxes that arise with such attempts. The interest to be taken in such paradoxes is not aimed at the destruction or demolition of philosophy but rather the identification of otherwise obscure conditions that pertain in the striving for ideals: in truth, politics, ethics, science and so on. The case of language functions as a synecdoche for a far wider sphere of problems: the question of power unfolds as the paradox of hospitality; the question of force unfolds in the paradox of justice; the question of the political unearths the paradoxes of

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friendship. I will concentrate on the formative work of Jacques Derrida, the name most associated with deconstruction, with the aim of outlining – while demonstrating in a critical reading – some of the basic principles of this deconstruction.

Poststructuralism and Deconstruction It is not certain when the word poststructuralism was first coined. The demand for the category was certainly expressed in Baltimore in October 1966, at the conference held by Johns Hopkins University, ‘The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man’. The conference itself marks a turning point in the relations between American and European intellectual life and is often referred to (warmly by some and with disdain by others) as the moment when French thought in particular entered into American intellectual life. As always with this kind of thing the underlying trends that the event is said to mark will turn out to be considerably more complicated, but this is nevertheless a possible moment for the coinage of the term poststructuralism. The conference organisers set out with the ambition of bringing together an avowedly broad range of academics (mathematicians, economists, philosophers, anthropologists, psychologists, literary critics, classicists, and so on) working in idioms associated with a novel concept of structure. It was designed to bring together academics identified with some aspect of structuralism. The idea was to explore ways in which the boundaries between the sciences and the humanities might at that time be undergoing a progressive transformation, which under the sign of structure would radicalise topics normally thought to be the province of the humanities. It would render them newly susceptible to kinds of scientific analysis. But listening to papers, which soon become famous, by Roland Barthes, Jacques Lacan and Jacques Derrida, the participants would have observed that whatever was happening in France could not be reduced to any of the current notions of structuralism (for instance as an ensemble of scientific or quasi-scientific approaches in the humanities and the human sciences). Even Roland Barthes, whose work in structuralism and semiotics was widely known, seemed already (typically) to be inflicting definitive subversions on the idiom he had helped to foster. And so the term poststructuralism was coined, implying that in the hands of current French thinkers things were moving on. Deconstruction – the name almost immediately adopted as a way of naming Derrida’s philosophical activity – comes at about the same time to be associated with poststructuralism. Much later – once significant deconstructive work had been applied to deconstruction itself (the word

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and the thing) – Derrida began to accept it as one term among many in an evolving ensemble of such terms. The point would be more in line with the phenomenon of the evolving self-destructive ensemble, than with any attempt to find the single meaning or word. In the following discussion of method in relation to deconstruction I will refer from time to time to this phenomenon (the evolving self-destructive ensemble) as a way of thinking about how deconstruction works (what happens, who or what does what and to whom, what are the consequences, what can we do?) while putting the word itself under some strain. Shortly after the 1966 conference in America, ‘schools’ of deconstruction appeared, with the so-called Yale School becoming prominent. Significantly, the writers associated with the Yale School (they were after all at Yale) were literary critics. It was not an isolated phenomenon. Literature departments have always, rightly or wrongly, been the first among disciplines to foster the interest in deconstruction. In actuality, deconstruction (or ‘theory’ as academic departments tend to call it) implies a kind of activity somewhere between literature and philosophy, but reducible to neither, more scientific than science can be, and more philosophical than most critics and some commentators realise. At the heart of deconstruction lies the question of reading, which henceforth will be difficult to distinguish absolutely from writing. When a person reads, a kind of writing takes place: repeating, revising, decontextualising, recontextualising and so on. In certain cases this ‘taking place’ attains the status of an ‘event’. The aim of deconstruction (if we for now restrict the term to the concerns of method) is to produce such an event. So deconstruction could not be simply a method of reading. Rather it names the necessity that puts this reading-as-writing in a privileged place with respect to any method in any activity whatsoever (scientific, critical, philosophical, ethical and so on). The concern with reading, furthermore, if we pursue the notion of reading-as-writing a bit, could not be reduced to any of the ancient or modern notions of interpretation. The notion of reading-as-writing implies an activity but it also demands passivity on the part of the reader, who repeats but by doing so helps bring about the surprise of some event. Derrida will at length refer to this reading-as-writing as acti-passivity. So we now speak in terms of how we might produce a critical reading rather than about guidelines for or practices of reading. A critical reading has a peculiar status in relation to the texts in connection with which it is produced, and it implies an irreducible element of parasitism. Derrida’s texts are critical readings. Later in his career, even his own texts become the object of his peculiar parasitism. It is quite difficult to bring a critical reading off, because a reader, understood in this sense, becomes extremely sensitive to the details

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of a text that he or she reads and yet shows an apparent disregard for what in normal circumstances, and by the logic of standard ways of reading, would be respected as its intentional or deliberate content.

Principles of Deconstruction It has been often said, correctly, that deconstruction, whatever it is, is not a method. And this despite numerous high-profile dictionary and encyclopaedia entries that claim it is. A more or less official and certainly pervasively received idea of deconstruction therefore lends credence to other more trenchant positions that seek to criticise deconstruction, as if it involved the decisions, techniques, objects and aims that, normally speaking, characterise methods. What is more to the point, yet less often said, is that in producing the kinds of critical reading associated with deconstruction there inevitably develops a discourse on the concept of method. This is also correct but could lead the unwary into the trap of believing that deconstruction is simply a kind of meta-philosophy (as is sometimes also said), a discourse on or about philosophy. And while to some extent it is, this too gets us off the point, because it leaves in question the basic assumption: if deconstruction is a discourse on or about philosophy then what kind of discourse is it? What language other than that of philosophy could possibly be adequate for a discourse on philosophy? So not a method, exactly, nor a meta-philosophy, quite, deconstruction nonetheless implies a discourse on method and a way of questioning philosophy in philosophical language, or at least in a language not distinct from the language that philosophy too must employ. Within this generality (which applies to all Western philosophy since its pre-Socratic dawn) it becomes necessary to identify some specifics, which mark this discourse (deconstruction) out from the rest and provide some footholds for those who would like to participate in some way. A complication arises in that these specifics begin surprisingly (for they nearly always come at first in the form of questions about marginal, even trivial, matters) to mark the most trenchant concerns of philosophy at its most general. There’s no ideal order in which to lay down the ‘rules’ (for want of a better term) of deconstruction. But we could argue the following: we may begin in a way that is oriented by what Derrida refers to as ‘the thought of the trace’ (Derrida [1967: 233] 1998: 162). The thought of the trace would not be an argument (as in a point of view or a position that one takes) but rather it would serve the role of a principle, in the time-honoured sense of this word, meaning a proposition that expresses a basic truth to be followed in the service of a philosophy (and so an aesthetics, an ethics, a politics or a science).

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A principle more generally would be a kind of rule or imperative by which one could live. That should already be a bit surprising. Not many people today would say that deconstruction proceeds on the basis of a fundamental truth. So what then is this thought of the trace? As a fundamental truth it’s complicated because the thought, such as it is, actually robs us of the very thing it is supposed to provide: a secure and authoritative beginning. And, as ever, it concerns what at first could easily be taken, and dismissed, as a relatively trivial truth in the sphere of philosophical activity. It can be located in writing, its most secure and visible medium, as a quality without which there would be no such phenomenon. There are three distinct ways of presenting it. 1. Evidentially: It is merely a matter of evidential certainty, and thus indubitable, that the basic unit of writing is what it is because it can be repeated. Such a unit need not even amount to a letter, for diacritical marks (accents and so on), as well as punctuation, all function in the same way; and letters too, depending on the writing system, can be made up of different and exchangeable parts. It simply is not possible to imagine such a mark independently of this possibility. When someone inscribes one on a parchment, a blackboard, a piece of paper, a computer screen, or wherever, what appears there is precisely a repeatable, something whose essence is its repeatability, something that is perceived in the dimension of its repeatability rather than in its appearance as such: I perceive the letter ‘a’ not as a unique onceonly form but as a repeatable, remarkable mark. I recognise it and can immediately distribute it in various (and I intuit, infinite) contexts. The mark that appears already takes us from the sphere of evidential experience into a rather more difficult sphere to comprehend without some logical unravelling: a mark, in order for it to be the mark it is, must be able to be repeated. 2. Logically: The repeatability of the mark implies a kind of identity that is predicated fundamentally on difference. If a mark must be repeatable in order for it to be the mark it is then even in the pre-nascent possibility of its repetition a difference is implied. No iteration of a single mark can be regarded as having the identical form of any other one. Each repetition of the same mark is logically distinct. This ‘a’ differs from this ‘a’. Quite a strange logical form of the otherwise commonplace notion of ‘difference’ is now implied. The difference in question does not distinguish between two different things (say an ‘a’ and a ‘b’). It distinguishes one instance of the same thing from another

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instance of it. But the distinguishing difference must be regarded as having its effect a priori. The written mark is only what it is by virtue of the fact that it may be repeated. Logically, then, this structure of repeatability shares some characteristics with the Platonic tradition’s theory of types, according to which every empirical form instantiates imperfectly the single purely intelligible type to which it belongs, its eidos. I mention this now to illustrate why the apparently trivial domain of written marks might end up having more general implications. The logic of the mark’s repeatable structure permits neither any purely intelligible form nor any brute empirical or material existence for writing, yet in every other respect the Platonic condition is fulfilled. And, in the meantime, the difference from itself of the mark has already hinted at some qualities that indicate what kind of ‘being’ such a mark might have. 3. Ontologically: … or almost … The difference from itself of the mark as a consequence of its repeatability gives to this insignificant little phenomenon a form of existence that at least in traditional terms would not amount to much, not even to being as such. A written mark does not exist (as such) independently of its repeatable structure, which thus allows it to appear only as the trace of something else (in the logical instance itself). It never has its own proper independent ontological character but appears always and everywhere in the form of a trace of a trace, and so part of a universe (the writing system) of nothing but traces of traces. These three modes of the thought of the trace (the evident structure of the trace in the written mark, the logical necessity of its repeatability, and the a priori force of its difference from self) will come to organise and underwrite everything that happens in the field of deconstruction. In Derrida’s Of Grammatology he works out the modes of the trace in terms like textuality, supplement, differance and arche-writing. Already we can identify some provisional implications by which to proceed. First, so long as we remain within the domain of writing, conventionally speaking, these propositions will be evidently true and, within the entire history of Western philosophy, not at all controversial. The question then would be to what extent is it possible to cordon off such a domain so that any implications derived from it could be controlled and maintained within it? The impact of deconstruction has to do with the rigorous form of this question, the productive failure of every attempt to control and contain the domain of writing, and consequently the consistency of its application to

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virtually any (perhaps every) field of philosophical questioning. This cannot, for reasons that will be developed in what follows, be simply asserted without demonstration. We can acknowledge however that Derrida’s readings of the 1960s and ’70s tend to focus on the complex structures by which texts in the Western philosophical tradition reveal paradoxical attempts to exclude from the sphere of philosophical activity all the effects I have just enumerated associated with writing. Not only does the attempt each time evidently fail, but also, and more to the point, a project of a philosophy – especially one that regards itself as scientific in some way – seems to depend for any possible measure of its success on exactly those effects that it attempts to exclude. Quietly there’s much at stake. A philosophical project (whether in the name of knowledge, reason, justice or art) seems to require a priority for the presence of the thought, or the context, or the being of what exists, or at least of the signs by which the world is produced and maintained. But the thought of the trace does not permit a priority for presence (writing never amounts to more than a trace of a trace). In a provisional way one can assume that if the structure of the trace applies in any field of philosophical activity (or for that matter any other) then nothing in this field would be free from the implications to be drawn from it. Second, if we cannot contain the thought of the trace in the domain of writing, conventionally speaking, then we must operate as if there were no other domain (nothing ‘outside’ the domain governed by the effects of textuality). Oddly enough and conversely this constraint implies a possibly uncomfortable kind of freedom and so a kind of responsible irresponsibility. Deconstruction proceeds by implication in various (perhaps illimitable) forms of inventive repetition. The logic of the structure of the trace must be instantiated in such a way that this logic is rendered apparent in the form of an event of repetition. We can assume, again without controversy, that most kinds of repetition do not amount to events in the sense meant here (something that comes without warning, unexpectedly). A project of deconstruction, however, while acknowledging the productive limitations of repeatability, would put it to work in a way that allows for the reproduction of a prior structure in a novel form. So nothing in deconstruction occurs in anything other than a form (a formal repetition) of something that has already occurred. There are risks involved and one must, as Derrida puts it, ‘take chances’. Third, the forms by which something can occur are many. Following again a rule that alters a Platonic principle, adjusting it in conformity with the thought of the trace, something that occurs in one form may be repeated in an entirely different one. There’s room there for immense reserves of

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alteration, whereby the same thing can reappear in radically different forms, in different and unexpected contexts and with entirely altered senses and shades of significance. These not entirely welcome consequences (but where would we be without them?) can be tempered by a deconstructive sense of responsibility, which implies a responsibility to the signature of the other in a repetition that in some way puts that signature to work in the form of a counter-signature. It helps to know a little about rhetoric and the styles not only (even if most obviously) of poetry but also of the formal properties of the logical proposition. Two senses of form apply (two forms of form): the formal quality of a written work – its style – and the logical form of the proposition – which can remain relatively unchanged in the formal transfer. The very possibility of a meta-language arises here: a language that takes an alternative form to its so-called object language thus putting language in relation to itself, in the structural relation between a writing and a writing on writing. The viable and appropriate form of such a project would be through what we still call today critical reading, that is, a way of reading that puts into question every existing protocol (every method) of reading while producing a new text in a new form that in some way observes fidelity to the text being read. To summarise, I have introduced in a preliminary way some principles of deconstruction: the thought of the trace; the necessary repeatability of the mark; the difference of the mark from itself in its repetition; the failure of philosophy to exclude from its sphere the effects of the trace; and the idea of a project of deconstruction, which mobilises the thought of the trace as a form of signature.

Beginning: The Thought of the Trace and Intuition All of that could not not proceed from the strange reference to an ‘elsewhere’ from which the place and the language were unknown and prohibited even to myself … (Monolingualism of the Other, Derrida 1998: 70) So the kinds of critical reading that have come to be known by the name deconstruction may be produced as repetitions mutatis mutandis. This Latin phrase (roughly ‘necessary changes having been made’) indicates situations where an argument or account of something (in say philosophy, law, engineering or science) may be transferred or applied to specific situations, in often quite altered arenas, if changes to details in these different contexts are granted (Aristotle’s identification of bird wings with the forelegs or arms of mammals, to use a very simple example). Derrida uses the phrase often. We

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might go so far as to say that each reading ought to be able to generate its own specific term that, without any synonymous correspondence, could nonetheless operate as an element in a chain of possible substitutions. In the works of the 1960s Derrida generates several such terms: supplement, differance, trace, brisure, arche-writing, iterability, signature, and also deconstruction. The situation designated by each term can thus be regarded as a repetition (of the others) with significant differences (in each case). The significant differences would appear in fairly obvious ways but an undeniable similarity of formal structure would ultimately emerge. What, then, does this chain of non-synonymous yet substitutable terms designate, which otherwise would not have a name (a word or concept) of its own? Here we must expand on the previous discussion of principles (and the thought of the trace) to identify some practical procedures. The first will fall again under the rubric of beginning – a problem for all of us and one that never really retreats. The second, no less insistent, may be mobilised in the manner of a historical analysis. It would be difficult indeed to separate them. They proceed as far as possible under the same principle and do so via the medium of a text to be read. A familiar quotation, again from Derrida’s Of Grammatology, reads, in Gayatri Spivak’s translation, as follows: We must begin wherever we are and the thought of the trace [la pensée de la trace], which cannot not take the scent [du flair] into account, has already taught us that it was impossible to justify a point of departure absolutely. Wherever we are: in a text where we already believe ourselves to be. ([1967: 233] 1998: 162) Few people talk about the implications of the word ‘scent’ in a passage that seems to have nothing much to do with the sense of smell. We find the quotation towards the end of the chapter on Rousseau called ‘that dangerous supplement …’, in the section, appropriately enough, on method. Nor does that discussion ever mention scent or anything to do with the sense of smell anywhere else. What is a reader supposed to think? The French reads as follows: ‘qui ne peut pas ne pas tenir compte du flair’ [1967: 233]. What is this ‘du flair’? A French speaker today would most likely hear what in English means something like ‘intuition’. In other, older, contexts they might hear that ability that animals have to sniff out certain things (sex, the complex of semiotic signals in turds, trails of pee, narcotics or other kinds of contraband), but it more commonly designates intuition: that capacity, which some develop to the level of a fine art, for good guesswork, following hunches, chancing a counter-intuitive hypothesis, and so on. The ways in

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which a given language offers opportunities for a suggestive connotation, surplus to a primary intention, can always betray that intention. Spivak’s translation, for whatever reason, has taken the connotative aspect of the statement as primary but in an English idiom that carries the colloquial (primary) sense of the statement only very weakly. This possibility lies, of course, at the heart of the meaning of deconstruction (and explains also why the notion of deconstruction has been subjected to so much mischievous abuse). Rather than translate it might be better to attempt a gloss: ‘It is necessary to (we have no choice, we must) begin some place where we are [quelque part où nous sommes] and the thought of the trace, which cannot not recognise intuition [the ability to follow hunches], has already taught us that it is impossible to justify a point of departure absolutely.’ The sentence speaks of an ability that the thought of the trace forces us to recognise but which seems to come from ‘elsewhere’: the capacity for connecting traces to other traces. The situation already points to an ethical commonplace, which situates a self both posterior to and alienated from its other (a locus elsewhere than in the present position in which we find ourselves). To the extent that we make a critical decision in deconstruction this power inevitably comes to us from elsewhere. And while there is no point justifying any point of departure, because we must begin wherever we happen to be, we are nonetheless forced into a situation of paradoxical responsibility in relation to a text that requires reading. Hence the need, if we want our reading to have any purchase in the world, for historical analysis. We can analyse the process in connection with Derrida’s brief but much studied text ‘Structure, sign and play in the discourse of the human sciences’ (in Derrida 1978: 278–95). With any luck we ought to be able to produce a new text on the basis of this analysis. History as a sphere marked by signs of disturbance, of struggle, antagonism and compromised negotiation, situations in short that seem, again in the ancient manner, to call on some concept of justice or of action, thus approximates (mutatis mutandis) the situation we find when faced with the text. At this stage several layers are in play. On the one hand a text might seem to call for an interpretation and a hermeneutics guiding it. At the time that Derrida was engaged in these early writings the question of interpretation was ubiquitously in the air. On the other hand, it was neither certain then, nor do I think it is much more certain now, in what ways an interpretation might best proceed (despite voluminous texts that address the question). In short there are conflicting arguments about interpretation and, in the now familiar phrase, conflicting ‘interpretations of interpretation’. What method does someone imply when they speak of interpretation? The question is troublesome because the terms method

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and interpretation are intricately connected and so ‘method of interpretation’ has an oxymoronic flavour. However we understand deconstruction in relation to method it’s obviously not going to be enough to say that it approaches its text as a kind of interpretation. The history of the concept of interpretation has an uneasy relation to the history of the concept of structure, which after a potentially revolutionary series of intellectual challenges to the received order of knowledge seemed at that time to have emerged in a powerful new light. The question of interpretation is ancient but it appears revitalised in the recent turn to novel notions of structure. In the meantime the vocabulary of structure gathers currency in several fields often not conversant with each other but now beginning to fray at their borders, including not only so-called hard science (mathematics, biology, physics) but also the humanities (literature, history, and several branches of philosophy) and social (or human) sciences (linguistics, psychology, anthropology, sociology and so on). One thing that ties these discourses together has to do with the more or less unanimous quest, realised in a variety of ways, to depart from the idealist or metaphysical basis of previous philosophies. There is actually nothing new in this. Decisive passages in modern philosophy, from Descartes to Kant and Hegel, demonstrate that at the heart of the philosophical project is the sense of a need to clear away the sediments of previous philosophies, and the need to remove, as Marx famously puts it in a paradoxically mystical statement, the ‘rational kernel’ from the ‘mystical shell’. One of the inherited senses of the word deconstruction implies this kind of detaching and desedimentation. What seems new and still hangs like a shadow over thought today concerns the shift from conceptual priority over things (individuals more or less isolated from each other like atoms) to structures of relation and to processes of mutation, difference and becoming. The sphere of language demonstrates the shift more exactly and more clearly perhaps than any other. The idea of language as a structure of relations may be opposed to the common sense or nominalist theory of language, according to which discrete words serve as names for discrete ideas, which in turn correspond to discrete things. The developed structuralist idea of language posits an abstract structure of rules or laws (a syntax) of events (or utterances), which in each case alters the structure sometimes subtly but potentially catastrophically. It’s an account, in the language of the time, of ‘genesis and structure’, a combination of interminable genetic mutations through time (diachronic language change) and momentary structural stability (synchronic rules that govern the limits and possibilities of events). This idea apparently does great damage to the classical notion of language, conceived in one or other of philosophy’s two

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main strands: metaphysics and empiricism. An orderly tripartite arrangement of ideas, things and words, in which either the idea (for philosophy) or the thing (for empirical science) takes precedence, has been replaced by a notion of genetic mutation, under which the word (as an element in a system of signifiers) generates the idea (signified), and the thing disappears from the picture altogether, surviving only in the forms by which it is represented. The signifier produces its signified in lieu of the thing, person or idea that it was always supposed to have represented. The thing returns, of course (no one seriously intends to do away with the so-called real world as it is commonly understood), but as the sign already of itself and as thus governed by the structure of relations outside of which it would never have been able to appear at all. Taking Derrida’s engagement with this history alongside those of his closest contemporaries (in names like Bataille, Blanchot, Deleuze, Foucault, Lacan and Levinas) it is possible to see in some of the strands of his writing a response to trends developing in the wake of several of the most influential thinkers of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Marx, Freud, Saussure, Durkheim, Nietzsche and Heidegger). These two lists in their orderly rank seem to simplify matters of great complexity and so to pose an insurmountable challenge to anyone wishing to master the thought variously named by them. Derrida’s relatively brief, enigmatic and somewhat deceptive response to this situation appeared in a paper he presented in 1966 at the influential conference at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore on the ‘Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man’. His paper, ‘Structure, sign and play in the discourse of the human sciences’, was published the following year in the collection Writing and Difference along with the two other books of that year, Speech and Phenomena and Of Grammatology. It is useful now to recall ‘the thought of the trace’ as a way of organising this material. The trace emerges, as we have seen, in the way a written mark appears. It marks a difference but in a strange way. References in cultural theory to situations of cultural difference (negotiations across difference) tend to miss the point. With the idea of cultural difference it is possible to imagine a destabilising, mediating sphere within which diverse particulars may touch each other always partially, provisionally, vulnerably. But the difference of the mark from itself in its repeatability does not as such distinguish anything from anything else. This kind of difference in fact distinguishes nothing. It allows something to appear but the thing itself does so only as the trace of itself (its difference from self). A fascinating yet largely unnoticed habit of Western thought involves attempts on the part of the philosopher to (for want of a more sensible

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phrase) touch themselves. Both Speech and Phenomena (Derrida [1967] 1973) and Of Grammatology (Derrida [1967] 1998) pursue this habit in quite systematic ways. By deciphering patterns of auto-affection or self-touching in the writings of Husserl and Rousseau, Derrida identifies the importance of touch for the question of the relation to the other and to objects generally. The sense of passivity attached to word affection is particularly important. If the auto-affection is taken as a kind of action, then the sphere of its activity refers back to the paradoxical passivity of the experience. The auto-relation puts a self in touch with itself in the form of a kind of protective layer that serves also as a plane of contact with the world, a sphere of minimal distance between itself and its objects and others. The auto-relation functions like a defensive layer that protects a self not only from itself (it divides itself from itself) but also from others: Enjoyment! If such a thing be made for man? Ah! If I had ever in my life tasted the delights of love even once in their plenitude, I do not imagine that my frail existence would have been sufficient for them, I would have been dead in the act. (Confessions, Book VIII quoted in Derrida [1967: 223] 1998: 155). Derrida concludes that ‘hetero-eroticism can be lived (effectively, really, as one believes it is possible to say) only through the ability to reserve within itself its own supplementary protection’ ([1997: 223] 1998: 155). That which undermines a relation also reserves within it a structure that protects it and keeps it intact. This way of construing the sense of danger describes the structure of the supplement in Derrida’s reading exactly: ‘a terrifying menace, the supplement is also the first and surest protection; against that very menace’ ([1997: 222] 1998: 154). And in the auto-relation strictly speaking, this relation of simultaneous putting in danger and protecting from danger, touch in the mundane sense, becomes possible. Later Derrida picks up the vocabulary of biology in his discussions of philosophy’s quest for immunity. An immunological structure is seen as auto-immunological when defenses are not so much bypassed but rather the forces marshalled in the service of defence attack the body they are supposed to be defending. Such a situation can only arise if the structure in question is instituted in a movement that separates itself from itself – a movement (interval, relation, and so on) that thus establishes a sphere not only of defence but also, crucially, of vulnerability. When reading Derrida this is the kind of thing that describes the reading-as-writing structure, the text (but also love and death for that matter).

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Structure and Sign The problems of language and structural linguistics, in Derrida’s readings, recapitulate in fascinating ways those of contemporary philosophy in its relation to, and emergence out of, more than twenty centuries of metaphysics. In this way linguistics can be taken as exemplary, and in several places Derrida explicitly proposes readings of texts in linguistics in place of, as substitutes for, what would be much more complex and time-consuming readings of philosophy: the example of the sign in ‘Structure, sign and play’; the reading of Saussure in Of Grammatology; the reading of Benveniste in place of Nietzsche in Margins of Philosophy (1972). The linguistic ‘example’, however, should never be taken as simply exemplary, that is, as one possible example amongst many. First of all, language poses significant and seemingly insuperable problems for a metaphysics that would cleanse itself and its values of qualities that seem to undermine those values. The supreme value is that of presence: a status or topos, a ‘there’ that would be untouched by the drifting of the spatial and temporal intervals of which linguistic exchange consists. Language, in its collusion with time and chance, manifests not only an inability to settle into timeless stasis but also a productive restlessness without which it simply would not be what it is. And secondly, to the extent that a new concept of structure has emerged, this occurs as a turn towards those aspects of language that hitherto metaphysics had spurned. That is, since the nineteenth century at least a series of not always concerted trends have turned towards the realm of language as a way of substituting the thought of structure for the thought of the metaphysical present. In ‘Structure, sign and play’ (1978: 351–70) Derrida identifies these trends at their most radical in the writings of the three exemplary names, Nietzsche, Heidegger and Freud. What is clear is that these names do not represent influences so much as a historical structure to which they refer only as the most radical marks of a much more general formation. So the reading proceeds on two levels. An arguably marginal question of philosophy – the question of language and linguistic structure – shadows, and overlaps with, more general and so often less technically precise questions of the history of metaphysics (the struggle of philosophy with the world, with knowledge, with morals and politics, with religion and with the aesthetic questions that traditionally mark the major texts in a major history). It is as if the history of metaphysics is ‘writ small’ in the problem of the concept of the sign. The theme of the auto-affection that at once protects and exposes a body to danger plays such an important role in Derrida’s readings here that it is surprising how little notice has been taken of it, over the years, in

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the general reception of deconstruction. Later he refines the pattern that concerns him here as an auto-immunity (referring to the medical condition according to which an immune system attacks the cells it is supposed to be protecting). ‘Structure, sign and play’ can itself be read as a cunning condensation of the books to be published the following year, especially Of Grammatology, though the problem of condensation (since Freud’s book on dreams of 1900 a highly charged word but also a word designating an ancient rule of poetic composition) will be especially acute in this case. As much of the reception of Derrida depends, no doubt scandalously, on the example of ‘Structure, sign and play’, deconstruction has been taken as a kind of version of one of the two major trends identified there, that is, as a kind of ‘post-structuralism’ in the sense of a variation of or mutation out of the structuralist position (as variously criticism, revision, extension, etc.). Deconstruction, though, comes in a subtler and more deeply historical manner. Two ways (two methods) of thinking structure are posited: the classical way and the structuralist way. The structuralist way is seen as explicitly overturning, stepping beyond or otherwise radically revising the classical one. In a further subdivision two ways of undertaking this overturning are identified as ‘interpretations of interpretation’: one named after Nietzsche and the other named after Rousseau. So the entire structuralist project hitherto will be figured as variations of either Nietzsche’s or Rousseau’s teaching and this project, in its subtle division, will be put into explicit rapport with a classical model that has supposedly been supplanted. A problem with the difference within the sign between the signifier and the signified operates in an exemplary way to illustrate the connection. It is worth laying things out in order to see what might be at stake. First, Derrida’s text cannot be taken as simply a free-standing argument, its terms neatly defined and its object isolated and addressed with the kind of clarity a geologist might bring to a rock. Whether we inhabit the text to be read in a classical way or in a (post) structuralist one there is no choice but to inhabit it in some way. This constraint might amount to all we can say with certainty about deconstructive method but, once again, the ways in which we inhabit a text may as well follow guidelines identified already in terms of the thought of the trace. Derrida’s text thus ‘inhabits in a certain way’ the texts of structuralism. There is the risk. It is going to strike its reader as something like a structuralist text, albeit strangely altered. If the structuralist position and its methods and principles are mobilised enough to be put to work on structuralism itself then perhaps a new kind of text might emerge. The complication now is that the classical position returns, brought back into the picture like a revenant, in a potentially alarming (ghostly, spectral)

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way. And we should insist on this: the essay may be regarded singularly in Derrida’s oeuvre (an oeuvre in which each text is in a certain way singular to itself) as following the formal adventure of the structuralist method. We do not find this replicated exactly in other writings. So methodologically we can feel secure with the following principles: the thought of the trace and the auto-affective (and auto-immune) structure. Neither the specific content nor the formal structure of an essay can therefore be taken as indicative of deconstructive method per se. But here structure is the topic and in a certain way it also suggests the form. Derrida begins by cautiously identifying what he refers to as an ‘event’ in the history of the concept of structure. Two levels of engagement are now inextricably entwined. Historically (that is, sometime during the nineteenth century) the concept of structure suffers an event after which things are not ever going to be the same. There is much at stake. If we are to accept that after Nietzsche, after Freud, after Heidegger, it becomes necessary to think in terms of a structure that organises consciousness, life, social relations, language, and so on (and in the wake of the historical shift designated by them, the entire structuralist project is implicated), then on those very terms such an event must have an intricate relation of possibility to the structure or matrix from which it emerged. That is to say, it would be an event governed by a syntax, even if that syntax is altered in the event. With this in mind we can read history as a kind of mobile structure of events. So let us begin with the classical style. The epistēmē (the Greek term for axiomatic knowledge recharged by Michel Foucault in his already notorious Les mots et les choses from earlier in 1966) gives to structure a ‘centre’ and ‘neutralizes the structurality of structure’. It ‘limits the play of structure’ but represents a force that is ‘outside the structure’. Privileged among the values typical of the classical way, in connection with this ‘centre outside the structure’, would be those associated with the signified: presence, the statement, the intentional role of agents, individuals, authors, subjects, and so on. The centre therefore indicates the form of a presence, a perhaps invisible unity, an origin and end even in repetition, substitution, transformation or permutation. Different forms or names nonetheless could carry such an absent-presence through the substitutions of metaphors and metonymies. The signifier would always thus be subordinated to the task, with more or less fidelity, of carrying signified meaning to its destination. Now against this classical style it is possible to identify the characteristics of what for want of a better word for the moment we might with justice call the ‘event’. The style we associate with this event in the history of the concept of structure would be as follows: ‘it begins to think the structurality

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of structure’. The phrase has a characteristically Heideggerian flavour, taking the form of phrases like ‘the being of beings’, established already by the time of Being and Time (Sein und Zeit from 1927), and ‘the thingliness of the thing’, analysed at length in the influential essay ‘The origin of the work of art’, in which the role of interpretation and the indeterminate force of the interpretable takes centre stage. And indeed the names we are encouraged to associate with it are Nietzsche, Heidegger and Freud (qui genuit Foucault, Lacan, Barthes, and so on). By thinking the ‘structurality of structure’ the classical privilege is systematically undermined and so now we begin to think the absence of centre, or at least we begin to think of subjects, authors, agents and so on as decentred. The concept of structure has an obvious association with building but it also has a wider reach of connotations (Struere, Structum to build: the manner of putting together; the arrangement of parts; the manner of organisation; a thing constructed; an organic form). If structuralism rather generally now refers to ‘the belief in and study of unconscious, underlying patterns in thought, behaviour, social organisation, etc.’ then it is possible to trace its emergence in contemporary thought. The Marxist notion of structure, taken explicitly from G. W. F. Hegel, had been subjected to an intense series of studies, first in the hands of influential French commentators like Alexandre Kojeve and Jean Hyppolite (Derrida’s supervisor) and then in the group surrounding Louis Althusser. Problems arise concerning the connection between ‘the economic structure of society’ (which is said to form the basis for the totality of social relations) and the ‘legal and political superstructure’, which Althusser begins to locate as the site for the ‘reproduction of the conditions of production’. Althusser produces a series of readings of Marx throughout the 1960s, which have as their main aim something like an absolute break between the Hegelian-Marx and the properly Marxist-Marx (and so a break with Hegel). Only many years later, when the dominant voices of French Marxism have all but died out, does Derrida explicitly return to the question of Marx’s heritage in Spectres of Marx (unless one counts some oblique remarks in Glas). But it would not be difficult to identify in ‘Structure, sign and play’, as well as other essays from Writing and Difference (1978), a continuous if allusive reference to these contemporary controversies. Derrida’s aim though is at once more specific and more general. With Nietzsche the question of the underlying force of unconscious structure is indelibly located as a question of language. In a much-quoted early text, he writes:

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Originally it is language that works on building the edifice of concepts; later it is science. Just as the bee simultaneously builds the cells of its comb and fills them with honey, so science works unceasingly at that great columbarium of concepts, the burial site of perceptions, builds ever-new, ever-higher tiers, supports, cleans, renews old cells, and strives above all to fill that framework which towers up to vast heights, and to fit into it in an orderly way the whole empirical world, i.e., the anthropomorphic world. (‘On truth and lies in their non-moral sense’, Nietzsche 2005: 150) Heidegger takes up this notion of language (the ‘house of being’) as the structural basis for the entire conceptual universe of things: a world to which access can only be gained through concepts of it and which is thus dependent upon a single support: the signifier. Heidegger, of course, does not use this word, which we inherit from Ferdinand de Saussure, but Heidegger is precisely concerned with the structural role of a ‘signifier’ (something standing in for something else in the manner of a word, a phenomenon, a logos) when he identifies the otherwise empty notion of being at the (absent) centre of the structure of the whole: To put it negatively, it is beyond question that the totality of the structural whole is not to be reached by building it up out of elements. For this we would need an architect’s plan. The Being of Dasein, upon which the structural whole as such is ontologically supported, becomes accessible to us when we look all the way through this whole to a single primordially unitary phenomenon which is already in this whole in such a way that it provides the ontological foundation for each structural item in its structural possibility. (Heidegger 1962: 180) The centre of the structure, then, lies outside the structure. It is in it but outside it. And so on. Heidegger’s work with words (like the Greek Aletheia and the German Ereignis) creatively distorts them so that through an often bizarre and surprising constellation of linguistic, etymological and associative connections a new (although never sufficient) signification is produced: the event (Ereignis) of truth itself (Aletheia). The event and its truth designate nothing else than the potential for this distortion, hence the so-called ‘turn’ (the Kehre) away from philosophy and towards the poetic from the 1930s onwards. And therefore the adventure of ‘Structure, sign and play’ stages the following formula. According to the law as laid down by structuralism, structure (matrix, syntax, grammar, and so on) produces (conceives and gives birth to)

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an event (utterance, process), which in turn alters the syntax in the form of a genetic mutation. But when this law is applied to structuralism itself (in its emergence as a world historical event), the same formula applies: the history of Western metaphysics gives birth to structuralism/poststructuralism. The event, then, like the example, and like the supplement, destroys and replaces that which it supplements. It kills its parents (specifically its mother). In this respect the new formation can be regarded as a more or less secret or silent repetition of the old one, to which it stands as a kind of momentary determination of its future. The history of Western metaphysics is already the destruction of the history of metaphysics. Empiricists destroy idealists, sophists destroy truth, dialectics destroys literary inspiration, materialists destroy ideology, and philosophers in response destroy the sceptics yet are destroyed by them. In line with the structures that Derrida later describes as auto-immune, this mutual destructivity actually ensures the survival of what remains of metaphysics. Structuralism repeats the epistēmē and once again gives ‘structure’ a centre (absence), neutralises the structurality of structure, limits the play of structure, and posits a centre outside the structure. The specific difference of this transfer, mutatis mutandis, from a classical schema to a structuralist one involves a reorientation of the privileged values. Among the values typical of the structuralist way, again in connection with this ‘centre outside the structure’, would be those associated with the signifier: absent meaning, the enunciative modality, the unintentional role of agents, authors, subjects and so on. The event thus topples the signified from its purchase above the signifier (signifier/signified) and replaces its transcendental force with the notion of structure (structure/event). The transcendental force has not disappeared; it has been displaced. This concept breaks with the prior structure but, in its own terms, must in a certain way repeat the prior structure. With the concept of structure now focused on the signifier rather than on the signified part of the sign the sphere of knowledge might seem much changed. But for the change to be effective a further displacement is required. Between two alternatives within the idiom of interpretation (one retains the ghost of the classical notion of truth; the other rejects the classical notion of truth absolutely in its projection towards an unknowable future) Derrida establishes a ‘common ground’, which he calls ‘difference’. Difference, or the thought of the trace, performs in a non-interpretive way to mark the possibility of repetition as underlying both alternatives, looking back to an absolute past and forward to a future to come (the French avenir) but dividing the present into two non-present temporal dimensions, letting the present appear only in its division from itself, as contrary interpretations of

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interpretation, letting the present appear only in its loss, in the lost-ness of its loss. ‘Structure, sign and play’ performs the deconstruction of structuralist and poststructuralist positions as much as it does classical ones. And it does so by mobilising the hidden or secret methods that already operate there, animating those very positions, by discovering the source of their power in their repeatability rather than in anything that would necessarily be taught or proposed by the texts themselves.

References Aristotle (1988), The Generation of Animals, ed. J. L. Ackrill, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Derrida, Jacques ([1972] 1972), Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass, London: Routledge. [Marges de la philosophie, Paris: Minuit]. Derrida, Jacques ([1967] 1973), Speech and Phenomena, trans. David B. Allison, Evanston, IL: Northwestern. [La voix et le phénomène, Paris: PUF]. Derrida, Jacques ([1967] 1978), Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass, London: Routledge. [L’écriture et la différence, Paris: Seuil]. Derrida, Jacques (1990), Glas, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press Derrida, Jacques (1992), ‘ “This strange institution called literature.” An interview with Jacques Derrida’, Acts of Literature, ed. Derek Attridge, London: Routledge, pp. 33–75. Derrida, Jacques (1994), Spectres of Marx, London: Routledge. Derrida, Jacques (1998), Monolingualismism of the Other, trans. Patrick Mensah, Stanford, CA: Standford University Press. Derrida, Jacques ([1967] 1998), Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. [De la grammatologie, Paris: Minuit]. Derrida, Jacques ([2000] 2005a), On Touching – Jean-Luc Nancy, trans. Christine Irizarry, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. [Le toucher, Jean-Luc Nancy, Paris: Galilée]. Derrida, Jacques (2005b), Paper Machine, trans. Rachel Bowlby, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Derrida, Jacques and Maurizio Ferraris (2001), A Taste for the Secret, London: Polity. Caputo, John D. (1997), The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida: Religion without Religion. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Donato, Eugenio and Richard Macksey (eds) (1970), The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man: the Structuralist Controversy. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Foucault, Michel (1966), Les mots et les choses – une archéologie des sciences humaines, Paris: Gallimard.

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Freud, Sigmund (2006), Interpreting Dreams, trans. J. A. Underwood, London: Penguin. Heidegger, Martin (1950), Holzwege, Frankfurt: Klostermann. Heidegger, Martin (1956), What is Philosophy? trans. Jean T. Wilde and William Kluback, Albany, NY: New College and University Press. Heidegger, Martin (1962), Being and Time, Oxford: Blackwell. Heidegger, Martin (1966), ‘La fin de la philosophie et la tâche de la pensée’, in Kierkegaard vivant, trans. Jean Beaufret and François Fédier, Paris: Unesco. Heidegger, Martin (1969), ‘Das Ende der Philosophie und die Aufgabe des Denkens’, in Zur Sache des Denkens, Tübingen: Max Niemeyer. Heidegger, Martin (1972), ‘The end of philosophy and the task of thinking’, On Time and Being, trans. Joan Stambaugh, New York, NY: Harper and Row. Heidegger, Martin (2008), ‘On the origin of the work of art’, in Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell, New York, NY: HarperCollins, pp. 143–212. Husserl, Edmund (1973), Logische Untersuchungen, 3 vols, Tubingen: Niemeyer. Hyppolite, Jean (1997), Logic and Existence, trans. Leonard Lawlor and Amit Sen, New York, NY: State University of New York Press. Kockelmans, Joseph (1994), Edmund Husserl’s Phenomenology, West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press. Kojève, Alexandre (1947), Introduction à la lecture de Hegel, Paris: Gallimard. [Translated as Introduction to the Reading of Hegel: Lectures on the Phenomenology of Spirit by James H. Nichols, Jr., Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1969]. Lacan, Jacques (1966), Écrits, Paris: Éditions du Seuil. Nietzsche, Friedrich (1999), Sämtliche Werke. Kritische Studienausgabe in 15 Bänden, ed. Giorgio Colli und Mazzino Montinari, Berlin: de Gruyter. Nietzsche, Friedrich (2005), The Anti-Christ, Ecce Homo, Twilight of the Idols and Other Writings, ed. Aaron Ridley and Judith Norman, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Nietzsche, Friedrich (2007), Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. Graham Parkes, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Chapter 6 É c r i t u r e Fé m i n i n e Zoë Brigley Thompson

metHods Écriture fÉminine

Introduction: Problems, Perplexities and Misconceptions When I say I believe women & men read & write differently I mean that women & men read & write pretty differently. Whether this is biologically ‘essential’ or just straightforward like when you left the toaster burning or because women have a subordinated relationship to power in their guts I don’t know. Is this clear enough for you to follow. (Critchley 2010: 177, lines 1–8) In ‘When I say I believe woman’, the avant-garde poet Emily Critchley delves into problems of textuality and gender. With wryness and humour, Critchley riffs on the ideas of the French feminists – Hélène Cixous, Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva. The poem rambles around the possibilities and perplexities of écriture féminine without the need to provide a concrete answer. Critchley begins with a qualification, but the expectation of clarification is undermined by the self-conscious, intentional lameness of the comment: ‘I mean that women & men / read & write pretty differently’. Are men and women simply different as in essentialist thinking? Is écriture féminine a way for women to rediscover ‘the power in their guts’? What is obvious is that the relationship between gender and writing is far from being ‘straightforward’ or ‘clear’, as Critchley implies with her nonsensical statements. Another aspect of écriture féminine, referred to in Critchley’s poem, is the perceived lack of clarity in authors expounding its arguments. When Critchley writes ‘Is this clear / enough for you to follow’, not as a question but as a flat statement, she implies that whether the reader understands or not

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is of little consequence to the speaker. Describing the writing style of Hélène Cixous who is a renowned exponent of écriture féminine, Susan Sellers suggests that ‘the relentless claustrophobic exploration of the fragmented “I” – far from encouraging and enabling the reader – can produce a bewildered retreat to more conventional textual pleasures with a feeling little short of relief ’ (Sellers 1996: 5). Such frustrated readers approach French feminist texts with a desire for logic and order, but Marta Segarra defends Cixous’s poetic writing style explaining that ‘she is still considered mainly a theorist or even a “philosopher” – an appellation she does not acknowledge – and is thus criticised for being abstruse and not giving concrete directions that could be taken as a method’ (Segarra 2010: 4). This introduction to the theorising of Hélène Cixous explores some of the problems addressed by écriture féminine, but also seeks to unravel some of the misunderstandings and misconceptions of this philosophy. The overview begins by outlining the first formulations of écriture féminine in Cixous’s essays ‘The laugh of the Medusa’ and ‘Sorties’. From such beginnings, the survey goes on to consider the key concepts of écriture féminine and féminité, and it offers a more detailed account of the characteristics of écriture féminine. There is discussion of the possibilities of écriture féminine for male and female writers and commentary on how, in Cixous’s philosophy, women’s material experience of pregnancy and maternity gives them special access to féminité. The French feminists consider their method to be ‘feminine’, a term which designates a quality connected to women’s physical experience, but which is not necessarily defined by biological sex. This use of the term ‘feminine’, however, has proved controversial among mainstream feminists. Ann Rosalind Jones for example has criticised féminité and écriture féminine as ‘idealist and essentialist, bound up in the very system they claim to undermine’ noting that the ideas ‘have been attacked as theoretically fuzzy and as fatal to constructive political action’ (Jones 1981: 252–3). Such attacks, however, arise from misconceptions of what the French feminists mean when they talk about the feminine. As Segarra explains, ‘écriture féminine can be produced by men or women writers, as masculinity and femininity exist in every human being’ (2010: 4). Jones, however, states that Cixous ‘is convinced that women’s unconscious is totally different from men’s’ and she mistakenly proposes that féminité ‘defines men as phallic-solipsistic, aggressive, excessively rational and then praises women, who, by nature of their contrasting sexuality, are other-oriented, empathetic, multi-imaginative’ (1981: 251, 255). This representation could not be more different from Cixous’ own definition

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of her theories, which emphasise féminité and écriture féminine as concepts applicable to both genders: I do not say feminine writing. I talk of femininity in writing, or I use heaps of quotation marks, I speak of ‘so-called feminine’ writing. In any case, femininity – to define it – also exists in men, it does not necessarily exist in women, and so this should not return to enclose itself in the history of anatomical difference and of sexes. All that is a trap. (Cixous 2008: 22) Other critics recognise the complexity of écriture féminine, such as Sandra Gilbert who confirms Cixous’s rejection ‘of persistent and consistent sexual essences’ and who emphasises that écriture féminine is ‘a fundamentally political strategy, designed to redress the wrongs of a culture through a revalidation of the rights of nature’ (1986: xv). According to Maggie Berg too, critics of écriture féminine should have ‘recognized that masculine and feminine are in a relation of “différance” rather than difference’ (1991: 55). Writing about différance and history, Jonathan Culler recalls Derrida’s comment that différance is ‘the movement by which language, or any code, any system of reference in general, becomes “historically” constituted as a fabric of differences’ (Derrida 1982: 12). Culler emphasises that Derrida paradoxically ‘uses history against philosophy: when confronted with essentializing, idealizing theories’ while simultaneously using ‘philosophy against history and the claims of historical narratives’ (1982: 129). Like Derrida, the French feminists are suspicious of grand historical narratives and the essentialising tendencies of theory, though for them, these issues are inflected by gender history and the repression of féminité by Western philosophical discourse. In Cixous’s words, ‘All the great theorists of destiny or of human history have reproduced the most commonplace logic of desire, the one that keeps the movement towards the other staged in a patriarchal production’ (1986: 99). For the French feminists, the term ‘history’ usually refers to ‘history of phallocentrism, history of propriation … that of man’s becoming recognized by the other’ (Cixous 1986: 99). Above all, history is a force that represses authentic femininity, so that Chris Weedon writes how ‘the Western rationalist tradition, from the ancient Greeks onwards represses the féminine side of both individuals and culture in general’ (1997: 7). Cixous writes how in Western traditions of philosophy, theory and literary criticism, ‘woman is always associated with passivity’ (1986: 98), while Irigaray, in The Way of Love, reverses the meaning of the word philosophy, so that it represents not a love of wisdom, but a subversive feminist philosophy of women’s love. The French feminists seek to correct the dominance

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of ‘ “masculine” femininity which alienates us from our bodies’, though this does not entail ‘the rejection of theory per se but its transformation as part of the struggle to transform society’ (Weedon 1997: 7). This transformation dictates a poeticising of theory, which is connected to the anti-rational powers of féminité.1 Cixous describes her ‘theoretical texts’ as ‘carried off by a poetic rhythm’, and she infers that poetic aspects of language can be used for subversive ends (2008: 81). Irigaray too confirms that poetry can become poïesis, an act of making, because ‘poetic language sometimes keeps available a part of the energy of the coming into relation’, the meeting of the one and the other (2002: 136). Finally, Kristeva envisions the poet as a figure who ‘wants to make language perceive what it doesn’t want to say’, confirming that ‘it is this eminently parodic gesture that changes the system’ (1982: 31). As a subversive and repressed quality, the ‘feminine’ as defined by Cixous in particular is an exceptionally poetic idea, and it owes a great deal to Derridean deconstruction. Cixous admits that her creative and theoretical writing ‘corresponds entirely to the Derridean definition of writing that disseminates, works over the signifier, that listens to itself being written and that retraces its own steps, that re-enscribes’ (2008: 12). Cixous then adopts a Derridean mode of expression which gestures to the notion of différance, because it brings with it what Weedon describes as a ‘critique of the metaphysics of presence in which the speaking subject’s intention guarantees meaning and language is a tool for expressing something beyond it’ (1997: 13). Critics like Segarra (2010: 12) and Penrod (1996: 17) have emphasised too that the critique of binary logic as expressed by différance is significant for Cixous and her theorising of the feminine. Deconstruction undermines theory’s assurance of ‘systematic knowledge’, and ‘claims to know only the impossibility of such knowledge’, seeking instead ‘ “deep penetration” into the nature of language and literature’ (Culler 1982: 22, 24). From such a starting place, Cixous interrogates language itself, creating a new poetic speech that expresses féminité better than any classic, structured argument. If deconstruction and Derrida are inspirational for écriture féminine, psychoanalytic theories of femininity and the self are also significant, though they are to be argued against rather than embraced. Penrod explains that for the French feminists, ‘writing from the margins has involved writing from the spaces of post-Freudian psychoanalysis and deconstructionist theory’ (1996: 7). While deconstruction offers the French feminists a place from which to critique the authority of theory and Western discourse, their engagement with psychoanalysis uncovers assumptions about the gendered self. Often this means engaging with the fathers of psychoanalysis, and the

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detailed analysis that follows will consider how écriture féminine has emerged from her dialogues with Freud. While Luce Irigaray parodies Lacan’s phallocentrism in This Sex which is not One, Cixous’s theories have focused for the most part on refuting Freud’s ideas on femininity; as Penrod affirms ‘there is much less Lacan than there is Freud’ (1996: 17).2 Through engaging with deconstruction and critiquing psychoanalysis, the French feminists create a theory of ‘femininity’ and textuality which offers an alternative to the phallogocentrism of Western discourse. Féminité as theorised here represents the power to open up a body which is permeable, open and generous and it runs in parallel to Derrida’s notions of hospitality, which he discusses with Cixous in their dialogue, ‘From the word of life’: Exposure to the other can only take the form of powerlessness. The other is he or she before whom I am vulnerable, whom I cannot even deny his or her alterity. I cannot say that I open doors, that I invite the other: the other is already there. That is unconditional hospitality. (Cixous and Derrida 2008: 175) Derrida’s idea of a hospitable stance is reminiscent of Cixous’s notion that human beings choose between ‘masculine gender roles that seek to close down, appropriate and control’ and ‘a more open, feminine response willing to take risks’ (Sellers 1996: 4). Écriture féminine then entails representing and reinscribing a new way of being, and this means rejecting separation from others, instead being open, responsive and willing to take risks. The sections that follow will illustrate how this philosophy manifests itself in Cixous’s early works such as ‘The laugh of the Medusa’ and ‘Sorties’, as well as later theoretical texts or interviews and her creative writing. The sections that follow work through some of Cixous’s key ideas related to écriture féminine and féminité, beginning with the symbol of the Medusa as a challenge to the phallocentrism of orthodox psychoanalysis. The crossing over of sexuality, gender and textuality is considered in relation to the ‘sexts’ of écriture féminine, and there is discussion of how male and female writers can access fémininité, focusing on the example of James Joyce in particular. Having established that men and women both can be writers of écriture féminine, the analysis turns to what Cixous says in particular about women: about the difficulty of women’s speech as represented by the hysteric; about the liberating quality of women’s sexuality as represented by Shakespeare’s Cleopatra; and about the special access to féminité offered by women’s material experience of pregnancy and maternity. What is clear from Cixous’s diverse writings on the subject, however, is that écriture féminine is not merely posturing for

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political effect, but a complex theory of a language that subverts phallocentric norms.

The Medusa’s Laughter Since the publication of her infamous essay, ‘The laugh of the Medusa’, Cixous has proclaimed ‘difference feminism’ as transformative of negative qualities sometimes associated with the feminine via the jubilant energy of écriture féminine. Theorising of écriture féminine comes to fruition in works like ‘The laugh of the Medusa’ and ‘Sorties’ in The Newly Born Woman, though these essays are perhaps not the most representative of Cixous’s writing style, because they were written as polemics asserting a clear political stance. In Rootprints, Cixous explains that her 1970s’ essays were ‘a conscious, pedagogic, didactic effort’ when she saw herself ‘having an obligation to become engaged to defend a certain number of positions’ (Cixous and Calle-Gruber 1997: 5). Cixous later disowned essays like ‘The laugh of the Medusa’ for being too didactic, yet such examples are still extremely illuminating when studying the development of Cixous’s écriture féminine. In ‘The laugh of Medusa’ and in ‘Sorties’, Cixous reinvents the symbolic Medusa, who in Ovid’s Metamorphoses represents the threatening energy of the ‘feminine’: the Medusa turns men to stone with her castrating stare. Cixous’s use of the Medusa challenges Freudian psychoanalysis and the characterisation of the ‘feminine’ as weakness, passivity or jealousy of the all-powerful phallus. In most of her oeuvre, Cixous is usually in conversation with Freud and psychoanalysis in general. Addressing him as ‘Uncle Freud’ (2008: 139), Cixous challenges Freud’s characterisation of femininity as passivity, though she does not totally reject the psychoanalytic method. Penrod observes that confronting Freud preoccupies Cixous far more than challenging Lacan whose theories are a source of argument for Irigaray. Penrod remarks, however, that for Cixous, ‘it is not possible to reject Freud outright merely because of his misogynism; … it is vital to have read Freud and then to have reread or rethought him in relation to other, different ways of conceptualizing the world’ (1996: 17). Most of Cixous’s theoretical works respond to Freud’s empty vision of femininity, but her use of the Medusa in particular relates to the orthodox psychoanalytic view in Freud’s short essay ‘The Medusa’s head’. Here, Freud comments in particular on Perseus’s beheading of the monstrous woman:

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To decapitate = to castrate. The terror of the Medusa is thus a terror of castration that is linked to the sight of something. Numerous analyses have made us familiar with the occasion for this: it occurs when a boy, who has hitherto been unwilling to believe the threat of castration, catches sight of the female genitals, probably those of an adult surrounded by hair, and essentially those of his mother. (Freud 1992: 273) For Freud, the sight of the genitals of the mother and the absent phallus is all too threatening, overwhelming and disturbing in phallic systems of value. The ‘unnatural’ sight of the Medusa with her serpents for hair is equivalent to the female genitalia and both are so terrifying that they turn the watcher (only men, not women) to stone. For Freud, the Medusa is simply a locus for male anxieties, but what Cixous does effectively in ‘The laugh of the Medusa’ is to reverse such negative associations and to consider what the Medusa might mean for women, a line of thought that is notably absent from Freud’s analysis.3 Freud famously described femininity as a mysterious and unknowable ‘dark continent’, but Cixous identifies this idea as a ‘trick on [woman]: she has been kept at a distance from herself, she has been made to see (= not-see) woman on the basis of what man wants to see of her, which is to say almost nothing’ (1986: 68). This supposed ‘dark continent’, Cixous continues, ‘is neither dark nor unexplorable’, but fear of the ‘feminine’ fixes ‘our place between two terrifying myths: between the Medusa and the abyss’ (1986: 68). Reframing Freud’s theories, Cixous asserts that the femininity envisioned by Freud as null and empty is multiple and rich, and it is useful to recall Cixous’s dialogue with Derrida, Veils, in which femininity is symbolised by the silkworm, a creature which creates beautiful thread out of its self, out of nothingness (cf. Cixous and Derrida 2001). The big reveal of the feminine shows that ‘woman is not castrated’; ‘the Medusa is beautiful’ and her laughter forces history to ‘change its sense, its direction’ (Cixous 1986: 69). Cixous questions the centrality of symbolic castration in psychoanalytic symbology, and seeks to transform female sexuality from a site of taboo and shame to a thing of feminine power and beauty. It is words that enable this transformation as is clear in Cixous’s threat to ‘show them our sexts’ (1986: 69).

Writing Sexts Everyone knows that a place exists which is not economically or politically indebted to all the vileness and compromise. That is not obliged to

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reproduce the system. That is writing. If there is a somewhere else that can escape the infernal repetition, it lies in that direction, where it writes itself, where it dreams, where it invents new worlds. (Cixous 1986: 72). If Cixous’s version of the Medusa represents a currency of gender and desire beyond negative castration symbologies, her more authentic, powerful version of femininity is brought into play by the intricacies of language. To show one’s sext is almost as taboo as revealing one’s sex in Cixous’s vision of repressed femininity. This kind of writing certainly has a relationship with the repression of women, but it avoids being essentialist because it seeks to liberate not only women, but men who have repressed their femininity. As Cixous confirms, ‘I am not trying to create a feminine writing, but to let into writing what has been forbidden up to now’ (2008: 52). The propagators of écriture féminine are ‘not the novelists, allies of representation’ but ‘the poets’, because ‘poetry involves gaining strength through the unconscious and because the unconscious, that other limitless country, is the place where the repressed manage to survive’ (Cixous 1976: 879–80). The work of poetry has long been associated with the work of the unconscious and the return of the repressed through slips of the tongue and dreams for example. For Cixous, poetry is a powerful force that works against the phallocentric system; she writes how ‘Poetry and power are estranged nations: it is impossible to hold both nationalities’ (2008: 91). In seeking writers of écriture féminine, Cixous is attracted by ‘authors who constantly ask questions that are political but are treated poetically’ (Penrod 1996: 9). Cixous often chooses poets such as Rainer Maria Rilke, Hölderlin, Osip Mandelstam, Marina Tsvetaeva or Anna Akhmatova, but she also identifies poetic writers of prose like Franz Kafka, Margueritte Duras and Clarice Lispector, or playwrights like Jean Genet. Because féminité is a quality not necessarily defined by sex (though connected to womanhood), Cixous is adamant that male or female writers can produce écriture féminine. There have been poets who would go to any length to slip something by at odds with tradition – men capable of loving love and hence capable of loving others and of wanting them, of imagining the woman who would hold out against oppression and constitute herself as a superb, equal, hence ‘impossible’ subject. (Cixous 1976: 879) In Reading with Clarice Lispector, Cixous discusses what these writers might have in common and notes that ‘People like Clarice [Lispector] and Genet are people who exposed themselves to the other. They let themselves be

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impregnated, penetrated, invaded by the other’ (1990: 147). While Genet is open to the ‘repugnant other’, and Rilke is penetrated by ‘trees, by works of art, by flowers, angels’, Lispector is invaded by masculinity (Cixous 1990: 147–8). Another key example is James Joyce on whom Cixous wrote her PhD thesis. Described by Geert Lernout as half ‘French doctorate’, half ‘Sartrean biography’ (1990: 42), Cixous’s doctoral work depicts Joyce as a poetic figure who fulfils her demand to ‘let[s] femininity through in a very powerful way’ (2008: 54). Commenting on Joyce’s erotic correspondence with his wife Nora, letters which envision ‘the wild brutal madness’ of his lust (Joyce 1966: 272), Cixous analyses how Joyce’s (Jim’s) initial desire to penetrate the mystery of his lover becomes a kind of sympathy, empathy even, as Joyce enters what it is to be a woman. Though ‘Jim strips Nora of her impenetrability until she has no secrets left’, their erotic and textual relationship ‘approaches the mystery of her being so closely that the continuity established between the two of them allows him to move between the masculine and the feminine and vice versa’ (Cixous 1972: 522). This early analysis of Joyce prefigures Cixous’s later theorising of écriture féminine: how certain modes of writing have, what Sellers calls, ‘the potential to explode masculine thinking’ (1996: 5). Later, in ‘Sorties’, Cixous writes of Joyce’s masterwork Ulysses and she identifies the text (especially Molly’s eponymous soliloquy near the end of the book) as an example of écriture féminine: ‘What is feminine (the poets suspected it) affirms: … and yes I said yes I will Yes, says Molly (in her rapture), carrying Ulysses with her in the direction of a new writing’ (1986: 85). The liberating jouissance of Molly represents the ‘willingness to defy the masculine and seek new relations between subject and object, self and other through writing’ (Sellers 1996: 5). Despite their differences, writers like Lispector, Genet, Rilke and Joyce do have something in common: what Cixous calls ‘a certain type of generosity, a certain type of capacity to expend without fear of loss’ (2008: 22). This idea of sacrificing a whole or coherent self in order to reach the other is also common to Irigaray. Like Cixous, Irigaray recommends a communication which is ‘necessarily poetic’ and calls for the creation of a ‘third space’ though this means sacrificing one’s ‘self and one’s own world in order to make oneself available for what such a growth has to construct with the other’ (2002: 88, 132). Cixous brings these ideas of hospitality, sacrifice and generosity into her definition of écriture féminine, and she concludes that such writers ‘know for example that to lose is not necessarily to lose, that it could be a way of working with life’ (2008: 22).

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Speaking Hysterically Écriture féminine can be the province of male or female writers, but Cixous makes it clear that for women to come to subversive speech can be painful and difficult. As Sellers notes, ‘while she stresses that feminine writing, like femininity, is potentially the province of both sexes, she nevertheless locates in women’s writing the repressed “history” of our experience’ (1996: 4). In ‘The laugh of the Medusa’, Cixous confirms that ‘writing has been run by a libidinal and cultural – hence political, typically masculine – economy … a locus where the repression of women has been perpetuated … where woman has never her turn to speak’ (1976: 879). Cixous theorises that such phallocentric proscriptions mean ‘our innate bisexuality is structured according to a single, masculine libido’ which represses féminité (Sellers 1996: 2). Conventional femininity is a fake mode of being created by phallocentric social norms and routines; women are forced to take up this fake femininity, while men repress the ‘feminine’ aspects of their bisexual character, bisexuality being what Cixous designates: ‘the original condition of every individual’ (2008: 60). Maggie Berg explains that ‘Irigaray, Hélène Cixous, and Julia Kristeva hold the Lacanian view of the unconscious as the product of the subject’s insertion into the symbolic’, but they affirm that this entrance into the symbolic ‘is not the cause but the consequence of women’s social experience’ (Berg 1991: 53). When women are inducted into the symbolic, into a phallocentric of representation and being in the world, women are led ‘to be their own enemies, to mobilise their immense strength against themselves’, creating what Cixous defines as anti-narcissism: ‘the infamous logic of anti-love’ (1976: 878). Even while men repress their femininity, they have access to speech which, in Cixous’s view, is conventionally a phallogocentric realm, but she questions how women are to come to speak for themselves in this order. For example, Cixous recounts her experience of teaching female students and paraphrases their debilitating stream-of-consciousness on being asked to speak: ‘Finally I dare to speak! I speak poorly, it’s awful, I say things I never should say, I don’t dare’ (2008: 64). Cixous emphasises the painful process for women learning how to speak for themselves. Speech is so often ‘governed by the phallus … reserved in and by the symbolic’, that too often women remain silent when they ‘should break out of the snare of silence’ (1976: 881). The halting, tentative speech through which women begin to depart from silence is reminiscent of hysterical discourse, and Cixous does indeed describe hysterics as ‘my sisters’ (1986: 99). For Cixous, the indirect speech of the hysteric through bodily tics, spasms and symptoms is a

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precursor of écriture féminine: ‘The hysteric is not just someone who has had her words cut off, someone for whom the body speaks’ but is someone ‘who makes demands of others’ (Cixous and Clément 1986: 154–5). More commonly in orthodox psychoanalysis, the hysteric’s bodily symptoms are thought to originate from the lack in femininity itself. As Stephen Heath explains, when psychoanalysis listens to the woman hysteric, there is always a curious lag ‘produced by the logic, the woman can only be “the woman”, different from’, but Heath readily points out that ‘for centuries, hysteria has named an incapacity to take that place, to be the difference, “the woman” ’ (1992: 52). The hysteric in Cixous’s terms breaks out of the phallocentric norms of artificial ‘femininity’, exposing symptoms of a disturbing and powerful féminité beneath. In relation to the hysteric and the breaking through of subversive speech, Freud’s case study of Dora is especially talismanic for Cixous. This case study of Dora is one which reveals the inadequacies of Freud’s own methods, when he seems to misdiagnose the eighteen-year-old Dora, who comes to Freud initially suffering from hysterical symptoms such as a mysterious cough, migraines and depression. In sessions with Dora, it emerges that her father has been having an affair with a married friend, Frau K, while Dora herself is suffering advances from the woman’s husband, Herr K. Though Dora expresses disgust at Herr K’s advances, Freud concludes that she in fact feels the opposite, at which she breaks off the sessions. In retrospect, Freud recognises that he made two errors in his analysis: he failed to recognise transference between the analyst and analysand, and he did not take into account the strength of Dora’s feelings not for Herr K, but for Frau K. Kathryn Robson explains that ‘it is not only [Dora’s] body, but also her desire – her desiring gaze at another female body – that poses an enigma to Freud’s thought’ (2004: 40). This challenge to Freud is particularly relevant to Cixous’s theorising, because ‘Dora, like the other hysterics whose cases are recounted in Freud’s texts, does not merely refuse the positioning of the female body in Freudian thought, but also challenges and destabilises Freud’s theory through her bodily speech’ (Robson 2004: 41). Cixous sees Dora as a woman seeking a new mode of speaking, but on failing to find écriture féminine, she has to communicate instead through her silences: ‘She manages to say what she doesn’t say, so intensely that the men drop like flies’ (Cixous and Clément 1986: 150). Though she cannot speak directly, Dora can communicate through her bodily symptoms. This oblique language makes her, in Cixous’s view, a ‘poetic body’ and ‘the true “mistress” of the Signifier’ (Cixous 1986: 95). Cixous identifies with Dora, stating ‘I am what Dora would have been if woman’s history had begun’ (1986: 99).

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Cixous’s vision of Dora as a revolutionary woman emerges fully in her play, A Portrait of Dora, which visualises the hysteric negotiating sexuality and textuality: I’ll write a letter. It will be hesitant. It will start with these words: ‘You have killed me’. And I’ll write: ‘You, dear, have killed me’. Then I’ll write another letter on paper as fine as onion skin, that will start with these words: ‘That’s what you wanted…’ I’ll leave it ambiguous, for him to complete ‘himself ’. Because I don’t know what he wanted. Yet ‘It’s me’ who is dead. My body is buried. In the forest. It’s dark there. I am voiceless. (Cixous 2004: 40 lines 250–4). Just as Cixous’s students began speaking haltingly and full of self-doubt, so Dora’s letter is hesitant and begins with her own obliteration. Her second attempt is just as fragile, written on delicate onion skin, and it is devoted, not to what Cixous calls her ‘stifled desire, its rage, its turbulent effects’ (1986: 99), but to the desire of men. Dora, however, does not know or care what it is that men want, but is well aware that she has no active role to play in determining or aiding male desire. In her ‘feminine’ part, Dora is as live as a corpse, and her poetic images conjure a buried life of blankness and silence. Even in representing this buried life, however, Dora is revolting against the order of things; as Cixous proclaims, Dora is ‘the one who cannot stand that the family and society are founded on the body of women, on bodies despised, rejected, bodies that are humiliating once they have been used’ (Cixous and Clément 1986: 154). Describing the situation of Dora and the other hysterics, however, Cixous confirms that ‘if woman has always functioned “within” man’s discourse, … now is the time for her to displace this “within”, explode it’ (1986: 95). This can be both a liberating and transgressive act, as Cixous represents through her punning use of the French verb voler: to fly or to steal. For woman and men, discovering écriture féminine is both a means of liberation from patriarchal norms of gender and language, and a way to steal back a sense of subversive power: to rediscover the repressed féminité beyond the routines of phallogocentric culture.

The Jouissance of Cleopatra So far it has been established that, in Cixous’s theory of écriture féminine, both male and female writers can have access to the repressed féminité, though the process of coming to subversive speech can be especially difficult for

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women. Having recognised these facts, however, Cixous also believes that there is something in particular about women’s sexuality and their material experience of the world which makes them particularly conducive to the hospitality or opening up required by écriture féminine. Cixous comments that it is ‘much harder for man to let the other come through him’, because conventional masculinity cultivates in some men a phallocentric logic (1986: 85). What écriture féminine requires is that writing becomes ‘the passageway, the exit, the dwelling place of the other in me’ (1986: 85–6). This opening up to otherness is more familiar to women, according to Cixous, because ‘There is a bond between women’s libidinal economy – her jouissance, the feminine Imaginary – and her way of self-constituting a subjectivity that splits apart without regret’ (1986: 90). This view of the power of woman’s jouissance, of her libidinal energy, has been criticised by some mainstream feminist critics for presenting a ‘monolithic vision of shared female sexuality’ which ‘rather than defeating phallocentrism as doctrine and practice, is more likely to blind us to our varied and immediate needs’ (Jones 1981: 257). Cixous affirms, however, that ‘there is at this time, no general woman, no one typical woman’ and she stresses that ‘you can’t talk about a female sexuality, uniform, homogenous, classifiable into codes any more than you can talk about one unconscious resembling another’ (1976: 876). What Cixous does try to offer is a more positive women’s imaginary which rejects the phallocentric norms of theoretical thought. Women’s writing is as taboo as showing one’s sex, according to Cixous, and the illicitness of a female imaginary can only be rendered through imagery that is in itself forbidden. Consequently, to envisage female creation, Cixous uses images of masturbation: ‘I too, overflow, my desires have invented new desires, my body knows unheard-of songs’ (1976: 876).4 Like Irigaray, Cixous believes that women’s bodies have been colonised and that it will take an imaginary of the female body for women to rediscover their own imaginative power. In ‘Sorties’, Cixous looks back to Shakespeare to discover such an imaginary, in particular to his play Antony and Cleopatra. Shakespeare is another of those writers sympathetic to the goals of écriture féminine, because he enables a kind of hospitality in his writing: an opening up to the other. To Cixous, Shakespeare is ‘that being-of-a-thousand-beings’ (1986: 98) and she declares that, as an authorial voice, he is ‘neither man nor woman but a thousand persons’ (1986: 122). In Antony and Cleopatra, Cixous sees an opening up to female sexuality through the omnipotent character of Cleopatra. In many ways, Cleopatra seems to conform to Freud’s characterisation of ‘femininity’ as a ‘dark continent’; she is ‘from the Orient’ and represents all the anti-rational forces of womankind (1986:

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125). What Cixous admires in Shakespeare’s representation of Cleopatra, however, is the fact that she is so difficult to define. As Stacy Schiff writes, ‘Shakespeare attested to Cleopatra’s infinite variety’ (2010: 6). Cixous recognises in Cleopatra too not a monolithic female sexuality, but a figure ‘who is incomprehensible, who exceeds the imagination, … who is more than all, no existence can contain her’ (1986: 126). How different is this imaginary of female sexuality and women’s bodies than the anti-narcissism, which, in Cixous’s view, prevents women from speaking. What an image of power, exuberance and rejuvenation Cixous finds in Cleopatra, when compared to those women trapped in phallocentric routines, who ‘haven’t had eyes for themselves’ and whose ‘sex still frightens them’ (1986: 68). To unravel this fear, or what Cixous calls anti-narcissism, there must be a ‘return to the body … which has been turned into an uncanny stranger on display’ (1976: 880). Sexuality, however, can only take one so far on that journey, however, since even Cixous admits that ‘a woman by her opening up, is open to being “possessed,” which is to say, dispossessed of herself ’ (1986: 86).

White Ink Although féminité can be the province of men or women writers, Cixous sees a special propensity to écriture féminine in her idea of female jouissance, but also in the material experiences of the female body. Cixous has commented that the quality of féminité has affinities with ‘the [female] body, from the anatomical, the biological difference, from a whole system of drives which are radically different for women than men’ (2008: 66). Sellers reiterates that Cixous ‘finds in women’s specific experiences of pregnancy and childbirth, for example, the potential for a radically different connection to the other, to subjectivity and love’ (1996: 4). It is in Cixous’s view this ‘sex-specific potential physically to nurture and give birth to an other’ which ‘makes it easier for women to accept the disruptions (to the self) that an encounter with the other can bring’ (Sellers 1996: 9). Women’s bodies are primed to accommodate the other that is the unborn child, though some may not choose to take up this possibility. Cixous does not call for all women to be mothers, or perpetuate what Jones describes as ‘the coercive glorification of motherhood that has plagued women for centuries’ (1981: 255). Rather she imagines the mother’s body as representing an alternative to the Freudian or Lacanian theories of separation and the inevitability of the symbolic order. Whatever women’s choices, however, Cixous imagines the mother’s body always as a potential host for an other – not sacrificing her self, but

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retaining the possibility of birth and life. Cixous writes, ‘There is always within her at least a little of that good mother’s milk. She writes in white ink’ (1976: 881). All three French feminists represent this idea in one form or another, with Irigaray exploring the mucous of the mother’s body as an angelic force for creating a ‘female’ divine,5 while Kristeva has theorised the chora, a space existing in the mother’s body related to the semiotic, the poetic and the pre-Oedipal.6 Like Irigaray, Cixous imagines the mother’s body as an uncanny space which defies the logic of phallocentrism, because of its powers of transformation and production, but her theorising of the maternal body and language has much in common with Kristeva’s semiotic, when she describes how the mother ‘nourishes, and … stands up against separation; a force that will not be cut off but will knock the wind out of the codes’ (Cixous 1976: 882). While Cixous comments briefly on motherhood in her theoretical texts, her creative writing also presents maternity as a subversive power, as she practices the textual hospitality of écriture féminine. The prose poems, Dreams I Tell You, offer the point of view of a mother whose priorities are infiltrated by her child-other. The speaker explains: ‘I am filled with anxiety, what if my baby were about to fall, but I can hear her crying through the window, she is still there, she is still alive’ (2006: 38). The mother’s life is inextricably linked to the well-being of her child and their connection dictates that the mother opens up to an other, creating a space of hospitality between the two beings. Such a portrait of motherhood may seem saccharine, but Cixous’s portraits of motherhood are often more disturbing than idealised. In the poetic novel, Hyperdream, for example, Cixous portrays a daughter’s feelings of uncanniness at her connectedness to her mother: life continues to weave its fabrics within the framework of the body of my mother and within the framework of my body, without me for my part having asked for anything, though on my mother’s behalf the half comes down to me … my mother’s skin, dated, would be the most faithful canvas, or mirror, or painting of my most basic, dated state of mind and soul. (Cixous 2009: 11) The bodies of the mother and child are still intimately connected, influencing each other even in separation. The mother’s body denies the logic of separation at the heart of phallocentrism; instead the mother and daughter reproduce each other as portraits or mirror. The mother’s fabric is the daughter’s fabric; the mother’s skin is the daughter’s skin. Such representations are necessarily disturbing because they undermine the conventional

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idea of the separate, bounded identity and open a space which is hospitable to otherness. In Cixous’s theories of maternity, ‘there is always hidden and ready in woman the source; the locus for the other’ (1976: 881). However écriture féminine is approached and whether its writers are male or female, the main condition is always opening up to otherness and the creation of space in which that otherness can dwell. For women questing towards the power of speech and language, such a process can be difficult, but Cixous affirms that the possibilities of jouissance and the material, maternal experiences of the female body can lead women to rediscover their féminité. Such commentary has sometimes been misunderstood as the desire to create a ‘monolithic vision of shared female sexuality’, so Jones criticises Cixous and the other French feminists for ignoring the fact that each woman ‘responds to a particular tribal, national, racial, or class situation vis a vis men’, and also for disregarding the need to ‘understand and respect the diversity in our concrete social situations’ (1981: 257). Recent developments, however, in theorising écriture féminine and féminité insist that these ideas can be adapted for the needs of specific women (or even men). In a recent essay on the Lebanese-Canadian writer, Trish Salah, the critic Susan Billingham reinvents écriture féminine as a form of writing that might represent the needs of transsexual and transgender women. Coining the term écriture au trans-féminine, Billingham explains that this form of writing ‘seeks to achieve similar recognition of the transwoman’s voice and body’ as that gained for féminité by écriture féminine (2010). Such reapplications of écriture féminine suggest possibilities for new uses of Cixous’s theories in relation to race, sexuality and culture, because at its heart, as Sellers confirms, a ‘feminine approach’ simply ‘entails locating and maintaining a relation in which both self and other can exist’ (1996: 4). Écriture féminine is a complex theory, proving ‘that language does not function by binary oppositions but that every signifier is related to many others, even some that are apparently contradictory’ (Segarra 2010: 12). Not the opposite of masculine and not directly the same as straightforward notions of femininity, féminité signals instead a force antithetical to the phallocentric symbolic realm, a force akin to poetry and capable of revealing ‘the immense possibilities of the signifier’ (2010: 12). In a state of constant invention and reinvention, écriture féminine cannot be defined in any ordinary manner and Cixous concludes enigmatically that ‘this is an impossibility which will remain, for this practice can never be theorised, enclosed, coded – which doesn’t mean that it doesn’t exist’ (1976: 883).

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Notes 1. It is often ignored that the French feminists are creative artists in their own right. Cixous has published over forty novels and a number of plays in French, Luce Irigaray has published volumes of poetry, and Julia Kristeva is the author of poetic detective novels. 2. What is clear, however, for all the French feminists is that psychoanalysis is a source of inspiration and power; Julia Kristeva goes so far in Strangers to Ourselves as to proclaim that psychoanalysis might break down binaries between one and an other, because it represents ‘a journey into the strangeness of the other and of oneself, towards an ethics of respect for the irreconcilable’ (1991: 182). 3. As I have noted in my essay ‘The wound and the mask’, the Medusa trope has been developed by other critics; for example Kristeva uses it to describe the disturbing quality of the stranger to the native, and Bhabha describes the unsettling Medusa-like gaze of the colonised subject on his or her coloniser (Brigley Thompson 2010: 202–3). See also Chapter 22 by Caroline Rooney in this volume. 4. In developing her theory of jouissance, Cixous has a great deal in common with Luce Irigaray, though Irigaray responds to the phallocentrism of Lacan more than Freud. Discussing Irigaray’s version of écriture féminine in This Sex which is not One, Berg confirms that Irigaray is ‘a poststructuralist and a Lacanian insofar as she believes that the subject is a discursive construct, making identity unstable; but in order to rescue women from what she sees as the repressive effects of phallocentrism, she apparently proposes an alternative feminine discourse modeled on the female genitals’ (1991: 50). Irigaray’s two lips – the mouth, the labia – propose a specifically female imaginary, ‘offered playfully or ironically in order to avoid the phallocentric gesture of displacing the phallus with an alternative hierarchy’ (Berg 1991: 56). They also represent an alternate mode of speaking ‘referring simultaneously to the production or construction of textuality (the lips that speak) and sexuality (the genitals); the point is that the two cannot and should not be separated, because one always implies the other’ (56). 5. In An Ethics of Sexual Difference, Irigaray does not demand that all woman be mothers, but emphasises that all too often the child replaces intimacy between man and woman. The mother-child metaphor, however, might be a way of knowing and understanding the female self, a way of creating a female divine, which is invoked for Irigaray through the figure of the angel: ‘that which unceasingly passes through the envelope(s) or container(s), goes from one side to the other’ (1993: 15). Gail M. Schwab’s reading of Irigaray’s angel contends that, ‘the angel is the mother’s body, where mediation always already took place between the fetus [sic], the mother and the placenta’ (1994: 367). Quoting Irigaray, who writes in An Ethics of Sexual Difference that ‘mucous should be … related to the angel’ (1993: 17), Schwab suggests that the most important role of the angel is

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to be ‘a medium of exchange’ performed via mucus, the placenta, the mother’s body (1994: 367). 6. Cixous has much in common with Kristeva’s ideas on the maternal too, however, and her association of the pre-Oedipal or semiotic with the maternal through the symbolic chora. Kristeva defines the pre-Oedipal stage as defined ‘by a lack of differentiation among need, demand, and desire, and by a piecemeal body that is not yet identified as one’s own body because the identity of the ego and the superego already depend on language and the father’ (1996: 110). In other words, as Jones puts it, ‘Kristeva sees semiotic discourse as an incestuous challenge to the symbolic order, asserting as it does the writer’s return to the pleasures of his preverbal identification with his mother and his refusal to identify with his father and the logic of paternal discourse’ (1981: 249). Out of such a refusal emerges a kind of écriture féminine, presented by Kristeva as the ‘semiotic style’ which ‘is likely to involve repetitive, spasmodic separations from the dominating discourse’ (Jones 1981: 249).

References Berg, Maggie (1991), ‘Luce Irigaray’s “Contradictions”: poststructuralism and feminism’, Signs, 17: 1, 50–70. Billingham, Susan (2010), ‘Écriture au trans-feminine’, Canadian Literature 205: 33–51. Scholarly Journals, Proquest 756912049, accessed 22 February 2011. Brigley Thompson, Zoë (2010), ‘The wound and the mask: rape, recovery and poetry in Pascale Petit’s The Wounded Deer: Fourteen Poems after Frida Kahlo’, in Feminism Literature and Rape Narratives: Violence and Violation, ed. Sorcha Gunne and Zoe Brigley Thompson, London: Routledge, pp. 200–16. Cixous, Hélène (1972), The Exile of James Joyce, trans. Sally A. J. Purcell, New York, NY: David Lewis. Cixous, Hélène (1976), ‘The laugh of the Medusa’, trans. Keith Cohen and Pamela Cohen, Signs, 14: 875–93. Cixous, Hélène (1986), ‘Sorties’, in Hélène Cixous and Catherine Clément, The Newly Born Woman, trans. Betsy Wing, Theory and History of Literature vol. 24, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota, pp. 63–129. Cixous, Hélène (1990), Reading with Clarice Lispector, ed. and trans. Verena Andermatt Conley, Theory and History of Literature vol. 73, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Cixous, Hélène (2004), ‘Portrait of Dora’, in Selected Plays of Hélène Cixous, trans. Ann Liddle, London: Routledge, pp. 35–60. Cixous, Hélène (2006), Dreams I Tell You, trans. Beverley Bie Brahic, New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Cixous, Hélène (2008), White Ink: Interviews on Sex, Text and Politics, ed. Susan Sellers, New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Cixous, Hélène (2009), Hyperdream, trans. Beverley Bie Brahic, Cambridge: Polity.

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Cixous, Hélène and Mireille Calle-Gruber (1997), Hélène Cixous, Rootprints: Memory and life writing, trans. Eric Prenowitz, London: Routledge. Cixous, Hélène and Catherine Clément (1986), ‘The untenable’, in Hélène Cixous and Catherine Clément, The Newly Born Woman, trans. Betsy Wing, Theory and History of Literature vol. 24, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota, pp. 147–60. Cixous, Hélène and Jacques Derrida (2001), Veils, trans. Geoffrey Bennington, drawings by Ernest Pigeon-Ernest, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Cixous, Hélène and Jacques Derrida (2008), ‘From the word of life, with Jacques Derrida’, in Hélène Cixous, White Ink: Interviews on Sex, Text and Politics, ed. Susan Sellers, New York, NY: Columbia University Press, pp. 166–79. Critchley, Emily (2010), ‘When I say I believe women’, in Infinite Difference, ed. Carrie Etter, Exeter: Shearsman, pp. 177–84. Culler, Jonathan (1982), On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism after Structuralism, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Derrida, Jacques (1982), Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Freud, Sigmund (1963), Dora: an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria, ed. Philip Rieff, New York, NY: Touchstone. Freud, Sigmund (1965), ‘Femininity’, in New Introductory Lectures in Psychoanalysis, trans. and ed. James Strachey, New York, NY: Norton, pp. 139–67. Freud, Sigmund ([1940] 1992), ‘The Medusa’s head’, in Freud on Women: A Reader, ed. Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, New York, NY: Norton, pp. 272–3. Gilbert, Sandra M. (1986), ‘Introduction: a tarantella of theory’, in Hélène Cixous and Catherine Clément, The Newly Born Woman, trans. Betsy Wing, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota, pp. ix–xviii. Heath, Stephen (1992), ‘Difference’, in The Sexual Subject: A Screen Reader in Sexuality, London: Routledge, pp. 47–106. Irigaray, Luce (1985), This Sex which is not One, trans. Catherine Porter, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Irigaray, Luce (1993), An Ethics of Sexual Difference, trans. Carolyn Burke and Gillian C. Gill, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Irigaray, Luce (2002), The Way of Love, trans. Heidi Bostic and Stephen Pluháček, London: Continuum. Jones, Ann Rosalind (1981), ‘Writing the body: toward an understanding of “Écriture Féminine” ’, Feminist Studies, 7: 2, 247–63. Joyce, James (1966), Letters, vol. II & III, ed. R. Ellman, New York, NY: Viking. Kristeva, Julia (1982), Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art, ed. Leon S. Roudiez, trans. Thomas Gora, Alice Jardine and Leon S. Roudiez, Oxford: Blackwell. Kristeva, Julia (1991), Strangers to Ourselves, trans. Leon S. Roudiez, New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Kristeva, Julia (1996), Interviews, ed. Ross Mitchell Guberman, New York, NY: Columbia University Press.

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Lernout, Geert (1990), The French Joyce, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. Penrod, Lynn Kettler (1996), Hélène Cixous, New York, NY: Simon and Schuster/ Macmillan. Robson, Kathryn (2004), Writing Wounds: The Inscription of Trauma in Post-1968 French Women’s Life-Writing, Amsterdam: Rodopi. Schiff, Stacey (2010), Cleopatra: a Life, New York, NY: Little, Brown and Co. Schwab, Gail M. (1994), ‘Mother’s body, father’s tongue: mediation and the symbolic order’, in Engaging with Irigaray: Feminist Philosophy and Modern European Thought, ed. Carloyn Burke, Naomi Schor and Margaret Whitford, New York, NY: Columbia University Press, pp. 351–78. Segarra, Marta (2010), ‘Hélène Cixous: blood and language’, in The Portable Cixous, ed. Marta Segarra, New York, NY: Columbia University Press, pp. 1–16. Sellers, Susan (1996), Hélène Cixous: authorship, autobiography, and love, Cambridge: Polity Press. Weedon, Chris (1997), Feminist Practice and Poststructuralist Theory, 2nd edn, Oxford: Blackwell. Whitford, Margaret (1991), Luce Irigaray: Philosophy in the Feminine, London: Routledge.

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Chapter 7 S ch i z o a n a ly s i s : A n I n c o m p l e t e P ro j e c t Ian Buchanan

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There is no straightforward way to say what schizoanalysis is. The problem is not so much that the question is not answered by Deleuze and Guattari or that it is somehow unanswerable; rather the problem is that it has several answers. Unwilling to provide any kind of ‘formula’ or ‘model’ that would enable us to simply ‘do’ schizoanalysis as a tick-box exercise in which everything relates inexorably to one single factor (e.g. the family), which is what they thought psychoanalysis had become, Deleuze and Guattari observe a quite deliberate strategy of providing multiple answers to the questions their work raises. Guattari’s insistence that schizoanalysis is a form of meta-modelling makes it clear that this supple approach is quite deliberate. Meta-modelling is something like the ‘scenario planning’ utilised by ‘risk managers’ in complex organisations who try to foresee and ‘manage’ the variety of possible transformations an institution such as a university might undergo if circumstances changed (e.g. how would it cope with an earthquake?). Meta-modelling tries to grapple with the realm of ‘what might happen’ that constantly dogs the realm of ‘what is happening’. Deleuze and Guattari’s elaborate system of new terms and concepts (many of them contrived from obscure literary sources) is of a piece with this strategy of providing multiple answers to basic questions and should be seen as deliberately guarding against the reductive tendencies of the ‘practically-minded’. As I will explain in more detail in what follows, one has to read Deleuze and Guattari’s work with an eye toward the resonances (which is not to say equivalences) between their many ideas and from that develop a ‘machine’ that can be put to new purposes. This is not to say schizoanalysis is either incoherent or impractical, as many of its detractors are quick to claim, but to insist that its practice cannot be divorced from its theory and that to engage with one it is necessary to engage with the other. Schizoanalysis can usefully be considered an ‘incomplete project’ because

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it exists in a state of ‘permanent revolution’. Throughout Deleuze and Guattari’s lifetime it was subjected to ongoing construction and modification in light of both the new theoretical problems its own development threw up and the constantly shifting and changing social and political circumstances it encountered. One can see this very clearly in the transition from Anti-Oedipus to A Thousand Plateaus in which the crucial concept of the desiring-machine is abandoned in favour of the assemblage. Deleuze and Guattari even admit that they are not sure that each of them used terms like the body without organs in the same way as each other. This is why Deleuze and Guattari often say ‘everything begins in the middle’ – there is no step-by-step way of applying schizoanalysis because life itself is not like that. My point is that it is no denigration of schizoanalysis to describe it as an incomplete project. Indeed, it joins some very illustrious company in this regard – Walter Benjamin’s arcades project is incomplete, as is Karl Marx’s capital project and so too Hegel’s philosophical project, at least according to Fredric Jameson, who is something of a connoisseur of the incomplete project. The incompleteness of these projects owes nothing to the premature deaths of the respective authors – the projects are incomplete because they are intrinsically ‘unfinishable’. How, for instance, could one ever be done analysing the inner workings of capital when capital itself is so volatile? Having said that, each of these unfinished projects is, in some paradoxical way, the richer for being unfinished and unfinishable, because they have inspired countless attempts to finish them and in the process have given rise to productive reworkings that keep the projects alive for new generations of readers. In this light I am even tempted to say that schizoanalysis is almost the poorer for the fact that it is not widely regarded as an incomplete project. To say schizoanalysis is an incomplete project is to acknowledge, first of all, the glaring fact that nowhere in Deleuze and Guattari’s writings do they explain exactly how one should do schizoanalysis. While it is clear that Deleuze and Guattari intend their work to be a resource to action – in interviews they describe it as an exercise in pop philosophy, by which they mean it should be treated as a kind of self-help apparatus – it is not clear just what kind of a resource it is. The conclusion of Anti-Oedipus defends its lack of a model or programme to follow on the grounds that it is not speaking for anyone or anything – if schizoanalysis is a revolution, and Deleuze and Guattari patently want us to see it as such, it is nevertheless a revolution without either a name or identity or even a specific goal, save that we should ‘liberate’ ourselves (Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 380).1 But that does not mean we should give up trying to develop a schizoanalytic methodology because paradoxically – and this is the other sense in which it is important to

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say schizoanalysis is an incomplete project – no matter how difficult it is to extrapolate a method for doing schizoanalysis from Deleuze and Guattari’s work, without the constant attempt to do so their thought is literally inert. By failing to try and complete schizoanalysis, Deleuze and Guattari scholars are missing an opportunity to realise schizoanalysis and are thereby condemning it to live on in a ghostly and increasingly insubstantial way, to adapt Theodor Adorno’s famous pronouncement on the fate of philosophy itself (Adorno 1973: 3). Schizoanalysis’ potential is unrealised, in other words, precisely because it is assumed that its theoretical development is complete; conversely, the more we consider schizoanalysis to be incomplete in its development the better the position we are in to actually realise its potential. In his review of François Dosse’s biography of Deleuze and Guattari, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari: Intersecting Lives, Peter Osborne makes a different, but not unrelated claim concerning schizoanalysis’ status today. He observes that Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus remain to be adequately received, despite the millions of words of introductory summaries and secondary exposition to which they have been subjected by the middle tier of an academic publishing industry that is tending increasingly towards its ‘real subsumption’ to capital via authorial branding. That is, they have yet to become the enabling conditions of theoretically significant new productions. There is, in the way there are thriving fields of post-Foucauldian study, for example. There is, largely, simply fetishistic terminological repetition. (Osborne 2011: 151) Unlike the self-serving critiques of Alain Badiou and Slavoj Žižek, which read more like the declamations of jealous rivals than genuine philosophical engagements, Osborne’s comments cut to the quick. Leaving aside his tart snipe at ‘middle tier’ academic publishers, which reeks of ressentiment and is in any case simply irrelevant, Osborne’s claim that there is no post-Deleuzeand-Guattarianism is a serious one. Although he does not offer any evidence in support of this claim, its ‘truth’, if you will, is not hard to discern in the secondary literature, which is, as Osborne implies, overwhelmingly focused on the basic task of explaining Deleuze and Guattari’s concepts. Osborne blames the obscurity of Deleuze and Guattari’s writing for this weakness in the secondary literature, but this is at best only a partial answer. Certainly the obscurity of Derrida’s writing, for example (but one could just as well say the same of Nancy’s, Rancière’s or Irigaray’s writing), does not seem to have had any significant limiting effect on either the creativity or productivity of commentators. The question we are left with is how does one realise the

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schizoanalytic project? My answer, in brief, is that our approach must be to try to complete it, to finish the unfinishable as it were. Perhaps the best way to do this is to briefly turn back the clock and retrace the steps of schizoanalysis’ development. Schizoanalysis is the result of one of the most productive collaborations between two critical theorists of the twentieth century. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari began corresponding with one another in April of 1969, but did not actually meet until June that same year when they were introduced by Deleuze’s former student from the University of Lyon, Jean-Pierre Muyard, who happened to be working as a psychiatrist at the private psychiatric clinic La Borde, where Guattari worked as an administrator. Deleuze was in touch with Muyard because he was interested in following up on the theoretical speculations he had made about how schizophrenics use language in The Logic of Sense and, as fate would have it, Guattari had recently given a lecture on that topic for Jacques Lacan’s seminar, later published as ‘Machine and structure’ (in Guattari 1984), drawing on Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition and The Logic of Sense. According to Deleuze and Guattari’s biographer François Dosse, ‘Guattari and Deleuze immediately connected. Guattari’s conversation was full of topics that interested Deleuze, such as mental illness, La Borde, and Lacan …’ (Dosse 2010: 3). Both men were at turning points in their lives – Guattari was restless and dissatisfied with Lacanian psychoanalysis, while Deleuze was casting about for his next project. In their different ways, both felt that psychoanalysis had made a fundamental wrong turn when Freud ‘discovered’ Oedipus. And it was on this basis that they agreed to work together despite their very different professions and very different backgrounds. Because Deleuze was already a well-established full professor of philosophy, he is generally credited with the ‘senior’ role in their collaboration, with Guattari consigned to some junior helpmeet role when not ignored altogether. That the truth was very different to this is not that hard to see if one simply reads their work attentively. There are two clichés about the collaboration. The first, spouted by the likes of Alain Badiou, Manuel DeLanda and Slavoj Žižek is that Guattari’s wild thought contaminated the purity of Deleuze’s philosophy. Against this obvious injustice, Deleuze offers two quite beautiful images that put their working relationship into its proper perspective: first, he describes Guattari as a diamond miner and himself as a diamond polisher; second, he compares Guattari to the ocean, characterised by endless movement, and himself to a hill that appears like an island amidst the sea (Dosse 2010: 7, 10). No one can fail to notice that the works Guattari wrote with Deleuze are superior in style to those that he wrote alone (the diamond polisher at work). Yet it

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must also be said that the pieces Guattari wrote on his own are in many ways more inventive and more experimental than anything co-signed by Deleuze (the restless ocean at work). The second widely held cliché is that Guattari politicised Deleuze, the implication being that before he met Guattari he was somehow apolitical. That this is patently untrue can be gleaned from his writings about Palestine, among other topics, which show a long awareness of and keen concern about day-to-day political issues. Along the same lines, it is often said that Guattari was the activist while Deleuze was the mandarin, aloof where the other was engaged. But this misunderstands activism, making it seem that the only form of political engagement is that which takes place in the streets, which is not only false but also fundamentally antiintellectual. It implies that thinking, making new concepts, creating new ideas and modes of being are not in themselves revolutionary acts, which is precisely the opposite of what Deleuze and Guattari’s entire oeuvre argues! Of the two, Guattari seems to have been the most prolific in terms of the invention of new concepts. As Deleuze explained to his Japanese translator Kuniichi Uno: I have never met anyone who is so creative, or who produces more ideas. And he never stops tinkering with his ideas, fine-tuning them, changing their terms. Sometimes he gets bored with them, he even forgets about them, only to rework and reshuffle them later. (Deleuze 2006: 238) For example, the concept of the desiring-machine, which was abandoned in the writing up of A Thousand Plateaus, returns without explanation or clarification in Chaosmosis (Guattari 1995: 52). As one might expect of someone described as being like the sea, ‘always in motion’, Guattari’s work is studded with new concepts, not all of them as successful or coherent as those he produced in collaboration with Deleuze (Deleuze 2006: 237). Some of these less successful concepts appear to be experimental sketches for concepts that would be worked out more satisfactorily in the collaborative work. Others, and these are the most problematic, appear to be attempts to take existing concepts in new directions – here I am thinking of the way Guattari uses the concept of the body without organs in his diaries (Guattari 2006: 330). But as Deleuze himself notes, even those moments where they seem to be at cross-purposes are instructive in their own way. As Deleuze puts it: ‘From time to time we have written about the same idea, and have noticed later that we have not grasped it at all in the same way: witness “bodies without organs” ’ (Deleuze and Parnet 2006: 17). Other concepts, meanwhile, particularly those created in Chaosmosis, offer fresh perspectives

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on old concepts as well as entirely new trajectories. The reality is, then, that some of Guattari’s experiments evolve into workable concepts and others do not and it seems to me we have to be prepared to set aside those concepts which either confound the conceptual matrix at the core of schizoanalysis or, what amounts to the same thing, fail to add to it in any meaningful way. Guattari’s political activism was informed by his clinical practice. He was of the view that psychiatry cannot be regarded as a stand-alone discipline, or practice, and that it must incorporate everything that makes life the complex reality that it is. And he did mean literally everything – one of the things that makes reading Deleuze and Guattari so difficult is the astonishing scope of the materials they pull together, which ranges from philosophy and literature to biology, physics and higher mathematics. This is especially true of A Thousand Plateaus (Deleuze and Guattari 1987) which bears the traces of the active involvement of the dozens of participants in the seminars Deleuze and Guattari taught together in the mid 1970s. Guattari seems to have been a kind of intellectual vortex, constantly drawing in new ideas, new materials, new concepts and so on, with an almost relentless appetite and capacity for ‘the new’. The concepts Guattari would go onto invent, such as the assemblage and the rhizome, reflect precisely this approach to the world of inquiry and they aim to give us the analytic means of describing the way the subject is a product of multiple forces both internal and external, the conscious and the unconscious. However, while it is clear that Guattari’s work is keenly informed by his own practical experience – and Dosse tells us that it was precisely his practical experience with schizophrenics that intrigued Deleuze, although he was apparently horrified at the idea of meeting an actual schizophrenic himself – we know very little about Guattari’s day-to-day practice as a clinician. Unfortunately, even with the aid of François Dosse’s generally quite detailed biography we are still very much in the dark with regards the actual practice of schizoanalysis. He provides only the scantiest details of Guattari’s clinical career, which is a real pity because it would be extremely interesting to know how Guattari treated his patients. What Dosse does tell us raises some quite important questions that one hopes future research in the area will be able to settle. There are, I think, two questions in urgent need of clarification. Firstly, Dosse informs us that Guattari worked as an administrator at the private psychiatric clinic La Borde founded by Jean Oury, which specialised in the treatment of schizophrenia. Opened in 1953, La Borde aimed to provide a radically new form of care which in the jargon of the times attempted to ‘de-institutionalize the institution’. Sometimes associated with the so-called ‘anti-psychiatry’ movement led by the UK-based psychiatrists R. D. Laing and David Cooper, La Borde

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was much more cautious in its approach and tended to view many of the reforms advocated by ‘anti-psychiatry’ as both dangerous and irresponsible. Guattari’s review of Mary Barnes’s autobiographical account of her treatment in Kingsley Hall, which like La Borde was an experimental de-institutionalised institution for schizophrenics, makes apparent the theoretical and practical differences between his own thinking and that of Laing and Cooper. In Guattari’s view, the situation at Kingsley Hall remained all too Oedipal, all too locked within psychoanalysis’ familialist framework, which constantly seeks to explain the significance of present actions by reference to a particular account of childhood and which focuses exclusively on the libidinal interactions between a child and his or her parents. Guattari also observes that Kingsley Hall does not take into account the matter of money and for him this is decisive: one cannot get away from Oedipus, he argues, if one does not interrogate the nexus between psychoanalysis and capitalism (Guattari 1995: 177–85). These kinds of comments seem to indicate a profound practical knowledge on Guattari’s part concerning the treatment of schizophrenics, yet Dosse says nothing at all about this aspect of Guattari’s professional life. We learn nothing at all about Guattari’s interaction with patients from Dosse. Indeed, he almost makes it seem he did not have any clinical interaction with patients, which goes against the established view of Guattari’s career (which may now turn out to have been nothing more than conjecture in any case). The second area calling for clarification is Dosse’s claim that Guattari maintained a separate private practice as a psychoanalyst. What he does not clarify is whether Guattari followed his Lacanian training or utilised his own schizoanalytic ideas. If the latter is the case, then it would be invaluable to know exactly what those ideas were and more particularly how they were applied in a clinical setting. What did Guattari actually say to his patients? This, it seems to me, is an incredibly important question and it is quite surprising that Dosse does not pursue it. What we know is this: Guattari received formal training in psychoanalysis from Jacques Lacan, France’s most important interpreter of Freud, achieving the status of analyste membre (member analyst) licensing him as a pyschotherapist. Although he remained a member of Lacan’s school, the Ecole freudienne de Paris, from its inception until its dissolution in 1980 shortly before the master’s death, Guattari’s relationship to Lacan and Lacanian psychoanalysis was at best ambivalent. The publication of Guattari’s notebooks, Écrits pour L’anti-Œdipe (2004; The Anti-Oedipus Papers, 2006), has made it clear just how strained relations were between them, especially after the publication of Anti-Oedipus (even though that work was, in the words of its authors, designed to save

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Lacan from the Lacanians). Guattari wanted to work with Deleuze precisely because he thought Deleuze could help him resolve a number of theoretical impasses he found in Lacan’s work (Deleuze 1995: 13–15). In particular, Guattari rejected the idea that the unconscious is structured like a language, which is the cornerstone of Lacan’s structuralist re-interpretation of Freud. This is why Deleuze’s book The Logic of Sense interested him so much, it offered a much richer account of the relationship between language and the unconscious than Lacan’s work did. When he met Guattari, Deleuze had recently completed his Doctorat d’État (required by the French academic system for progression to full professor) at the University of Lyon, consisting of two book-length works, both published in 1968 – Différence et repetition (Difference and Repetition) and Spinoza et le problème de l’expression (Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza). Some measure of the impact of these works can be gleaned from the fact that it was in his 1970 review of Difference and Repetition and the book Deleuze published a year later, Logique du Sens (1969, Logic of Sense), that Foucault made the infamous pronouncement that perhaps one day the twentieth century would be known as Deleuzian. Deleuze himself did not take Foucault’s prophecy too seriously; he saw it as a joke, an attempt to provoke enemies. But even before this, Deleuze had already gained widespread attention with a sequence of short but incisive monographs on David Hume, Immanuel Kant, Friedrich Nietzsche, Marcel Proust, Leopold von Sacher-Masoch and Baruch Spinoza that established him as a thinker to be reckoned with. He is often credited with bringing about a wholesale revival of Nietzsche, an author very much out of favour in France because of the way his work was appropriated by Nazi ideology. Deleuze would later add to this already-impressive oeuvre two books on cinema as well as monographs on Gottfried Leibniz, the artist Francis Bacon, and his close friend Michel Foucault. Deleuze himself specified that the presiding aim of his work was to overturn Platonism, a project he adopted from Nietzsche. He meant by this that philosophy should seek the conditions of real experience in simulacra (or what he would later call affects and becomings) not simulations (or what he would also call representations; Deleuze 2004: 298). After their first meeting, Deleuze and Guattari agreed to work together and over the next few months they met and shared ideas and developed a work that was simultaneously a critique and a rethinking of both Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud (particularly the Lacanian interpretation of the latter) and a synthesis of a new methodology they proposed to call ‘schizoanalysis’. Guattari’s notebooks provide a partial but nonetheless illuminating picture of the actual logistics of their collaboration. They would meet and talk, usually

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for hours at a time, then after several weeks of this Deleuze cut himself off from the world – including Guattari – and wrote. He showed Guattari work-in-progress drafts of the manuscript, which the latter commented on, but without the expectation that Deleuze would necessarily incorporate his comments. The trust implicit in this process is quite amazing and speaks to the depth of not only their friendship, but their real intellectual connection. Essentially, then, Deleuze wrote their books on his own, having soaked up as much of their preparatory dialogue as he could. This perhaps accounts for their amazing consistency of tone, and seamlessness of style and argument; but what really amazes (and in many cases infuriates) Deleuze’s readers is just how radically different that tone and style is when compared to his previous works. That the argument remains essentially the same is lost on most readers. The philosophical purists tend to object to both its extensive use of literature and its foray into contemporary politics, as though to say Deleuze’s philosophical thinking had somehow been corrupted as a consequence. On its publication in 1972, L’Anti-Oedipe (Anti-Oedipus) was an immediate sensation, but it divided opinion quite sharply between those like Fredric Jameson who heralded it as a radical intervention and those like Perry Anderson who dismissed it as irrationalist nonsense. What we know today as schizoanalysis was conceived by Deleuze and Guattari over the course of the next decade, beginning with the alreadymentioned bestseller Anti-Oedipus and ending with A Thousand Plateaus (1980). In between they wrote a book on Franz Kafka, which despite its many merits as an intervention into Kafka studies, is ultimately a transitional work that departs from Anti-Oedipus in significant ways, but does not arrive fully at where A Thousand Plateaus begins. Like the book Dialogues (1977), which Deleuze wrote with his friend Claire Parnet as a kind of anti-interview interview and published a few years before A Thousand Plateaus appeared, Kafka: Towards a Minor Literature (1975) is best read as a kind of route map that guides the reader in how to approach the conceptual labyrinth of A Thousand Plateaus. In addition to these three books, Deleuze and Guattari also gave several interviews on their work, some of which are collected in Negotiations (1995), as well as dozens of lectures and seminars, many of which can now be found on the Internet. A decade after A Thousand Plateaus Deleuze and Guattari wrote another book called What is Philosophy? (1991), but it does not mention schizoanalysis and instead speaks of something they call geophilosophy and though it is not a negation of schizoanalysis – as Isabelle Stengers (2011) implies – it is nevertheless a very different kind of project from their previous collaborations. It may well be (as Dosse’s biography claims) that Guattari had very little hand in it, in which case it

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should perhaps be read as Deleuze’s own attempt to settle accounts with the discipline of philosophy (Dosse 2010: 456). I would add that if it must be insisted that Deleuze wrote a philosophical last will and testament, as Giorgio Agamben seems to think, then it is this work, and not the somewhat incoherent fragment ‘Immanence: a life’ (1995) that was allegedly the last thing Deleuze wrote before taking his own life, that should be assigned that role (Agamben 1999). Guattari was not purely practical in his contribution to the development of schizoanalysis any more than Deleuze was purely philosophical in his. It could perhaps be said he was a theorist who worked with practical problems, but even that has to be taken on faith, in a certain sense, because nowhere in Deleuze and Guattari’s work does one find actual clinical case histories or case studies. In Dialogues Deleuze cites a couple of examples of clinical cases he knew of through Guattari and it seems clear that these actual cases did factor in their thinking. Beyond this, though, there is no direct evidence of the influence of Guattari’s clinical work anywhere in their collaborative writing; nor are there any detailed case analyses in Guattari’s own writings which one might draw on to supplement their collaborative work and fill in the missing pieces. The resulting impression that schizoanalysis is somehow detached from the actual world of ‘madness’ is compounded by Deleuze and Guattari’s repeated exclamations that they have never met a schizo. It may be that they were being ironic in saying this, but the fact is it fits the evidence. The bulk of the case material Deleuze and Guattari refer to is drawn from written sources, predominantly diaries, letters, memoirs and fiction (poetry, prose and drama). There are also multiple references to Freud’s case histories, particularly Little Hans, the Wolfman and Schreber, as well as references to both Melanie Klein’s cases and Lacan’s. Either way, it is still written and not ‘live’ examples they mostly work from, which raises questions about their referential or empirical value. It would be difficult, for example, to determine whether Artaud’s poetry can be said to prove the existence of the clinical entity referred to as a body without organs in the schizoanalytic literature. What we know today about schizoanalysis is in fact very limited in scope. Deleuze and Guattari have not been all that well-served by their commentators, who for the most part seem incapable of seeing the forest for the trees (I do not exclude myself from the charge). Most attempts to simplify Deleuze and Guattari’s work, and there have been many, tend to focus on the tantalising new concepts, some of which have become veritable slogans of our time – becoming, lines of flight, deterritorialisation, body without organs, to mention only a few – and ignore or fail to see what is truly original

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in their thought. In large part this is because most readers take at face value Deleuze and Guattari’s often vituperative rejection of Freud’s writing and seemingly of psychoanalysis as a whole, as though that were somehow even possible in a critical age that was in many ways invented by Freud. The fact is, though, Deleuze and Guattari do not reject either the whole of Freud or the whole of psychoanalysis, nor indeed do they reject parts of Freud or parts of psychoanalysis. They propose rather to re-engineer psychoanalysis and until it is grasped what exactly that entails their work will never be fully understood and schizoanalysis, their joint invention, will continue to ring hollow (Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 82). What exactly did Deleuze and Guattari want to reengineer in Freud’s work? There is a simple answer to this question, which holds the key to schizoanalysis and explains why they lambasted Freud. It has to do with association, which is to say the connections or links we make in our minds between ideas, thoughts, images, memories, feelings, sensations and all other forms of stimuli both internal and external. Understanding how Deleuze and Guattari’s model of association differs from Freud’s is the key to understanding their entire project. All of their most important concepts pertain to association. Freud tended to use the term binding (Bingung) rather than association, but the issue is the same: why does one thought, feeling, memory or sensation seem to go with or somehow belong to another? For example, the whole of Proust’s À la Recherche du temps perdu unspools as it does because of the seemingly endless loops of associations that Marcel finds himself entangled in when he dunks his madeleine into his lime-blossom tea. Why does the narrator draw together the images, the ideas, the reflections, the memories that he does? Is there an underpinning logic to their selection? Deleuze’s hypothesis is that Proust should be read as a kind of Egyptologist, someone who sets themselves the task of learning a discourse consisting of signs whose meanings are known only to those capable of using them, to those select few who have been initiated into their particular mysteries (Deleuze 2000: 91). The figure of Marcel is that of the analyst, but of a type superior to Freud because he does not assume there is an external key to the coded ways of Paris’ upper classes. He is not, in this sense, a hermeneuticist in the way Freud was. Deleuze’s unspoken implication is perhaps that Freud was not the Egyptologist he thought he was. By the same token, Marcel is not even a semiotician, strictly speaking, though many of Deleuze’s readers seem to want to read his book that way, as though it were an account of a theory of semiotics. It is not that because as Deleuze makes clear from the first pages, Marcel’s interpretation of the worlds in which he moves is pathological – his logic of reading is the symptom of that pathology and it

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is the pathology that Deleuze is interested in. It is a kind of semiotics, to be sure, but it is a semiotics that is premised by the idea that the psyche would have to be organised in a very particular kind of way for it to make the types of associations it does. In subsequent work, Deleuze and Guattari would use the concept of the ‘regime of signs’ to theorise the relation between the organisation of the psyche and the kinds of interpretation of signs it is capable of making, providing us with a catalogue of five basic types of what we might call association-machines (Deleuze and Guattari called them abstract machines; Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 111–48). To see how schizoanalysis differs from psychoanalysis one must first of all grasp what psychoanalysis understood by association. The clichéd scene of the patient on the therapist’s couch ‘free associating’, that is, allowing their mind to drift from one thought to the next regardless of logic or sense and sharing that with their analyst without inhibition, provides a ready-made image of what association means, but does not tell the whole story. At a minimum it means that no thought exists in isolation, it is always intimately tied to another thought that came before it and is always capable of laying siege to thoughts that come after it. Hence Deleuze’s claim that Proust’s work is not about memory at all, but rather the way thoughts as signs are bound to one another across time (Deleuze 2000: 3). Freud’s foundational hypothesis is that ‘free association’ works as a therapeutic tool because there is no such thing as a purely random thought or statement; everything is connected according to its own peculiar logic. This logic is both singular and universal in that it will have a unique permutation for every individual but will nevertheless follow pathways that are common to all humans. That this logic is not always known or indeed knowable to us is proof, Freud reasoned, of the existence of an unconscious, a part of the psyche that produces thoughts affecting our self without us being aware of its processes.2 This is why it is possible for us to be angry, sad, upset, depressed or even happy, without apparent cause or reason. Freud’s hypothesis was that the unconscious can explain why we feel as we do, even if the conscious cannot. The entire theoretical edifice of psychoanalysis is erected on this platform and what it essentially offers is an explanation of our muddled and confusing thoughts and in doing so reduces their psychic ‘charge’. Aptly enough one of Freud’s first patients thus described psychoanalysis as a ‘talking cure’ because its central therapeutic idea is that if we can come to a conscious understanding of the logic of the associations we make unconsciously then even if we are unable to stop making those associations we will not be so troubled by them. The essential problem Freud had to solve was this: why are some thoughts more significant than others? His basic answer was that everything in our

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psychic life revolves around the formation of our selves as sexual beings, that is to say beings who are compelled by biology to want and need interaction with other beings. At the height of the Victorian era, a period in Western history renowned for its prudishness, Freud proposed that human interaction of every type can only be fully understood if humans are grasped as sexual beings. Indeed, he used that very Victorian prudishness to make his case: the fact that as a culture, if not as individuals, we are so uptight about sexual matters is proof, he argued, both of sexuality’s centrality to the psychic life of human existence and its inherent complexity. He positioned sexuality as both that which we have difficulty talking about and that which we must talk about if we are to attain a healthy attitude towards it. He shifted attention away from the cataloguing of sexual practices of the type pioneered by Krafft-Ebbing to the more complex issue of sexuality, the underlying set of ‘reasons’ why particular sexual practices seem necessary and not merely desirable or pleasurable. To put it more simply, sexual practices are what we as individuals ‘do’ and sexuality is who ‘we’ are and while the latter is to a certain extent influenced by the former, practices do not by themselves make us who we are. The case of the so-called ‘closet homosexual’ speaks powerfully to this point. Psychoanalysis matured as a theory when Freud realised that sexual ideas are as significant, if not more significant, than sexual practices. His first major breakthrough as a theoretician came when he recognised the importance of sexual fantasy. Sexuality refers then to a particular organisation of desire, one that does not simply have to do with attaining orgasm or producing children, but goes to the very heart of what might usefully be called our existential being in the world. More generally, it refers to a system of association between ideas, thoughts, practices and acts whose connections we find both psychically and physically pleasing for which Jung invented the useful term ‘complex’. Freud’s genius was to see that a single form of complex – the infamous ‘Oedipal complex’ – was common to all of humanity. Freud observed that childhood sexual development appears to follow the same narrative pathway as Sophocles’ tragedy Oedipus Rex and concluded that the play still resonates today as it did two thousand years earlier because it contains a universal truth. According to the theory of the ‘Oedipal complex’, as it came to be known, ‘normal’ heterosexual desire is formed by the transformation of incestuous desire. First the child forms a ‘love’ attachment to his mother and in so doing comes to think of his father as a deadly rival. In the child’s eyes, the father wields the power of castration, evidence of which is to be seen in the example of his mother’s apparently missing genitals. Unable to defeat his father in reality, the child symbolically ‘kills’ his father by turning

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away from the mother and (after a period of latency of a decade or more) attaches instead to a non-maternal woman who is in effect a substitute for the mother and in doing so assumes the same structural position as the father. On this model of desire, every new attachment is in some sense a repetition of the child’s original attachment to their mother; every problem and difficulty the child might have had with that original attachment to their mother is then played out in variation with every new love attachment, which is effectively what is meant by neurosis. Of course, the basic cause of these real or potential difficulties in forming love attachments tend to derive from the presence of the father as a kind of permanent obstruction to desire, the eternal ‘No’ that reverberates in every neurotic’s head like the sound of thunder. So in this sense, every love attachment is also a variation on this original relationship with the father as the voice of the Law. With Oedipus, then, Freud found a ready-made and remarkably adaptable answer to the question, why are some thoughts more significant than others? This was also his worst mistake, according to Deleuze and Guattari, who argue that psychoanalysis goes badly wrong after this point in Freud’s career when he enshrines the Oedipal narrative as the universal of human sexual formation. It is important to pause at this point and think carefully about what they mean here. Deleuze and Guattari are themselves of little help in this regard because they tend to race on ahead as though what they are saying is obvious. In Dialogues Deleuze states that he and Guattari only ever had two objections to psychoanalysis: ‘that it breaks up all productions of desire and crushes all formations of utterances’ (Deleuze and Parnet 2006: 57). These two objections to psychoanalysis chart a very clear course through the whole corpus of writings on schizoanalysis: on the one hand, Deleuze and Guattari develop a new theory of desire around the notion of production, and on the other hand, they develop a new hermeneutic model for analysing the utterances or products of desire. This latter statement will surprise many since Deleuze and Guattari’s rejection of interpretation has virtual folklore status in critical theory. Their famous claim that one should not ask what things mean, only how they work, has been widely taken up as a slogan among those scholars and critics wanting to liberate themselves from the tyrannies of tradition. But this misunderstands Deleuze and Guattari’s project – what they say is that the unconscious cannot be interpreted, not that interpretation per se is impossible. Indeed, it would be nonsense for them to claim interpretation is impossible, not the least because their own work is full of interpretations. When they say Freud crushes utterances what they mean is that Freud does not listen to his patients, whereas in contrast they do and consequently their analyses of Freud’s cases are better than the

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master’s (see, for example, Deleuze and Parnet 2006: 59–60). To make sense of both these diagnoses – that Freud breaks up the productions of desire and crushes all formations of utterances – we need to return to the issue of association. Here it will be helpful to look at one of the key examples that preoccupied Deleuze and Guattari, namely Freud’s case study of the five-year-old Viennese boy known as Little Hans who had a fear of horses and was as a consequence agoraphobic. Freud did not treat the boy himself, but relied on the boy’s parent for information about his condition and advised them on how to proceed. Of all Freud’s case studies, it is this one that seems to incense Deleuze and Guattari the most because of the many quite blatant instances where both Freud and the boy’s parents fail to listen to Hans and to make matters worse insist on putting words in his mouth. For example, at the train station Hans tells his friend Lizzi not to touch the horses in case they bite her and his father responds by saying to Hans ‘Do you know, I don’t think you’re talking about horses really, but about widdlers that shouldn’t be touched’. Hans very smartly replies: ‘But widdlers don’t bite’ (Freud 2002: 23). As this brief exchange illustrates, Hans’ statements are crushed beneath the weight of psychoanalytically inflected judgements about what he is really talking about. In a wonderful counter-study, Deleuze and Guattari (with the assistance of Claire Parnet and André Scala) list Little Hans statements side by side with what Freud says he ‘hears’, thus making it abundantly clear just how at odds the analyst and analysand really are in a clinical regime governed by the dictates of Oedipus (Deleuze 2006: 89–112). Schizoanalysis can be understood then as an attempt to correct this situation and create a space in which the patient’s utterances can be heard for themselves. Deleuze and Guattari are only partly successful in this enterprise, however, because while they make it clear that it is highly problematic to trace every utterance back to some primal Oedipal fantasy they do not solve the bigger problem of why certain associations are more important than others. In their own analysis of Little Hans, Deleuze and Guattari argue that Hans’ fear of horses and associated agoraphobia needs to be understood in terms of what they call a street-assemblage, by which they mean a symptomal complex consisting of Hans, the street, horses and the station across the road. The street-assemblage stands in the place of Freud’s Oedipal complex, naming a very particular organisation of desire, but in contrast to psychoanalysis’ account of things it does not actually explain that organisation. This is the most important sense in which schizoanalysis is an incomplete project: it offers a highly agile and extremely useful descriptive system, but lacks an explanatory apparatus. Their re-engineering of psychoanalysis is in

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this precise sense unfinished. And as I have said above, everything revolves around the problem of association. Again we can take their analyses of Little Hans as our point of reference: Little Hans’ horse is not representative but affective. It is not a member of a species but an element or individual in a machinic assemblage: draught horse-omnibus-street. It is defined by a list of active and passive affects in the context of the individual assemblage it is part of: having eyes blocked by blinders, having a bit and a bridle, being proud, having a big peepeemaker … etc. (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 257) They move away from Freud by shifting the domain of analysis from representation to affect – the horse no longer stands for something other than itself (i.e. it no longer represents the Father), it is now the name of a particular kind of ‘feeling’. That feeling is not defined by ‘horsiness’ or the sense that one is somehow horse-like; rather, it is defined by the affects we associated with having one’s eyes blocked, by being restrained with bit and bridle, the sense of pride one is nevertheless able to maintain in spite of such restraints, and so on. Deleuze and Guattari use the term ‘affect’ to designate these feelings because they occur at a level beneath or perhaps before ideation. If they call Hans’ feelings ‘becoming-horse’ it is not because Hans is thinking about horses or is in danger of becoming one, but rather because the affects he is experiencing are those we associate with horses, such as being restrained. And while this seems to make more sense as an account of Little Hans’ neuroses than Freud’s suggestion that everything can and must be traced back to an Oedipal relation between Hans and his parents, it does not explain at all why these particular affects and not some others are so central to his sense of self. It is this gap, if you will, in Deleuze and Guattari’s work that explains – in my view – why Osborne’s ‘post-Deleuzeand-Guattarianism’ is yet to flourish. Obviously, too, it is this ‘gap’ that must be focused on if the project of schizoanalysis is to be brought to completion. Although I refer to this problematic dimension of Deleuze and Guattari’s work as a ‘gap’ it should not be thought that they were themselves unaware of its existence or that they had not considered how it might be overcome. Deleuze and Guattari readily admit that the task of constructing schizoanalysis is unfinished, the project incomplete. ‘Guattari and I have only begun’, Deleuze says, ‘and completing this logic will undoubtedly occupy us into the future’ (Deleuze 2006: 177). The logic he is referring to here, in this interview given on the eve of the publication of A Thousand Plateaus, is that of the ritournelle (variously translated as refrain and ritornello).

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Several years later, perhaps wearied by the misunderstandings and misgivings his work had occasioned since he began collaborating with Guattari, Deleuze somewhat resignedly tells his interviewer Didier Eribon that the one concept he and his co-author had created was precisely the ritornello or refrain (Deleuze 2006: 380). This might seem a throwaway remark, and it certainly has an exasperated edge to it, but I want to suggest it actually goes to the heart of the entire schizoanalytic project because the concept of the refrain is Deleuze and Guattari’s solution (albeit partial and incomplete) to the problem of association. In the chapter on the refrain in A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari give the example of the lullaby as an instance of what they are talking about, but as with so many of their examples it is not straightforward. The lullaby itself is not the refrain; rather, it is the process that singing the lullaby initiates that constitutes the refrain. When the child sings to themselves in the dark so as not to feel alone, it is not the song that is the refrain, it is the harnessing of powers that the song initiates that constitutes the refrain. The refrain is, in other words, a mechanism of association: it brings together forces, ideas, memories, powers we did not know we had and so on. It might take the form of a song, but the song is not the refrain, it is merely our means of accessing the refrain. Although there is a still a lot of work to be done before a method of doing schizoanalysis can be carved out, it is my speculation that it will arise out of a detailed understanding of how the refrain functions. Of the various definitions of schizoanalysis that Deleuze and Guattari give, the most useful in my view is the one given by Guattari in The Machinic Unconscious (1979). He defines schizoanalysis as a ‘pragmatics of the unconscious’, by which he means a mode of analysis whose purpose is to understand how the unconscious works (Guattari 2011: 27). Work is meant in the most literal sense here – ultimately Deleuze and Guattari argue that the unconscious is a factory (and not a theatre, which they claim is how Freud conceives it) and they draw heavily on Marx’s work on labour in the elaboration of their newly minted discourse of the machinic unconscious. But this discourse can be misleading because although Deleuze and Guattari frequently use the language of machines to describe the operations of the unconscious, their model is not mechanics but pragmatics. The only time they make a direct comparison between the unconscious and actual machines is when they compare it to the absurd machines of the Dadaists, surrealists, as well as the infernal machines imagined by Buster Keaton and Rube Goldberg (Guattari 1995: 135).3 And on these occasions what is crucial is that these machines do not work. As Guattari observes in a postface he wrote for the second edition of Anti-Oedipus, Man Ray’s collage ‘dancer/danger’

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does not work, inasmuch as its working parts, its cogs and wheels and so on, do not turn or intermesh with one another in a mechanical fashion, and it is precisely for that reason that it works as a piece of art (Guattari 1995: 120). It works by creating an association (i.e. refrain) between the human dancer and the inhuman machine and thereby brings them into a new kind of relation which Deleuze and Guattari would later call the assemblage, but in their first works they called the desiring-machine. Desiring-machines are the working parts of the machinic unconscious; it is their operation that the pragmatics of the unconscious is tasked to understand. If dreams are Freud’s ‘royal road’ to the unconscious, then it is desiring-machines that provide Deleuze and Guattari with their sovereign superhighway to the machinic unconscious. If schizoanalysis is the discourse of the desiring-machine, as it were, then to understand schizoanalysis we must first of all understand the desiringmachine; in fact, though, as I have shown above we must go further back still because the desiring-machine is a product of a still more primary process, it is what desiring-production produces or gives rise to. So the true primary process is desiring-production, which can be understood as the process of producing associations, that is, the connections and links between thoughts, feeling, ideas and so on. But desiring-production only becomes visible in and through the machines it forms. And while both these terms are abandoned by Deleuze and Guattari in subsequent writing on schizoanalysis, the thinking behind them remains germane throughout. Indeed, in my view, one cannot make any progress in trying to understand Deleuze and Guattari’s thought until one has first understood what they mean by production. This is by no means as straightforward as it might seem because they cast their discussion of production in language drawn from Marx, which has the effect of making it seem as though they are talking about the production of physical things. And all their talk about a material psychiatry simply reinforces this impression. Of course that is not what they are talking about at all, but they make it quite difficult to decipher what it is they are driving at by framing their discussion of the desire in this way. One has to start by asking the very simple question: if desire produces, then what does it produce? The answer is not physical things, at least not in the way Marxism would understand that notion. So why use the Marxist language? For the same reason Freud uses economic language in his account of libido: to create a model. The correct answer to this question, then, is objects in the form of intuitions, to use Kant’s term for the mind’s initial attempts to grasp the world (both internal and external to the psyche). That is what desire produces, objects, not physical things.

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Kant, Deleuze and Guattari argue, was one of the first to conceive of desire as production, but he botched things by failing to recognise that the object produced by desire is fully real (Deleuze and Guattari reject the idea that superstitions, hallucinations and fantasies belong only to the realm of ‘psychic reality’ as Kant would have it: Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 25; Kant 1929: particularly Book II, ‘Analytic of Principles’). The schizophrenic has no awareness that the reality they are experiencing is not the same reality as everyone else’s. If they see their long-dead mother in the room with them they do not question whether this is possible or not; they are not troubled by any such doubts. What they see is for them what is, quite literally. If this Kantian turn seems surprising, it is nevertheless confirmed by Deleuze and Guattari’s critique of Lacan, who in their view makes essentially the same mistake as Kant in that he conceives desire as lacking a real object (for which fantasy acts as both compensation and substitute). Deleuze and Guattari describe Lacan’s work as ‘complex’, which seems to be their code word for useful but flawed (they say the same thing about Badiou). On the one hand, they credit him with discovering desiring-machines in the form of the objet petit a, but on the other hand they accuse him of smothering them under the weight of the Big O (Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 310). As Žižek is fond of saying, in the Lacanian universe fantasy supports reality. This is because reality, as Lacan conceives it, is deficient; it perpetually lacks a real object. If desire is conceived this way, as a support for reality, then, they argue, ‘its very nature as a real entity depends upon an “essence of lack” that produces the fantasized object. Desire thus conceived of as production, though merely the production of fantasies, has been explained perfectly by psychoanalysis’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 25). But that is not how desire works according to Deleuze and Guattari. It would mean that all desire does is produce imaginary doubles of reality, creating dreamed-of objects to complement real objects. This subordinates desire to the objects it supposedly lacks, or needs, thus reducing it to an essentially secondary role. This is precisely what Deleuze was arguing against when he said that the task of philosophy is to overturn Platonism. Nothing is changed by correlating desire with need as psychoanalysis tends to do. Desire is not bolstered by needs, but rather the contrary; needs are derived from desire: they are counterproducts within the real that desire produces. Lack is a countereffect of desire; it is deposited, distributed, vacuolized within a real that is natural and social. (Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 27)

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This rejection of Lacan confirms what might be termed the neo-Kantian reading of desire because it means that we cannot define desire in a transitive fashion: any attempt to define desire as the desire for something immediately puts us back into the realm of lack. Productive desire cannot be the desire for something, it must produce something. This brings us to the most important twist in Deleuze and Guattari’s rethinking of desire: if desire is productive and what it produces is real then desire must be actual and not virtual. Deleuze and Guattari are quite explicit on this point. Referring to the formation of symptoms, such as hallucinations, Deleuze and Guattari write: ‘The actual factor is desiring-production’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 129). To which they add the following important clarification: ‘The term “actual” is not used because it designates what is most recent [which is its usual meaning in both French and German], and because it would be opposed to “former” or “infantile” [which is how it is used in Freud’s texts]; it is used in terms of its difference with respect to “virtual” ’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 129). I doubt there is a more important or consequential statement in the whole of Deleuze and Guattari’s writings. Its importance becomes clear in the next sentence: And it is the Oedipus complex that is virtual, either inasmuch as it must be actualized in a neurotic formation as a derived effect of the actual factor, or inasmuch as it is dismembered and dissolved in a psychotic formation as the direct effect of this same factor. (Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 129, emphasis in original) This is a major reversal of how we are taught to think about the relationship between the actual and the virtual. To actualise the virtual, then, does not mean that something that was previously only notional or imaginary is thereby made concrete and real (an idea turned into a thing, for example); rather, it means that something that was sensual is made present to the mind in an active sense (it becomes an object). The actual is that which concerns the mind right now, where concern would mean an active form of attention which could be either conscious or unconscious (what we commonly refer to as ‘preoccupation’ would be an example of unconscious active attention). ‘For, as Bergson shows, memory is not an actual image which forms after the object has been perceived, but a virtual image coexisting with the actual perception of the object’ (Deleuze 2006: 114). Freud’s biggest mistake Deleuze and Guattari claim, which demonstrates his failure to understand this point, was to think that the unconscious is constructed in the image of Oedipus, which would mean that the unconscious is merely a shadow theatre for the conscious and

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not a productive system in its own right. Freud thus mistook the virtual for the actual and vice versa. The problem of the actual and the virtual is central to the entire schizoanalytic project, but as is obvious from the foregoing discussion Deleuze and Guattari’s conceptualisation of this problematic does not follow any of the expected paths – it is not used in either an ontological or metaphysical sense, but wholly in what must be called a psychological sense. And that must be borne in mind at all times if one is not to be led astray by Deleuze and Guattari’s often perplexing rhetoric. Assembling, or synthesizing, which is the other word Deleuze and Guattari sometimes use, is then the basic operation performed by the unconscious, or indeed the mind as a whole. There are a number of sub-operations of assembling that Deleuze and Guattari consider, but for present purposes it suffices it to say that assembling is what the mind does. In this respect assembling should be thought of as a mode of cognition. Deleuze and Guattari quite explicitly link assembling to Kant’s synthetic judgement and state that the ‘synthesizer has replaced judgement, and matter has replaced the figure or formed substance’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 109). Synthesizers are like judgements, they are the specific operations of cognition which give the understanding both coherence and consistency, but differ in that their object is not intuition, but the molecular forces that give rise to intuition. If there is a critique of Kant implicit in this move, it is that he does not go far enough in his critiques. Having said that, Deleuze and Guattari do not argue that the synthesizer is a theoretical improvement upon synthetic judgement, or that it is a necessary corrective of Kant, rather, their position is that the synthesizer supersedes synthetic judgement in a historical sense. Although they accuse Kant of conforming to a State form of philosophy, their argument for leaving him behind is staged on world-historical not philosophical grounds (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 376). Whereas ‘romantic philosophy still appealed to a formal synthetic identity ensuring a continuous intelligibility of matter (a priori synthesis), modern philosophy tends to elaborate a material of thought in order to capture forces that are not thinkable for themselves. This is Cosmos philosophy, after the manner of Nietzsche’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 342). It is in music, rather than philosophy, however, that one finds the clearest articulation of how synthesizers work, according to Deleuze and Guattari. The great French modernist composer, Edgard Varèse’s work is seen as exemplary by Deleuze and Guattari because through his experiments with electronic instruments he creates ‘a musical machine of consistency, a sound machine (not a machine for reproducing sounds), which molecularizes and atomizes, ionizes sound matter and harnesses cosmic energy’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 343).

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If Guattari’s definition is ultimately too narrow in scope to do justice to the schizoanalytic project as whole, because it ranges well beyond the strict confines of the unconscious to include not only the psyche as a whole but beyond that social system in which it comes into being, it is nevertheless a useful starting place because it enables us to think more concretely about the nature of Deleuze and Guattari’s collaborative project. This is a necessary step in the process of coming to grips with Deleuze and Guattari’s thought because it is only by being clear about the macrostructure of their project that one can resolve the myriad difficulties of deciding how one should interpret their often quite eccentric-seeming concepts, such as the body without organs. What Guattari’s definition tells us is that their principle concern was to understand how the psyche works – this forms the macrostructure of their project taken as a whole. What we can infer from this, I want to argue, is that they were not particularly interested in devising either a new ontology of things (which is one of the main ways they are read) or a new politics (which is the other key way in which they are read). Rather what they gave us is a new topography of the psyche.

Notes 1. In his discussion with Foucault, Deleuze described speaking for others as unethical (Deleuze and Foucault 1977). 2. By thought I mean here and in what follows ideation of any type, including somatic expressions such as emotion and affect. 3. This essay originally appeared as the appendix to the second edition of AntiOedipus. In the text Guattari actually refers to Julius Goldberg, but from the discussion that follows it is clear he meant Rube Goldberg.

References Adorno, Theodor (1973), Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton, London: Routledge. Agamben, G. (1999), Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy, ed. and trans. D. Heller-Roazen, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Buchanan, Ian (2006), ‘Deleuze’s “life” sentences’, Polygraph, 18: 129–47. Deleuze, Gilles (1995), Negotiations, trans. M. Joughin, New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Deleuze, Gilles (2000), Proust and Signs, trans. R. Howard, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Deleuze, Gilles (2004), The Logic of Sense, trans. M. Lester, London: Continuum. Deleuze, Gilles (2006), Two Regimes of Madness: Texts and Interviews 1975–1995, trans. A. Hodges and M. Taormina, New York, NY: Semiotext(e).

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Deleuze, G. and M. Foucault (1977), ‘Intellectuals and power’, in D. F. Bouchard (ed.), Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews by Michel Foucault, New York, NY: Cornell University Press. Deleuze, G. and F. Guattari (1983), Anti-Oedipus, trans. B. Massumi, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Deleuze, G. and F. Guattari (1975), Kafka: Towards a Minor Literature, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Deleuze, G. and F. Guattari (1987), A Thousand Plateaus, trans. B. Massumi, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Deleuze, G. and F. Guattari (1991), What is Philosophy? London: Verso Deleuze, G. and C. Parnet (2006), Dialogues II, trans. H. Tomlinson and B. Habberjam, London: Continuum. Dosse, François (2010), Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari: Intersecting Lives, trans. D. Glassman, New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Freud, Sigmund (2002), The ‘Wolfman’ and Other Cases, trans. L. Huish, London: Penguin. Guattari, Félix (1984), Molecular Revolutions: Psychiatry and Politics, trans. R. Sheed, London: Peregrine Books. Guattari, Félix (1995), ‘Balance-sheet program for desiring machines’, in Chaosophy, trans. R. Hurley, New York, NY: Semiotext(e), pp. 123–50. Guattari, Félix (2006), The Anti-Oedipus Papers, New York, NY: Semiotext(e). Guattari, Félix (2011), The Machinic Unconscious: Essays in Schizoanalysis, trans. T. Adkins, Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e). Kant, Immanuel (1929), Critique of Pure Reason, trans. N. Kemp Smith, London: MacMillan. Osborne, Peter (2011), ‘Guattareuze?’, New Left Review, 69: 139–51. Stengers, Isabelle (2011), ‘Gilles Deleuze’s last message’, available online at http:// www.recalcitrance.com/deleuzelast.htm (accessed 9 August 2011).

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Pa r t I I I Themes

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Structure and Subject In Chapter 8, ‘Structure and Subject’, Williams establishes the mutual imbrication of these important concepts, showing how they have been historically and conceptually inseparable in both structuralism and poststructuralism. Arguing not only that the problematic of the subject itself remained a key figure of thought for all the various conceptions of structure and structuralism, but further that the subject persists (as both a radical paradox, and as an unresolved potentia) in all positions that announce its dissolution or deconstruction, Williams then poses the following crucial question: how might one now, in the wake of poststructuralism, think the space of subjectivity anew? For Williams, it is precisely the persistence of the subject, an unresolved potentia or radical paradox (of desire, force, affect), that allows us to think the concept of the subject and the space of subjectivity anew. In an important respect, and not unlike Lundy (see Chapter 3), Williams provokes us to critically re-evaluate many of the characterisations of ‘structuralism’ and ‘poststructuralism’ we are constantly confronted with (including, of course, the working definition of poststructuralism that guides the book you are currently reading). In Chapter 9, ‘How do we Recognize the Subject?’, Widder picks up, directly and indirectly, on many of themes discussed by Williams, moving from an analysis of Lacan’s conception of the subject of lack to Deleuze and Guattari’s anti-Lacanian – but not necessarily anti-Lacan – conception of desiring-machines and the subject that emerges from them. Concluding with a discussion of the place of the subject in Deleuze and Guattari’s idea of making oneself a ‘body without organs’ or BwO, drawing in part on Sartrean and Nietzschean ideas that are important influences for Deleuze, Widder

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aims to show how the continuing centrality of the subject in certain strands of poststructuralist thought comes at the cost of excluding from consideration a molecular domain of possible transformation. This, for Widder, does not imply some foolhardy abandonment of the possibility of coherent agency, but instead allows us to consider agency in different terms. Again drawing on Deleuze and Guattari, Widder thinks this agency in terms of a ‘concrete multiplicity’, a ‘nomadic subject’ that is generally linked to an experimental form of politics. In Chapter 10, ‘Foucault: The Culture of Self, Subjectivity and TruthTelling Practices’, Belsey draws on the work of Foucault to think through the problem of agency in a more specific institutional and political context; namely education. Suggesting that Foucault’s philosophical and historical insights on subjectivity and truth can form the basis of an investigation into contemporary forms of truth-telling in the constitution of the educational subject, as well as emphasising the importance of his studies on governmentality, Belsey further argues that Foucault provides us with an understanding of how modern neo-liberalism can constitute self-governing subjects and what a key role education plays in developing these particular technologies of the self.

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Chapter 8 S t r u c t u re a n d S u b j e c t Caroline Williams

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This chapter will examine the philosophical movement that has utilised and taken as its starting point the concepts of structure and subject. Both concepts are riddled with tensions and ambiguities, not least because they are used by a diverse collection of philosophers whose writings are commonly placed under the banner of structuralism and poststructuralism. They are concepts with their own distinct histories, their own logical and ontological bases (albeit contestable ones), but in the 1950s and 1960s, particularly in France, they come together, cross over and support one another, articulating a series of profound and influential problems and questions that had – and indeed continue to have – wide-ranging philosophic-political effects upon the development of knowledge within the humanities and beyond. In the event of structuralism, which sought a formalised account of the elemental structure of any object of knowledge, be it the psyche, a kinship system, a novel, a poem, social relations or the economy itself, we find an unequal contract between structure and subject where the former addresses the fundamental terms of existence of the latter, rigorously qualifying its conditions of possibility and its mode of constitution. If we here begin to name multiple additional concepts, such as those of relation, difference, sign and signification; essence, humanism and anti-humanism; science, ideology and discourse, it is merely to indicate that we cannot appreciate the philosophical adventure of the concepts of structure and subject without embracing a matrix of additional conceptual forms and figures. Perhaps the greatest tension framing the twin concepts of structure and subject is the one lying between the two. A cursory study of this philosophical conjuncture might expect any degree of commitment to the concept of structure to require by necessity a wholesale rejection of the concept of subject, which is considered no longer to offer a secure ground for the production of knowledge (if it ever could secure this basis). This, however,

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is far from being the case. It is a central objective of this chapter to establish the mutual imbrication of these two concepts, which are inseparable from the start. As Gilles Deleuze observes, Structuralism is not at all a form of thought that suppresses the subject, but one that breaks it up and distributes it systematically, that contests the identity of the subject, that dissipates it and makes it shift from place to place, an always nomad subject, made of individuations, but impersonal ones, or of singularities, but pre-individual ones. (Deleuze 2004: 190) It would therefore be mistaken to suggest that the itinerary of structuralism and poststructuralism (however we might understand these categorisations) was premised upon a disengagement with, and rejection of, the subject and subjectivity. It is the very shifting mechanism, the movement and production of the subject by and through structures (of language, power, ideology, etc.) that is at stake here. As Étienne Balibar reminds us ‘no one has taken more seriously than the structuralists themselves the reproach that was initially made to them, namely that they reduced the subject to structure in order to plunge it into slavery’ (Balibar 2003: 17). Indeed, as we shall see below, the problematic of the subject has orientated and galvanised much of the development of structuralism such that we cannot think about structure or subject as separate entities. I will argue here not only that the problematic of the subject itself remains the key figure of thought for all the various conceptions of structure and structuralism, but further that the subject persists (as both a radical paradox and as an unresolved potentia) in all positions that announce its dissolution or deconstruction (see Williams 2001 for a detailed analysis). Indeed, I will suggest that a more powerful question remains to be posed after an analysis of the many contours shaping this conceptual terrain. Has the precise theoretical and political utility of the subject come to an end? If we can agree that this is not the case, then how might one now, in the wake of poststructuralism, think the space of subjectivity anew? What evidence might one find in contemporary thought to think the enigmatic figure of the subject?

Setting the Scene: Locating the ‘Structure’ in Structuralism and the ‘Subject’ in Subjectivity Before we turn to examine closely some examples of the complex interactions of these two concepts, it is necessary to sketch an outline of their history and epistemological background, but also to underscore and insist

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upon the diversity of positions characterising the structuralist encounter. During the course of this chapter it will also become apparent that any attempt to sharply demarcate structuralism from poststructuralism must falter since the unravelling and ‘free play’ of the concept of structure celebrated by the latter is already engendered within the terms of the former. To put this in other words: poststructuralism inheres within structuralism (see also Balibar 2003). As we will illustrate below, many of the thinkers we might associate with poststructuralism, for example, Foucault, Derrida and Lacan, have also written books that were critical advances within the development of structuralism, and they were to marshall these arguments against the dominant metaphysical motifs within French philosophy (particularly phenomenology and existentialism), hence calling into question the modern subject of philosophy. For Paul Ricoeur (1974), it was Marx, Nietzsche and Freud who were the three great masters of suspicion who demystified the idea of self-consciousness by bringing forth an account of the structures that produced it. But poststructuralist thinkers obviously also brought to structuralism their own projects and competing philosophical perspectives. Thus, Althusser’s anti-humanism owed more to Spinoza than to Lévi-Strauss, and both Foucault and Derrida’s thought remained as sensitive to the anti-humanist appeal of Heidegger’s later philosophy of Dasein as it did to Nietzsche (and, indeed, Heidegger’s reading of him). Given such nuances, how might we begin to define and understand the complexity of the structuralist enterprise? Most discussions of the movement, philosophy and conceptual base of structuralism justly emphasise its theoretical diversity, its ‘family of methods’, and the contestability which has arisen at the heart of the concept of structure itself. In his article ‘How do we recognize structuralism?’ Deleuze (2004) ascribes the origin of structuralism (as do most commentators on its history) to the linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure and the Russian formalist school, before its migration and subsequent flowering in other domains such as psychoanalysis, literature, philosophy and sociology. Saussures’s Course in General Linguistics, originally published in 1916, laid the early foundations for modern structural linguistics. This understood language or la langue as an autonomous system with its own rules of operation that made speech or la parole possible. Language became a code to be read as a network of relationships which articulate distinct sets or series of linguistic elements. For Saussure, the constitution of language and the sign was thus part of a formal, objective structure, atemporal and invariant; one need only understand the system of relations and differences composing the sign via its key components: the signifier (the sound-image or material attribute of

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language) and the signified (the concept or referent of a particular sign). No longer could the subject be viewed as the author of speech and the origin of expression; the imprint of consciousness upon its form was now faint and without weight. As Lacan’s psychoanalytic reading of Saussure proposes (see below), signification is placed in an entirely different register from the strivings of an intentional subject. Structural linguistics, with its thesis of the radical autonomy of language isolated from its diachronic mutations and from the speaking subject, offered many philosophers the tools with which to think against both the phenomenological and existential currents of the subject of history dominant within post-war French philosophy and politics (voiced most strongly in the work of Jean Paul Sartre), and the positivism, spiritualism and idealism endemic within the disciplines of the human sciences (see Gutting 2001, ch. 1). Thus followed a concerted effort, both polemical and political, to study structures rather than histories, conditions and relations rather than essences and totalities, bracketing off in the manner of a Husserlian reduction the whole problem of consciousness and the human being, psychology and the empirical referent, in favour of a search for objective, atemporal and scientific conditions of possibility for subjectivity, life and knowledge itself. In many philosophical senses, the attention to structure was a polemic against the unappealing – and ultimately unredeeming – anthropological vision of Hegelian philosophy, which dominated the French philosophical scene (Butler 1999; Roth 1988). Particularly in its Sartrean form, this had tended to reduce the dialectic to the historical movement of consciousness and the praxis of the human subject. In 1929, Jean Wahl, who had worked closely with Foucault, Derrida and Deleuze during the early stages of their philosophical work (Gutting 2011, particularly ch. 1), published his influential study on Hegel’s ‘unhappy consciousness’. It was this text more than any other, which informed the anthropological reading of Hegel and was developed by Kojève in his lectures and subsequent book (Kojève 1980; Baugh 2003). For those who embraced the concept of structure, however, the need to escape this kind of Hegel was paramount since such a philosophical strategy could only culminate in the idealist turns of Sartre’s ontology of freedom and Lukács’s radical historicism, both of which privileged the genesis of consciousness above all else. We must nonetheless note the significant contribution of Jean Hyppolite’s studies of Hegel (Hyppolite 1974, 1997). Hyppolite effectively unravelled the existential reading of Hegel by Wahl and Kojève, developing instead a speculative logic that attended, amongst other things, to Hegel’s own reflections upon language as the Logos or discourse. This functioned rather like Saussurian linguistics, decentring

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human subjectivity and experience and placing it within an ontological field of linguistic structures. Hyppolite’s continued involvement with the philosophical work of (post)structuralists ensured that some engagement with Hegel – albeit intensely critical – remained. His important contribution to late twentieth-century thought (sometimes underestimated) thereby placed poststructuralists up against Hegel and made all their efforts to extricate themselves from him a more complex and, for some, an infinite task (see Lawlor 2003). Althusser’s apt remark sums up well the predicament of his generation: ‘We are all caught up in the decomposition of Hegel’ (Althusser 1997b: 151). In an excellent commentary on the topic of structure and subject, Balibar et al. (2006) suggests that at least some of the interrogations of the subject initiated by (post)structuralism have been facilitated by its double connotation within modern philosophy as both subjectum and subjectus (as on the one hand, a logico-grammatical and philosophical function, where the subject is laying forth or a lying under, as in a ground, support or predicate for knowledge; and on the other hand, as a politico-juridical function: under a rule, submitted, subjected). In addition, this grammatical complexity is compounded by the idiomatic properties of the French language, which also suggest a series of overlapping and complex derivations of the subject (sujet), namely as subjection (sujétion and assujetissement), subjectivity (subjectivitié) and subjectivation (subjectivation) (Balibar et al. 2006: 7). We will see some of these grammatical tensions played out in the discussions below. It is this linguistic complication that helps us account for a paradox installed within the heart of the subject, where identifying the subject as a subjected being (as an effect of structure, as determined by the objective structure of la langue) nonetheless still holds fast to the idiom of the subject. So long as attention to structure requires the subject to be radically displaced, it continues to remain a crucial figure of analysis. Indeed, in her own discussion of this problem, Judith Butler argues that the subject carries this paradox within itself, where subjection is presented as a general trope or retroactive ‘turning’ of the subject back upon itself to delineate the very possibility of subjectivity (Butler 1997). As we will see below, thinkers of structure are cognisant of this problem to varying degrees; for some (Althusser) it will remain a limit, for others (Derrida, Foucault, Deleuze) it is something that is rooted out and forced into question once again. It is clear, however, that the paradox of the subject haunting structure cannot simply be bracketed or put to one side. There is a perpetual risk that structuralism can masquerade as a subject. As if by a process of inversion, structuralism can effectively take over the subject’s function, role and status, and become, to paraphrase

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Ricoeur, a form of Kantianism without the transcendental subject: structure as the determining origin and objective ground of all meaning. It is when such (Kantian) risks are avoided that structuralism gives birth to a creative moment of analysis that makes it distinctly poststructuralist in form. Let us now turn to consider some of the positions that best expose and address the paradox of the subject at the heart of the concept of structure.

Between Structure and Subject: Althusser and the Production of the Subject We will begin our discussions with the seminal work of the Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser. Whilst rarely considered a poststructuralist, Althusser’s writings act as a nodal point, a point of condensation (to use a Freudian term adapted by Althusser), which marks out and identifies a number of radical poststructuralist currents. Althusser was also a dominant influence at the Ecole Normale Supérieure between 1948 and 1980 and his teaching had a decisive effect upon Lacan, Foucault, Derrida and Badiou, as well as Deleuze; they often passed early drafts of soon to be published essays for his comments. Between 1966 and 1969, the journal Cahiers pour L’Analyse also provided a seed-bed for research seeking the formalisation of concepts (particularly those of subject and structure) and the development of a new kind of scientific rigour (presented particularly in the writings of Bachelard and Canguilhem), and to which all of the above contributed. Furthermore, works like For Marx and the collaborative study Reading Capital stimulated landmark discussions regarding the relative autonomy of the superstructures, the non-subjective nature of the historical process, the validity of the concept of ideology and its permanence, the scientific nature of Marxism, and the mutual imbrication of politics and philosophy. More significantly perhaps, the Althusserian ‘moment’ connected Marxism with vital non-Marxist currents of thought (e.g. structural linguistics, Lacanian psychoanalysis, Spinozism), facilitating new departures and opening up creative and critical dialogues with, amongst others, feminism and cultural studies. This detour taken by Marxism through structuralism – and later poststructuralism – was also fundamental to the theoretical development of those philosophers who continued to work within a revised Marxist (some might say post-Marxist) problematic, for example, Étienne Balibar, Pierre Macherey and Antonio Negri. We might also want to add to the names already noted those of Cornelius Castoriadis, Ernesto Laclau, Claude Lefort, Jacques Rancière and Slavoj Žižek, since many of these latter thinkers developed their own perspectives by thinking beyond or against, rather

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than within or through the Althusserian problematic. Putting to one side the way in which Althusser has often been presented as a rather dogmatic structuralist, I will consider two aspects of his thought here: the conception of history, and the conception of subjectivity and agency. Both illustrate the complexity of Althusser’s usage of the concepts of structure and subject, indicate the diversity of philosophical resources he brought to these problems, and together point to the distance taken from structuralism by his own theoretical approach. In 1973, Althusser published his Essays in Self-Criticism where he claimed to have been misunderstood: he was not a structuralist at all, but instead a (rather unorthodox) Spinozist. Every philosophy, Althusser argued, has to ‘make a detour via other philosophies in order to define itself and grasp itself in terms of its difference …’ (Althusser 1973: 133). The necessary detour taken via Spinoza was made in order to elucidate Marx’s own detour via Hegel, ‘helping us to see that the concepts Subject/Goal constitute the “mystifying side” of the Hegelian dialectic’ (1973: 137). It was Spinoza’s anti-subjectivism, his view of the subject as part of nature and as part of a social body by which it is continuously affected, together with his rejection of all forms of transcendence, teleology and functionalism, that would inform Althusser’s own commitment to anti-humanism and anti-historicism. Similarly, it was Spinoza’s materialism – which Althusser would later call his nominalism (as ‘the only conceivable form of materialism…’ (Althusser 1997b: 11) that offered Marxism a complex, layered materialism where an infinite, generative substance with a multiplicity of attributes (Spinoza called such a Substance, God or Nature) expresses itself in every concrete, finite modification. As related in his autobiography The Future Lasts a Long Time, what fascinated Althusser about Spinoza was what he understood by the latter’s philosophical strategy. In the Ethics, Spinoza had transformed the conception of a transcendental God (Substance) as the transitive cause of all things, prior to the world he creates. By understanding God as identical with Nature, as well as being self-caused (causa sui), Substance itself became the continuous production and differentiation, composition and decomposition, of the many diverse (infinite) forms of its being. It is this move that constitutes, for Althusser, Spinoza’s ‘unparalleled audacity’. Not only did Spinoza ‘take over the theoretical places fortified and occupied by [his] adversaries’ (i.e. the theological problem of God’s power and existence), ‘he established himself there as if he were his own adversary … and redisposed the theoretical fortress in such a way as to turn it completely around, as one turns around cannons against the fortress’s own occupants’ (Althusser 1997b: 10, 11). It was Spinoza’s strategic conception of the immanent causality of Substance

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that would enrich Althusser’s understanding of society as a structural totality where each level or instance of the social whole and its concrete practices may effect and influence the other levels. Althusser’s transformation of Marxist philosophy aimed to be far-reaching, extending to a formalisation of the structure of knowledge itself. Upon the kamplatz of philosophy, where the ideologies of socialist humanism, existential phenomenology and forms of historicism laid claim to Marxism, Althusser mapped out the distinctive topography of Marxist science as a kind of theoretical practice. Not only did the theoretical field where science produced its own objects and concepts require no external referent (since its own conditions of truth and consistency were the result of immanent reflection), the form of immanent causality adopted by Althusser made every final cause disappear, giving rise to the idea of reciprocal effectivity: the presence of the structure only through its effects. This notion of causality, together with the idea of overdetermination, deferred any reference to a pure origin but also threatened the purity and rational basis of Marxist science with the force of what Foucault would later call ‘the outside’ (Foucault 1987). In this way, no simple Hegelian logic of contradiction could prevail; overdetermination ensured the absence of any primary cause and rendered each level or instance of the structure mutually determined and determining, complex and decentred. If history has a role here, it is not as the genesis of consciousness towards a goal or end, but as a ‘process without a subject or goal’ which begins with the concrete determinants of the mode of production (its material, structural elements) rather than with the ideological notion of the subject as voluntary agent (see ‘Reply to John Lewis’ in Althusser 1984). If science was considered be a subject-less discourse, it is important to assess the basis of Althusser’s theoretical anti-humanism, which established a reciprocal relationship between ideology and subjectivity: ‘the category of the subject is only constitutive of all ideology in so far as all ideology has the function … of constituting individuals as subject’ (Athusser 1984: 45). This formulation was not simply a displacement of the subject but a self-conscious reframing of its conditions of possibility. Althusser also highlights the circularity and duplicity present in this redoubling process of ideology and the subject which require each other as if by a principle of necessity: ‘there is no ideology except by the subject and for subjects’ (1984: 44). No longer to be viewed as a sovereign, intentional being, and the constituent ground of meaning, Althusser (and Spinoza) were concerned precisely with the production of the subject: how the subject was constituted and how forms of individuality were composed and preserved over time. It was in Spinoza’s radical understanding of this imaginary constitution – supplemented, of course, also by Lacan

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(see below) – that Althusser would later claim to rediscover ‘the matrix of every possible theory of ideology’ (1997: 7), and also find the resources for his novel conception of ideology: Spinoza’s ‘theory’ rejected every illusion about ideology, and especially about the number one ideology of that time, religion, by identifying it as imaginary. But at the same time it refused to treat ideology as a simple error, or as naked ignorance, because it based the system of this imaginary phenomenon on the relation of men to the world ‘expressed’ by the state of their bodies. (Althusser 1973: 136) In this way, Althusser’s materialist rendering of ideology dispensed with every idealist philosophical tendency as all references to the subject, belief, actions and ideas were inserted into the materialist practices through which the modalities of interpellation occurred. Such practices and rituals, he argued, worked to tame and discipline, normalising and subjecting the body to certain regimes of thought and action. Critics have sometimes argued that what is missing from Althusser’s Spinozist account of voluntary servitude or subjection is an account of how the subject itself may work retroactively upon the ideological structure that determines it (that which Deleuze, in his book Foucault (1988) has named folded force). Althusser’s conception of the subject as an effect of ideology certainly highlights the grammatical tension between subjectum and subjectus identified by Balibar and discussed above. The form of this paradox has been deliberately captured in Althusser’s deployment of the spectre of the subject as always-already a subject: a subject whose emergence is perpetually bound up with its subjugation to ideology. His analysis of its constitution or production nonetheless stops short of a consideration of how the process of subjectivation, of interpellation itself, must be continuous if it is to produce and maintain self-disciplining subjects. There is no focus upon the incessant process of interpellation, no account of the link between ideological practices and the historically specific and flexible ways of constituting subjects of capitalism – something that both Foucault (see, for example, 2005, 2008, 2010) and Hardt and Negri (2005, 2009) would pursue in his wake. Similarly, there was no developed reflection upon the role of linguistic articulation in the theory of ideology, the psychoanalytic aspect of which Althusser had begun to probe in his 1965 research paper ‘Three notes on the order of discourse’ (Althusser 2003: 33–84). Here Althusser writes ‘that the subject-function which is the characteristic effect of ideological discourse in turn requires, produces or induces … a characteristic effect, the unconscious-effect or the effect subject-of-the–unconscious,

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that is, the peculiar structure which makes the discourse of the unconscious possible’ (2003: 53). Thus, it is not just a subject-effect but an unconscious effect too, that is produced by ideology. Remarkably, in some open questions at the end of ‘Three notes’ we also find Althusser suggesting that perhaps the theoretical utility of the concepts of the unconscious and the subject of the unconscious have come to an end, or ‘cannot be employed unequivocally’ (2003: 77); or at least are appropriate only in a qualified sense. For Althusser, the spaltung, lack or absence of the subject (in the field of signification) theorised by Lacan, actually ‘opens up alongside a subject … it is not a subject, but something altogether different’ (2003: 78). But these remarkable theorisations of a nascent subjectivity as a complex production never quite constituted, and disruptive of all theories that retrospectively view it, are not pursued in his later work on ideology. As he wrote to a friend in 1977, in relation to his own work this was ‘a limit that had not yet been crossed’ (cited in Althusser 1996: 4–5). Might Althusser have perhaps found further resources in Spinoza’s own elaboration of the production of individuality, that which Balibar, utilising Gilbert Simondon’s philosophy, has named via the concept of transindividuality (Balibar 1997)? In the final section of this chapter, when reflecting upon the utility of the concept of the subject today, we will return to some of the most interesting and penetrating antisubjectivist reflections that recur throughout Althusser’s corpus (including his final efforts to think a new form of materialism) in the idea of the process without a subject or goal. Framed by his Spinozism, this formulation may still offer the seeds for considering the subject in another way – as something altogether different.

Configuring the Subject after Althusser: Lacan, Derrida and Foucault Despite the fundamental differences framing their perspectives on the subject, I propose to consider the challenges posed by the next three thinkers alongside one another. In all cases, the philosophical motifs of structure and subject are developed between phenomenology and structuralism, which gives a peculiar unity to their otherwise quite distinctive approaches. Lacan and Foucault also continue to deploy the dual meaning of subject and subjection, perhaps developing the principle of subjugation to its limit point. Central themes in each of their work (différance and the ‘free play’ of the structure (Derrida); the subject as signifier (Lacan); disciplinary power and subjectivation (Foucault)) have also already been anticipated in the above discussions of Althusser’s thought, and each thinker confronts (and becomes

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mired within) the paradox of the subject broached in the first section. If the structures of language, power and signification appear to engender and produce the subject as their mere effect or residue, each open structure also forms part of a dynamic process of constitution which disperses the subject as much as it substantiates our knowledge of it. We can observe quite clearly Lacan’s distinctive debts to both Hegel and to Saussure in his construction of the subject. Lacan performs a linguistic turn upon psychoanalysis with his adaption and reinscription of Saussurian linguistics. It is the linguistic system of synchronic laws that fix the meaning of the sign making speech and signification possible. Language is a logos, a fundamental rational order that imparts conditions of possibility upon speech. It constructs a symbolic world of discourses and practices, both social and intersubjective. Lacan often refers to language as the field of the Other where the subject seeks its meaning. However, Lacan destroys the representational function of the sign, establishing ‘the incessant sliding of the signified under the signifier’ (Lacan 1977: 194), making the signifier diachronic and polysemic, and establishing what Jean Luc Nancy and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe have called ‘the aporia of reference’ (1992: 37). It is this structure of la langue that defines the subject, who disappears as its effect within the mobile chain of signifiers that circulate within the order of language. The symbolic order signals the eclipse, suture or fading of the subject, who takes up a place in this order only by losing itself in the process (Lacan 1986: ch. 16). The subject, then, loses its metaphysical status as origin and becomes subjugated to language. It is for this reason that Lacan will describe the unconscious as itself structured like a language, for it is through its (metonymic) subversions that desire may be incited to speak. The symbolic order of language is but one of the structural registers across which subjectivity is constituted. Lacan also theorises the realms of the imaginary and the real, and together with the symbolic these form the ‘borromean knot’ that attempts to tie together the dispersed figure of subjectivity. The imaginary is most clearly articulated in Lacan’s well-known account of the mirror-stage. It is this spectral mechanism that issues the fragmented being with a fictional image of bounded wholeness and individuality; a function of méconnaisance thus characterises the imaginary ego, which becomes the material support for the Spaltung (split) or division of a subject who finds no (Hegelian) recognition or fulfilment of desire in the imaginary object or image but instead only an experience of radical lack and incompleteness. If the imaginary represents anything, it is the primordial lack of being generated by the birth of the subject-as-signifier. The register of the real is that which always remains foreclosed in signification. The

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symbolic may try to bind it, the imaginary may create fantasies to fill out its meaning, but the real will always remain outstanding and subversive of all claims to incorporate it. Resistant to symbolisation, it is itself the site of the lack of the subject. When Lacan writes that ‘man is not entirely in man’, he is attending to the unthinkable space of the real (1988: 27). However, in his critique of the philosophical basis of Lacanian psychoanalysis Jacques Derrida describes the tripartite structure of symbolic, imaginary and real as an ‘unmodifiable transcendental or ontological structure’ that reconstitutes itself indefinitely and claims to reinscribe the impossibility of the subject’s identification with the symbolic order (Derrida 1981: 46, 1995: 713). Thus, even the category of the real appears to conceal and displace that which cannot be represented and the unconscious still ‘forces [upon discourse] the inscription of its very refusal’ (Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe 1992: 82). This metaphysics of representation arguably also pervades Lacan’s conception of the subject, which some of his critics claim remains resolutely tied to the Cartesain cogito even as he tries to subvert its foundation by displacing and reconfiguring its primary attributes upon the plane of language. What, then, are we to make of Lacan’s anti-humanism? Set within the linguistic structures which make the Cartesian subject of enunciation possible, it seems that the subject of certainty must relinquish its metaphysical status. Lacan decentres the cogito and takes the philosophy of the subject to its limit. No longer the author of meaning, the subject is authorised by the signifier that appears in its place. Thus, against Descartes’ idea of cogito ergo sum, Lacan writes, ‘I am not wherever I am the plaything of my thought; I think of what I am where I do not think to think’ (1977: 166). Does he nonetheless continue to theorise the subject according to the same series of questions (albeit now inverted) framing the constitution of the Cartesian subject? By identifying the cogito as ‘at the centre of the mirage that renders modern man so sure of himself even in his uncertainties’ (Lacan 1977: 165), Lacan’s subject arguably remains tied to a certain metaphysics of subjectivity. Against this view Slavoj Žižek has insisted that Lacanian psychoanalysis exposes the excessive kernel of the cogito and the hole or blindspot in the structure of representation (Žižek 1999). The paradox of the subject certainly infuses Lacan’s thought; the concept of structure cannot function without it. As to whether his thought contains a point of excess that may bring something other than the subject to bear upon these discussions, this is a question we must postpone until our final section. The attention to the realm of language and the ontological status of the subject continues in the writings of Derrida, although here there is no attempt to establish a theory of the subject. Whilst Derrida’s early works are

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written against the backdrop of structuralism, as indicated in so many of his interviews, his approach does not fit easily into an anti-humanist position. As we have observed already, such a dichotomy is an unhelpful one because such a principle of reversal: either constitutive origin or determined effect, cannot adequately recognise that the continued relevance of the subject does not issue in its delayed return or resurrection. Deconstruction does not simply break with the discourse of the subject but instead tries to locate and scrutinise that which remains excluded in the construction of the subject. Through its vigilant readings and critiques, deconstruction seeks to undo forms of discourse that centre the subject in relation to knowledge using the metaphysical qualities of self-presence, transparency and identity to confirm its authorship. Such representational thinking is built on the suppression of difference and alterity. Derrida calls this passing over or masking of difference the movement of différance understood as the condition for the possibility of every sign and meaning, every subject and movement of history. It is, he writes, ‘the nonfull, nonsimple, structured and differentiating origin of differences’ (Derrida 1982: 11). It envelops the subject, forever preventing and stalling its attempts to become a subject and ensuring that the moment of closure or containment of subjectivity (as ego, as subjectum) never quite arrives. In this way, the deconstruction of the subject recognises that the subject’s condition of possibility is also the condition of its impossibility. A paradox thus lies at the heart of the subject: the gesture that summons it into existence is also the one that establishes its eccentric existence (see Williams 2001). The subject only persists through a certain ceasing to be. Derrida departs from structuralism in his insistence that ‘structures are to be undone, decomposed, de-sedimented’ and their logic reconsidered in terms of how such an ensemble can be constituted (Derrida 1985: 278). He thus deconstructs structuralism’s ‘nostalgia for origins, … desire for a centre’ instead affirming a free play of structure that ‘passes beyond man and humanism’ (Derrida 1978: 249, 264). But deconstruction operates upon the infra-structure of metaphysics and cannot extricate itself from its conceptual edifice. In this sense, the condition of the paradox we have theorised in relation to the subject is wholly inevitable for deconstruction: Operating necessarily from the inside, borrowing all the strategic and economic resources of subversion from the old structure, borrowing them structurally, that is to say without being able to isolate their elements and their atoms, the enterprise of deconstruction always in a certain way falls prey to its own work. (Derrida 1981: 24, emphasis added)

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Derrida calls this the doublebind, the permanent risk of being inside and outside the metaphysical tradition that must be permanently negotiated. We might argue that the condition of this doublebind infests the positions of both Althusser and Lacan, the former in his desire to establish a pure science for Marxism freed from the impurities of ideology, and the latter in his effort to describe the dimensions of subjectivity across the three registers of its structural existence: symbolic, imaginary and real. Although both endeavour to escape it with more open structuring moments (overdetermination, the real) the status of the risk described above remains nonetheless. The paradox at the heart of the subject can now be expressed more clearly. On the one hand, contemporary theorists of subjectivity wish to undermine, displace and deconstruct the subject and, on the other hand, attend to its insistence and ineluctability to reconfigure it in some way. Such a paradox must not, however, be confused with the desire on the part of the human sciences to discover and name the innermost recesses of subjectivity and hence restore its centrality and its stability. Such an epistemological project is doomed from the start, as Michel Foucault reminds us in The Order of Things, with the image of the subject as an empirico-transcendental doublet (at once an empirical subject and a transcendental object of knowledge) trying to gain self-knowledge when its stability and self-certainty are open to question (see Foucault 1970). Are we to understand all the strategies to (dis)locate and (de)construct the subject advanced by the human sciences as merely attempts to fill out the subject to a state of plenitude of meaning once again? Are all reflections on the subject to founder and fall back upon this kind of metaphysical subjectivism? In the case of the writings of Foucault, the answer must be a resounding ‘no’. As with Derrida’s strategic questioning of the constitutive power of the subject, we do not receive any clear solutions. In his early archaeological analyses, Foucault describes an anonymous structure of discourse where the rules governing statements create the conditions for sense and impose certain limits on speech, thought and action. Nonetheless, if (following structuralism) the subject here becomes an effect of discourse, it is not wholly determined. Instead, a struggle for subjectification occurs, and the subject must be made to occupy and function according to these discursive rules. The body must inscribe within itself the principle of subjection. As Foucault’s writings change their emphasis to a genealogical analysis of the body and power, subjection takes the form of a struggle where resistance and transgression accompany the hollowing out of an interiority, and may also be a site of transformation and possibility: a becoming other of the subject (Foucault 2005; Deleuze 1988). Indeed, whilst Foucault may take

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the principle of subjection to its limit-point, in his later work he does pay considerable attention to the different ways in which the history of norms has produced the subject and shaped its ethical conduct. Like power, ethical practices create modes of subjectivation wherein new formations of subjectivity may be stylised. There is, therefore, no form of power without the complement of a retroactive freedom that produces a surplus of subjectivity, a force of being as desire, as resistance, in the folds or margins of power/ freedom. Like Derrida, Foucault offers us no theory of the subject. Neither constitutive nor constituted and without the power of determination, the subject is that not quite determined effect of discourse, structure and power. In this way, what we might still today continue to call the subject must live out this paradox or vacillation within and outside the moorings of power; a paradox that takes the place of its own constitutive power.

Conclusion This chapter has traced the dynamic intersection of subject and structure in a range of (post)structuralist positions. It has been observed throughout this discussion that the concepts of subject and structure are inseparable. We began by questioning the conceptual utility of the concept of the subject today, and asking how one might, in the wake of poststructuralism, think the space of the subject anew. We need finally to broach this question once again. We have also noted the grammatical ambiguities inherent in the idiom of subjectivity, where the many derivations of its possible meaning (particularly as subjectum and subjectus) contribute to the paradox haunting its multiple configurations. Indeed, I have argued here that the subject persisting within all the positions considered above (and, of course, there are many others that are not considered) is at once decentred and rendered an effect; clearly, it is a subject that persists only through a certain ceasing to be a substantial unity with a sustained essence and identity. As an unresolved potentia (of desire, force, affect), perhaps something altogether different may be seen to open up alongside or outside the concept of the subject. It is this, I argue, that allows one to think the space of subjectivity anew. Whilst we must remain vigilant regarding the risks attendant in the grammar of the subject – as well as the theoretical cul-de-sac one reaches when all powers of determination are merely transferred to another structure lying behind or outside the subject – the present philosophical and political utility of the subject may not be doubted and is evidenced in many contemporary works. We have already identified the beginnings of such a preoccupation with the space of subjectivity in the later writings of Althusser. In conclusion, I

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would like to take up and push further his formulations (see also Williams 2012). Together with Spinoza, Althusser was concerned with the production of the subject: how the subject was constituted and how forms of individuality were composed and preserved over time. Indeed, when Althusser writes repeatedly of the idea of a process without a subject, and with no assignable end, he has in mind an ontology where the conditionality and singularity of the subject emerges via an aleatory, quasi-anonymous process. Writing about the same problem in Spinoza, Balibar similarly notes that it is the regard for a process of consciousness without a subject that makes it impossible to speak of the subject in Spinoza (Balibar 1992: 50). I have elsewhere proposed that Spinoza’s conceptions of affect (as both a power to affect and be affected) and conatus (as a generative, yet fractural force pulsating through all living forms) be understood as processes without a subject (Williams 2010). Such a perspective considers affect as an impersonal force that overflows the subject, passing through, between and beyond the subjects who remain to all intents and purposes its effects. This force field can only be explored through a relational ontology that recognises the transindividual structure through which subjects are produced. This structure works also to twist and unravel that which it produces, such that the subject is a doubly inscribed register of being, perpetually deconstituted and reconfigured by the encounters and practices (be they material, semiotic, ethico-political) that surround it (see Williams 2010: 257, 2012). Here the distance between Althusser and Foucault is not that great, especially when one considers their reflections on the state of the subject with, and through, Spinoza. What we find in such reconfigurations of the subject is a novel formalisation of the concept of subjectivity without the subject, where that which we may retrospectively think of as the subject emerges only in and through the process that permits its circulation.

References Althusser, Louis (1973), Essays in Self-Criticism, trans. Graham Lock, London: New Left Books. Althusser, Louis (1984), Essays in Ideology, trans. Ben Brewster, London: Verso. Althusser, Louis (1996), Writings on Psychoanalysis, ed. Oliver Corpet and François Matheron, New York, NY: Comumbia University Press. Althusser, Louis (1997a), The Spectre of Hegel: Early Writings, ed. François Matheron, London: Verso. Althusser, Louis (1997b), ‘The only materialist tradition, Part 1: Spinoza’, in W. Montag and T. Stolze (eds), The New Spinoza, Minneapolis, MN: Minnesota University Press.

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Althusser, Louis (2003), Philosophy of the Encounter: Later Writings, 1978–1987, ed. François Matheron and Loiver Corpet, London: Verso. Balibar, Étienne (1992), ‘A note on “Consciousness/Conscience” in the Ethics’, Studia Spinozana, 8, 37–53. Balibar, Étienne (1997), ‘Spinoza: from individuality to transindividuality’, Mededelingen vanwege het Spinozahauis, Delft: Eburon. Balibar, Étienne (2003), ‘Structuralism: a destitution of the subject’, Differences, 14: 1, 1–21. Balibar, Étienne, Barbara Cassin and Alain de Libera (2006), ‘Subject’, Radical Philosophy, 138, 15–41. Baugh, Bruce (2003), French Hegel, London: Routledge. Butler, Judith (1997), The Psychic Life of Power: Theories of Subjection, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Butler, Judith (1999), Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth century France, 2nd edn, New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Deleuze, Gilles (1988), Foucault, trans. Sean Hand, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Deleuze, Gilles (2004), ‘How do we recognize structuralism?’, in Desert Islands and Other Texts 1953–74, trans. M. Taormina, New York, NY: Semiotext(e). Derrida, Jacques (1978), Writing and Difference, London: Routledge. Derrida, Jacques (1981), Positions, London: Athlone Press. Derrida, Jacques (1982), Margins of Philosophy, Brighton: Harvester Press. Derrida, Jacques (1985), ‘Letter to a Japanese friend’, in David Wood and Robert Bernasconi (eds), Derrida and Différance, Coventry, Paraousia Press. Derrida, Jacques (1995), ‘For the love of Lacan’, Cardozo Law Review, 16: 3–4, 699–728. Foucault, Michel (1970), The Order of Things, London: Tavistock. Foucault, Michel (1987), ‘Maurice Blanchot: the thought of the outside’, in Foucault/Blanchot, New York, NY: Zone Books. Foucault, Michel (2005), The Hermeneutics of the Subject: Lectures at the Collège de France 1981–82, New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan. Foucault, Michel (2008), The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France 1978–79, New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan. Foucault, Michel (2010), The Government of Self and Others: Lectures at the Collège de France 1982–83, New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan. Gutting, Gary (2001), French Philosophy in the Twentieth Century, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gutting, Gary (2011), Thinking the Impossible: French Philosophy Since 1960, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri (2005), Multitude, London: Penguin. Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri (2009), Commonwealth, Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University. Hyppolite, Jean (1974), Genesis and Structure in Hegel’s Phenomenology, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.

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Hyppolite, Jean (1997), Logic and Existence, Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Kojève, Alexander (1980), Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, trans. J. Nichols, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Lacan, Jacques (1977), Ecrits: A Selection, trans. A. Sheridan, ed. J. A. Miller, London: Routledge. Lacan, Jacques (1986), Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, trans. Alan Sheridan, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Lacan, Jacques (1988), The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book II: The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis 1954–55, trans. S. Tomaselli, ed. J. A. Miller, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lawlor, Leonard (2003), Thinking Through French Philosophy, Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press. Lawlor, Leonard (2006), The Implications of Immanence: Toward a New Concept of Life, New York, NY: Fordham University Press. Nancy, Jean-Luc and Phillipe Lacoue-Labarthe (1992), The Title of the Letter: A Reading of Lacan, trans. F. Raffoul, New York, NY: State University of New York Press. Ricoeur, Paul (1974), The Conflict of Interpretations: Essays in Hermeneutics, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Roth, Philip (1988), Knowing and History: Appropriations of Hegel in Twentieth Century France, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Williams, Caroline (2001), Contemporary French Philosophy: Modernity and the Persistence of the Subject, London: Continuum. Williams, Caroline (2010), ‘Affective processes without a subject’, Subjectivity, 3: 3, 245–62. Williams, Caroline (2012), ‘ “Subjectivity without the subject”: thinking beyond the Subject with/through Spinoza’, in Beth Lord (ed.), Spinoza beyond Philosophy, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Žižek, Slavoj (1999), The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology, London, Verso.

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Chapter 9 H ow d o we Re c o g n i s e t h e S u b j e c t ? Nathan Widder

t H e m e s : s t ru c t u r e a n d s u b j e c t recognising tHe subject

The question of the subject remains both central and contentious in poststructuralist thought, despite – or perhaps in accordance with – the poststructuralist declaration of the subject’s death. The issue primarily concerns where a revised notion of the subject will be positioned and what role it will take in relation to concepts of meaning, agency, thinking and politics. The matter, however, is not usually posed in this way, as many thinkers who broadly fall within poststructuralist circles have instead framed the question of the subject as a debate between those who would retain it and those who would throw away it. Slavoj Žižek, for example, proclaims himself to be one of today’s ‘partisans of the Cartesian subjectivity’ (Žižek 1999: 2), maintaining that unless a ‘unique scene of the Self ’ is established and affirmed, the self will be reduced to ‘a pandemonium of competing forces’ (1) and the subject will be replaced by nothing more than ‘multiple subject-positions and subjectivizations’ (2). Along similar lines, Ernesto Laclau contends that ‘if the subject was a mere subject position within the structure [of relations that constitute the subject’s identity], the latter would be fully closed and there would be no contingency at all’ (Laclau 1996: 92); Laclau thus maintains that ‘the subject, who can only exist as a will transcending the structure’ (92), is a necessary condition for change, and particularly for political change. The implication of such views, of course, is that others have incoherently and foolishly either reduced the subject to a linguistic effect or abandoned the notion altogether. Rarely, however, do those who frame the debate in this way identify these incoherent others and offer much in the way of a convincing reading of their work. The subject may be loosely defined in terms of a being whose relationto-self is sufficient for it to recognise and represent – or, perhaps better, to ‘re-cognise’ and ‘re-present’ – itself as a unified point of reference in relation to its agency. The subject is the ‘I am I’ that figures as the cause of

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action, even while it may also be subjected to the forceful action of external agencies, thereby being both a free and a subjected subject. The subject can be conceived on Cartesian terms as a being that attains self-certainty through a process of doubting, or on Hegelian terms as a being that attains self-certainty through the recognition of another subject who is recognised in turn. It can also be located in the unconscious, perhaps taking the form of an unconscious subject of desire that subverts the actions the conscious self thinks it intends.1 And it can obviously be related to the structure of language, as it has been in much twentieth-century thought, in so far as a language user becomes a subject by assuming the position of an ‘I’ who states facts, articulates concepts and expresses feelings, emotions and beliefs. All this, however, only begs the question of the subject’s relation to the agency associated with it. The displacement of the subject in twentiethcentury thought indicates that it cannot be presumed to be a straightforward ‘doer behind the deed’. Nevertheless, is some form of subjective unity a precondition for the coherence of action, even if this coherence is not consciously recognised? Or is the subject simply a frequent accompaniment to an agency whose coherence and efficacy are achieved elsewhere, in something that, in Foucault’s terms, is ‘both intentional and nonsubjective’ (Foucault 1990: 94)? At stake in this distinction is the way the self as a political, ethical and micropolitical entity can be understood. The first position seems very much to be that expressed by Žižek, Laclau and others who emphasise the subject’s displacement but who admonish any perceived failure to appreciate its necessity. It should not be surprising that the establishment, at both individual and collective levels, of a never fully stable form of the subject, and the negotiation of its inevitable failure, are taken by these theorists to be central political tasks. In contrast, the second position finds expression in Deleuze and Guattari’s goal of reaching ‘not the point where one no longer says I, but the point where it is no longer of any importance whether one says I’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 3). This is the point, they maintain, where we ‘render imperceptible, not ourselves, but what makes us act, feel, and think’ (3). Acting, feeling, and thinking certainly exist, and through them forms of subjectivity are introduced into the world. But, for Deleuze and Guattari, despite being standard trademarks of the subject itself, these activities do not find their origin in such a being, but instead in something pre-individual and pre-subjective, something not re-cognisable. The subject, then, is an appearance that accompanies subjectivity without in any way being its cause or foundation. There is a great deal that must be unpacked in these different formulations of the subject. This chapter will attempt to do so by moving from

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an analysis of Lacan’s conception of the subject of lack to Deleuze and Guattari’s anti-Lacanian – but not necessarily anti-Lacan – conception of desiring-machines and the subject that emerges from them. It will conclude with a discussion of the place of the subject in Deleuze and Guattari’s idea of making oneself a ‘body without organs’, or BwO, drawing in part on Sartrean and Nietzschean ideas that are important influences for Deleuze. In proceeding along this path, I hope to make clear how a continuing centrality of the subject in certain strands of poststructuralist thought comes at the cost of excluding from consideration a molecular domain of possible transformation. But I also hope to show that the further displacement of the subject in a way that allows us to engage this domain does not amount to some foolhardy abandonment of the possibility of coherent agency, but instead allows us to consider agency in terms of its concrete multiplicity. In his 1967 essay, ‘How do we recognize structuralism’, a text that in many respects identifies not structuralism but poststructuralism, Deleuze writes: Structuralism is not at all a form of thought that suppresses the subject, but one that breaks it up and distributes it systematically, that contests the identity of the subject, that dissipates it and makes it shift from place to place, an always nomad subject, made of individuations, but impersonal ones, or of singularities, but pre-individual ones. (Deleuze 2004: 190) As will be seen, this nomadic subject is linked to an experimental form of politics, one that is often dismissed as an apolitical aestheticism from perspectives that pose an all-or-nothing alternative between the unity of the subject and a subject-less chaos. Like most all-or-nothing choices, however, this is a false one.

The Subject of Desire as Lack The Hegelian subject determines its self-consciousness through a movement of desire. Desire is negative relation to another, and the dialectic of the subject requires that desire assume two forms. Natural desire, associated with appetite, seeks to negate external objects by possessing, consuming or destroying them, reducing their independence to nothing. Human desire, on the contrary, is a desire for recognition, which can be achieved only through a self-negation that transforms the subject into an object of desire for another. This appears to entail a loss of subjectivity, but the way this selfnegation confirms self-consciousness’s value ultimately secures the subject for itself. In both cases, desire refers to something the subject finds lacking

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in itself, indicating that attainment of what is desired brings fulfilment or completion. Reconciliation between self and other through reciprocal recognition of self-conscious agency ensures for each being its identity and subjective certainty. In contrast, Lacan conceives desire as an irresolvable lack, one whose negativity surpasses that of natural appetite and the human demand for recognition but is nevertheless generated by the interplay of these dialectical forms. In the first place, he maintains, there is ‘a deviation of man’s needs due to the fact that he speaks: to the extent that his needs are subjected to demand, they come back to him in an alienated form’ (Lacan 2006: 579). When an infant cries out to be fed, or an adult states his needs in language, there is not only a call for these needs to be met, but a simultaneous demand for recognition and love from the other who is called. In this way, ‘demand in itself bears on something other than the satisfactions it calls for’ (579). Needs are particular, but demand splits off from need in so far as the latter must be articulated through language, which expresses meaning through signifiers that are general or universal and which the needy and demanding subject must take from others, since it does not invent language itself. As the particularity of its needs is negated, the subject is placed on the alien terrain of an Other, whose response to these demands then holds categorical significance: the mother confirms her absolute love by answering the infant’s needs, or her contempt by ignoring them, in either case expressing something beyond the situation itself, since her response does not convey love or hate at only this moment. ‘In this way’, Lacan argues, ‘demand annuls (aufhebt) the particularity of everything that can be granted, by transmuting it into a proof of love, and the very satisfactions demand obtains for need are debased (sich erniedrigt) to the point of being no more than the crushing brought on by the demand for love’ (580). Demand thereby ‘constitutes the Other as having the “privilege” of satisfying needs, that is, the power to deprive them of what alone can satisfy them’ (580). It projects a ‘phantom of Omnipotence’ (689) onto the Other who provides or withholds love, which in turn necessitates that the Other’s caprice must ‘be bridled by the Law’ (689). But the seemingly cancelled particularity of need, the element of need that could not be wrapped into the universality of the language required to communicate it, returns as a residue of desire ‘beyond demand’ (Lacan 2006: 580) through the fact that no particular gift of love can meet demand’s requirement for unconditionality. Even when the subject receives everything it needs and demands, it continues to feel lacking, which indicates to it that something has been withheld. But this something, this objet a, must remain

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nameless – and in this way it is more than a particular thing – since the subject has already voiced everything it could articulate. Lacanian desire thus points to something that, unable to be expressed in language, must have been primordially excluded from it when the subject became a subject by stepping onto the Other’s terrain: ‘What is thus alienated in needs constitutes an Uverdrängung [primal repression], as it cannot, hypothetically, be articulated in demand’ (579). Desire is thus rendered infinite, as the object that would quench its thirst cannot be located. But the effect of this quandary is not simply to leave the subject forever incomplete. Rather, the place of its constitution, already alien to it, is also subverted. That an objet a is withheld from the subject suggests that it is desired and enjoyed by another. But this cannot be the Other to whom demands are made; it must instead be an Other who exercises a power of prohibition. The terrain on which the infant finds itself thus shifts from that of the mother who provides or withholds love to that of the father who intervenes in the mother-child relationship. The infant’s subjectivity is thereby constituted through the prohibition of a paternal Law that undercuts the recognition that would give the subject the validation it seeks. By a reversal that is not simply a negation of the negation, the power of pure loss emerges from the residue of an obliteration. For the unconditionality of demand, desire substitutes the ‘absolute’ condition: this condition in fact dissolves the element in the proof of love that rebels against the satisfaction of need. This is why desire is neither the appetite for satisfaction nor the demand for love, but the difference that results from the subtraction of the first from the second, the very phenomenon of their splitting (Spaltung). (Lacan 2006: 580) In so far as it depends on its relations to others, the subject is constituted as an incomplete and lacking being. But while a dialectical reconciliation between the subject and its others might seem conceivable, leading to ‘a subject finalized in his self-identity’ (675), this possibility is foreclosed by a more fundamental relation to an enigmatic Other, ‘an alterity raised to the second power’ (436), to whom the subject attributes the enjoyment (jouissance) proscribed to it, and who, not recognising the subject, remains alien to the subject in turn. Furthermore, due to the link between subjectivity and language, this alien force is also embedded in the linguistic structure, such that, as the subject comes into being as an ‘I’ who speaks through signs, it encounters a mysterious power that Lacan associates with the phallus – a linguistic signifier not to be confused with a phantasy, whose place is the

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Imaginary and which is characterised by unity; nor with an object, which could be good, bad, partial or complete, but which in any event tends towards being conceived as an object of reality; and certainly not with the penis, which at best is only symbolised by the phallus (579). The phallus, Lacan maintains, is a ‘Master Signifier’ that cannot be associated with any signified, assuming instead a place as a transcendent Other whose power makes itself felt in all the signifiers used to designate the identities of subjects and object, marking them with a lack that cannot be represented or resolved. This subject of lack is also a subject of trauma, one that comes into being carrying an inexpressible and inescapable sense of loss. Trauma implies an original unity that has been broken, which suggests that the subject once had something now gone. But since the unity is imaginary and never actually existed, the missing object that would return the subject to its former wholeness is unrecoverable. The subject is thus compelled to seek this impossible lost object beyond every demand, or to appeal to the authority that seems to take this object as its own desire. The result is a series of repetitions in which the subject attempts to secure its identity: repetitions of love, where the subject seeks another who can complete it, but this fails each time because no particular other can substitute for ‘the part of himself, lost forever, that is constituted by the fact that he is only a sexed living being, and that he is no longer immortal’ (Lacan 1981: 205); and sadomasochistic repetitions of self-negation, where the subject prostrates itself before the Other in the hope of receiving acknowledgement and recognition, of becoming the objet a enjoyed by the Other. In this way, Lacan establishes a coherence to the subject’s agency in the form of a desire that always drives it towards a unity that it can never reach. The agency of the self refers back to this desiring subject, which displaces the subject from the place of self-conscious awareness it holds in the Cartesian process of doubt and the Hegelian dialectic of recognition, but the subject as an unconscious doer behind the deed remains. Lacan thus declares that ‘Freud’s discovery was to demonstrate that this verifying process authentically reaches the subject only by decentering him from self-consciousness, to which he was confined by Hegel’s construction of the phenomenology of mind’ (Lacan 2006: 241), and that in his own use of the term he designates ‘the Cartesian subject, who appears at the moment when doubt is recognized as certainty – except that, through my approach, the bases of this subject prove to be wider, but, at the same time much more amenable to the certainty that eludes it. This is what the unconscious is’ (Lacan 1981: 126). Lacan’s commitment to some form of the subject is obvious. But the limitations of his account become apparent when turning to the relation between

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desire and the drives. It should be noted that the agency implied by the two concepts is completely different: desire centres agency in the subject – ‘I desire a lost object’; but with the drives this is inverted – ‘I was driven to the object, driven to desire it’. Freud famously declares that drives are ‘mythical entities, magnificent in their indefiniteness’ (Freud 1965: 95). But Lacan notes that in an earlier text, ‘Freud uses the word Konvention, convention, which is much closer to what we are talking about’ (Lacan 1981: 163).2 Drives are the conventions attributed to observable phenomena in order to account for what cannot be explained by the observable evidence alone. In this regard, they reveal the inadequacy of an account of the subject’s agency that is based on the way its desire is founded within language. For example, that the subject is compelled to chew – on a pen, on its fingernails, or whatever seems to be available – cannot be explained by need, demand or the desire that emerges from their interplay, but instead must be attributed to an ever-present oral drive. Of course, this drive can also be satisfied by chewing food, but precisely because food is not a required object for the drive, no lack within the subject can explain this observed behaviour; instead, there must be an active force within the organism that is indifferent to the object on which it acts. Lacan frequently points out that the usual translation of Freud’s Trieb as ‘instinct’ gives it the misleading sense of its being purposeful. ‘Drive’, he maintains, is not ‘thrust’ (Lacan 1981: 162), although thrust, understood as ‘a mere tendency to discharge’ (163) is a central quality of drive. But thrust is not kinetic – ‘it is not a question of something that will be regulated with movement’ (165) – as this would imply a temporary phenomenon, an energy that is used up, whereas drive’s force remains constant. Lacan thus maintains that Freudian drives operate on ‘the terrain of … a potential energy’ (164), and that, through their discharges, they invest themselves onto objects. Tendencies to discharge are engendered by the inequalities of the plane, as transmissions across it create potential differences of energy that function as stimuli or excitations (163). As these stimuli are immanent to the energetic plane, they do not refer to the objects that receive investment, and so they are not linked to need: ‘there is absolutely no question in Trieb of the pressure of a need such as Hunger or Durst, thirst’ (164). Just as Freud defines pleasure in terms of discharges that decrease the tension within the organism, meaning that the pleasure principle operates regardless of whether drives attain their objects or achieve their aims, so Lacan states: ‘Even when you stuff the mouth – the mouth that opens in the register of the drive – it is not the food that satisfies it, it is, as one says, the pleasure of the mouth’ (167). While this investment is not kinetic, it does involve the drive’s energy following the

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path of a circuit, a ‘movement outwards and back in which it is structured’ (177). A drive’s thrust takes it around its object and ‘plays a trick’ on its object,3 which it does not necessarily absorb or capture. The drives within the subject, Lacan notes, achieve satisfaction simply with discharge, but the subject itself does not. As a consequence, ‘something new comes into play – the category of the impossible’ (Lacan 1981: 166), which ‘is so present in it [the pleasure principle] that it is never recognized in it as such’ (167). This impossibility accounts for the way drives remain indifferent to their objects or investments and why these investments shift, because it indicates that the object onto which the drives cathect is not an object of need, and so ‘its function as object … is to be revised in its entirety’ (168). In so far as impossibility pervades the pleasure principle, any object of need at which the drives are aimed is at the same time the ‘objet a cause of desire’, which takes ‘its place in the satisfaction of the drive’ (168). A drive, Lacan concludes, is thus satisfied to the extent that any object, whatever it is, successfully substitutes itself for the impossible object, the drive thereby circling around and ‘tricking’ both the object and itself: ‘The objet petit a is not the origin of the oral drive. It is not introduced as the original food, it is introduced from the fact that no food will ever satisfy the oral drive, except by circumventing the eternally lacking object’ (180). Desire, however, must attain its object to be fulfilled, and even while the drives are successfully discharged, the desiring subject remains lacking. Desire is thus forced to shift accordingly, and the drives follow these shifts in such a way that at every stage of development – from the oral to the anal and finally to the genital phase, an order that for Freud governs the emergence of sexuality as an independent drive – the drives are directed by the subject’s relation to the Other’s prohibitions. They are oriented ‘by the intervention of something that does not belong to the field of the drive – by the intervention, the overthrow, of the demand of the Other’ (180). However, it is clear that there is no necessity to this explanation of the drives’ indifference to their objects. Indeed, all that is implied by the idea of drives as discharges on a field of potential energy is that when a discharge occurs it must be onto some object, just as when lightning strikes it must go somewhere, such as from cloud to ground or to another cloud. Moreover, since the objet a arises only with the subject’s entry onto language, it is clearly extraneous to the drives’ general operation, which is pre-subjective. The vicissitudes or vacillations of the drives thus have no necessary relation to the desiring subject, a fact that Lacan admits when he says that the drive manifests itself in ‘the mode of a headless subject, for everything is articulated in it in terms of tension, and has no relation to the subject other than

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one of topological community’ (Lacan 1981: 181). This lack of necessary correspondence between the drives and the subject, however, reveals the true relation between desire and the drives: desire is a configuration of the drives, introduced for Lacan by a linguistic and thus social structure; Lacanian desire organises drives around a non-dialectical or extra-dialectical lack in accordance with the subject constituted by its search for a lost object. While the drives remain indifferent to how, if at all, they are organised, the subject, the ‘I’ who desires, would fall apart without a careful arrangement that forced a correspondence between the drives and desire. It is thus necessary that the drives are made to circulate in accordance with the unconscious, which, structured like a language, is ‘situated in the gaps that the distribution of the signifying investments sets up in the subject’ (181). Drives flow around the lacks that structure the subject’s unconscious, and the subject is thereby driven to that which it also desires. But this correspondence cannot be anything more than a contingent arrangement. Even where this convergence of drives and desire takes place, it is clear that the Lacanian subject does not actually ‘stand behind’ anything. It is not a foundation – even an only partially stable one – for the coherence of action; nor is it an effect or expression of such coherence or of any real unity. It simply marks the location where forceful drives meet and interact with social forces that appropriate them in a certain way to organise them around lack. Moreover, as indicated by Lacan’s own account of language, this lack, and thus the agency that would be attributed to an unconscious subject, is introduced entirely from the social side of this forceful interaction. In this respect, Deleuze and Guattari’s position is perfectly consistent with Lacan’s when they maintain that lack is an effect rather than a foundation: ‘Lack … is created, planned, and organized in and through social production … It is never primary; production is never organized on the basis of a pre-existing need or lack’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 28). Desire as lack, they argue, does not emerge from the negative experience of need; rather, need is experienced in this way only after desire has been manoeuvred by social and economic forces into a search for lost fullness: ‘The deliberate creation of lack as a function of market economy is the art of a dominant class. This involves deliberately organizing wants and needs … amid an abundance of production; making all of desire teeter and fall victim to the great fear of not having one’s needs satisfied’ (28). Psychoanalysis thus errs by conceiving desire as necessarily taking the form of lack – as though this was not already a manipulation of both desire and drives – and reading all psychoanalytic symptoms through this lens (23–4). The error is carried forward by restricting the analysis of desire to the familial sphere through

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the triangular scheme of the Oedipus complex, when this family structure is in reality only a reflection of wider social structures and powers. This, in turn, indicates psychoanalysis’s failure to contextualise its own analysis and thereby recognise the historical specificity that connects the Oedipal orientation of desire around an unnameable lack to a distinctly modern social form. In this way, Deleuze and Guattari maintain, it becomes complicit in the replication of this form, which it purports to criticise: ‘psychoanalysts are bent on producing man abstractly, that is to say ideologically, for culture’ (108). It is not Oedipus and the family that explain the social, but the reverse. A detailed account of Deleuze and Guattari’s genealogy of social forms is beyond the scope of this chapter. Instead, the next section will focus on the way desire and drives are conceived when they are no longer overlaid with the structure of lack. As will be seen, a form of the subject still emerges, but as an accompaniment to organisation of drives that neither causes nor expresses their coherence, since their coherence does not take the form of a unity. This does not necessarily mean the subject is something dispensable, but, as will be seen, this change in the subject’s status shifts the thrust of any politics and ethics that follow from it.

Desiring-production and Desiring-machines Freud maintains that a multiplicity of drives compels the living organism in divergent directions. That the self is driven in a single overall direction, therefore, indicates that a particular drive or formation of drives is powerful enough to carry the rest along with it, and this, in turn, implies a synthesis of these divergent impulses. If I am driven to chew on my pen, it is only in so far as the strife and resistance of other compulsions is overcome, so that their energy is discharged in a way that does not disrupt my chewing or is co-opted into the chewing activity, resulting in this diversity of drives functioning as if with a singular intention. Deleuze and Guattari similarly conceive of the drives relating through a synthesis replete with frictions and resistances, and this organisation for them defines desire. They criticise a dominant Platonist tradition that ties desire to lack by placing it on the side of acquisition rather than production (Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 25), arguing that this misses desire’s productive and machinic character. Desire is a machine, in that it is ‘an agencement [assemblage] of heterogeneous elements that function’ (Deleuze 1997: 189). It is productive in a primary sense, meaning that desiring-production amounts to ‘the production of production’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 7), where no distinction is made between producing and product, and no telos is attributed to the process. To produce in this respect

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is ‘to rearrange fragments continually in new and different patterns or configurations; and as a consequence, [to have] an indifference toward the act of producing and toward the product, toward the set of instruments to be used and toward the over-all result to be achieved’ (7). Desiring-production is schizophrenic, not in the sense of being an escape from reality – the clinical diagnosis of schizophrenia as a mental disorder, and Deleuze and Guattari make clear that they are not glorifying schizophrenia as a mental illness, even if they take issue with psychoanalytic interpretations and treatments of the condition – but in its continual integration of seemingly incompatible elements. Understood simply as a drive to connect and synthesise, ‘desire “needs” very few things’ (27), and thus experiences no lack. Indeed, lack only characterises the state of a subject that, having withdrawn from itself, has lost its desire (27). Desiring-machines are non-subjective, and so the central question when examining them is not what desire seeks or means (the psychoanalyst’s question), nor what function it serves (the ethnologist’s question), but simply how it works (180–1). Constructed from fragmented and diverse drives or impulses, ‘desiringmachines work only when they break down, and by continually breaking down’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 8). Deleuze and Guattari identify three syntheses that together constitute machinic desire: connective, disjunctive and conjunctive.4 They do not follow one another chronologically, but rather express three different dimensions of a complex process that takes place continually. The first synthesis joins heterogeneities, constituting the machine and its functioning. However, ‘produced, at a certain place and a certain time in the connective synthesis’ (8) is a ‘body without organs’, which carries out the second synthesis. In so far as production is defined by connection, the body without organs emerges as ‘an element of antiproduction’ (8) within the productive process. It expresses the friction or knot of resistance within the desiring-machine, the way that, through the strife implied by the diversity of its impulses, it ‘suffers from being organized in this way, from not having some other sort of organization, or no organization at all’ (8). The body without organs thus repels the connected fragments, and in this way it effects their disjoining in such a way that they never harmonise entirely with one another. Desiring-machines can operate only because of this tension between the body without organs and the components connected through it: ‘Repulsion is the condition of the machine’s functioning, but attraction is the functioning itself. That the functioning depends on repulsion is clear to us, inasmuch as it all works only by breaking down’ (329–30). Finally, the third, conjunctive synthesis gives rise to a form of the subject. This is not a subject of lack, nor one of resolved identity, but a

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schizophrenic and nomadic subject without a stable identity. Deleuze and Guattari maintain that the strife between the drives’ connectivity and the body without organ’s force of repulsion is ultimately reconciled in the unconscious through the production of ‘intensive quantities’ that this subject ‘consumes’. These intensities amount to different tendencies towards which unconscious desiring-machines compel the self in accordance with the strength and ascendency of particular drives – a dominance that can always only be temporary, so that the self may later be driven in some other direction. In this way, the opposition of the forces of attraction and repulsion produces an open series of intensive elements, all of them positive, that are never an expression of the final equilibrium of a system, but consist, rather, of an unlimited number of stationary, metastable states through which a subject passes. (Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 19) These states can be associated with ‘personages’ or ‘dramatisations’ with which the subject identifies itself. The subject in no way chooses these states or personages, but appears and is consummated by way of a becoming that drives it to them. In being so driven, the subject emerges as an ‘I’ that always recognises itself and its desire in the form of a retroactive declaration, ‘so that’s what it was’ or ‘so that’s what I desired’. Compelled to chew the end of my pen, for example, I find myself declaring ‘this is what I wanted to do; I am a chewing subject’, even though no ‘I’ was involved in this pre-personal, schizophrenic process. The subject thereby passes through intensities that resonate with one another in the unconscious. As Deleuze and Guattari write with respect to Klossowski’s analysis of Nietzsche: There is no Nietzsche-the-self, professor of philology, who suddenly loses his mind and supposedly identifies with all sorts of strange people; rather, there is the Nietzschean subject who passes through a series of states, and who identifies these states with the names of history: ‘every name in history is I …’ The subject spreads itself out along the entire circumference of the circle, the center of which has been abandoned by the ego. At the center is the desiring-machine, the celibate machine of the Eternal Return … It is not a matter of identifying with various historical personages, but rather identifying the names of history with zones of intensity on the body without organs; and each time Nietzsche-as-subject exclaims: ‘They’re me! So it’s me!’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 21).

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What characterises these syntheses and the open structure of intensities engendered by them is that they are inclusive, not in the sense of establishing some sort of unity among diverse drives and states, but rather because the unconscious includes within it incompatible and incommensurable tendencies and personages, which in no way amount to fixed markers or identities. In contrast, psychoanalysis consistently overlays this field with exclusive forms of these same syntheses, thereby introducing specific types and meanings into an unconscious realm that is properly evaluated only in terms of the way it works. Unconscious personages, for example, are taken to be representations of the parents, and desire is interpreted accordingly: ‘So it was your father, so it was your mother’ (101). The desiring-machine’s drive to establish connections is thus construed as incestuous desire for the mother, even though in this realm ‘one would look in vain for persons or even functions discernible as father, mother, son, sister, etc., since these names only designate intensive variations’ (162). Thus the unconscious is reconfigured according to the kind of meaningful signifiers that imply an excessive or nameless lack, giving birth to the subject of desire as lack. Ironically, psychoanalysis discovers an Oedipal desire that must be repressed in order to constitute the subject only by first repressing the productivity of desiring-machines and the nomadic subjectivity that accompanies them. Distinct identities and persons certainly come to exist, but they are products of a social production that infiltrates unconscious processes from the outside. Deleuze and Guattari maintain that desiring-production and social production have the same nature – both are machinic – but inhabit different regimes, one microscopic or molecular and the other macroscopic or molar. The molecular is in no way individual in contrast to the molar being collective. Rather, molecular formations of desire are diffused throughout social formations, while the latter are the overall effects of these molecular dynamics. The two regimes are thus mutually imbricated – ‘everywhere there exist the molecular and the molar: their disjunction is a relation of included disjunction’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 340) – and in a relation of reciprocal determination. On the one hand, social machines are the direct products of the investments of desiring-machines. Deleuze and Guattari are rejecting Freud’s idea that desire is only invested in the social after it is repressed and sublimated, and thus maintain that ‘social production is purely and simply desiring-production itself under determinate conditions’ (29). This idea is central to Deleuze and Guattari’s thesis, inspired by Reich’s analysis of Nazism, that people were in no way duped into accepting fascism but actively desired it – desire came to desire its own repression. On the other hand, the molar social forms that emerge from desiring-production react

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back upon the molecular domain, bearing on desiring-machines in such a way as to direct their productive flows. In this way the social really does carry out a repressive function, but not in the way psychoanalysis conceives it. Social repression is not an exterior, non-desirous force that pushes desire into the unconscious, where it then returns through forms of displacement, transference, projection and fantasy. Repression does not suppress desire, but rather reconfigures it: ‘Repression cannot act without displacing desire, without giving rise to a consequent desire, all ready, all warm for punishment, and without putting this desire in the place of the antecedent desire on which repression comes to bear in principle or in reality’ (115). Social repression thus involves, for example, the channelling of drives into circulation around lacks and lost objects, thereby introducing them to a pattern of neurosis, or tying desire to subjectivity, to an ‘I’ who desires, by wrapping it into ‘collective and personal ends, goals or intentions’ (342). In such cases desire is lured into positions where it can be managed: ‘Oedipus is the baited image with which desire allows itself to be caught (That’s what you wanted! The decoded flows were incest!)’ (166), but at the same time this lure is a form of desire – ‘desire is that, too: a trap’ (166). Desire leads itself down ‘a path of resignation’ (60) in this way, but its ‘resignation-desires’ (62) nevertheless remain desires, even if they assume a negative or reactive form. At the level of molar social production, capitalism is characterised by an ‘axiomatic’ system that ‘deterritorializes’ and ‘decodes’ previous social forms by reducing qualitatively distinct values to quantitative exchange values and submitting them to the market. This shift has less to do with the development of technological productive forces – if that were the case, then one could rightly ask ‘why capitalism wasn’t born in China in the thirteenth century, when all the necessary scientific and technical conditions nevertheless seemed to be present’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 197) – than with a transformation of desire that renders it infinite by tying it to an endless search for profit. On a superficial level, it might seem that capitalism liberates desire from previous social forms that were organised around hierarchies of values and the prohibition of unacceptable desires. In reality, however, it remains antagonistic to desire at a fundamental level, threatened by the schizophrenic processes of desire that threaten to emerge from capitalism’s own market logic. The liberation that is achieved by capitalism would spin out of control unless a capitalist subject was in place that could be subjected to the disciplining and reterritorialisation of its desiring-machines. The family thus takes on a mission under capitalist social production ‘to produce neurotics by means of its Oedipalization, its system of impasses, its delegated psychic repression, without which social repression would

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never find docile and resigned subjects, and would not succeed in choking off the flows’ lines of escape’ (361). And the psychoanalytic profession is complicit with this mission. The neurotic is the politically harmless and, as a consumer ready to absorb all forms of excess production, highly useful form of deviance that capitalist society succeeds extremely well in producing. It is a resigned subject whose desire is structured around a nameless lack, and who can be manipulated in a perpetual search for fulfilment; but it is also the subject that has internalised a sense of guilt and consequently desires its own repression, welcoming this as something deserved. In these ways, it is wellprepared for the ‘freedom’ that capitalist society grants it, the true sense of this freedom being found in the absolute necessity given to this molecular repression: ‘Rather a society of neurotics than one successful schizophrenic who has not been made autistic’ (102).

The Place of the Subject Desire restored to its genuine creative power, Deleuze and Guattari declare, is the one true threat to capitalism: ‘we believe that capitalist society can endure many manifestations of interest, but not one manifestation of desire, which would be enough to make its fundamental structures explode, even at the kindergarten level’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 379). This restoration is a matter of releasing desire from the hierarchical stratifications that order it, of making ourselves, in Deleuze and Guattari’s terms, into a body without organs or BwO. At the level of the body, stratification comes from the organisation of the body and its organs into an organism that lives for specific functions and ends; at the level of the unconscious, stratification is carried out by the imposition of meaningful signification, grounded in a Master Signifier, onto unconscious processes; and at the level of consciousness it happens through processes of subjectification that embed a fictitious ego and an identity onto the self (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 159–60). The task of destratification is a collective one, since desire is a collective phenomenon whose molecular and molar levels are inseparable. It is also experimental and therefore potentially dangerous, which is why Deleuze and Guattari advise caution: ‘Not wisdom, caution. In doses. As a rule immanent to experimentation: injections of caution’ (150). Experiments with desire can easily be ‘botched’, leading on the one side to a cancerous or fascist BwO that clings resentfully and reactively to its stratifications, and on the other side to an empty ‘black hole’. Even though ‘dismantling the organism has never meant killing yourself, but rather opening the body to connections that presuppose an entire assemblage’ (160), many experiments ended badly ‘had emptied

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themselves of their organs instead of looking for the point at which they could patiently and momentarily dismantle the organization of the organs we call the organism’ (161). In the end, ‘staying stratified – organized, signified, subjected – is not the worst that can happen’ (161). Some may be understandably disappointed by the lack of specific guidelines provided for self-creation, though it is precisely because of the risks and uncertainties that surround making oneself a BwO that it is a political project. Nevertheless, an equally important question is whether the subject has a place within this endeavour. It might seem that only a subject able to reflect on itself and recognise its position in stratified relations could work to free itself from them, suggesting that subjectivity is the starting point for any such politics. Yet, as already seen, the subject is a paradigmatic form of stratification. Deleuze and Guattari contend that ‘revolutionaries often forget, or do not like to recognize, that one wants and makes revolution out of desire, not duty’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 344). The role the subject assumes for them in any revolutionary transformation must therefore be understood in light of the machinic agency of desire, rather than the reverse. Useful illumination can be found by turning to Sartre’s The Transcendence of the Ego (1957), an important if somewhat under-recognised source for both Deleuze and Guattari. In this early work, Sartre challenges the notion that the unity of consciousness requires an ‘I’ or ego standing behind it as a governing centre. Instead, following the basic phenomenological principle that consciousness must be consciousness of some object, he maintains that its unity comes from the syntheses that relate consciousness to objects and to past consciousnesses. In each case the ‘I’ is extraneous to these constitutive relations, leading Sartre to declare that it is a transcendent object: ‘the ego is neither formally nor materially in consciousness: it is outside, in the world. It is a being of the world, like the ego of another’ (31). As a result, he concludes, the transcendental conditions of consciousness – the conditions that ensure its agency – relate to an impersonal field of forces rather than a transcendental subject: ‘the transcendental field becomes impersonal; or, if you like, “pre-personal,” without an I’ (36). All this is evident in simple cases such as reading, where consciousness can be absorbed in its activity and aware only of itself and the book being read, with the ‘I’ appearing only when consciousness breaks from this immediacy, reflects on what it is doing as if it were an outside observer, and finds itself declaring ‘I am reading’ (Sartre 1957: 44–7). Sartre holds the ego to be a dubitable, but not a hypothetical object: ‘I do not say to myself, “Perhaps I have an ego,” as I may say to myself, “Perhaps I hate Peter” ’ (76). Undeniably, then, the ego exists in some respect. However, Sartre on

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two occasions explains its existence as that of a simulation: with respect to its agency, he holds that ‘we are dealing here with a semblance only’ (79), as consciousness alone has the capacity for genuine spontaneity; and with regards to its central function, he gives the ego a role of disguise, asserting that ‘everything happens … as if consciousness constituted the ego as a false representation of itself ’ (101), this disguise being necessary because consciousness can function only by masking from itself its own power and agency (100). Clearly the ego still frequently and persistently accompanies our actions. Sartre maintains that this is a matter of the way reflection is needed to sustain various forms of concrete, concerted agency: ‘we must not forget that action requires time to be accomplished. It has articulations; it has moments. To these moments correspond concrete, active consciousnesses, and the reflection which is directed on the consciousnesses apprehends the total action in an intuition which exhibits it as the transcendent unity of the active consciousnesses’ (Sartre 1957: 69). Many activities could not endure without the ‘I’, not because they require some chooser who stands apart from consciousness itself, but because they involve a relation-to-self that fosters the projection of a reference point that must appear as a centre of activity. A person who spends months or even years learning to dance, for example, changes continually throughout the process, as posture, footwork, rhythm and technique become intellectually and physically ingrained. In the end, it is not even the same person who has been taught. Nevertheless, the reflective self-to-self relation that is indispensable to the learning requires a conscious apprehension of the activity as ‘what I am doing’, even though this ‘I’ does not accomplish anything. ‘I’ did not learn to dance, because no ‘I’ persisted in the process, except as a reflection that accompanied the activity over time. While there are certainly differences between this image of a subject found in Sartrean conscious reflection and the nomadic subject arising from Deleuze and Guattari’s desiring-machines,5 both can be seen to play comparable roles in self-transformation. When Deleuze explains the process of transmutation that comes with the affirmation of Nietzsche’s eternal return, he holds that it requires a moment in which the self consolidates itself around an image of unity given to it as an ego ideal (Deleuze 1994: 110–11, 115), an image of the actor the self desires to be. This consolidation, however, is only a precondition for an event of overcoming in which any sense of the self ’s identity and subjectivity are dissolved (89–90). Nietzsche himself refers to the ‘I’, ego or subject as ‘a fiction’ (Nietzsche 1968: §370), ‘a perspective illusion’ (§518), ‘only a conceptual synthesis’ (§371), and the

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result of ‘our bad habit of taking a mnemonic, an abbreviative formula, to be an entity, finally as a cause’ (§548). It would seem clear, then, that when he formulates the eternal return as a matter of turning every ‘it was’ into ‘thus I willed it’, and finally into ‘thus I will its eternal return’, this ‘I’ is not actually carrying out any willing. This does not mean, however, that, like Sartre’s ego, it might not play a necessary role of disguise, precisely because ‘it could be useful and important for one’s activity to interpret oneself falsely’ (§492). The ‘I’ is in this way a necessary fiction adopted as a tool to help the self overcome its attachment to such an image. To affirm the eternal return is thus to use the image of the subject in order to dissolve it.6 In the same way, a self composed of multiple, heterogeneous desiring-machines may turn itself into a body without organs not by becoming a subject capable of resisting stratification – precisely because the subject is a stratification – but by using the semblance of a subject to move beyond it, thereby realising in action the multiplicity it already was. Does all this still not presuppose that the self must be really unified as a subject, at least temporarily, in order to choose to act this way? That question, for Deleuze and Guattari, forgets that revolutionary action, and indeed any action, is realised because it is desired, and not because it is chosen. Subjectivity is introduced into the world through pre-personal, machinic desire, rather than through a subject. And this is why the possibility for change is entirely dependent on the structure of individual and collective desiring-machines, on the quality and strength of their stratifications, and on the distribution of cracks that can open these formations to fundamental change. Some individuals or collectives may only have the capacities to change from one form of stratification to another, and may react to the possibility of destratification by clinging even more viciously to their stratifications. Regardless, what makes the ‘choice’ is not a subject but the body without organs, in so far as the form it takes determines the structure of desiring-machines that can operate through it, and thus what the self is able to do or become (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 165–6). The wager Deleuze and Guattari make here is that by working on our molecular constitution in certain ways, political necessities may follow. These necessities are best summed up by Foucault’s declaration that AntiOedipus is ‘an Introduction to the Non-Fascist Life’ (Foucault in Deleuze and Guattari 1983: xiii). A further part of this wager is that this work depends not on the category of the subject so much as on our capacity to move beyond the subject’s apparent foundational necessity. Or, put differently, it depends on the affirmation of a nomadic subjectivity open to being driven to experimentation and mutation. Only in this way, for Deleuze and Guattari,

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can pluralism be affirmed as a way of both individual and collective life. We must think beyond both the ‘death of the subject’ and the all-or-nothing alternatives posed by the political positions that still seek to reconstitute it.

Notes 1. Žižek illustrates this with the example of a victim of a swindle who is not actually deceived by the swindler but who instead, desiring a quick fortune through a semi-legal cheat, allows himself to be suckered. The victim’s subjectivity is confirmed precisely at the moment where it seems subverted, in so far as it was his own desire that did this to him and he has no one else to blame: ‘the subject, as it were, receives from the swindler his own message in its true/ inverted form – that is, he is not the victim of the external dark machinations of the true swindler but, rather, the victim of his own crookedness’ (1999: 75). 2. The earlier text is Freud (1957). 3. ‘The best formula seems to me to be the following – that la pulsion en fait le tour [the drive goes around it] … Tour is to be understood here with the ambiguity it possesses in French, both turn, the limit around which one turns, and trick’ (Lacan 1981: 168). 4. A trio of syntheses is common to Deleuze’s earlier solo writings, in particular Difference and Repetition (1994: ch. 2), which features three syntheses of time, and The Logic of Sense (1990: 47, 174–6, 231–2), whose syntheses have the same names as those of Anti-Oedipus, but in the order of connective, conjunctive and disjunctive. In all three cases, the subject is associated with a synthesis of conjunction. 5. Deleuze and Guattari declare that Sartre’s discovery of the impersonal transcendental field ‘restores the rights of immanence’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 47). Nevertheless, Deleuze holds that this achievement is limited in so far as ‘the impersonal transcendental field is still determined as the field of a consciousness, and as such it must then be unified by itself through a play of intentionalities or pure retentions’ (Deleuze 1990: 344 n5). Sartre’s focus on consciousness, for Deleuze, does not eliminate the subject but in fact serves to reinforce it by allowing Sartre in later works to treat the other that confronts consciousness as another subject (307, 344 n5, 366 n12). At the same time, Sartre consistently rejects the idea of a pre-personal unconscious, holding that its exponents do no more than posit an unconscious me that unifies states of mind with its own hidden forms of reflection (Sartre 1957: 55–6). This leaves Sartrean pre-personal consciousness to create itself ex nihilo spontaneously and at every moment. But this means that the unification can in no way be nomadic (Deleuze 1990: 102). 6. Sartre similarly says of consciousness’s agency when it is stripped of the ego: ‘This absolute consciousness, when it is purified of the I, no longer has anything of the subject. It is no longer a collection of representations. It is quite simply a first condition and an absolute source of existence’ (1957: 106).

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References Deleuze, Gilles (1990), The Logic of Sense, ed. Constantin V. Boundas, trans. Mark Lester with Charles Stivale, New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Deleuze, Gilles (1994), Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton, London: Athlone Press. Deleuze, Gilles (1997), ‘Desire and pleasure’, in Foucault and His Interlocutors, ed. Arnold I. Davidson, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, pp. 183–92. Deleuze, Gilles (2004), Desert Islands and Other Texts, 1953–1974, ed. David Lapoujade, trans. Michael Taormina, New York, NY: Semiotext(e). Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari (1983), Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem and Helen R. Lane, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari (1987), A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari (1994), What is Philosophy?, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell, New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Foucault, Michel (1990), The History of Sexuality, Volume One: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley, New York, NY: Vintage Books. Freud, Sigmund (1957), ‘Instincts and their vicissitudes’, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. and trans. James Strachey, 24 vols, London: Hogarth Press and Institute for Psycho-Analysis, vol. 14, pp. 109–40. Freud, Sigmund (1965), New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, trans. James Strachey, New York, NY: W. W. Norton. Lacan, Jacques (1981), The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, trans. Alan Sheridan, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, New York, NY: W. W. Norton. Lacan, Jacques (2006), Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English, trans. Bruce Fink, with Héloïse Fink and Russell Grigg, New York, NY: W. W. Norton. Laclau, Ernesto (1996), Emancipation(s), London: Verso. Nietzsche, Friedrich (1968), The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale, New York, NY: Vintage Books. Sartre, Jean-Paul (1957), The Transcendence of the Ego: An Existentialist Theory of Consciousness, trans. Forrest Williams and Robert Kirkpatrick, New York, NY: Noonday Press. Žižek, Slavoj (1999) The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology, London: Verso.

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Chapter 10 Fo u c a u l t : T h e C u l t u re o f S e l f, S u b j e c t iv i t y a n d Tr u t h - t e l l i n g P r a c t i c e s A. C. (Tina) Besley

t H e m e s : s t ru c t u r e a n d s u b j e c t f o u c au lt : t H e c u lt u r e o f s e l f

Introduction Western philosophy has had a continuous engagement with the problem of subjectivity and with the self as a locus of both consciousness and experience – a question that is deemed to be open to understanding, analysis and philosophical reflection – ever since the first moments of institutional philosophy in Ancient Greece. The notion of the self has been an object of inquiry, a problem and a locus for posing questions concerning knowledge, action and ethics since Antiquity. Plato and Aristotle in different ways inquired of the self in terms that we understand today as personhood and personal identity, viewing the self as an animated soul. This idea of self as a substance or form seemed dependent upon a unity that can act as a source of consciousness, memory and as a basis for self-knowledge. Following Descartes and Kant, the modern emphasis shifted to a thinking ‘I’ not only as a source of consciousness and representation but also ultimately as a source of all knowledge, action and ethics. Sometimes this tradition that has been taken up differently by different philosophers is referred to as the ‘philosophy of the subject’, where ‘subject’, at least in the pre-modern sense, refers to the political (or civic) domain of a reigning monarch and is anchored in a network of ‘rights’, ‘duties’, ‘responsibilities’ and ‘privileges’ that characterised the feudal relationship. The notion of the subject also prefigured the modern ‘citizen’, which as a concept finds its institutional origin in the Greek polis or city state and is intimately connected to the exercise of freedom and the pursuit of ‘well being’. These are themes taken up by Michel Foucault at different times through his life. Michel Foucault was continually at pains to avoid being labelled, yet his work clearly fits within French poststructuralist thought. In a 1983 interview

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with Gérard Raulet, ‘Structuralism and post-structuralism’, he states: ‘I have never been a Freudian, I have never been a Marxist, and I have never been a structuralist’ and then points out that his first book ‘Madness and Civilization, written between ’55 to ’60’ is none of these (Foucault 1998: 437). Nevertheless in the interview he elaborates the relationships between some of these movements in French intellectual thought and comments on some of the key people influencing them in something of a nod to his own thought. He states, for instance, that in 1953, reading Nietzsche was the point of rupture for me. There is a history of the subject just as there is a history of reason; but we can never demand that the history of reason unfold as a first and founding act of the rationalist subject. (Foucault 1998: 438) In a strong sense Foucault was articulating a historicist understanding of the subject that was shared by otherwise very different philosophies in postwar France including phenomenologists, existentialists, Marxists, other humanists, structuralists and poststructuralists, all of which increasingly began to understand the subject in its complex relation to history, culture and language, as one radically situated through the body and through a set of discursive and power relations. For Foucault, ‘knowledge, reason and rationality and the possibility of elaborating a history of rationality’ were the focus of his work at this point (Foucault 1998: 438) in so far as they indicated a genealogy of the subject. Moreover, he points out, everything that took place in the sixties arose from a dissatisfaction with the phenomenological theory of the subject, and involved different escapades, subterfuges, breakthroughs, according to whether we use a negative or a positive term, in the direction of linguistics, psychoanalysis or Nietzsche. (Foucault 1998: 438) In another interview, ‘An aesthetics of existence’ conducted by Allesandro Fontana in 1984, in response to the statement: ‘It is often said that there is no subject in Foucault’s work. Subjects are always subjugated; they are the point of application of techniques, normative disciplines, but they are never sovereign subjects’, Foucault replies: We have to make distinctions. In the first place, I don’t think there is actually a sovereign, founding subject, a universal form of subject that one could find everywhere. I am very skeptical and hostile toward this

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conception of the subject. I think in the contrary that the subject is constituted through practices of subjection, or, in a more anonymous way, through the practices of liberation, of freedom, as in Antiquity, starting of course from a certain number of rules, styles and conventions that are found in the culture. (Foucault 1989: 312–13). Foucault critiqued social institutions (psychiatry, prisons and the history of sexuality) and how they came into being, using genealogy, excavated subjugated knowledges about cultural practices and discourses, taking a historicist, contextualist stance. Foucault’s lectures at the Collège de France are currently being published as an ongoing series and have appeared in English only since 2005 when Society Must be Defended (Foucault 2005b) appeared. Frances Ewald and Alessandro Fontana, General Editors, state in their Foreword to Government of Self and Others that the lectures have their own status rather than being a sketch for different book projects. Foucault’s lectures ‘set out a program for a genealogy of knowledge/power relations, which are the terms in which he thinks his work from the beginning of the 1970s, as opposed to the program of an archaeology of discursive formations that previously oriented his work’ (Ewald and Fontana 2010: xiii). Foucault explored the theme of the culture of the self as a philosophical and historical question, and philosophy as an activity that taught about the care of the self.1 Foucault’s insights on subjectivity and truth formed the basis for investigating contemporary forms of truth-telling in the constitution of the educational subject. Combined with Foucault’s studies of governmentality this constitutes a general problematic for the investigation of new forms of subjectivity including ‘the entrepreneurial self ’ that has come to characterise neo-liberalism as a form of governmentality and the neo-liberal paradigm of educational policy. It is from this work that much of this chapter is derived.

Hermeneutics of the Self/Subjectivity In the latter part of his life Foucault focused on the more general problem of the historical form of the relations between ‘the subject and truth’ and how it took shape in the West. This concern was laid out most clearly in The Hermeneutics of the Subject: Lectures at the Collège de France 1981–1982 (Foucault 2005a). Foucault’s twenty-four, one-hour lectures explore the general problematic of subjectivity and truth based on a historical examination of the privileging of the Delphic precept ‘know yourself ’ (gnōthi seauton) over ‘care of the self ’ (epimeleia heaton). Here Foucault examines

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care of the self as a new theoretical point of departure interpreting Socrates as a master of care of the self. He also examines reasons for the elimination of care for the self in modern philosophy beginning with Descartes’s insistence on self-knowledge and the structure of the cogito. His work on care of the self is now tapped into by some scholars working in areas such as the ethics of care and the politics of care, in particular feminist comment and critiques (see Armstrong 2005; Noddings 2002, 2003). While his work has a mixed reception among feminists, those working from a poststructuralist perspective find his ideas, especially those around power, disciplinary technologies and the body and subjectivity to be useful. Judith Butler uses him to challenge aspects of how much of feminist identity politics holds to an essential, naturalised female identity. Nevertheless, many feminists remain committed ‘to some essential, liberatory subject rooted in “women’s experience” (or nature), as the starting point for emancipatory theory’ (Sawicki 1994: 289). It is helpful to see the Hermeneutics of the Subject lectures in conjunction with the series of thirteen courses he gave from 1970 to 1984. The first five courses reflected his early work on knowledge in the human sciences, concerning punishment, penal and psychiatric institutions.2 The remaining eight courses focused squarely on ‘governmentality’ studies, with a clear emphasis also on the problematic (and hermeneutics) of the subject and the relation between subjectivity and truth.3 The Hermeneutics of the Subject and the historical form of the relation between subjectivity and truth is a cornerstone in his governmentality studies and appears in six seminars given at Berkeley and published as Fearless Speech (Foucault 2001) where in particular he addresses the notion of parrhesia. His earlier seminars at Vermont in 1982 appear as ‘Technologies of the self ’, (Foucault 1988b). On a number of occasions, Foucault referred to ‘the culture of the self ’, and a year before he died it was the title of a lecture and following discussion he gave at Berkeley on 12 April 1983.4 The term indicates that we cannot approach the question of the self without locating it within the network of values and social practices that characterise a culture at a particular time. These practices and relations change and are constituted very differently in different historical eras. For Foucault there is no such things as universal necessities when it comes to human nature; indeed, there is no such thing as human nature; nothing, that is, that we can advance a theory about which is valid for all ages and across all cultures. Even within the Western tradition there have been marked shifts that centre around quite different sets of practices. In the lecture, he used Kant’s essay ‘What is enlightenment?’ to emphasise the question ‘What are we now?’ and more broadly, ‘What is truth?’ as well as the related question ‘How is it possible to know the truth?’

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Here Foucault employs the term ‘historical ontology of ourselves’ and views his own later work precisely as an investigation utilising this mode of historical analysis. Foucault is entranced by Kant’s question of the present – ‘the question of what is happening now’ because it bears on what this present actually is and how it might be recognised, distinguished and deciphered. In his historical investigations of the formation of ourselves through the history of thought he focuses on three sets of relations: those concerning truth, obligation and relations to ourselves and to others. In particular, Foucault had turned from his earlier studies of systematic and structural forces that produced the self to examine the relation to oneself and examples of techniques of the self. In these investigations he saw that care of the self (concern for the self) was the main form of ethics in Roman and Greek thought for over a thousand years. For Foucault the concept of ‘culture’ is central. In The Hermeneutics of the Subject Foucault (2005a) writes: I think we can say that from the Hellenistic and Roman period we see a real development of the ‘culture’ of the self. I don’t want to use the word culture in a sense that is too loose and I will say that we can speak of culture on a number of conditions. First, when there is a set of values with a minimum degree of coordination, subordination, and hierarchy. We can speak of culture when a second condition is satisfied, which is that these values are given both as universal but also as only accessible to a few. A third condition for being able to speak of culture is that a number of precise and regular forms of conduct are necessary for individuals to be able to reach these values. Even more than this, effort and sacrifice is required. In short, to have access to these values you must be able to devote your life to them. Finally, the fourth condition for being able to talk about culture is that access to these values is conditional upon more or less regular techniques and procedures that have been developed, validated, transmitted, and taught, and that are also associated with a whole set of notions, concepts, and theories etcetera: with a field of knowledge (savoir). (Foucault 2005a: 238) Foucault explains that, in Antiquity, there were two major ethical principles – ‘know yourself ’ and ‘take care of yourself ’. The former came to displace and obscure the latter because the tradition of Christian morality made self-renunciation the condition for salvation. By contrast, taking care of oneself became presented as an immorality. Also, knowledge of the self, as Foucault (1988b: 22) explains, ‘takes on an ever-increasing importance as the first step in the theory of knowledge’. Foucault then proceeds to investigate

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the theme of ‘taking care of oneself ’ in Antiquity, focusing first on Plato’s Alcibiades I and, second, on the Hellenistic period and the Stoics, including Seneca and Plutarch. He investigates techniques employed by the Stoics – the disclosure of the self through letters to friends and the examination of self and conscience – and the truth games of early Christianity that led finally to the whole apparatus of confession. Foucault investigated ‘care of self ’ versus ‘know your self ’ (latter as a means for taking care of one self) in the Greco-Roman culture of the self which seemed to create a culture based on autonomous selves, though not separate from its political relations, but geared towards care of themselves and principles of self-cultivation. In this culture a set of obligations to the self grew up not as necessarily rule-based or authoritarian but rather as the result of a personal choice aimed at a better life and the possibility of a new type of existence. Curiously, this culture was not religious in any institutional or organised sense even though we might still call it spiritual. Around the same time in ‘Technologies of the self ’, Foucault (1988b) departs from Heidegger’s essentialism to focus on historical ontologies established through a Nietzschean-styled genealogical investigation. Following Nietzsche and the later Heidegger, Foucault reacts against the phenomenological and humanist subject to emphasise modes of subjectivation and the way that human beings become subjects. In so doing he transforms Heidegger’s essentialism into a historical inquiry, distancing himself from Heidegger’s universalism and preoccupation with essences. From Heidegger he accepts the relationship between subjectivity and technology, although he gives it a historical cast. In particular, he became interested in techniques of self-formation and how the roots of the modern concept of the self could be located in first- and second-century Greco-Roman philosophy and in fourth- and fifth-century Christian spirituality. As he says in ‘Truth, power, self ’: All my analyses are directed against the idea of universal necessities in human existence. They show the arbitrariness of institutions and show which space of freedom we still can enjoy and how changes can still be made. (Foucault 1988a: 11) He was to remark ‘I do believe that there is no sovereign, founding subject, a universal form of subject’. He explains further, ‘I believe, on the contrary, that the subject is constituted through practices’ of subjection to or liberation from ‘a number of rules, styles, and inventions to be found in the cultural environment’ (Foucault 1988b: 50–1). Hubert Dreyfus sheds

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light on the way Foucault turns Heidegger’s history of being from things to objects to focus on selves and how they became subjects: just as Heidegger offers a history of being, culminating in the technological understanding of being, in order to help us understand and overcome our current way of dealing with things as objects and resources, Foucault analyzes several regimes of power, culminating in modern bio-power, in order to help us free ourselves from understanding ourselves as subjects. (Dreyfus 1996: 1) Foucault draws our attention to the ways in which technologies have always been part of culture and society and instrumental in questions of self-formation. He aims ‘to sketch a history of the different ways in our culture that humans develop knowledge about themselves … [and] to analyze these so-called sciences as very specific “truth games” related to specific techniques that human beings use to understand themselves.’ (Foucault 1988b: 17). He outlines four major types of technologies, ‘each a matrix of practical reason’: (1) technologies of production, which permit us to produce, transform, or manipulate things; (2) technologies of signs systems, which permit us to use signs, meanings, symbols, or signification; (3) technologies of power, which determine the conduct of individuals and submit them to certain ends or domination, an objectivizing of the subject; (4) technologies of the self, which permit individuals to effect by their own means or with the help of others a certain number of operations on their own bodies and souls, thoughts, conduct and way of being, so as to transform themselves in order to attain a certain state of happiness, purity, wisdom, perfection, or immortality. (Foucault 1988b: 18) Foucault uses Heidegger’s notion of the history of metaphysics as a history of different forms of technology. He both pluralises and historicises Heidegger’s concept of technology to apply it with greater political force in relation to various systems of production, discourse, power and subjectivity.

Care of the Self and the Aesthetics of Existence In his later work, following Nietzsche’s lead and again tapping in to Ancient Greco-Roman cultural practices, Foucault develops a framework to theorise the self, which not only allows for the exercise of individual agency, but also

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recognises in it the ethics of self-constitution and ‘arts of the self ’ and an ‘aesthetics of existence’ (Foucault 1980). By this, he meant a set of creative and experimental processes and techniques by which an individual turns him- or herself into a work of art. For Nietzsche the figure of the musician best represented the mode of creative self-transformation, although he also talked of the philosopher-artist. By contrast, Foucault’s famous essay ‘Writing the self ’ emphasised the writer and writing. Yet, at the same time, he also questioned the notion of the author and the author-function (Foucault 1998b). Foucault, while rejecting the phenomenological account of the subject, held on to the body as a site of power relations occupying a spatial-temporal location in development of Western institutions. The aesthetics of existence was also part of Foucault’s genealogical strategy to move us from the concepts and discourses of ‘desire’, ‘lack’ and ‘repression’ that have controlled sexuality in the modern era. Following Nietzsche’s lead Foucault argues that the idea of morality as a slavish obedience to a code of ethics is in the process of disappearing, replaced by an emphasis of style of the self that Foucault refers to as an aesthetics of existence. This is to understand the self as a work of poetic and artistic transformation. The arts of the self that focus on forms of selfstylisation, and a crafting of the self, of one’s personality and character, has links to Baudelaire’s notion of beauty and to the Greek tradition of ethics as an askesis or spiritual self-discipline (O’Leary 2002). In his now-famous argument concerning ‘care of the self ’, Foucault (1990) recognises freedom as the ontological condition of ethics. Ethics is seen to be the practice of liberty. In the Western tradition, taking care of oneself requires a certain kind of knowledge of oneself, first made clear in the Delphic invocation ‘To know oneself ’ as an ultimate goal. To take care of one’s self then requires a knowledge of the self and its truths. In this way, Foucault links ethics to the game of truth through the discursive production of truths about the self. Foucault argues that the subject is not a substance but rather a form, which is not always identical to itself. Our language has many expressions that testify to this condition: ‘He is not himself today’; ‘She is beside herself ’, etc. Ethics, then, for Foucault, becomes a practice or way of life that gives freedom the form of an ethos. Historically, in the West, the subject has given form to their life through the pursuit of freedom revolving around the concern for truth, a game with a set of principles and rules of procedures that enabled the subject to escape domination if only (s)he knew how to play the game properly. This is a truth-game in which the stakes could not be higher: self-survival, self-assertion (in the original sense), self-mastery. It was a game that linked the ethical constitution of the

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self to the practice of freedom through the pursuit of truth. Games of truth in modernity took many different forms that emerged culturally in a broad variety of related practices: not only portraiture and self-portrait, biography and autobiography, but also more specifically forms of talking, reading and writing involving essential spiritual practices in Greco-Roman times that later shifted to confession, where the centrality of truth and truth-telling (parrhesia) was paramount. Arnold Davidson (1997) makes it clear that Foucault’s later work, The Care of the Self (Foucault 1990) drew partially on Pierre Hadot’s 1995 work on ‘spiritual exercises’ (Exercises spirituels et philosophie antique, original 1987) especially with regard to what Foucault called ‘ethics’ or the self ’s relationship to itself or ‘ethical self-constitution’. Davidson suggests that Foucault’s four main aspects of the self ’s relationship to itself are an appropriation of Hadot’s four-fold framework for interpreting ancient thought: the ethical substance, that part of oneself that is taken to be the relevant domain for ethical judgement; the mode of subjection, the way in which the individual established his relation to moral obligations and rules; the self-forming activity or ethical work that one performs on oneself in order to transform oneself into an ethical subject; and, finally, the telos, the mode of being at which one aims in behaving ethically. (Davidson 1997: 200–1) Hadot emphasised that in ancient schools of thought philosophy was considered to be a way of life, a quest for wisdom, a way of being and, ultimately a way of transforming the self. The quest for self-realisation and improvement is the final goal of spiritual exercises and is shared by all philosophical schools of antiquity (Hadot 1995). Through spiritual exercises – including ‘reading’ and ‘writing’ – the self is liberated from its egoism, its passions and its anxieties. These exercises were aimed at nothing less than a transformation of one’s world-view and one’s personality involving all aspects of one’s being, including intellect, imagination, sensibility and will. Foucault’s (1997) essay, ‘Writing the self ’ also clearly draws on Hadot’s work. Foucault analyses a passage from Athanasius’s Vita Antoni about writing the self that involves ‘the actions and movements of our souls as though to make them mutually known to one another, and let us be sure that out of shame at being known, we will cease sinning and have nothing perverse in our hearts’ (cited in Foucault 1997: 234). ‘Self-writing … offsets the dangers of solitude’ and exposes our deeds to a possible gaze; at the same time the practice works on thoughts as well as actions, which brings it into line with the role of

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confession (in the early Christian literature). It permits, at the same time, a retrospective analysis of ‘the role of writing in the philosophical culture of the self just prior to Christianity: its close tie with apprenticeship; its applicability to movements of thought; its role as a test of truth’ (Foucault 1997: 235). No technique, no professional skill can be acquired without exercise; nor can one learn the art of living, the techne tou biou, without an askesis that must be understood as a training of the self by the self. (Foucault 1997: 235) Reading and writing are part of ‘arts of the self ’ which contribute to what Foucault calls the ‘aesthetics of existence’ and also a basis for the government of self and others. These spiritual exercises constitute a form of pedagogy designed to teach its practitioners the philosophical life that had both a moral and existential value. Hadot claimed that Socrates provided a set of dialogical spiritual exercises that epitomised the Delphic injunction ‘Know thyself !’ and provided a model for a relationship of the self to itself that constituted the basis of all spiritual exercise. In this model, Hadot draws our attention to the primacy of the process one adopts to a problem rather than the solution. Foucault’s work is instructive when investigating modern forms of pedagogy, and the historical transition from church- to state-based forms of formal schooling. In The Use of Pleasure, Foucault talks of technologies of the self as ‘models proposed for setting up and developing relationships with the self, for self-reflection, self-knowledge, self-examination, for deciphering the self by oneself, for the transformation one seeks to accomplish with oneself as object’ (Foucault 1986: 29). Foucault views confession as the principal technology that emerged for Catholicism to manage the sexual lives of believers – a technology of the self. The counter-reformation saw confession changing profoundly so that it came to apply to not just acts but also to one’s thoughts. In the eighteenth century confession developed as a complex technology of secular discourses proliferating in pedagogy, medicine, psychiatry and literature, and reaching its secular highpoint in Freud’s ‘taking cure’. Since Freud one might say that the secularisation of confession has been ‘scientised’ through clinical codifications, personal examinations, histological techniques, the general documentation and date collection of personal data, the proliferation of interpretive schemas and the development of a whole host of therapeutic techniques for ‘normalisation’. With these new techniques for normalisation and individualisation we are ‘obliged to be free’:

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self-inspection replaces the confessional as new forms of self-regulation become manifest. Foucault alerts us to the way that modern pedagogies are secular technologies of the self in which self-regulation and self-examination comes to occupy centre ground. Foucault emphasises the power/ knowledge grid in which we turn the gaze of examination back upon our selves as objects. On a cautionary note, Christopher Lasch, in commenting on American culture in the 1970s, points to the forms of self-disorders that accompany a culture of narcissism, both the narcissistic self and the minimal self (Lasch 1979, 1984). The role of biography and autobiography is broader than simply a specialist narrative genre within literature. Philosophy in a pedagogical sense is always autobiographical in so far as we belong to a particular form of life, we are compelled to recreate ourselves through narrative. Philosophical forms of biography and autobiography are self-narratives, linked strongly with the becoming of the self, not only through basic social and psychological processes such as ‘reading’ and ‘writing’ the self but also through other forms of media and representations. Self-representation may take various forms – sculpture, the visual arts, dance and performance. In the performing and the visual arts we experience both scripted and unscripted (free expression) kinds of self-representation and self-recognition. Children learn the art of discourse against a background of truth. They learn the cultural compulsion to tell the truth; to tell the truth about themselves. Such truth-telling discourses are central to the narrative creation and reconstruction of the self. Autobiography sets up a sense of agency as the child or adult learns to look back and reflect on past actions and decisions. In our Western society children learn to be ‘autonomous’, at least in so far as that means responsibility for oneself, one’s actions and those under one’s care. In the current consumerist era, it seems less obvious that educational institutions promote a relation to the self based on truth-telling, but rather that this relation has been replaced by another primary ethos: happiness, security, survival, success, ‘self-improvement’, wealth. We are witnessing a shift from the shaping of an individual of classical liberalism – the ethical individual of Kantian humanism – to a market individualism of neo-liberalism where the self is shaped as a utility maximiser, a free and contractual individual, whose is self-constituted through the market choices and investment decisions that it makes – the emergence of the entrepreneurial self. The entrepreneurial self is ‘responsibilized’ to make welfare choices based on an actuarial rationality that seeks to ‘insure’ the individual against risk which the State has transferred to the individual. The promotion of the

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entrepreneurial self represents a shift away from a rights-based welfare model of the citizen to the model of citizen-consumer (based on the rejuvenation of homo economicus) where the individual calculates the risks and invests in herself at critical points in the life cycle (see Besley and Peters 2007). Foucauldian philosophical notions of care for the self are relevant to the moral education of young people. We can link the concept of care of the self to policies and practices within educational institutions by looking at certain policies, particularly, but not only, those associated with forms of pastoral care – student and staff counselling, career counselling; in curriculum areas such as health education, social studies and citizenship education, and neo-liberal policies concerning human capital and the development of the entrepreneurial self. Narrative therapy as formulated initially by Michael White and David Epston is one form of counselling which is used worldwide in some schools, that is strongly influenced by poststructuralist Foucauldian notions including an examination of self, cultural contexts, power/knowledge, the way power relations shape, legitimise and constitute personal narratives and the assumed neutrality of institutions (such as counselling) that often seem unaware of their power/knowledge relationships (see Besley 2009).

Parrhesia as Truth-telling Practices In 1983, Foucault turns to the notion of parrhesia, delivering lectures in two locations. One is the set of twenty delivered from January to March at the Collège de France, detailed in The Government of Self and Others (Foucault 2010), which uses the spelling parrēsia and only became available in English in 2010. The other is a set of six lectures delivered at the University of California, Berkeley in October to November 1983 (Foucault 2001), which are used here.5 Truth-telling is a speech activity revolving around four questions – ‘who is able to tell the truth, about what, with what consequences, and with what relation to power’. Parrhesia is a kind of verbal activity where the speaker has a specific relation to truth through frankness, a certain relationship to his own life through danger, a certain relation to himself or other people through criticism … and a specific relation to moral law through freedom and duty. More precisely, parrhesia is a verbal activity in which a speaker expresses his personal relationship to truth, and risks his life because he recognizes truth-telling as a duty to improve or help other people (as

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well as himself). In parrhesia, the speaker uses his freedom and chooses frankness instead of persuasion, truth instead of falsehood or silence, the risk of death instead of life and security, criticism instead of flattery, and moral duty instead of self-interest and moral apathy. (Foucault 2001: 19–20) First, it is associated with frankness: parrhesia refers to ‘a special type of relationship between the speaker and what he says’ (Foucualt 2001: 12). The male pronoun is deliberate as the parrhesiastes is generally male and must know his own genealogy and status and is usually a male citizen (see Foucault 2001: 12). Unlike rhetoric, which provides the speaker with technical devices to help him persuade an audience, covering up his own beliefs, in parrhesia the speaker makes it manifestly clear what he believes as he gives his own opinion. Second, parrhesia is linked with truth. In the Greek, parrhesia is a speech activity where there is an exact coincidence between belief and truth. Foucault claims that ‘the “parrhesiastic game” presupposes that the parrhesiastes is someone who has the moral qualities which are required, first, to know the truth, and secondly, to convey such truth to others’ (Foucault 2001: 14). He points out that the parrhesiastic certainty about truth stands in contrast to Descartes’ uncertainty about what he believes in before he obtains clear evidence since for the Greek ‘truth-having is guaranteed by certain moral qualities’ (Foucault 2001: 15). Third, the moral courage of the parrhesiastes is evidence of his sincerity, for there is a clear risk or danger in telling the truth which may or may not be life-threatening. Often the danger is invoked because the parrhesiatic relationship is between the speaker and a man of more power and status. The compulsion or duty to sincerely and frankly tell the truth to a superior required moral courage because the parrhesiastes risks putting himself in danger and his life at risk for example in challenging a tyrant or a teacher or father. Fourth, rather than demonstrating truth, the function of parrhesia was criticism, which could be directed either towards oneself or another. The parrhesiastes is someone who has the courage to tell the truth even though he may be putting his life at risk for the truth that the parrhesiastes speaks is capable of hurting or angering the interlocutor. Parrhesia is thus a form of criticism, directly either towards oneself or another, where the speaker is always in a less-powerful position than the interlocutor. The fifth and last characteristic concerns duty for in parrhesia telling the truth is a duty. So in relation to education the parrhesiastes may therefore be anyone in a

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subordinate or less-powerful position than the other to whom the criticism is addressed. Parrhesia emerged as distinct philosophical problems with Socrates and were pursued in his confrontations with the Sophists in dialogues concerning politics, rhetoric and ethics. Foucault outlines the meanings and the evolution of ‘parrhesia’ and its cognates, as they enter into and exemplify the changing practices of truth-telling in ancient Greek society. In particular, Foucault investigates ‘the use of parrhesia in specific types of human relationships’ and ‘the procedures and techniques employed in such relationships’ (Foucault 2001: 107). Central to his analysis is the importance of education, how it was central to ‘care of the self ’, public life and the crisis of democratic institutions. Foucault adds: And I would say that the problematisation of truth which characterises both the end of Presocratic philosophy and the beginning of the kind of philosophy which is still ours today, this problematisation of truth has two sides, two major aspects. One side is concerned with insuring that the process of reasoning is correct in determining whether a statement is true (or concern [sic] itself with our ability to gain access to the truth). And the other side is concerned with the question: what is the importance for the individual and for the society of telling the truth, of knowing the truth, of having people who tell the truth, as well as knowing how to recognise them. (Foucault 2001: 65–6) He states that he aligns himself with the ‘critical’ philosophical tradition rather than the ‘analytic tradition’ (Foucault 2001: 170). He further states: My intention was not to deal with the problem of truth, but with the problem of truth-teller or truth-telling as an activity … What I wanted to analyse was how the truth-teller’s role was variously problematised in Greek philosophy. And what I wanted to show you was that Greek philosophy has raised the question of truth from the point of view of the criteria for true statements and sound reasoning, this same Greek philosophy has also raised the problem of truth from the point of view of truth-telling as an activity. (Foucault 2001: 65–6) The twenty lectures detailed in The Government of Self and Others (Foucault 2010) is a continuation of Foucault’s reading of ancient Greek philosophy focusing on parrēsia or truth-telling that forms the basis of Athenian democracy and informs a theory of Greek citizenship. The lectures open

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with Foucault’s famous discussion of Kant’s ‘What is enlightenment?’ and the second lecture discusses the concept of tutelage before he turns to the examination of parresia through a series of ancient texts by Euripides and Plato. As volume editor, Frédéric Gros explains in ‘New projects and new departure’ that these lectures were a continuation of 1982 work and were originally conceived as becoming a publication alongside The History of Sexuality as a political study of the ethical dimensions of ancient governmentality and a natural progression from the government of self (1982) to the government of others (1983) (Foucault 2010: 377). Foucault demonstrated that these practices link truth-telling and education in ways that are still operative in shaping our contemporary subjectivities, thus they are relevant in understanding the exercise of power and control and of contemporary citizenship especially in situations where there is some risk for a person in telling the truth to a superior – a situation that clearly can occur in schools. Besley and Peters (2007) provide three exemplars of parrhesia in educational settings. A parrhesiastic studentteacher-school authority relationship developed in the UK in 2003 at the start of the Iraq war, when some senior students risked jeopardising their GCSE and A Level exam grades and a few were suspended. From being viewed and dismissed by adults as predominantly concerned about style and lifestyle, fashion and music, many youth throughout the world became politically radicalised. In the UK, despite the influence of some formal curriculum, for example citizenship education, much of the information, communication and organisation for youth anti-war protests took place outside the classroom through the Internet and text messaging. For example the Hands Up for Peace campaign, organised by youth in an inner London comprehensive high school, involved painting a banner of hand prints on the school stage without the knowledge of teachers. In some cities students walked out of school without permission to attend protest marches and a few were suspended for taking this action, being considered truant by teaching authorities and teacher unions. For example, sixteenyear-old sixth-former, Sachin Sharma was suspended from Prince Henry’s Grammar School, Otley (Besley 2006). A second exemplar of parrhesia explores the situation of a schoolgirl who revealed past sexual abuse by a step-father to the school counsellor. It takes enormous courage to reveal this and is a huge risk in multiple ways. The unfortunate upshot was that despite the step-father being removed from the home and protection orders being put in place, professional counselling for family members, the mother and extended family tended to blame the girl resulting in her ‘losing’ her family – that is, being harmed

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further. Sexual abuse is never acceptable, but the issue is highly complex and this case highlights the ethics and the politics of telling and the impact on the young person who has been abused: Why tell? Who to tell? When to tell? Does age of the child affect this? What are the ramifications of telling? Then there is a ‘meta-telling’ in the form of a narrative (or case study) as a further telling of the story for professional purposes. This sort of disclosure is a form of parrhesia because it clearly involves the five criteria of frankness, truth, danger, criticism and duty – in telling the truth to someone of a higher status. It is a form of personal parrhesia that focuses on the self and where the young person displays courage in disclosing the truth about herself and her family. In the process, the student exposed herself to considerable risk – to being interviewed and questioned by family and friends and a whole range of professionals: counsellors, social workers, lawyers, police, the judge in Court; to repeatedly telling her story (and the untrue official family story); to not being believed by others; to change or even loss of family relationships; to financial loss; to experiencing a whole range of negative emotions; to being an object of curiosity and possible fun, ridicule and shame if peers worked out what was going on, and so on. It is not surprising that several times she wished she had never told. To a certain extent it was directed at the art of living (techne tou biou) – at making living with an unpalatable truth more comfortable – yet the result was certainly not entirely satisfactory for the girl. She certainly gave an account of herself and her situation in a personal, face-to-face context. Although Foucault warned that such an account was not to be confused with a ‘confessional autobiography’ or narrative of the historical events of one’s life, this sort of disclosure is much more than simply an autobiography for it required frank speech, truth-telling, courage to face a whole range of probable risks and potential personal danger as well as a sense of duty or compulsion to do so, since the step-father’s abuse was so anathema to her. Not surprisingly some young people decide to avoid telling for many years – the risk seems too high (Besley and Peters 2007). A third educational exemplar concerns educational researchers. Being an ethical educational researcher goes beyond simply adherence to ethical codes. If an educational researcher stumbles upon serious misconduct they may feel a duty to inform relevant authorities, in effect becoming a ‘whistle-blower’ – a truth-telling practice which is an example of parrhesia. On the one hand an expression of dissent and accusation of wrong-doing may be seen as a challenge to authority and of disloyalty to the organisation. On the other hand, it may be seen as an act that requires considerable moral courage and personal risk or danger in telling some unpleasant or

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unpalatable truth, in effect, it requires parrhesia. In Western countries today, this may be a highly risky action for a researcher who may fall foul of the educational establishment – either the institution being researched and/ or the body funding the research, and/or the researcher’s employer. In an era when educational institutions are particularly concerned about how the public views them, publication of unpalatable criticism and truths may be vehemently rejected. It may mean that the researcher is unable to obtain further research contracts if his/her criticism is seen as uncomfortably critical by such authorities and in turn, he/she may be informally blacklisted, and thereby prevented from earning an income from educational research. In other countries, especially dictatorships, the risks may be far more severe and even life-threatening (Besley and Peters 2007). Foucault’s interest in the self sought to understand the Nietzschean project of aesthetic self-transformation as an ethical and political project and above all a matter of understanding the relationship to oneself. By contrast with Nietzsche, Foucault substituted political concepts for aesthetic ones and democratic aspirations for culturally elitist ones. Self-transformation and creation thus is a process within postmodern, liberal democracies that might be taken up by anyone at all and frequently is, as in the relation of forms of freedom tied to thought and expression and these to the notion of democracy: freedom of thought and freedom of expression as the basis for educational self-transformation. Foucault provides us with an approach that enables us to understand both how liberal subjects constitute themselves through choice-making, where freedom is the necessary first premise of a historical ontology of ourselves. He also provides us with an understanding of how modern liberalism makes the connection between government and self-government, between direction from above and self-regulation (or autonomy, where auto means ‘self ’ and nomos means ‘law’). He helps us remember the importance of the role of truth-telling practices as technologies of the self and as key aspects in being citizens in a modern democracy and of the key role education plays in this.

Notes 1. Subjectivity and Truth: Foucault, Education and the Culture of Self (Besley and Peters 2007) provides systematic analysis and development of Foucault’s later concern for the historical form that relations between subjectivity and truth in the history of Western philosophy has taken since Antiquity. 2. These included ‘La volonté de savoir’ (1970–1), ‘Théories et institutions pénales’ (1971–2), ‘La société punitive’ (1972–3), ‘Le pouvoir psychiatrique’ (1973–4), ‘Les anormaux’ (1974–5).

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3. These included ‘It faut défender la société’ (1975–6), ‘Securité, territoire, population’ (1977–8), ‘Naissance de la biopolitique’ (1978–9), ‘Du gouvernement des vivants’ (1979–80), ‘Subjectivité et vérité’ (1980–1), ‘L’herméneutique du subjet’ (1981–2), ‘Le gouvernement de soi et des autres’ (1982–3), ‘Le gouvernement de soi et des autres: le courage de la verite’ (1983–4), all of which are now translated into English. 4. For audio files of ‘Michel Foucault: The Culture of the Self ’, 12 April 1983: Berkeley Language Center – Speech Archive SA 1456 and ‘Discussion’, 19 April 1983: Berkeley Language Center – Speech Archive SA 1462 go to http://www. lib.berkeley.edu/MRC/audiofiles.html#foucault (accessed 11 April 2006). 5. The same sorts of concerns for truth and truth games in pursuit of an ‘aesthetics of existence’ drives Foucault’s (2001) discussion of parrhesia or truth-telling in ancient Greece in his Berkeley lectures which can be seen, in part, as a continuation and elaboration of some of the themes concerning ‘technologies of the self ’ that Foucault (1988a, 1988b) gave as lectures at the University of Vermont a year earlier in 1982. Yet there are significant differences in the themes Foucault pursues in these two sets of lectures, the way he pursues them and his characterisation of the Platonic model. In the Vermont set he characterises the Platonic model as ‘defective’ in that it is dualistic (teacher/pupil) and directed at knowing oneself rather than care for the self; in the Berkeley lectures he treats the Socratic/Platonic model with greater sympathy, emphasising that the tradition is not only the source of the search for truth (as in the truth value of a statement) but also of a critical philosophy based upon an understanding of the practices of truth-telling.

References Armstrong, A. (2005), ‘Foucault and feminism’, Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. See http://www.iep.utm.edu/foucfem/. Besley, A. C. (2006), ‘Technologies of the self and parrhesia: education, globalisation and the politicisation of youth in response to the Iraq War 2003’, in Michael A. Peters (ed.), Education, Globalization and Citizenship in an age of Terrorism, Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers. Besley, A. C. (2009), Counseling Youth: Foucault, Power and the Ethics of Subjectivity, Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishing. Besley, A. C. and M. A. Peters (2007), Subjectivity and Truth: Foucault, Education and the Culture of Self, New York, NY: Peter Lang. Davidson, A. I. (ed.) (1997), Foucault and His Interlocutors, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Dreyfus, H. L. (1996), ‘Being and power: Heidegger and Foucault’, International Journal of Philosophical Studies, 4: 1, 1–16. Ewald, F. and A. Fontana (2010), ‘Foreword’, in M. Foucault, The Government of

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Noddings, N. (2003), Happiness and Education, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. O’Leary, T. (2002), Foucault and the Art of Ethics, London: Continuum. Sawicki, J. (1994), ‘Foucault, feminism, and questions of identity’, in G. Gutting (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Foucault, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Language and Text In Chapter 11, ‘Derrida’s Language: Play, Différance and (Con)text’, Anderson defends the Derridean project against some of its most wellknown and influential critics. Interrogating the notion that Derrida’s work implies the radicalisation of language as a ‘play of differences’, Anderson shows how this can be used to justify various types of readings (she notes the important influence of Richard Rorty in this context) that have reduced his work to an ‘anything goes’ philosophy. Further, other critics such as Searle and Habermas have, Anderson argues, unfairly labelled Derrida’s work as perpetuating indeterminacy and nihilism. Against these images and misreadings of Derrida, Anderson asserts that while différance displaces or dismantles metaphysics, and reveals a subjectivity that is not fixed and unified by a certain concept of time and space, and thus challenges the idea of the subject as an ‘originary source’, this does not imply a nihilism of undifferentiated freeplay. Rather, différance and the Derridean method alwaysalready imply an immanent and concrete movement through the system that thus deconstructs (also see Phillips in Chapter 5). In Chapter 12, ‘Hélène Cixous and the Play of Language’, Puri picks up on the theme of the play of language, but maps it in relation to the writing of Cixous, exploring specifically how the latter locates this language play in the body. Focusing on Cixous’ notion of écriture féminine (also see Brigley Thompson in Chapter 6), and the relationship between language and laughter, Puri aims to open up Cixous’ conceptualisation of ‘woman’, analysing how language is rooted in the gendered body and, relatedly, how Cixous’ writing proposes itself as part of a political project that interrogates and undermines phallocentric economy by democratising the role of the writer. Cixous, Puri points out, urges everyone to write, because it is only through

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writing that an authentic voice can be found, and it is this find that will generate the discovery of new desires and possibilities. In Chapter 13, ‘Luce Irigaray: An Ode to A-(Luce)’, Russell immediately and similarly situates Irigaray’s work in terms of a feminist politics. A key element of this political project concerns how her style of writing and use of language calls into question the masculine One of the phallocratic logos in a way that seeks an opening for woman’s voice. Further, Irigaray represents what Russell calls ‘the conscience of the poststructuralist event’. By this she means that Irigaray’s critique of the history of philosophy has involved exposing the suppression of the feminine upon which the origins of philosophy are grounded while simultaneously imagining a space for woman’s voice not only in the symbolic, but also in the world. Irigaray, Russell claims, is one of very few philosophers whose work seeks to traverse the chasm between theory and praxis whilst maintaining a commitment to poststructuralist methods and thinking.

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Chapter 11 D e r r i d a ’ s L a n g u a ge : P l a y, D i f fé r a n c e a n d ( C o n ) t ex t Nicole Anderson

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Introduction On 9 May 1992, Barry Smith and eighteen cosignatories wrote a letter to the The Times in an attempt to sway Cambridge University dons not to award Derrida an Honorary Degree. (It failed. The vote was 336 to 204 in favour of Derrida.) This event became known as the ‘Cambridge Affair’. In this letter Barry Smith and company claim that Derrida’s writing ‘does not meet with accepted standards of clarity and rigour … his works employ a written style that defies comprehension … [and] consist in no small part of elaborate jokes and puns “logical phallusies” [sic] and the like’. As a result, his work attacks ‘the values of reason, truth, and scholarship’ (Smith 1992). Elsewhere, Smith was reported as saying: ‘to call [Derrida’s] thinking nihilistic would be to flatter it by saying it was intelligible’ (d’Acona 1992). These comments reveal that Smith was not acquainted with Derrida’s works and therefore guilty of the most elementary failures of scholarly method, which Derrida makes clear when he points to evidence in the letter itself that his critics had either not read his work or were attributing to him claims they knew he had never made: ‘I challenge anyone to find in my writings the expression “logical phallusies”, by which the signatories of this document, in what is a serious and dogmatic abuse of their authority in the press, try to discredit me’ (Derrida 1995: 404). The Cambridge Affair is a famous incident. It is by no means an isolated one.1 In fact, criticisms of nihilism and relativism also typify more scholarly debates that have taken place in academic articles and books, and are a result of the misinterpretation of both the content of Derrida’s work, as well as his style of writing. As Derrida himself has noted, these misinterpretations have been a consequence of influential scholars not reading and/or

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not understanding but critiquing him nonetheless because his ideas have challenged their own political and ideological agenda’s (Derrida 1995: 404). Furthermore, criticisms have generally been based on what others have said about Derrida, rather than on Derrida’s arguments themselves. For example, many misunderstandings, and hence criticisms of Derrida’s work, are often based on others appropriation and conflation of Derrida’s work to an ‘anything goes’ postmodernism that rejects metaphysics (metanarratives), unified meaning and humanist subjectivity, in favour of an endless undifferentiated textual freeplay. Richard Rorty (the American postmodernpragmatist) was one of the more famous, and one of the first, to make this conflation (Rorty 1982, 1991).2 While Rorty was an advocate of what he (mis)interpreted to be Derrida’s textual freeplay, his conflation of Derrida to an anything-goes postmodernism, in turn, perpetuated a misunderstanding in regards to Derrida’s style of writing. In part, it is Richard Rorty’s characterisation of the style of Derrida’s later writing as undifferentiated textual freeplay (i.e. the endless substitution of one sign for another so that any sign can mean anything at any time) that has served to justify an attack of deconstruction as nihilistic and unethical. This attack and critique of Derrida’s work as textual freeplay, generically, goes something like this: Derrida’s radicalisation of Saussurian linguistics as a differential play of signs (différance) and the contamination of binary oppositions in language is an assault on metaphysics, ethics and subjectivity. It is an assault because Derrida’s differential play of signs is an abandonment of absolute meaning in favour of indeterminacy. Consequently, Derrida’s deconstruction is nihilistic and therefore unethical. Along these veins, there have been many ‘scholarly’ critiques and attacks of Derrida’s work. However, two famous and influential examples of this critique in a sustained form is found in Jürgen Habermas’ The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (1987),3 and in John Searle’s paper ‘Reiterating the differences’ (1977), which is a response to Derrida’s paper ‘Signature event context’ (1977), and to which Derrida, in turn, responds in book-length form in Limited Inc (1997). More specifically, both Searle and Habermas interpret Derrida’s notion of context as indeterminable and as an all-embracing context of texts, leading both to further argue that for Derrida there is no authentic ‘intention of meaning’ (Searle 1977: 207), thus Derrida relativises meaning and communication (Habermas 1987: 197).4 It is for these reasons that both Habermas and Searle’s criticisms will be the focus of this chapter. These and other similar criticisms and negative interpretations largely took place from the late 1970s to late 1980s, the hey-day of the poststructuralist movement to which Derrida’s work has been aligned. Nonetheless,

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they continue today to have influence. So while it appeared from roughly the mid-1990s onwards that these criticisms, and the disparaging ad hominine attacks on Derrida, waned (not least because of Derrida’s work on hospitality, justice and responsibility), the event of Derrida’s death on 8 October 2004 revealed that these criticisms were simply dormant, just waiting for the opportunity to resurface. And that they did, virulently, in newspaper articles and internet sites only a day or two after his death. For example, in a similar manner to Barry Smith’s attack in the media, on 10 October Jonathan Kandell claimed in the New York Times that Derrida’s deconstructive methodology [sic] defined ‘all writing’ as that which was ‘full of confusion and contradiction, and that the author’s intent could not overcome the inherent contradictions of language itself, robbing texts … of truthfulness, absolute meaning and performance’ (Kandell 2004, Section 1: 1). What is it about Derrida’s work, then, that prompts such negative interpretations, controversy, debate and appropriation, not only by those who have not read Derrida, but also by those who have? As evidenced in the media articles by Smith (1992) and Kandell (2004), but also in academic articles and books (by Searle (1977) and Habermas (1987) among others),5 Derrida’s ideas on language, in particular the differential ‘play’ of signs, is what has consistently sparked, across the decades, the most negative criticisms. Therefore, the aim of this chapter is to be as clear as possible about what Derrida actually argues regarding language – with the focus being on ‘play’, ‘différance’ and (con)text – in order to demonstrate that the seeming coherence of such famous criticisms (made by Habermas and Searle) or postmodern appropriations (made by Rorty) are unfounded. To begin let us turn to Rorty’s appropriation of Derrida’s style and his notion of ‘play’ in order to set the scene for a discussion later on Habermas’ and Searle’s interpretations of Derrida’s idea of language as a differential ‘play’ of signs.

Play Rorty’s appropriation of Derrida’s work predominantly took two forms: first, the reinterpretation of Derrida’s style of writing as that which challenges philosophical genres so as to overcome ‘the tradition of Western metaphysics’ (Rorty 1991: 99). Second, the redeployment of Derrida’s notion of ‘play’ (jeu) away from Derrida’s particular articulation of it as a movement of différance, to an ‘undifferentiated textual free-play’. As we will see, in regards to both forms of appropriation, Rorty is in the habit of emphasising only particular aspects of Derrida’s work, and neglecting others that he feels are a mistake or irrelevant.

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Style The stylistic aspects of Derrida’s work that Rorty emphasises are the part Rorty describes as the ‘good side’ of Derrida’s project (i.e. what Rorty takes to be Derrida’s performative play with language: neologisms, punning, joking, non-serious style, the contamination of oppositions and distinctions, the blurring of various genres, for example, philosophical and literary modes of writing so as to abandon the philosophy/literature opposition, and which is exemplified by Derrida’s books Glas and Spurs: Nietzsche’s Styles). The part of Derrida’s work that Rorty thinks is mistaken and should not be appropriated or emphasised is what Rorty describes as the ‘bad side’ of Derrida, and is characterised by Derrida’s concern with the traditional conception of philosophy and his predilection for ‘philosophical system-building’ (Rorty 1982: 99). Henry Staten argues that one of the reasons for Rorty’s one-sided emphasis and appropriation is because Rorty’s own deconstructive project is too close to that of Derrida’s for Rorty to be able to disassociate himself so neatly from it. So Rorty makes Derrida’s project look on the one hand viable and important (so that it chimes with Rorty’s own), and on the other hand senseless and useless (so that Rorty is left holding the field alone). (Staten 1986: 455) For Rorty, Derrida’s style works to expose philosophy as ‘just the selfconsciousness of the play of a certain kind of writing’ (Rorty 1982: 103), rather than a reflection of metaphysical truths. In other words, philosophical writing ‘is delimited, as in any literary genre, not by form or matter, but by tradition’, extending from Plato to Kant to Husserl, Heidegger and Hegel (92). Therefore, according to Rorty, the theoretical/objective style of philosophical writing, and thus its arguments and claims to truth, are contingent and contextual. It is all very well for Rorty to argue that philosophical writing is simply another contingent and contextual genre; it is another matter to conclude from this that Derrida’s style performatively demonstrates his abandonment of theory and objectivity (characteristic of philosophical genres). However, from this conclusion Rorty goes further arguing that Derrida’s playful, ‘fantasizing’ style can be clearly demarcated from theoretical and rigorous content. The implication is that by abandoning theoretical style, universal meaning and readability can be dispensed with altogether and the tradition of Western metaphysics can thus be overcome (99). The irony, however, is that in order to be able to emphasise the ‘good side’ of Derrida (his later work), Rorty constructs a ‘theoretical’/‘fantasizing’ distinction:

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one that he himself attempts to collapse. Nevertheless, it is important to note the very works of Derrida’s, such as Glas, that Rorty insists abandon theory actually examine a range of theoretical and philosophical questions and problems, such as the relationship between style (form) and content. In Glas Derrida deconstructs the opposition between form and content through a comparison between Hegel’s objective, philosophic writing (represented by a column set out on the left side of the page) and Genet’s literary, subjective prose (set out in a column on the right, ‘opposite’, side of the page). Reading and attempting to compare the two columns on each page reveals the ‘undecidability’ of the opposition between philosophy and literature, content and form, theory and practice. Furthermore this ‘undecidability’ between the columns reveals the unreadability, or the ‘illegibility’, of the Glas text as a whole (the Hegel and Genet columns themselves are broken and disjointed by differing themes and interjections). However, these two columns are not simply compared but juxtaposed, demonstrating at the same time the differences that establish these oppositions. The subversion of the form/content, philosophy/literature, theory/ practice oppositions is not a means of getting ‘beyond’ or ‘overthrowing’ oppositions so much as challenging the structure and construction of oppositionality per se. Derrida performs this challenge not in order to simply collapse the distinction between philosophy and literature, not simply to demonstrate that philosophy is ‘just another kind of writing’, as Rorty insists, and certainly not to reject metaphysics outright. Rather, the juxtaposition, yet ‘undecidability’, of the Hegel and Genet columns demonstrate that these particular oppositions (and all oppositions generally) are interdependent on one another, and based on language rules and contexts. As Derrida argues, in Glas: ‘this illegibility [this undecidability] … that scrambles and breaches signification, is that without which there would not be any text’ (Derrida 1990: 33). This interdependence is further confirmed many years after the publication of Glas, when in an interview Derrida insists: no indeed, philosophy is not simply a ‘kind of writing’; I am very suspicious of the over easy mixing of discourses … On the contrary, Deconstruction pays the greatest attention to multiplicity, to heterogeneity, to these sharp and irreducible differences. If we don’t want to homogenise everything then we have to respect the specificity of discourses. (Derrida and Norris 1989: 75) Thus, the line, the interstice, between the columns of Glas that make it readable and unreadable simultaneously, is not only a performative point,

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and a practical problematisation of oppositionality, but also a practical continuation of some of the philosophical concerns raised by Derrida in Of Grammatology (1976) and Speech and Phenomena (1973), precisely those ‘early’ texts which Rorty rejects as ‘philosophical’ and therefore ‘bad’.

Freeplay Rorty’s second appropriation: the redescription of Derrida’s notion of play (jeu) as ‘undifferentiated free-play’ is also one-sided. As mentioned earlier, this interpretation of play has contributed to the dissemination of a particular view of deconstruction as an ‘anything goes’ postmodernism, which has led to the attack on Derrida’s notion of language as nihilistic and unethical. As Niall Lucy argues, the conflation of deconstruction, and hence poststructuralism, with postmodernism has been a result of the ‘misinterpretation’ of Derrida’s word ‘play’ in his essay ‘Structure, sign and play’ (Lucy 1997: 97), where ‘Derrida’s sense of “play” as “give” was transformed ecstatically to mean “play” as “playfulness” or (“unruliness”)’ (102). The following passage from ‘Structure, sign and play’ confirms Lucy’s observation, but it is also significant for revealing how and why Rorty (and as we will see, Habermas) have taken the positions they have regarding Derrida’s work. Derrida argues: There are thus two interpretations of interpretation, of structure, of sign, of play. The one seeks to decipher, dreams of deciphering a truth or an origin which escapes play … The other, which is no longer turned towards the origin, affirms play and tries to pass beyond man and humanism, the name of man being the name of that being who … has dreamed of full presence, the reassuring foundation, the origin and the end of play. The second interpretation … to which Nietzsche pointed the way, does not seek … ‘the inspiration of a new humanism’… [Rather], the Nietzschean affirmation, that is the joyous affirmation of the play of the world and the innocence of becoming, the affirmation of a world of signs without fault, without truth, and without origin … This affirmation then determines the noncenter otherwise than as loss of center. (Derrida 1978: 292) Rorty adopts only the second interpretation of play (as Nietzschean affirmation) in his reading of Derrida. Along with Derrida’s play of style (evidenced in Glas earlier), emphasising this second interpretation allows Rorty to associate Derrida’s notion of play: ‘the affirmation of a world of signs without fault, without truth, and without origin’ (292), with frivolity,

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non-seriousness, game-playing, and so on, thereby, in turn, implying that Derrida’s work avoids intellectual rigour and seriousness associated with philosophical writing, and is simply a form of fantasising style and word play (puns, neologisms, etc.) (Rorty 1982). However, shortly after the passage from ‘Structure, sign and play’ quoted above, Derrida goes on to argue that ‘although these two interpretations must acknowledge and accentuate their difference and define their irreducibility, I do not believe that today there is any question of choosing … because we must first try to conceive of the common ground, and the différance of this irreducible difference’ (Derrida 1978: 293). And again, some years later in Positions, Derrida argues that ‘by means of this double play … I try to respect as rigorously as possible the internal, regulated play of philosophemes or epistimemes by making them slide – without mistreating them – to the point of their nonpertinence, their exhaustion, their closure’ (Derrida 1982: 6). Yet for all of Derrida’s qualifications, Rorty continues to focus on the second interpretation of play, and reinterpreting it as freeplay. In contradistinction to this postmodern appropriation of play, Derrida makes it clear that: I never spoke of ‘complete freeplay or undecidability’ … Greatly overestimated in my texts in the United States, this notion of ‘freeplay’ is an inadequate translation of the lexical network connected to the word jeu, which I used in my first texts, but sparingly and in a highly defined manner. (Derrida 1997: 115–16) Yet if Derrida argues that this definition of play as ‘freeplay’ is an ‘inadequate translation’, then what exactly does Derrida mean by ‘play’ apart from the fact that there are two interpretations, and also given that he does indeed adopt various style(s) of writing and argument, creates neologisms, and so on? Extending the discussion of play in The Ear of the Other (1988), Derrida gives us an answer when he elaborates on the distinction between the two interpretations of play. The first interpretation, outlined initially in ‘Structure, sign and play’, can be likened to what Derrida calls in The Ear of the Other, ‘play in the world’, while the second interpretation is likened to ‘play of the world’. (In fact, note that ‘play of the world’ significantly describes the second interpretation as Nietzschean affirmation in the passage from ‘Structure, sign and play’ quoted earlier). The first, and predominant, concept of play (in the world) is typically conceived by philosophy ‘as an activity’ where the subject ‘manipulate[s]

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objects’ (Derrida 1988: 69). There are, in turn, at least two implications to this classical philosophical definition of play: the initial implication is that this activity of play is positioned as less serious, less economical, than ‘work’. Defining play in this way constructs a metaphysical dichotomy between play and work, where the space of play is ‘dominated by meaning’ and ‘by its finality’ (69), and consequently, between being and non-being, subject and object, subject and other. Once these dichotomies are established, another implication unfolds. These dichotomies enable the metaphysical concept of play as that which is enacted in a ‘contained’ and ‘present’ space, and thus in turn, privileges a humanist concept of the subject as unified (in time and place) and autonomous. To put it another way, doing, or ‘to do’, or playing with something (an object, another, etc.) requires putting oneself in or into a particular place and space in order to ‘perform’ that action (and this will be referred to later in relation to Habermas and Searle’s defence of speech-act theory). It is therefore to constitute the subject as inside a space rather than outside that space. It is this inside/outside opposition (between one space and place and another) that helps to form the subject as distancing and objective, and hence autonomous. Consequently, the subject (the ‘who’) is experienced in this space as the ‘presence of the present’ and as the ‘present of presence’ (unified in, and universal across, time and place/space) (69). What is perpetuated, then, is a metaphysical conception of Being and ontology. The second notion of play is one that deconstructs the first. Derrida reformulates the concept of ‘doing’ and ‘playing’ away from the classical conception outlined above, and advises that ‘one must think of play in another way’, in a way that is ‘no longer determined and contained by something, by the space that would comprehend it’ (69). He suggests that this new formulation of play should not necessarily be thought of as a ‘game that one plays with’, rather the notion of play could perhaps be better ‘understood as the play of the world’, not ‘play in the world’ (69). On the one hand, as we have seen, to be ‘in’ something is to perform an action, and to construct ‘a difference or interval between two things’. This difference is a structural difference of comparison and contrast that operates to permanently fix, and make unchanging, the interval or space between two things. It also means to be enclosed (as in: within a space), which encapsulates an opposition between inside and outside, and thus constructing a causative relation or function. On the other hand, ‘play of the world’ means to be associated, in accord, assimilated: and what these synonyms suggest is that play of the world, is a play that is always already a disseminating process that haunts (differs and defers) the constructed boundaries between ‘play’ and ‘work’, and subject

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and object, subject and other. To rethink play in the way Derrida suggests is to simultaneously deconstruct the notion of the ‘proper name’ (and hence the autonomous subject) and a notion of the ‘thing’ (in the empirical sense) as presence. That is, and returning to ‘Structure, sign and play’, to rethink play is to not only guard against the potential opposition that can be constructed (as Rorty has done) between the two interpretations of play (as origin and truth on the one hand, and Nietzschean affirmation: signs without truth and origin, on the other) – an opposition which contributes to constituting a notion of the centre (presence/present) (Derrida 1978: 279) – but it is to rethink play as that which ‘determines the noncenter’ (and noncentre can be defined as the ‘movement of supplementarity’, or différance) rather than as a ‘loss of center’ (Derrida 1978: 289, 292). Rethinking play this way is to also rethink the notion of an autonomous ‘who’ from one that does the playing (play in the world), to one that is a continual process of play (of the world): it is a move from autonomy to heteronomy; from ‘auto-affection’ to ‘heteroaffection’ (Derrida 1998: 28), and we will return to this shortly.

Language and Text Meanwhile, if play of the world is always already a differing and deferring process that destabilises binary oppositions, and which serves to render pure ideality and ‘all totalization, fulfillment, plentitude impossible’ (Derrida 1997: 116), this is not to say that Derrida wants to obliterate oppositions or even thinks he can. After all, and as we have seen with Glas, Derrida acknowledges that without oppositions ‘the limits of a concept would have no chance’ (117) precisely because everything, every concept, would be so homogenised as to be indeterminate. Derrida here does not sound like he is endorsing an undifferentiated freeplay, put forward by Rorty, and therefore producing indeterminacy, an argument put forward by Habermas. Unravelling Derrida’s notion of play as a movement of différance (which makes oppositions, and the notion of presence, possible) will not only make this more obvious, but will answer and dispel further charges made by Habermas and Searle (later in this chapter) that in his theory of language, and with his neologism différance, Derrida obliterates authentic ‘intention of meaning’ (Searle 1977: 207), and thus relativises meaning and communication (Habermas 1987: 197). Let us begin, then, with this claim: ‘play of the world’ is différance. Derrida argues: ‘What we note as differance will thus be the movement of play that “produces” (and not by something that is simply an activity) these differences, these effects of difference’ (Derrida 1973: 141). If play, as différance,

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produces differences (distinctions, categories, and hence, oppositions) and is not an undifferentiated textuality, Derrida nevertheless warns that: Since language (which Saussure says is a classification) has not fallen from the sky, it is clear that the differences have been produced; they are the effects produced, but effects that do not have their cause a subject or substance, a thing in general, or a being that is somewhere present and itself escapes the play of difference. (Derrida 1973: 141) These quotes convey two important aspects of Derrida’s notion of language and play those critics (such as Habermas and Searle, among many others) and appropriators (Rorty) have overlooked. First, Derrida does not deny differences but attempts to make us aware that these differences are the effects of the play of the world, rather than produced by a subject or substance (play in the world). If there are differences then there cannot be an undifferentiated textuality (which would homogenise and thus dispense with difference). Moreover, the play of différance is what produces the subject, ‘totality, pure ideality, fulfilment’, and so on. Second, Derrida’s différance radicalised Saussure’s structuralist theory of the arbitrary and differential relation of signs as a means of challenging traditional conceptions of language (hence Derrida’s work being defined as poststructuralist). The traditional approaches to language, generically speaking, claim that there is an intrinsic connection between a thing (in the world) and a word (in language). That is, words are not just names for things and objects (which is what they also are), but words also ‘name’ and ‘stand directly’ for (represent) what is absent. According to the traditional model of language, there is an essential nature to objects in the world, and as a result there is one reality unchanging through space and time, eternal and existing independently of us: reality, in other words, is always already constructed without input from human beings, and language simply labels that reality.

The Play of Différance Taking up Saussure’s6 notion that language is formed in and through a structure of differences – what Saussure calls an arbitrary and ‘differential relation’ – Derrida goes further in his challenge to this traditional conception of language. He argues that language does not reduce space and time (in the way that a concept of ‘play in the world’ attempts to do). Rather, within language there is a continuous movement from one signifier to another signifier that reveals the spatial and temporal, or differing and deferring, movement

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of language; what Derrida calls différance (or ‘play of the world’). Différance, Derrida argues, ensures that no sign is ever simply ‘present in and of itself … Nothing, neither among the elements nor within the system, is anywhere ever simply present or absent. There are only, everywhere, differences and traces of traces’ (Derrida 1982: 26). Hence, there is no intrinsic connection between a thing (in the world) and a word (in language). Thus, within the sign (i.e. the signifier/word and signified/concept), there is always a reference to something that is non-present (or absent), or something ‘wholly other’, an alterity that is never fully present, precisely because signs are a result of a process of differing (of not being identical; a differentiation that ‘produces different things’) and deferring (a spacing/temporalisation, or an operation of delay and detour between one word/thought and another) (9). It is important, nevertheless, to note that absence is not exterior to the sign but is part of the sign, part of presence. Consequently, absence, as a ‘different’ presence, is what makes presence, thus the ‘now’ (the present), possible. Given this, différance is not a rejection of the subject, which is constituted as and by presence. Furthermore, for Derrida, the multivalence of meaning that différance captures enables différance to make undecidable (as we saw with the ‘columns’ in Glas) the oppositions within language, such as: the sensible and the intelligible, presence and absence, identity and other, speech and writing, work and play, inside and outside, philosophy and literature, and so on (9). In this way, unlike Saussure, différance questions a logocentric metaphysics that relies for its foundations on oppositions. It is this radicalisation of the play of differences as well as the deconstruction of unified, unchanging and unmediated meaning that has critics of Derrida worried. Worried, because what différance reveals is that within language and thus within culture, there is no absolute meaning, there is no absolute presence (and hence autonomous subject), or transcendental signified that can be accurately and purely (re) presented in language as an absolute truth, and thus there is no one true reality. In other words, this notion of language as différance is the deconstruction of the metaphysics of language as ‘presence’, or as ‘given’. This scepticism of a language as presence, or as ‘given’, is according to Samuel Wheeler, what links Derrida to the analytic tradition of W.V. O. Quine, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Donald Davidson (Wheeler 2000: 3–4). For example, both Derrida and Davidson ‘agree in denying a “given” ’ (8), and in doing so reveal that ‘questions about realism and idealism cease to have a point’ because ‘without a given, there is nothing to say about the match between language and reality except “Fred is a frog” is true only if “Fred is a frog” ’ (8). The implications of this will be returned to shortly. Meanwhile, suggesting as Derrida does

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that there is no intrinsic connection between a thing and a word, between language and reality, is profoundly political because in arguing this Derrida reveals the way in which difference in language, and thus also in our institutions and culture, is suppressed through this privileging of presence. The material consequences of this suppression of difference in language can be seen in the suppression of gender, sexual, racial, class and economic differences within society and culture. It is understandable that Habermas might interpret Derrida to be abandoning the notion and belief in the humanist-autonomous subject and thus mutual understanding, meaning and communication. After all, Derrida’s notion, ‘play of the world’, is an attempt to convey how the subject is one that is in a continual process of play (differing and deferring), so that it is a move from autonomy to heteronomy; from ‘auto-affection’ to ‘hetero-affection’ (Derrida 1998: 28). But what Derrida’s notion of différance makes clear is that because the subject is constituted in and through language; because language is the play of differences; and because différance is not only about difference and differentiation, but also is what makes ‘presence’ and thus the subject possible, then one cannot simply abandon the subject, or simply step outside metaphysics. Therefore this move from autonomy to heteronomy does not constitute abandonment in the sense that Habermas, Searle or even Rorty claim it does. In fact, Derrida defines différance as ‘the play which makes possible nominal effects’ (Derrida 1986: 26). The nominal can be defined as the ‘noun’, and thus the ‘thing’. Moreover, the ‘thing’ is that which is reduced in space and time to the ‘now’, to the present moment, or to ‘presence’ that is privileged. The ideological humanist positioning of the subject is a result of privileging first person language so that, through the process of naming, the ‘I’ is distinguished from the ‘You’. Derrida argues, that ‘the subject’, that which is ‘self-identical, or even conscious of self-identity, self-conscious … is inscribed in the language … is a “function” of language’ (Derrida 1973: 145). But Derrida also points out that because the subject is a function of language, the subject, produced through the noun or the first person, cannot be absolutely or purely distinguished from the ‘You’, or the Other which functions through second and third person language, or from the non-nominal. In the words of Derrida: if an idiom effect or an effect of absolute properness can arise within a system of relations and differences with something else that is either near or far, then the secret proper name is right away inscribed – structurally and a priori – in a network where it is contaminated by common names. (Derrida 1988: 107).

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Thus the nominal as presence can only be established in contradistinction to what is not nominal. Therefore, at the same time that différance constitutes presence or the nominal, différance is not, Derrida insists, a ‘pure nominal unity’. For Derrida, then, while the ‘effects of subjectivity’ (which are characterised by rationality, autonomy, self-presence, etc.) are real, the subject in itself (as that which is ‘self-present’) is a fable because ‘the relation to self can only be based on difference and not only self-presence’ (Derrida and Nancy 1991: 100). Habermas, Searle and other critics of Derrida do not see it this way, however. For example, Habermas believes that it is not through a play of differences that communication and meaning, or ‘mutual understanding’ can be achieved, or is even formed. Rather mutual understanding can only be achieved if ‘the same utterances are assigned the same meaning’ (Habermas 1987: 198). If we can achieve this then for Habermas meaning (and in consequence, the subject) is fixed and universal and never ambiguous. Elaborating further, Habermas suggests that ‘mutual understanding’, which is formed in and through interaction, and generated by ‘speech-acts’, is achieved because of the ‘lifeworld’ to which subjects belong. Habermas adopts the linguistphilosopher J. L. Austin’s idea of language as performative (speech-act theory). Austin classified the performative aspect of speech acts (as opposed to the constative) into locutionary acts, illocutionary acts and perlocutionary acts. Locutionary acts can be defined as the meaningful phonetic, grammatical forms produced. Illocutionary acts indicate what is actually ‘performed’ when uttering words or a sentence, such as promising, demanding, accusing, and soon. The perlocutionary acts are those that directly affect their hearer(s): for instance, frightening or embarrassing someone, and so on. So speech acts ‘perform’ certain kinds of social acts. The lifeworld, then, is the world of subjects, society and culture, and speech acts take place in this lifeworld (298). For Habermas, mutual understanding not only takes place through a performative relation built into speech itself, but speech acts raise validity claims. In communication, Habermas argues, there are three validity claims, which he argues to be universal: claims to truth, normative rightness and truthfulness, that is, in regards to the latter validity claim, the speaker’s intentions can be assumed to be sincere/truthful. Because of these validity claims Habermas argues that behind every sentence, every utterance, a consensus can be reached between speakers on the rationality and value of the claims made in the sentence by a speaker. Thus, unlike Rorty, what concerns Habermas in particular is that through the play of differences in language Derrida dispenses with validity claims (and hence truth conditions) by annulling oppositions in language.

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Consequently Derrida relativises meaning and produces an undifferentiated freeplay, what Habermas has also called an ‘indeterminate authority’ (181). Thus, as we have seen, for Habermas, différance dispenses with rationality and hence with subjectivity altogether. This is a problem for Habermas because he believes a unified subjectivity is closely tied to universal ethics. In other words, underpinning Habermas’ theory of communicative action and mutual understanding are speech acts and validity claims that work as a unifying and universal foundation for rational, ethical and moral agreement, and which in turn presuppose intentional subjects or ‘conscious egos’ (Derrida 1997: 76). Overall, in The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (1987) Habermas is drawn to the conclusion that, for Derrida, there is no unity of meaning or communication. Arguably, this opinion derives not only from Rorty, but has been influenced by John Searle’s critique of Derrida’s interpretation of Austin’s speech act theory. This three-way debate between Austin, Searle and Derrida has already been discussed in detail by Christopher Norris (1987). Therefore what follows is not a reiteration of this debate, but instead expands Norris’ account by including Habermas in the exchange, and focusing on a comparison of Derrida’s, Searle’s and Habermas’ understandings and interpretations of ‘context’, in order to explain why it is that Habermas sides with Searle despite, as alluded to earlier, the confluence of Derrida’s and some analytic philosophy’s notions of language. This requires starting with a brief examination of Searle’s attack on Derrida’s essay ‘Signature event context’.

Speech Acts As outlined earlier, performative speech acts ‘perform’ certain kinds of social acts, for instance, marriage vows, making demands or promises, threats, congratulations, opening and closing ceremonies, and so on. Now, because ‘the performative is a “communication” which is not limited strictly to the transference of a semantic content’, Derrida argues that Austin goes a long way beyond a formal or cognitive model of communication (Derrida 1997: 13). Despite this, like Saussure and Husserl, Austin’s theory of speech acts still privileges speech over writing (19). Derrida argues that Austin is able to do this by practising two exclusions. First, Austin opposes felicitous speech acts to infelicitous ones. Felicitous acts are successful acts in that the speaker has the social or institutional authority to make the act effective. Infelicitous speech acts are utterances that are not effective: for example, when one makes a promise one does not intend to keep. Austin thinks of

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these infelicities as unsuccessful speech acts. According to Derrida, Austin, in preserving the ‘pertinence, purity, and rigor’ (14) between these utterances, is able to claim that felicitous utterances proceed within a definable, determinable and value-laden context. This context is akin to the oppositions (inside/outside, subject/other), as well as the cause and effect produced by ‘play in the world’, precisely because felicitous utterances are delineated by ‘the teleological jurisdiction of an entire field whose organizing center remains intention’ (15). In other words, within the context of a ‘conventional’, ‘correct’ and ‘complete’ teleological procedure, a felicitous speech act is produced, which in turn, is characteristic of ‘play in the world’. Just as Saussure and Husserl privilege speech by association with a self-present consciousness, Austin privileges the felicitous utterance by association with an intending, self-conscious subject. However, for Derrida, implicated in this notion of felicitous speech acts is a notion of the subject as universal, autonomous, rational. Felicitous speech acts, in other words, help to privilege the subject as distancing and objective, associated with autonomy and rationality. Second, Austin excludes from performative utterances that take place under ‘normal’, ‘everyday’, ‘ordinary circumstances’ (whether they be felicitous or not) those utterances that he considers to be ‘parasitic’, and thus, non-serious. The latter are not produced in normal, but in unusual, secondary circumstances, like an actor in a play taking marriage vows. Derrida points out that Austin acknowledges that the parasitic is inherent in every ‘act of utterance’. Despite this evidence, Austin excludes the parasitic in the same way writing is excluded as secondary to speech by Saussure and Husserl. Derrida insists that it ‘is just such a “parasite” that writing has always been treated by the philosophical tradition, and the connection in this case is by no means coincidental’ (17). Thus, Derrida deconstructs the permanent boundary between felicitous/infelicitous, and normal/parasitic, utterances. He points out that every performative utterance is structured by ‘iteration’ (which is what makes every utterance quotable). Iteration is not simply repeatability, which entails a traditional concept of representation. Rather, Derrida describes iterability as ‘a differential structure’ because it escapes the dialectical oppositional structure of presence and absence, and instead ‘implies both identity and difference’ (53), and which is why the felicitous is contaminated by the infelicitous, the normal by the parasitic, and vice versa. In ‘Reiterating the differences’, Searle argues that ‘Derrida has completely mistaken the status of Austin’s exclusion of parasitic forms of discourse’ (Searle 1977: 204). Habermas agrees with Searle, arguing that there are

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parasitic utterances that should and can be excluded from normal ones (Habermas 1987: 199). Moreover, Habermas also agrees with Austin and Searle that ‘there are contexts in which the same sentences lose the illocutionary force of a promise’, such as actors getting married on stage (194, italics are mine). Thus, along with Searle, Habermas argues that there are definable, determinable contexts in which we can locate a ‘normal’ as opposed to a ‘parasitic’ utterance. This determinable context also enables a felicitous utterance (that is, a transparent and unified meaning) to be conveyed. Habermas declares that if all utterances are assigned the same meaning, and if participants stick to these references or meanings, then interpretation and mutual understanding can be unproblematically achieved (198). To the chagrin of both Habermas and Searle, utterance and a unified meaning are precisely what Derrida deconstructs. Consequently, Habermas argues that Derrida’s notion of ‘context’ ‘precedes every process of communication and every participating subject’ thereby annulling the distinction between normal and parasitic utterances. Thus, Habermas insists that Derrida destroys a genre’s particular autonomy. Interpreting Derrida’s notion of context as indeterminable, and as an all-embracing context of texts, leads both Searle and Habermas to argue that for Derrida there is no authentic ‘intention of meaning’ (Searle 1977: 207), thus Derrida relativises meaning and communication (Habermas 1987: 197).

Context In some respects Habermas and Searle are right to claim that for Derrida language and context are not absolutely determinable. It does not follow from this, however, that for Derrida communication ceases to be meaningful or valid and that Derrida therefore perpetuates endless textual freeplay (an absolute indeterminacy), relativism and hence nihilism. In fact, Derrida goes to great length to point out that the ‘ambiguous field of the word “communication” can be massively reduced by the limits of what is called a context’ (Derrida 1997: 2). It is precisely because there is context that absolute indeterminacy (as freeplay) and relativism is reduced. So when Derrida famously states in Of Grammatology that ‘there is nothing outside the text’ (Derrida 1976: 58) this does not mean a rejection of the transcendental signified or metaphysical system (because one cannot simply step outside the effects of this system), but rather, as he confirms in Limited Inc, ‘there is nothing outside context’ (Derrida 1997: 136). That is, there is no mark or sign that is ‘valid outside context’ (79). What Derrida is arguing here is that the meanings of signs are limited by the ‘real context’

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in which a sign, or utterance, is situated. For example, limited by environment, situation and experience, but also limited and constrained by ‘semiotic context’, by the semantic stratum of language. Nevertheless, ‘by virtue of its essential iterability, a written syntagma can always be detached from the chain in which it is inserted or given without causing it to lose all possibility of functioning, if not all possibility of “communicating” precisely’ (9). That is, due to its iterability, a sign or mark can be grafted or inscribed onto other sematic chains (and this is what allows for some form of indeterminacy of interpretation). He gives an example of this, arguing that the sequence of words ‘the green is either’ is unacceptable in the context of ‘an epistemic intention’, or an intention to know, and yet, ‘the green is either’ is not prevented from ‘functioning in another context as signifying marks’ (12). For Derrida, then, this is why the sign or utterance ‘can never be entirely certain or saturated’ (3). Yet, while Derrida argues that no context is entirely determinable (9) this does not mean intentionality is destroyed, as Searle claims. ‘On the contrary’, Derrida argues, Sec [‘Signature Event Context’] insists on the fact that ‘the category of intention will not disappear, it will have its place …’ (Let it be said in passing that this differential-deferring (différantielle) structure of intentionality alone can enable us to account for the differentiation between ‘locutionary’, ‘illocutionary’ and ‘perlocutionary’ values of the ‘same’ marks or utterances). (Derrida 1997: 58) For Derrida, the differential-deferring structure ensures that no utterance or speech act is either absolutely determinable or absolutely indeterminable. Thus, context, on the one hand, constrains the ambiguity of meaning that comes from the slippage of signifiers into signifiers, so that, for Derrida, there is no absolute indeterminacy or undifferentiated textual freeplay. In fact, Derrida insists – in the same way that he insists that there are effects of subjectivity even if the subject is a fable – that ‘by no means do I draw the conclusion that there is no relative specificity of effects of consciousness, or of effects of speech’ (19). Furthermore, it is precisely because of context as constraint, as a limiting structure, that Derrida can argue that the ‘multiplicity of contexts and discursive strategies that they govern’ are not absolutely relativistic (Derrida 2002: 363). On the other hand, Derrida believes that the context in which speech acts or utterances take place cannot ultimately be determined by a single interpretation because, while meaning can be constrained and limited by context, this does not stop altogether the possibility of several interpretations and

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meanings being correct at the same time (Wheeler 2000: 4). This possibility of several simultaneous correct interpretations and meanings is what Habermas negatively labels the ‘indeterminacy of meaning’, leading to relativism of meaning and communication and a denial of truth-values inherent in language. But Wheeler, comparing Derrida to the analytic philosopher Davidson, sums up the position in this way: for Derrida if there are truth and truth conditions, indeterminacy means that these notions cannot be generally applicable (6), and thus ‘truth becomes another fiction, resting on metaphysical conceptions’ ( 8), while for Davidson if ‘an utterance has truth conditions and truth value’ indeterminacy means that one cannot know ‘what that truth value is’ (6). However, as Wheeler interprets them, for Derrida ‘this is not to say that we cannot continue to characterise utterances [or speech acts] as “true” and “false” ’, rather it is ‘to say that these terms cannot be theoretical tools for grasping what goes on in understanding and communication’, precisely because, as Davidson argues, ‘no conditions of speakers and contexts can yield an analysis of truth’ (6). Yet while the indeterminacy of meaning and context is not equivalent to nihilism or relativism or endless freeplay, Derrida’s form of indeterminacy can be interpreted positively as that which enables context to open possibilities. Not in the sense of opening to an absolute ‘outside’ the system (a transcendental signified, or ultimate truth), but in the sense that context opens the possibility of recontextualisation, or ‘contextual transformation’ (Derrida 1997: 79). This is because, as we have seen above and as Derrida points out, ‘one sentence can have two meanings and two effects’, so that context cannot be saturated and is always ‘open and mobile’ (Derrida 2002: 24). Furthermore, because context is open and mobile, constraint only delineates and limits a play of endless possibilities, and does not altogether close down possibilities and transformation.

Conclusion Based on this radicalisation of language as a ‘play of differences’, it is easy to see how Derrida has been used to justify, on one side of the critical field, various types of readings (via Rorty) that have reduced his work to an ‘anything goes’ philosophy exemplified by one aspect of postmodernism. On the other side of the critical field, more orthodox critics (exemplified in Searle and Habermas) have labelled Derrida’s work as perpetuating indeterminacy and nihilism. However, Derrida has been very clear: while différance displaces or dismantles metaphysics, and reveals a subjectivity that is not fixed and unified by a certain concept of time and space (play in the world), and

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thus challenging the idea of the subject as an ‘originary source’ (presence/ present), this does not mean a rejection of metaphysics and therefore it is ‘neither to give up this passage through the truth of Being, nor is it in any way to “criticise”, “contest”, or fail to recognize the incessant necessity for it’ (Derrida 1973: 154). Rather, this displacement exposes – through the slippage of signifiers, which destabilise binary oppositions – the privileging of presence in the sign (through the proper name: the nominal). In other words, while différance disrupts the privilege of unity and totality given to the sign, différance does not necessarily disregard unity/presence because it is what makes the ‘presentation of being-present possible’ (Derrida 1973: 134). For Derrida, then, the ‘speaking or signifying subject would not be selfpresent, insofar as he speaks or signifies, except for the play of linguistic or semiological difference’ (Derrida 1973: 146). Here we have the paradox of différance. The presence of the present is manifested and exposed; it exists, only because of différance that produces differences through an endless movement of differing and deferral from one signifier to another, which at the same time, destabilises this presence by exposing the absence, or otherness, within presence itself. It is therefore to miss the point of différance, in fact any deconstructive process of Derrida’s (trace, archewriting, erasure, supplement, and so on), to argue that Derrida abandons metaphysics, truth, and hence the subject, and endorses an undifferentiated freeplay. Différance is not only not about destroying metaphysics or reconstructing it for that matter, but différance cannot take place outside the system it continually deconstructs. After all, ‘there is no outside the text’.

Notes 1. See also the Heidegger Affair. Both the Cambridge and Heidegger Affairs are reproduced and published in Points … Interviews 1974–1994 (Derrida 1995). 2. Much has been written on Rorty’s appropriation of Derrida’s ideas, most notably by Christopher Norris (see Norris 1987, 1989). 3. While the urgency of combining political and philosophical forces against the ‘West’s’ war with Iraq in 2002 led to the rapprochement between Derrida and Habermas (see Habermas and Derrida 2003), it does not occlude the real and significant philosophical differences between them, nor the criticism’s Habermas made of Derrida in the 1980s. 4. For more on defending Derrida against Habermas, see Rodolphe Gasché (1988). 5. Other scholars famous for criticising Derrida’s work as nihilistic, indeterminate and unethical include John Ellis (1989) and Gillian Rose (1984).

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6. For more on Saussure see the chapter in this book, ‘From Structuralism to Poststructuralism’. For Saussure, language is arbitrary and thus contingent precisely because it is constructed by its users (language does not exist apart from its users) (Saussure 1991: 3). This suggests that the world (reality) is always already mediated by the cultural meanings users give to those words/signs. Reality, and meaning, then, is constructed by its users (by a culture or society). This is not to deny that a thing in the world exists, rather it is to argue that the interpretation of a ‘thing’ may differ across cultures due to the contingent and contextual construction of language, and therefore this ‘thing’, or the world, may be perceived and thus understood in differing ways.

References D’Ancona, Matthew (1992), ‘Cambridge votes on Derrida’s degree’, The Times, May 16: 13. Derrida, Jacques (1973), Speech and Phenomena: and Other Essays on Husserl’s Theory of Signs, trans. David B. Allison, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Derrida, Jacques (1976), Of Grammatology, trans. G. C. Spivak, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Derrida, Jacques (1978), ‘Structure, sign and play in the discourse of the Human Sciences’ in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass, London: Routledge, pp. 278–93. Derrida, Jacques (1982), Positions, trans. Alan Bass, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Derrida, Jacques (1986), Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Derrida, Jacques (1988), The Ear of the Other: Otobiography, Transference, Translation, ed. Christie McDonald, trans. Peggy Kamuf, Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press/Bison Books. Derrida, Jacques (1990), Glas, trans. J. P. Leavey Jr, and R. Rand, Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press. Derrida, Jacques (1995), Points … Interviews, 1974–1994, ed. Elizabeth Weber, trans. Peggy Kamuf, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Derrida, Jacques (1997), Limited Inc, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Derrida, Jacques (1998), Resistances of Psychoanalysis, trans. Peggy Kamuf, PascaleAnne Brault and Michael Naas, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Derrida, Jacques (2002), Negotiations: Interventions and Interviews 1971–2001, trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Derrida, Jacques and Jean-Luc Nancy (1991), ‘ “Eating well”, or the calculation of the subject: an interview with Jacques Derrida’, in E. Cadava, P. Connor and J.-L. Nancy (eds), Who Comes After the Subject? London: Routledge Press. Derrida, Jacques and Christopher Norris (1989), ‘Jacques Derrida: in discussion

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with Christopher Norris’, in A. Papadakis, C. Cooke and A. Benjamin (eds), Deconstruction: Omnibus Volume, New York, NY: Rizzoli Press. Ellis, John (1989), Against Deconstruction, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Gasché, Rodolphe (1988), ‘Postmodernism and rationality’, Journal of Philosophy, 85: 10, 528–38. Habermas, Jürgen (1987), The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures, trans. F. Lawrence, Cambridge: Polity Press. Habermas, Jürgen and Jacques Derrida (2003), ‘February 15, or What binds Europeans together: a plea for a common foreign policy, beginning in the core of Europe’, in Constellations: An International Journal of Critical and Democratic Theory, 10: 3, 291–7. Kandell, Jonathan (2004), ‘Jacques Derrida, abstruse theorist, dies in Paris at 74’, New York Times, 10 October. Lucy, Niall (1997), Postmodern Literary Theory: An Introduction, London: Blackwell. Norris, Christopher (1987), Derrida, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Norris, Christopher (1989), ‘Philosophy is not just a “kind of writing”: Derrida and the claim of reason’, in Reed Way Dasenbrock (ed.), Redrawing the Lines: Analytic Philosophy, Deconstruction, and Literary Theory, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Rorty, Richard (1982), Consequences of Pragmatism (Essays: 1972–1980), Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Rorty, Richard (1991), ‘Postmodern bourgeois liberalism’, in Objectivity, relativism and truth: philosophical papers vol. 1, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rose, Gillian (1984), Dialectic of Nihilism: Post-structuralism and Law, London: Blackwell. Saussure, Ferdinand (1991), ‘The object of study’ and ‘Nature of the linguistic sign’, in David Lodge (ed.), Modern Criticism and Theory: A Reader, London: Longman. Searle, John (1977), ‘Reiterating the differences: a reply to Derrida’, Glyph, 1, 198–208. Smith, Barry (1992), ‘Derrida degree a question of honour’, The Times, 9 May. Staten, Henry (1986), ‘Rorty’s circumvention of Derrida’, Critical Inquiry, 12: Winter, 453–61. Wheeler, Samuel (2000), Deconstruction as Analytic Philosophy, Stanford; CA: Stanford University Press.

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Chapter 12 H é l è n e C i xo u s a n d t h e P l a y o f L a n g u a ge Tara Puri

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It is said that words have power over life and death. In my garden of hell words are my fools. I sit upon a throne of fire and listen to my language … Sometimes I laugh, sometimes I cry; sometimes I even forget; more often I remember … It is because of words that I laugh. (Cixous 1986: 3) For Hélène Cixous, words are powerful, mellifluous things capable not only of evoking memories and fantasies, but creating the world and the self. Her writing constantly plays with language, breaking it up and recomposing it, widening its gaps, showing its fractures, filling it up with puns, and inventing new portmanteau words. It is this irrepressible energy that makes so much of her writing epiphanic in its effect. Her formulation of écriture féminine, as articulated in The Newly Born Woman and ‘The laugh of the Medusa’, has everything to do with the potentiality that resides in words. The quote that I begin with is from the epigraph of Cixous’ first novel Inside and speaks of the centrality of language to both the novel and the self that inhabits the novel. An autobiographical, stream-of-consciousness narrative,1 Inside is split into two halves that trace the growth of the writer largely in reference to two absent signifiers that mark each section: her father who dies and her lover from whom she separates. It is an evocative meditation on the death of her father, her relationship with her mother and her shared childhood with her brother. But as the title suggests, it explores the inside of the writer, a personal inscape mapping her relationships, her memories, her losses and her dreams. Like in Cixous’ other works, the deceptive simplicity of the title secretes a multiplicity of meanings: ‘inside’ is her inner being as a writer, it is also a bodily interiority that arises from being woman, it is suggestive of a place of refuge and protection, as well as a place that confines and sets apart. Much of the novel takes place in the domestic interiority of

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her parents’ household and as such this ‘inside’ becomes a place of both safety and exile, a space separated from the world of politics, public life and history; a space of secluded, proper femininity. But at the same time, this ‘inside’ also has something to do with Cixous’ method of writing, her hope to write from the body: ‘It is as if I were writing on the inside of myself. It is as if the page were really inside. The least outside possible. As close as possible to the body. As if my body enveloped my own paper’ (Cixous and Calle-Gruber 1997: 105). Words for Cixous then come from this space of the inside, where it is impossible to separate the body from the paper; the rhythms of the body transform themselves into the words that mark the page.2 It is the sense of radical possibility that Cixous associates with the written word in particular that I will explore in this chapter, considering the ways in which she locates language in the body. I will approach the idea of écriture féminine obliquely, through an analysis of the axis formed by language and laughter, while also showing Cixous’ dialogue with psychoanalysis. My attempt is to open up Cixous’ conceptualisation of ‘woman’, analysing how language is rooted in the gendered body, and I will conclude by turning towards Cixous’ own conflictual relationship with language. Zoë Brigley Thompson’s essay, included in this collection, provides a detailed examination of écriture féminine, situating it in the context of French feminism and deconstruction, and laying it out in all its illimitable complexity. This chapter attempts to consider the same problematic from a differing point of view.

It is Because of Words that I Laugh The Newly Born Woman is an unusual, collaborative book – it is structured as a dialogue between Cixous and Catherine Clément about the ways in which the function and organisation of language situates women in a site that consists in silencing their voice and shaping them to a particular image. These images are those of the sorceress and the hysteric, of Cleopatra and Medusa, amongst others. In her essay ‘Sorties’ (or ‘Exits’), that forms the second part of this book, Cixous speaks of how sexual difference is treated in terms of opposition, so that woman is always imagined as passivity to man’s activity, night to his day.3 The solidarity between logocentrism and phallocentrism has created a structure that passes itself as eternal and natural, and it is woman’s repression that ensures the system’s functioning. However, Cixous argues, the worst damage that this phallogocentrism has done to woman is to create in her an ‘antinarcissism’, what she calls ‘a logic of

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antilove’ (Cixous and Clément 1996: 68). Figured as the other, as invisible, foreign, secret, hidden, mysterious, black and forbidden, woman has been imagined as the ‘dark continent’. This phrase comes from Freud’s explanation of women’s sexuality, where he describes the sexual life of adult women as a ‘dark continent’ for psychology (Freud 1990: 38). It is a deeply evocative phrase that draws on the confident discourse of imperialism, as well as that of masculine adventure and exploration. Women’s sexuality is constituted as an unknown geographic space – virgin, hostile, impenetrable, as well as an unrepresentable, unsolvable enigma. Cixous is responding to this Freudian analysis when she argues that women have been taught to fear women, to fear their own bodies and their sex. This is an ideology that figures women as lack, freezing them between two equally terrifying myths – the myth of Medusa and the myth of the abyss. The woman who shows her desire, who turns her desiring gaze at the man turns him into stone, and turns herself into an unnatural monster. On the other hand, if she stays passive, waiting for the prince who will bring her to life with a kiss, she turns into the lack, the gap, the abyss that is fundamentally defined by a lack of fulfilment – indeed an inability to be fulfilled. Cixous follows this analysis of women’s position by insisting that women need to write themselves into language. She calls out her war-cry: ‘Let them tremble, those priests; we are going to show them our sexts!’ (Cixous and Clément 1996: 69). These priests are the male writers who exclude the female body from the realm of literature, the academics who guard the portals of their empire, and the psychoanalysts that render women as lack. In her essays ‘The laugh of the Medusa’ and ‘Castration or decapitation?’, Cixous draws out connections between writing, the body and the passionate energy of laughter. For Cixous, it is only through writing that a new unconscious can be found, and a previously repressed self voiced. It is this new unconscious that will allow the discovery of new desires, and new belongings. Closely connected to this idea of writing is laughter, linked not simply to the psyche, but primarily and organically to the body. Cixous writes of a libidinal discourse that will draw on the excess of laughter to liberate writing, women’s writing in particular, from the burden of masculine disciplines and imposed meanings. This idea of the ‘libidinal economy’ that Cixous often writes about refers back to Freud’s conceptualisation of libido as the instinctive energy or force, contained in the unconscious structure of the id. Women’s writing (écriture féminine) and women’s laughter can then challenge the phallogocentric state and its repressive discipline. Extending the economic metaphor, she asserts women writers as ‘the sowers of disorder’ who refuse to deposit their lives

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in the patriarchal, Freudian ‘banks of lack’, and to reinstate the religion of the father (Cixous 1976: 884). ‘The laugh of the Medusa’ is a powerful and unexpectedly poetic manifesto written by a woman, for women, urging them to take up the pen and write their desires and their bodies. In this essay, Cixous describes how women might write, breaking from myth and rhetoric that have kept them from participating in the public sphere. This is a key text where she writes about écriture féminine and puts forward a spirited argument for the transformation of subjectivity. In this feminist declaration for a new kind of female writing, Cixous continues the project she had begun in The Newly Born Woman by reappropriating the notion of woman as the ‘dark continent’, as lack, and as Medusa. Returning to Freud’s colonial metaphor, Cixous reveals its violence and reinscribes it with ideas of racial marginality, as she writes: You [the man, the priest] can incarcerate them [women], slow them down, get away with the old Apartheid routine, but for a time only. As soon as they begin to speak, at the same time as they’re taught their name, they can be taught that their territory is black: because you are Africa, you are black. Your continent is dark. Dark is dangerous. (Cixous 1976: 877–8) Playing with the same metaphor of unknown, enigmatic space, Cixous continues: ‘we the labyrinths, the ladders, the trampled spaces, the bevies – we are black and we are beautiful’ (Cixous 1976: 878). Women are not defined by lack but by abundant, overflowing desires and proliferating pleasures; the walls of their ‘trampled spaces’ collapse to reveal an uncontainable body. Cixous then goes on to reinvent Medusa as a mythical figure of excess. She represents the overabundance of the body, of its pulsations and its drives. Medusa is a key figure in Freud’s castration complex. In Ovid’s Metamorphosis, Medusa is pictured as a horrific, mutated, threatening symbol of female power, though there are other more ambiguous stories surrounding her.4 She is the serpent-headed Gorgon who turns men to stone with her gaze. Freud, like many nineteenth-century and early twentiethcentury writers, misogynistically casts her as an emblem of a dangerous, castrating sexuality. Cixous is often in conversation with Freudian theories of psychoanalysis, and her thought frequently responds to this empty vision of femininity. For Freud, Medusa with her crown of hissing, biting snakes, and her paralysing, petrifying stare, is the ultimate symbol of female sexuality, and functions as a site where male anxieties about women can be concentrated.5 Cixous enacts a rereading and rewriting here that reverses this negative symbol of the Medusa head. Spivak argues that ‘the choice

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of the Medusa as her logo is a derisive takeoff on the notion that woman as object of knowledge or desire does not relate to the subject-object but to the eye-object dialectic’ (Spivak 1981: 173); that woman is rarely perceived as a subject that is also an object of knowledge or desire, but rather as a passive object available to be gazed at. In mockery of Freud’s theories, Medusa is reconfigured not as threat but as joyful laughter: ‘You only have to look at Medusa straight on to see her. And she’s not deadly. She’s beautiful and she’s laughing’ (Cixous 1976: 885).6 This laughter is the first breaking point in the armour of the male-authored economy, and the male-authored text. Cixous celebrates this laughter and its explosive effects even more explicitly in ‘Castration or decapitation?’ Cixous recounts a story that is worth repeating at some length: it is a Chinese story taken from ‘a very serious text, Sun Tse’s manual of strategy, which is a kind of handbook for the warrior’ (Cixous 1981: 42). It tells the story of the king who commanded General Sun Tse to turn his one hundred and eighty wives into soldiers. In order to satisfy this wish, Sun Tse had the women arranged in two rows, each row headed by the favourite wives, and then taught them ‘the language of the drumbeat’: two beats, turn right, three beats, turn left, four beats, about turn, and so on. But instead of following his instructions and learning the code, the women started laughing and chattering and even though the General repeated the lesson several times, they paid him no heed. In fact, the more he repeated, the more the women fell about laughing. This is when the General put his code to the test. According to the code, if the women laughed instead of becoming soldiers, their actions would be deemed mutinous and the punishment for mutiny was death. So the women were condemned to death. The idea of simultaneously losing a hundred and eighty wives bothered the king, but the General was a man of principle, and this code was the Absolute Law, and an order is an order. Consequently, as an example, the two women commanders were beheaded. They were replaced and the exercise started again, and the women turned left and right, in silence, without a single mistake, like they had never done anything other than practice the art of war. Cixous goes on to write: It’s hard to imagine a more perfect example of a particular relationship between two economies: a masculine economy and a feminine economy, in which the masculine is governed by a rule that keeps time with two beats, three beats, four beats, with pipe and drum, exactly as it should be. An order that works by inculcation, by education … An education that consists of trying to make a soldier of the feminine by force, the force history keeps reserved for woman, the ‘capital’ force that is effectively decapitation. (Cixous 1981: 42)

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Cixous here is again responding to a psychoanalytic vocabulary and discourse – while the man fears castration, if we are to understand masculinity as being culturally ordered by the castration complex, the woman is threatened by decapitation, a decapitation that operates through a complete silencing. Cixous continues: ‘It’s a question of submitting feminine disorder, its laughter, its inability to take the drumbeats seriously, to the threat of decapitation’ (Cixous 1981: 43). In both these texts then, Cixous uses laughter as a force intimately associated with the overflowing desires, unrecognised rhythms and ebullient drives of the female body. This laughter is part of the feminine disorder that the measured drumbeats of a masculine economy try to regulate and restrain. It is this laughter that sends shock waves through the masculine economy, through its frugal linguistic structure that resists the rupturing presence of excessive, fearless, stormy ‘female-sexed’ texts. In Cixous’ notion of écriture féminine, writing must go hand in hand with laughter – signifying a jouissance, an awareness of the body and its seething, proliferating impulses. In another essay ‘The book as one of its own characters’, she makes an explicit connection between writing and laughing in her own work: So I write knowing-feeling-experiencing that everything I write can be held against me, nothing I write can be held against me, I write, knowing that the verb laugh, rire, is in cahoots with the verb write, écrire. And that laughing is the result of seeing oneself writing, so seriously, writing oneself to death. (Cixous 2002: 432) Writing by necessity contains laughter (écrire, rire), and this laughter is turned inward at the writer who laughs at herself. This laughter then rejects and transforms the seriousness of the writer’s purpose; while the writer’s work is to write ‘[her]self to death’, this spontaneous laughter overturns the expenditure that is suggested by this image. Luce Irigaray too recognises the power of laughter and the gendered opposition between laughter and seriousness. There seem to be echoes between her choice of words and those of Cixous, and her resistance to the ‘seriousness of meaning’ resonates with the seriousness of writing that Cixous mocks. Irigaray writes: Isn’t laughter the first form of liberation from a secular oppression? Isn’t the phallic tantamount to the seriousness of meaning? Perhaps woman, and the sexual relation, transcend it ‘first’ in laughter? Besides, women among themselves begin by laughing. To escape from a pure and simple

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reversal of the masculine position means in any case not to forget to laugh. Not to forget that the dimension of desire, of pleasure, is untranslatable, unrepresentable, irrecuperable, in the ‘seriousness’ – the adequacy, the univocity, the truth … – of a discourse that claims to state its meaning. (Irigaray 1985: 163) Laughter then is a polyphonic, bodily response that subverts the seriousness and univocality of phallocentric language, momentarily waiving away meaning itself. The uncontrollable fit of laughter is a riposte that can transcend the enclosed economy of an overconfident, seemingly unshakable discourse. Diane Davis calls it a ‘laughing-in-language’, ‘a place where language is transgressed by a laughter that releases the desire, the excess that is repressed in the “centred” structurations of theoretical discourse’ (Davis 1995: 138). But what is significant in this breaking laughter is that in laughing at accepted and expected phallocentric logic, as well as at the laughing woman herself, it creates a detonation that opens up the possibility of a liberating space outside enclosing constraints and oppositional models. A recognition of the body in writing, Cixous then argues, is what will lead to a new writing that will be guided by newly discovered desires, and the irrepressible flow and discordant currents of laughter will splinter the male-dominated literary sphere and the male-authored text. It is through écriture féminine, that the woman writer will be able to transgress limits, and to inhabit a space that is neither inside nor outside, but a space that allows for life rather than incorporation or acceptance. ‘Rather than merely replicating the static, fragmented or silenced position [Cixous] has diagnosed women as occupying, her texts attempt to transgress these positions by “overloading” them, and lyrically exploding them’ (Ainley 1994: 356). Part of the way in which this lyrical explosion of binary positions takes place is through ideas of spending and the gift. Cixous analyses the present economy of exchange as essentially exploitative, as founded on a system of returns based on expenditure and exhaustion that then has to translate into an earning, a dividend. Moreover, this is a system that manages its limits very carefully, operating through a precisely monitored censorship, and a judgemental repression that suffocates women’s voice. She instead proposes a differently composed female libidinal economy defined through a feminine textual body: ‘A feminine textual body is recognized by the fact that it is always endless, without ending: there’s no closure, it doesn’t stop, and it’s this that very often makes the feminine text difficult to read’ (Cixous 1981: 53). While a masculine economy is based on loss and gain, a feminine economy will be more expansive, working through a free giving; it will be an economy that

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will not mourn loss but will seize loss, living through it. It is the yearning for a system of the gift rather than the depleting experience provided by masculine ‘banks of lack’. The imbrication of writing and laughter is central to écriture féminine, but Cixous also points out that laughter is only the first step. Irigaray suggests the necessity of following this liberating laughter with words, when in a bracketed remark she directly addresses the woman reader: ‘If you keep on laughing that way, we’ll never be able to talk to each other. We’ll remain absorbed in their words, violated by them. So let’s try to take back some part of our mouth to speak with’ (Irigaray 1985: 208). Laughter for both these writers conspires with language, and lies at the juncture of Cixous’ philosophy of the body, of writing and of resistance. Her woman writer is a fleshly subject, desiring and desirable, writing in words that recover and reveal her sex. Laughter then functions as a subversive site where these lines of thought intersect, and makes room for the words to come.

Woman as Metaphor and the Art of Flying ‘The laugh of the Medusa’ begins with a clear statement of its aims: ‘I shall speak about women’s writing: about what it will do. Woman must write her self: must write about women and bring women to writing, from which they have been driven away as violently as from their bodies […]’ (Cixous 1976: 875). This woman whom Cixous is referring to again and again when she says things like ‘woman must write’, is not a stable, singular, biologically determined entity. She herself recognises that this is not one typical woman, a general woman. She clarifies, ‘you can’t talk about a female sexuality, uniform, homogenous, classifiable into codes – any more than you can talk about one consciousness resembling another’ (Cixous 1976: 876). She is not talking in essentialist terms but in terms of individuation, which at the same time possesses an awareness of commonality.7 Cixous also makes clear that it is not just women who can write femalesexed texts, or ‘sexts’. Though écriture féminine is intimately connected with women’s physical experience, it is not necessarily defined or limited by biological sex. In an interview Cixous clarifies: I do not say feminine writing. I talk of femininity in writing, or I use heaps of quotation marks, I speak of ‘so-called feminine’ writing. In any case, femininity … also exists in men, it does not necessarily exist in women, and so this should not return to enclose itself in the history of anatomical difference and of sexes. All that is a trap. (Cixous 2008: 22)

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But she does believe in ‘marked’ writing, writing that bears the traces of the sex of its writer. She says that women who claim to be writing as writers, not as women, women who declare that sexual difference means nothing, are like those people who make the assertion ‘I’m not political’ (Cixous 1981: 51–2). This is merely another way of saying ‘My politics are someone else’s’, and it is the same with writing. However, at the present historical moment, she argues, women need to be the ones who write about themselves, and in so doing reconstitute as well as represent differently their bodies in a way that shatters the glass surface of a writing that claims to be without gender, without sex. Inevitably, this sexlessness is only a thinly disguised masculine writing that privileges the singular, the unified and the rational over the multiple, the profuse and the impulsive. Just as women need to write about themselves, men too ‘have everything to say about their sexuality, and everything to write. For what they have said so far, for the most part, stems from the opposition’ (Cixous 1976: 877). This is the opposition that has been written into sexual difference that shows itself as a war between the sexes. Cixous does consider male and female sexuality as different, but not opposed to each other – and anyway, the female and the male are fluid beings. So, while Cixous uses terms like masculine and feminine, she makes it clear that she does not mean them as essential categories, also underlining the point that sexual difference can be seen as pure difference that allows for otherness, strangeness and multiplicity of identity, rather than being inscribed by negativity. In spite of this fluidity, and this emphasis on difference rather than hierarchy, Cixous insists that at this moment, due to various historico-cultural reasons, it is women who are more open to these new possibilities of writing, new desires and new sexualities. The term ‘woman’ for Cixous works at two levels – as a gendered being who is female, who is a woman, in Simone de Beauvoir’s sense of ‘one is not born, but rather becomes, woman’ (de Beauvoir 2009: 283),8 as well as a capacious metaphor for those who have been suppressed and marginalised by the dominant masculine economy that prizes reason and lack over the overflowing abundance and passion of the body. Femininity denotes not necessarily a female body, but a sexuality and a body that is permeable, open, generous, without end. Amongst the writers that she gives as examples of écriture féminine are Colette, Margurite Duras, Jean Genet and James Joyce. For her, James Joyce is an interesting example because he is a writer who is particularly masculine, with no feminist leanings, and yet there is a very strong presence of femininity in his writing. Jean Genet has been particularly significant for Cixous, who plays with the phonetic sound of his

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name in naming her book La Jeune Née (The Newly Born Woman). There are several puns contained in the spoken sound of the French title that are untranslatable into the English title: La Jeune Née: the newly born woman; La Genêt: a female Genet; Là je n’est: There I, a subject, is not; Là je une nais: There I, a subject (feminine), am born. It is this same verbal playfulness that Ursula Le Guin manages to encapsulate in her compact poem ‘For Hélène Cixous’: ‘Je suis là où ça parle’ I’m there where it’s talking where that speaks I am in that talking place Where That says my being is Where my being there is speaking am I And so laughing in a stone ear (Le Guin 1988: 60) This poem provides a kind of map to this chapter. My argument locates itself in and explores ‘that talking place’ that Le Guin writes about – this is a space within Cixous’ writing that allows for the woman’s voice to be heard, as well as the space where an exchange can take place between feminism and psychoanalysis, between the masculine and the feminine. This is also the space from which laughter emanates, only to resound ‘in a stone ear’. In Le Guin’s poem, the speaking voice is positioned in this space that allows for the speaking to take place, but at the same time, the voice has no one to hear it. This voice speaks a joyful language, but its laughter collides against a stone ear. Cixous’ woman writer will write volcanic texts, creating explosions in language. The first explosion is of course the explosive laughter of the woman writer. But what also makes these texts volatile is the fact that this is a writing that comes from foreignness and exile, from marginality, and from a deeply personal and intensely interior experience. This writing and its bodily language is compatible with Deleuze’s notion of ‘style’. He writes: ‘A style is

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managing to stammer in one’s own language. Not being a stammerer in one’s speech, but being a stammerer of language itself. Being like a foreigner in one’s own language’ (Deleuze 2007: 3). Speaking of her own experience as a woman writer, Cixous writes about feeling ‘exiled’ from language, and from her body. Her relationship with the French language in which she writes, thinks and dreams, is one where she will always remain a foreigner. Both Cixous and the woman writer she envisions write within the language bestowed to them, but interrupting, fracturing, stretching it, questioning it from the foreigner’s position, coming to it from the outside. Her wordplays, her neologisms and her ambiguities then are not accidental. But there is an intriguing, paradoxical dialectic between the inside and the outside: Cixous writes from the inside but feels that she is on the outside, on the other side of the border. Writing comes from the inside but that dense, intimate interiority is made possible by the condition of always being on the outside, always at the margins. Deleuze goes on to write: ‘We must be bilingual even in a single language, we must have a minor language inside our own language, we must create a minor use of our own language’ (Deleuze 2007: 4). Recalling Proust’s words with which he begins Essays Critical and Clinical,9 Deleuze argues that literature opens up ‘a kind of foreign language within language, which is neither another language nor a rediscovered patois, but a becomingother of language, a minorization of this major language, a delirium that carries it off, a witch’s line that escapes the dominant system’ (Deleuze 1998: 5). Cixous’ woman writer then is allied to Deleuze’s ‘becoming minoritarian’, which is not a pretending but a multiple, continuous becoming ‘in order to invent new forces or new weapons’ (Cixous 1991a: 4). Cixous recognises the impossibility of defining this feminine practice of writing, the impossibility of theorising and encoding it. This impossibility does not arise because this writing does not exist, but because ‘it will always surpass the discourse that regulates the phallocentric system’ (Cixous 1976: 883). But above all, in these early writings, Cixous is speaking not of the écriture féminine that already exists, but of the utopian yearning for an alternative practice of writing that lets into writing that which has been forbidden to it.10 This notion of ‘becoming’ contains within it, for Deleuze, ‘a component of flight that escapes its own formalization’ (Deleuze 1998: 1). The self that is constantly in a state of becoming cannot be pinned into one category, for in the interminable moments of becoming it is always fluid, never still enough to be contained within a definition. This becoming then presents itself as a space that makes possible an inversion of the inside and the outside, the known and the unknown, and generates a kind of foreignness within the familiar. In the interstices and intervals of language something new can take

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shape that can resist the used formulations of conventional representational strategies. To speak of the technique of the woman writer, Cixous uses the verb voler, with its double meaning of ‘to fly’ and ‘to steal’. ‘Flying is the woman’s gesture’, she says, and the woman writer will fly in language and make language fly (Cixous 1976: 887). And she will steal, taking pleasure in dismantling structures, things and values, stealing what she needs to make her language new. Flying and stealing are both metaphors that signify the mobility, the fluidity and the subversive potential of the woman writer. They are also images that show the lyrical quality and the romantic undercurrents of Cixous’ writing. Deleuze too writes of this writerly need to steal: ‘Stealing is the opposite of plagiarizing, copying, imitating, or doing like’ (Deleuze 2007: 5), for it is both outside, and in between, and as such marks the beginning of a conversation. For Cixous, writing is the space of subversion and encapsulates the very possibility of change.11 What is most subversive then is to bring in the other, to steal and to fly and to break out of a closed economy of desire based on sameness, making the self inseparable from the other. Brian Duren connects this with Cixous’ irreverence for the propre: Constantly referring to herself as a voleuse, a thief and a flier, she mocks the literature of the propre, literature as the property of an autonomous self. Her autobiographical essays, such as ‘Sorties’ (which means the action of going out, leaving; an exit; a sum of money spent) … are readings of texts, sorties, in the sense that they do not guide the reader toward (an illusion of) presence, of a self, at the center of the work, but rather project him/ her toward the margins of the text and beyond into other texts. Rejecting, in her literary criticism, the aesthetics and politics of mastery, she shifts constantly from the third person to the second and first persons singular, thus clearly implicating her subjectivity in her readings of texts and tearing the veil of truth that traditional literary criticism wears to conceal its real status of fiction. (Duren 1981: 42) For Cixous, the propre denotes a closed economy of desire because it is an enclosed empire that bases its dominion on exclusion. Duren goes on to explain that this empire of the propre is ‘a political and moral empire … an empire that is semantic, ontological, and sexual’; it contains within it the notions of propriety, possession, ownership, definition, and an ethics of right and wrong (Duren 1981: 39). Cixous recognises herself as the impropre when she describes herself as a ‘Jewoman’ (Cixous 1991a: 7, 12), a permanent exile living and writing in a language that is not her mother(’s) tongue, in a country that is not

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the country of her birth.12 Cixous, in her most explicitly autobiographical of essays ‘Coming to writing’, speaks of how she threw off the constraints that kept her from writing: ‘Everything in me joined forces to forbid me to write: History, my story, my origin, my sex’ (Cixous 1991a: 12). Susan Suleiman succinctly rephrases this dilemma when she posits the question, by what right did a ‘Jewoman’ with a German mother(tongue), growing up in Algeria without a father, desire to enter the Sacred Garden of French Literature? … [But] The passion to write can even get past triple walls of interdiction, triple walls of difference: foreignness, Jewishness, femininity. (Suleiman 1991: ix) It is precisely her sense of dislocation, the perpetual and multiple layers of exile that become the space from which a generative and genuinely creative writing can emerge.

I am Only a Poet It is difficult to separate and categorise Cixous’ works into novels, stories, autobiographical reflections, theory and so on. This cataloguing, undertaken in numerous biographies, seems permeable and arbitrary – it is impossible to label an essay purely poetic or fictional, or exclusively theoretical, so resolutely has Cixous undone the seams of genre difference. Her writing constantly subverts form, structure, notions of characterisation, narrative centre and linear temporality. Her voice is not one that evokes the wholeness of a confident, unfragmented self; rather it is perforated by loss and dispersal along with unexpected, fleeting moments of unadulterated pleasure. These are texts overflowing with images of writing, the voice, foreignness, exile, orgasm, birth and belonging. As Duren expressively argues, ‘her exorbitant texts read like a body expelling itself, an almost jubilant loss, a potlatch of signifiers, an excess of language that seems to defy the coherence and continuity and order of what we call meaning’ (Duren 1981: 46). Meaning then seems to lie just off the page, beyond its margins, just slightly beyond reach, constantly unsettling the unified self and its voice through the suggested presence (or marked absence) of the other. As Kuhn puts it, ‘meanings radiate, multiply, permeate the text, and finally go beyond it’ (Kuhn 1981: 40). Cixous moves away from characterisation and narrative logic in the traditional sense, stripping the idea of narrative to something more fundamental, more elemental. The character then is the writerly self, a shape-shifting, protean being, producing constantly changing relationships

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with the other, and consequently ‘her texts are always, like a psychoanalysis, quests, readings of dreams and fantasies, a working-out and a crossing-over’ (Duren 1981: 49). Given this polysemic, polymorphous nature of her writing, it is no wonder that Cixous expresses her discomfort with novelists, ‘allies of representationalism’, and sees poetry as showing the way to the woman writer, whom she formulates parenthetically as ‘I-woman, escapee’ (Cixous 1976: 879). Poetry is the privileged medium because it is more directly linked to the unconscious, ‘that other limitless country’ (Cixous 1976: 880), where the repressed have managed to survive. In ‘The last painting or the portrait of God’, Cixous declares ‘I am only a poet’ (Cixous 1991b: 106). She goes on to explain: ‘I call “poet” any writing being who sets out on this path, in quest of what I call the second innocence, the one that comes after knowing, the one that no longer knows, the one that knows how not to know’ (Cixous 1991b: 114). This ‘second innocence’ is ‘not a question of not having understood anything, but of not letting oneself get locked into comprehension’ (Cixous 2008: 161). This is what leads to the recognition of the self in the other, the stranger in the loved one, in the self. While Cixous finds a euphoria in writing, there is also a fear that words are not enough. On the one hand, extending the link between body and writing, between knowledge and sensual taste, she writes, ‘to see the world with fingers: isn’t this actually writing par excellence?’ (Cixous 2008: 161). On the other hand, she speaks of how she would like to write like a painter, to make words like a painting: ‘I am only a poet, I am only a poor painter without canvas without brush without palette’ (Cixous 1991b: 106). A painter is a ‘bird-catcher of instants’ (Cixous 1991b: 104), but the writer has to work harder to animate images: There are mimosas in the garden. I want so much to give them to you to see … If I were a painter! I would give you each mimosa-cluster whole. I would give you my mimosa-soul, down to the most minute quivering of the yellow spheres. I would put my mimosoul on the canvas, before your eyes. But I don’t paint. I can only speak to you of mimosas. I can sing the word ‘mimosa’. I can make the magic name ring out, the mimosa word: I can give you the music of the mimosa. I can swear to you that (the) mimosa is a synonym for alleluia … But I can’t nourish your eyes with mimosa light. (Cixous 1991b: 106–7) The problematic here for Cixous lies along the axis of the visual and the verbal. As a writer, she can only ‘tell’, not ‘show’, for words are colourless,

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unable to ‘nourish [the] eyes with mimosa light’. And yet there is a lure to the words. She calls herself ‘the awkward sorceress of the invisible’ (Cixous 1991b: 107), and the power of her sorcery, the magic of her words and her rhymes, can only work in collaboration with her readers. The success of her invocation is dependent on the faith of the reader. The seductive, heady nature of the painter’s skill is very different from the difficulties faced by the writer. In a freely moving rhapsody, Cixous beautifully and deliberately romanticises the act of painting in comparison to the act of writing which must always rely on words that have already been used, words that always stay on the surface of the page: This is our problem as writers. We who must paint with brushes all sticky with words. We who must swim in language as if it were pure and transparent, though it is troubled by phrases already heard a thousand times. We who must clear a new path with each thought through thickets of clichés. We who are threatened at every metaphor, as I am at this moment, with false steps and false words. (Cixous 1991b: 114) And yet there is a visceral urge to write that goes hand in hand with the knowledge that words can be accomplices, traitors and allies. It is this uncertain territory between words, visuality and physicality that Cixous is trying to negotiate in this essay. Words possess the power of invocation, the writer’s brush ‘sticky with words’, has a materiality that transfers itself onto the page. These words not only create an imaginative visual realm but significantly hold the possibility of carving out a new lived reality. In her oeuvre, Cixous engages in a complex debate on the nature of language. She recognises the cultural and historical burden that language carries and the problem of disengaging from that and creating meanings that are entirely new. But she also recognises the powerful nature of words, and the real work they do in building new histories and stories. This dialogue comes to the surface if we compare Cixous’ ideas about the ability of the painter to give us the mimosa whole, to give us his mimosa-soul, and the quote that I begin this chapter with. In that initial quote, Cixous (or the semi-fictional speaker) inhabits a garden different from that of the mimosa trees; this is the ‘garden of hell’ where she sits upon ‘a throne of fire’, where words function as her ‘fools’. The garden of Eden is transformed into the garden of hell, tormented and eternal; the blazing throne is suggestive of the agonising nature of the writer’s task as well as being suggestive of a purification ritual, or a test by fire. The notion of the fool contains within it both the idea of someone who is simple-witted, silly, unwise, as well as the jester

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who has the license to critique and to analyse as well as to clown around. The words are what allow for knowledge, memory, sorrow and laughter; that is why they have power over life and death, and that is why the writerly space is the garden of hell. The mimosa garden, on the other hand, speaks lyrically though equally despairingly about the difficulty of making words real, the uncertain magic of words. Explicitly linking the poet and politics, Cixous writes that ‘[a] poet will never be the president of a great state, no woman who is a woman, nobody whose tongue is free, will ever be president’ (Cixous 1993: 204). This is because a state will never accept a poet just as a poet will never accept a state, for there is something fundamentally irreconcilable between them. But at the same time, this incompatibility does not mean an armistice: Power is afraid of poetry, afraid of what has no strength, only the power of words. How much the word is feared – as much as the people, more than bombs – the history of our century has everywhere shown. It is the whole history of the Soviet century. People with no strength other than the secret strength of the poem have made tyranny quake … Mandelstam was deported for the crime of poetry. Because the clandestine strength of the poem is acknowledged. The metaphor exceeds us. The poem is stronger than anything. The poem is stronger than the poet. (Cixous 1993: 204–5) The power of the poet lies in changing the nature of language that is implicated in systems of meaning that maintain the status quo. And it is through writing that the other can merge with the self, and the people can come together with the poet in ‘reconstituting an internal homeland’ (Cixous 1993: 207). There is a power in writing for this is where the dispossessed can continue to live, for they can ‘work language, garden language, graft it, implant it’, here they can ‘excavate and build their palaces and their tombs, grow forests, gardens, and mountains’ (Cixous 1993: 209–10). The metaphor of the garden is noticeable again. This preoccupation with language is a concern that Cixous shares with many other poststructuralists, including Derrida, Deleuze and Foucault. It is also an issue that is central to feminist theorists in France, beginning from de Beauvoir and including Luce Irigaray, Julia Kristeva and Monique Wittig, who provide increasingly complex accounts of language. Her writing draws upon both poststructuralist theory and psychoanalysis in thinking about notions of identity, selfhood and language, while also engaging with contemporary feminist questions of sexual difference and the constructed

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nature of ‘woman’. But at the same time, Cixous’ ‘woman’ is a flexible, porous being, and her collective ‘women’ are also subjected to examination, for any collective feminism that seeks to speak on behalf of a multitude will necessarily become part of the very ideology that it is resisting. Cixous’s écriture féminine then, as Andrea Nye points out, needs to be re-examined as both a feminist strategy as well as a contribution to philosophy of language (Nye 1986: 46). Her challenge to linguistic structure, syntax, grammatical rules, narrative linearity, univocal clarity and genre are part of the larger resistance in her work to the established literary cannon and scholarship as well as to dominant cultural and ideological practices. Derrida too speaks of ‘her desperate love of language, the poetics of her verbal inventions, her still unheard-of vocabulary, her inspiration and her punctuation’ when he calls her ‘one of the great French poets and writers’ (Derrida 2006: xiv). These textual labyrinths are not devoid of political engagement, and the writing Cixous proposes is itself part of a political project that interrogates and undermines phallocentric economy by opening up, democratising, the role of the writer. She urges everyone to write, because it is only through writing that an authentic voice can be found, and it is this find that will generate the discovery of new desires and possibilities. But what pushes the boundaries of both writing and selfhood even further is the fact that this is not a static discovery. Rather, it is a discovery that is always in the process of unfolding, always exceeding the moment of its revelation, constantly spilling over the margin of the page. This kind of writing unearths a space of interiority that will always be open to the other as well as to metamorphosis. The idea of metamorphosis itself is an enigmatic, elliptical one, suggestive of not just a transformation or reshaping, but also a sense of process. Deleuze emphasises the inseparableness of writing from becoming: ‘in writing, one becomes-woman, becomes-animal or vegetable, becomes-molecule to the point of becoming-imperceptible’ (Deleuze 1998: 1). This indefinable, slippery notion of becoming is central to Cixous’ selfhood and as well as to her notion of écriture féminine. It is this imaginative political engagement combined with her mythical textual journeys that make her texts ‘impossible projects, powerful projections, and the most exorbitant gifts’ (Duren 1981: 50).

Notes 1. Hélène Vivienne Wenzel disapprovingly, though acutely, describes Cixous’ style as a ‘stream of the unconscious’ (1981: 268). 2. Cixous revisits this idea of the inside in ‘The author in truth’ when she undertakes a reading of the ‘first fable of our first book’ (1991c: 150), a reading that insists on the link between knowledge and taste: ‘astonishingly, our oldest book

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4. 5. 6. 7.

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of dreams relates to us, in its cryptic mode, that Eve is not afraid of the inside, neither of her own nor of the other’s. The relationship to the interior, to penetration, to the touching of the inside, is positive’ (1991c: 152). The inside then consistently appears in Cixous’ work as a space of creation and positivity. Spivak connects this approach to the Derridian methodology of ‘reversing and displacing hierarchized binary opposition’, as well as to the notion of restance (remains) or minimal idealisation (1981: 170). Sean Gaston explains ‘la restance’ as a remainder, an excess that resists teleological anticipation; it is an idea that contains both the sense of that which is left-over and resists reappropriation, as well as the sense of that which remains to come (2005: 96–7). Ovid describes Medusa as the ‘snakey-haired monster’ (1955: 110), as the ‘snakey-tressed Gorgon’ (112), whose ‘horrid head’ (111) needs to be cut off. Freud not only reads the terror of Medusa’s decapitated head as the terror of castration, but undertakes a more literal reading that pictures Medusa’s head as representative of female genitals (1940: 274). Spivak sees this statement as directly addressing the arrogance of Lacan when he writes ‘you only have to go and look at the Bernini statue in Rome to understand immediately she [St. Teresa] is coming’ (Lacan quoted in Spivak 1981: 173). Wenzel continues her criticism: ‘throughout Cixous’s works, a stream of the unconscious winds its way in long, breathless sentences evoking the essential woman through somewhat inaccessible meditations upon lovemaking, birth, and nursing which employ hyperbolic metaphors constructed upon wombs and mother’s milk’ (1981: 268). Wenzel’s critique of Cixous’ experimental style and her perceived essentialism as perpetuating a ‘neofemininity’ (266) are emblematic of the usual criticism targeted at Cixous. See, for instance, Crowder who is sceptical of Cixous’ writing, also seeing in it a ‘neofemininity’, and calls upon ‘the political need to resist in all its forms the siren song of “women’s nature” ’ (1983: 117). In a similar vein, Cecile Lindsay asserts: ‘I side with those critics, both French and American, who see in Cixous’s écriture féminine a dangerous version of a peaceful, oceanic future for females’ (1986: 52). Interestingly, when asked about her thoughts on Cixous and écriture féminine in an interview, Beauvoir answered: ‘Oh, I am not in sympathy with that at all. We need to steal the tools, women have to take back the tool that is language, but women cannot remake the language. No more than the proletariat who want the state to wither away can remake our consciousness … We have to steal the tool, but not destroy it, in my opinion. And in any case, I find the word-games feminist writers play very feeble. Of course a woman will mark her work with her femaleness, because she’s a woman and because when one writes one writes with one’s entire being. So a woman will write with her whole being, and therefore with her femaleness too. But to feel the need to play games, to cut words up, for example, I don’t like that at all, I don’t find it the slightest bit interesting’ (de Beauvoir and Wenzel 1986: 11). It is curious that de Beauvoir speaks of the need to ‘steal’ language and to ‘mark’ writing, words identical to Cixous’ vocabulary.

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9. Deleuze’s book begins with the epigraph, ‘Great books are written in a kind of foreign language’, from Proust’s Contre Sainte-Beuve. 10. See George Sotiropoulos’ chapter (Chapter 18) in this volume. 11. ‘Writing is precisely the very possibility of change, the space that can serve as a springboard for subversive thought, the precursory movement of a transformation of social and cultural structures’ (‘The laugh of the Medusa’, Cixous 1976: 879). 12. This typical verbal manoeuvre by which Cixous brings together racial, cultural and sexual difference in the term ‘Jewoman’ is central to the argument that she makes in ‘We who are free, are we free?’ It is a formulation that allows her to connect her personal story of exclusion and estrangement to a larger history: ‘I am not just me, I am a protagonist in a story much more important than mine. I was born a survivor, I escaped by the skin of my teeth. I need not have been born a survivor. I resemble those who escaped, and those who did not escape. I am also the untolerated women, the women they are secretly afraid of, I am the orphan, sometimes I am the blind and the handicapped. I am always the Jews, I am still the Arabs, for I could have been born on either side of the wall. Often I think that I could have been born further East, further South, I could have been born more of a woman, more black, more alien, more prohibited, more illiterate, and so on. This is a thought, that we Jewomen have all the time, the thought of good and bad luck, of chance, immigration, and exile’ (1993: 204). This remark further heightens the connections I have pointed out between Cixous’ notion of woman (here Jewoman) and Deleuze’s ‘becoming minoritarian’. Suleiman also draws a connection between Cixous’ Jewoman and Derrida’s dancer – both are not only emblematic figures but also utopian, idealised models or myths (1994: 234). See Timothy K. Beal for an interesting application of this conceptualisation of the Jewoman. Beal uses Cixous’ poetic meditations, along with Judith Butler’s theoretical works, to present a new reading of the book of Esther.

References Ainley, Alison (1994), ‘French feminist philosophy: de Beauvoir, Kristeva, Irigaray, le Doeuff, Cixous’, in Continental Philosophy in the 20th Century, ed. Richard Kearney, London: Routledge. Beal, Timothy K. (1977), ‘Subversive excesses’, in The Book of Hiding: Gender Ethnicity, Annihilation and Esther, London: Routledge. Cixous, Hélène (1976), ‘The laugh of the Medusa’, Signs, 1: 4, 875–93. Cixous, Hélène (1981), ‘Castration or decapitation?’, Signs, 1: 4, 41–55. Cixous, Hélène (1986), Inside, trans. Carol Barko, New York, NY: Schocken Books. Cixous, Hélène (1991a), ‘Coming to writing’, in Coming to Writing and Other Essays, ed. Deborah Jenson, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Cixous, Hélène (1991b), ‘The last painting or the portrait of God’, in Coming to Writing and Other Essays, ed. Deborah Jenson, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

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Cixous, Hélène (1991c), ‘The author in truth’, Coming to Writing and Other Essays, ed. Deborah Jenson, trans. Sarah Cornell, Deborah Jenson, Ann Liddle and Susan Sellers, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, pp. 136–81. Cixous, Hélène (1993), ‘We who are free, are we free?’, Critical Inquiry, 19: 2, 201–19. Cixous, Hélène (2002), ‘The book as one of its own characters’, New Literary History, 33: 3, 403–34. Cixous, Hélène and Mireille Calle-Gruber (1997), ‘We are already in the jaws of the book: interviews’, Hélène Cixous, Rootprints: Memory and Life Writing, trans. Eric Prenowitz, London: Routledge. Cixous, Hélène and Catherine Clément (1996), The Newly Born Woman, trans. Betsy Wing, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota. Cixous, Hélène and Henri Quéré (2008), ‘The novel today: interview’, in White Ink: Interviews on Sex, Text and Politics, ed. Susan Sellers, New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Crowder, Diane Griffin (1983), ‘Amazons and mothers? Monique Wittig, Hélène Cixous and theories of women’s writing’, Contemporary Literature, 24: 2, 117–44. Davis, Diane (1995), ‘ “Breaking up” [at] phallocracy: postfeminism’s chortling hammer’, Rhetoric Review, 14: 1, 126–41. de Beauvoir, Simone (2009), The Second Sex, trans. Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier, London: Cape. de Beauvoir, Simone and Hélène Wenzel (1986), ‘Reflections and recollections: from an interview with Hélène Wenzel’, The Women’s Review of Books, 3: 6, p. 11. Deleuze, Gilles (1998), ‘Literature and life’, Essays Critical and Clinical, London: Verso, pp. 1–6. Deleuze, Gilles (2007), Dialogues II, London: Continuum. Derrida, Jacques (2006), H. C. for Life, That Is to Say …, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Duren, Brian (1981), ‘Cixous’ exorbitant texts’, SubStance, 10: 3, 39–51. Freud, Sigmund (1981), ‘Medusa’s head’, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 18, London: The Hogarth Press and The Institute of Psycho-Analysis. Freud, Sigmund (1990), The Question of Lay Analysis, New York, NY: W. W. Norton. Gaston, Sean (2005), Derrida and Disinterest, London: Continuum. Irigaray, Luce (1985), This Sex which is not One, trans. Catherine Porter, New York, NY: Cornell University Press. Kuhn, Annette (1981), ‘Introduction to Hélène Cixous’s “Castration or decapitation?”, Signs, 7: 1, 36–40. Le Guin, Ursula K. (1988), ‘For Hélène Cixous’, Wild Oats and Fireweed, London: Harper Collins. Lindsay, Cecile (1986), ‘Body/language: French feminist utopias’, The French Review, 60: 1, 46–55. Nye, Andrea (1986), ‘French feminism and philosophy of language’, Noûs, 20: 1, 45–51.

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Ovid (1955), The Metamorphoses of Ovid, trans. Mary M. Innes, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty (1981), ‘French feminism in an international frame’, Yale French Studies, 62, 154–84. Suleiman, Susan Rubin (1991), ‘Writing past the wall or the passion according to H. C.’, in Coming to Writing and Other Essays, ed. Deborah Benson, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, pp. vii–xxii. Suleiman, Susan Rubin (1994), ‘Epilogue: the politics of postmodernism after the wall; or, what do we do when the “ethnic cleansing” starts?’, in Risking Who One Is: Encounters with Contemporary Art and Literature, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, pp. 225–44. Wenzel, Hélène Vivienne (1981), ‘The text as body/politics: an appreciation of Monique Witting’s writings in context’, Feminist Studies, 7: 2, 264–87.

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Chapter 13 L u c e I r i ga r a y : A n O d e t o A - ( L u c e ) Yvette Russell

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Like a great many of the authors discussed in this book, Irigaray would probably contest her labelling as a ‘poststructuralist’1 and her work is so varied and draws on such a wide range of sources and methodological traditions that any categorisation risks excluding or eliding important aspects of her thinking. What I think is important, however, and the value that this opportunity provides is to look again at her work and to do so alongside those other authors whose work contributes to the great Western canon of philosophy, the interrogation of which Irigaray has dedicated a great deal of her intellectual energy. Irigaray’s oeuvre defies brief summarisation and indeed to do so would be to do violence to her project. Reflecting on Speculum, she has commented that the text itself has no beginning or end and that a key part of her project is the very disruption of phallocratic laws that insist on a particular form of representation and ordering (Irigaray 1985b: 68). What I will instead attempt here is to situate her project amongst, but importantly also as distinct from, the Men of Poststructuralism. Part of that unique distinction, I will argue, is the continuing evolution of her work on rereading, but also as her project expands. In order to do this, I will need to describe aspects of her project and to explain what I understand to be her position across a number of works. The reader should not, however, take these descriptions as an exhaustive or even satisfactory account of the body of her work and should, of course, refer to the original text as the primary source. I will first consider the question of style in Irigaray’s work. A central element of her project has been a critique of the propositional logic characteristic of much modern philosophy. While she shares her critical approach to method with many other poststructuralist writers, her style calls into question the masculine One of the phallocratic logos in a way that seeks an opening for woman’s voice. In the second part of the chapter I will

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consider some of the major themes present in her work in the context of her critical project as a whole starting first with an exposition of Speculum of the Other Woman (1985a), and moving through the three phases of her project, as she has described them. In the third part of the chapter I will consider her unique contribution to the poststructuralist event. I will argue that Irigaray represents the conscience of the poststructuralist event. Her critique of the history of philosophy has involved exposing the suppression of the feminine upon which the origins of philosophy are grounded, but the constructive part of her project seeks to imagine a space for woman’s voice not only in the symbolic but also in the world. She is thus one of very few philosophers whose work seeks to traverse the chasm between theory and praxis whilst maintaining a commitment to poststructuralist methods and thinking.

Style It is better to speak only in riddles, allusions, hints and parables. Even if asked to clarify a few points. Even if people plead that they just don’t understand. After all, they never have understood. (Irigaray 1985a: 143) For anyone unfamiliar with her work, approaching Irigaray’s texts for the first time can be a daunting and confusing experience. Even writers intimately familiar with the vast body of literature that she draws on have been unable to contain their frustration with what they see as the opacity of her writing. It is hard to read Irigaray; one must work with, around, through and beyond the page. I have found my own anxiety allayed in the past by recalling Margaret Whitford’s advice: ‘If, in the interaction which takes place between you and Irigaray’s work, you do not withdraw, to that extent she has succeeded and the scene is set for a possible exchange’ (Whitford 1986: 8). Engaging with Irigaray is, necessarily, a dialogic encounter that requires an openness in the reader and a willingness to suspend oneself and to listen. Possibly one of the most unique aspects of Irigaray’s work, and the one that can make her difficult to access, is her use of widely varied nontraditional methodologies. Irigaray’s method or ‘style’ plays a central role in her philosophical project and in many ways sets her apart from her contemporaries. Trained in linguistics, psychoanalysis and philosophy, these disciplines infuse her writing. Her training as a linguist and her intensive engagement with specific philosophical and literary texts has meant that her work has often been classed as literary studies, a classification that she

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contests with some frustration. She situates her work squarely within the domain of the philosophical, an area traditionally reserved for men (Hirsh and Olson 1995: 97). Irigaray’s texts are often intentionally misleading, opaque, contradictory and open to several (or more) interpretations. She uses a vast range of rhetorical devices without any clear systematicity including ironic word-play, pastiche and allusion. In addition to this, her subversion of traditions of citation, representation and ordering means that a reader must be supremely attentive to the canon within which she is operating in order to catch relevant references. She addresses Lacan in detail, for example, in This Sex which is not One (1985b), without once mentioning him by name and only sparingly referencing the text to which she refers. She moves readily, also, between a mode of exchange that is in direct dialogue with the text she is addressing, and that with herself and her imagined interlocutor. A reader must be prepared to suspend notions of objectivity when engaging with her and be prepared to insert oneself into the discussion, often at a very visceral and affective level, in order to fully appreciate her movements. To the extent that she embraces a style that eschews the propositional logic characteristic of Aristotelian rationalism, she enacts an ‘overflow of meaning, structure [and] argument, putting phallocentric oneness into question’ (Grosz 1989: 127). Reflecting on her method in Speculum, Irigaray has described her process as ‘hav[ing] a fling with the philosophers’ (1985b: 150). This is a reference to her most radical methodological tool introduced first in Speculum: the use of mimesis. Irigaray describes her use of mimesis, thus: There is, in an initial phase, perhaps only one ‘path,’ the one historically assigned to the feminine: that of mimicry. One must assume the feminine role deliberately. Which means already to convert a form of subordination into an affirmation, and thus to begin to thwart it … To play with mimesis is thus, for a woman, to try to recover the place of her exploitation by discourse, without allowing herself to be simply reduced to it. It means to resubmit herself … in particular to ideas about herself, that are elaborated in/by masculine logic, but so as to make ‘visible,’ by effect of playful repetition, what was supposed to remain invisible: the cover-up of a possible operation of the feminine in language. (Irigaray 1985b: 76) Her use of this technique has numerous resonances as a tool of critique but also of critical inversion; she is psychoanalysing the psychoanalysts. Her critique is from inside psychoanalysis, she is using the methods of

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psychoanalysis but she is appropriating them against themselves in order to expose their hidden assumptions and prejudices. She uses mimicry too to parody the female hysteric, to give voice to woman’s body. To properly appreciate her writing it is necessary to accept that her style is an integral part of her project, that it is necessarily political, and that for her, there is no distinction between how she is speaking and what she is speaking about. So the plurality present in the text as she attempts to speak (as) woman is mirrored in various metaphors and allegories throughout her work. She writes the feminine body as multiple, oscillating seamlessly between analyst and analysand, inhabiting a location outside a strictly dialogic space through which to invoke a relationship between women where phallogocratic laws do not apply. As Elizabeth Grosz points out, ‘to speak with a multiplicity of meaning within a discipline that values precision, clarity, a single line of argument, the “translatability” of concepts independent of their materiality, formalisability, truth functions and so on …’ functions both in the form of political critique, but also ‘reveals what must be repressed and unspoken in phallocentric discourses: that there is always a different way of proceeding …’ (Grosz 1989: 127–8). Unique style characterises many of the authors discussed in this book, as it is perhaps one of the main methodological tools through which poststructuralist writers enact their critique. The use of lyrical and poetic language is also a style for which the writers associated with écriture féminine have become known (see Puri and Brigley Thompson in this volume). Irigaray is both a part of these traditions, but also separate from them, in that her broader project extends itself organically towards an imagining of woman’s voice in the social and political worlds in which it speaks.

Style in Context There is no way to trace a clear scholarly genealogy for Irigaray’s work; her command of the literature is so sophisticated and her sources so vast that she seems to almost dip in and out of various thinkers and traditions at will. Irigaray’s work did (and does) exist, however, within a context and that context is reflected in her approach. It is possible to see clear strains of Lacan and Derrida, for example, in her work. However, in Carolyn Burke’s words, they do not figure in her work as ‘straightforward influences’ but instead appear ‘ “intertextually”; they are interwoven into the web of her own text’s unfolding’ (Burke 1994: 39). Irigaray’s use of different deconstructive strategies clearly draws on Derrida’s thinking. As Whitford has stated:

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Derrida’s tactics, destabilizing the metaphysical opposition by privileging the hierarchically inferior term, can be compared with Irigaray’s claim in This Sex Which is Not One that ‘one must assume the feminine role deliberately’. And her statement that ‘there is no simple, manageable way to leap to the outside of phallogocentrism, nor any possible way to situate oneself there, that would result from the simple fact of being a woman’ parallels Derrida’s view that one cannot step outside the metaphysical enclosure (Whitford 1994: 16–17, my emphasis). Elizabeth Weed has considered the way in which Derridean ‘style’ has influenced Irigaray’s work and concluded that there is strong agreement between the two on the question of style, particularly woman’s style, manifest in a ‘deconstructive encounter of the texts’ (Weed 1994: 83). This is not to say that the way they write is similar but that their approach to the encounter between the text being written and the text being read involves a similar deconstructive impulse in which the conventions of propositional logic are called into question. Weed also considers Irigaray’s relationship with Lacan in a close reading of her essay ‘Così Fan Tutti’ (Irigaray 1985b: 86–105) concluding that ultimately, Irigaray and Lacan share the same critique of the phallic order. However, suggests Weed, Irigaray parts company with Derrida, Lacan and her other contemporaries in the way she evokes a female positivity in her deconstructive reading of the ‘blind spots’ of philosophical texts, but also how she strives to extend this project beyond its limits (Weed 1994: 86–7). So while Irigaray agrees with Lacan that Woman occupies an excluded place ‘internal to an order from which nothing escapes: the order of (man’s) discourse’ (Irigaray 1985b: 88), she faults Lacan on his refusal to accept the possibility of an alternative discourse outside of the phallogocentric system. Irigaray insists on the possibility of a positively conceived sexual difference in which a female symbolic can exist unmediated by the phallus. Where Irigaray really makes her mark, says Weed, is in the way in which she ventures into the unthinkable rejecting the temptation to appeal either to an archaic prior to metaphysics or to a utopian positivity that could only defamiliarize, she remains within a present signifying history and writes her female positivity and her positive sexual relation through other texts and other traces … Where Lacan and Derrida expose the effects of the phallic economy and figure their critiques as ‘feminine,’ Irigaray attempts to write what is blocked by phallic categories of reading and writing and calls what she does ‘woman’s

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style’ … Irigaray is thus able to write the culture’s symptoms and to evoke a different symbolic organization. (Weed 1994: 100–1) It is this positivity, and what she does with it, that really marks Irigaray apart from her poststructuralist contemporaries, and which she has developed over the course of her vast body of work.

Exposing the ‘Blind Spot’ Irigaray herself separates her body of work into three distinct phases (Irigaray 2008: 160). In the first phase she enacts a critique of the monosubjective (masculine) character and tradition of Western culture. In the second, she seeks to define the conditions necessary to develop a feminine culture and in the third, her focus is on the elaboration of a genuine coexistence between masculine and feminine subjects, without hierarchy, or ‘the construction of an intersubjectivity respecting sexual difference’ (Irigaray in Hirsh and Olson 1995: 96). The vast majority of scholarship on Irigaray’s work is directed at the first phase of her thought and this has, arguably, had the greatest impact on the event of poststructuralism. However, it is the trajectory of her project, its ambition, scope and originality, I will argue, that mark her apart from the other authors discussed in this book. In Speculum we are introduced to the first phase of Irigaray’s project, an exposé of the complete domination of the masculine imaginary throughout the history of Western culture as seen in psychoanalysis and philosophy. This domination, she argues, is maintained on the back of the phallocentric construction of women as men’s other, and the consequent silencing of the female imaginary. In such an order woman is literally homeless, stripped of the ability to enter the civic domain in her own right and confined to a role of mothering within a symbolic that requires her children renounce their desire for her in order to enter the universal, through the father. Key figures from the history of psychoanalysis and philosophy who are subject to Irigaray’s critical eye over the course of Speculum include: Freud, Plato, Descartes, Plotinus, Kant and Hegel. Irigaray’s critique of Freud is especially impressive, and while it was met with scandal when it was published in its original French in 1974, the extraordinary insight and originality of her approach to the texts she addresses remains today. Irigaray’s approach to psychoanalytic theory in Speculum reflects the remarkable complexity of her subject position at the time of writing. She is very much in defiance of her psychoanalytic upbringing both ‘recognis[ing] her constitutive, historical relations to a male genealogy of ancestors

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(father Lacan and grandfather Freud) while attempting to resist the[ir] influenc[e]…’ (Grosz 1986: 64). Entitled ‘The blind spot of an old dream of symmetry’, the first section of Speculum is a close reading of Freud during which she simultaneously quotes, dissects and parodies his text and method in order to expose the ‘blind spot’ in psychoanalytic theory which she alleges is the concept of woman. For Irigaray, Freud is paradigmatic of the tendency of Western culture and theory to erase and preclude the creation of an independent feminine identity. As Grosz explains, Freud deduces (rather than observes) a femininity that complements male development, and satisfies men’s needs. In other words, Freud develops a model of human subjectivity that represents all the variations of subjectivity only according to a singular (Western, capitalist, white, Eurocentric) male model. Femininity is always represented in some relation of dependence on this model, a lack or absence of the qualities characterising masculinity. (Grosz 1989: 105) Irigaray interprets this phallocentrism as necessitating a representational economy of the same in which woman’s difference is conceptualised as simply a (defective) variation of the One: ‘Sexual difference is a deviation from the problematics of sameness, it is, now and forever, determined within the project, the projection, the sphere of representations, of the same’ (Irigaray 1985a: 26–7). Her critique of Lacan too is just as effective for the way in which she engages with the text on its own terms and turns it against itself. In Speculum, while not engaging with Lacan directly, she is clearly referring to his thinking when talking about the imaginary but also importantly the mirror, which Lacan famously uses to explore the emergence of subjectivity (Lacan 2001: 1–7). In her critique of the mirror phase in Lacan she points out that the flat mirror can only reflect a surface image, thus representing woman’s genitality as ‘hole’ (Irigaray 1985a: 89). What is needed instead is a different sort of instrument, a speculum for example. This observation functions both literally but also as a metaphor for her critical approach to psychoanalysis in the text; an interrogation of its practice from the ‘inside’. Woman, argues Irigaray, only appears in Freud and Lacan as hole or lack to support the production of the symbolic and to represent what is outside the imaginary. For this reason, she describes women as ‘residue’, or as a ‘sort of magma … from which men, humanity, draw nourishment, shelter, the resources to live or survive for free’ (Irigaray 1984: 102, quoted in Whitford 1991: 67). This allows her the freedom to conceive of this excess, this residue, in a way that disrupts the dominant logos and provides the basis for change.

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A Feminine Culture The constructive part of her project in Speculum then, and subsequently, is to reveal a space in which the female imaginary can be created and thought in language and outside the dominant symbolic which is constructed upon the erasure of the mother and valorises a masculine subject masquerading as universal. An autonomous feminine imaginary for Irigaray can only be thought with the guarantee of two preconditions. The first of these is that the debt that Western culture owes to the maternal must be acknowledged and given its appropriate due. For Irigaray, this means the recalibration of the mother/ child, and more specifically the mother/daughter, relationship outside a symbolic order that represents woman as lack and erases the maternal in favour of the father. Related to this, the second precondition is that the symbolic order must be reconceived in such a way that represents the feminine in ‘womanorientated terms’, including the ‘autonomous conce[ption] of female sexuality, corporeality and morphology’. Such a challenge necessarily assumes, and indeed requires, a complete reimagining of systems of representation and meaning – of language itself (Grosz 1989: 109). In her work subsequent to Speculum, Irigaray goes about exploring the possibility of the reorganisation of language and systems of representation. The first chapter of This Sex which is not One presents a good example of her project in this way. Writing herself into the chapter as A-Luce, a play on the protagonist in Alice in Wonderland, Irigaray attempts to inhabit a space through the looking glass in Lewis Carroll’s story where phallogocentric logic no longer applies and where she becomes ‘the subject of the speculative inversion undertaken in Speculum …’ (Grosz 1986: 67). The book ends with the famous essay ‘When our lips speak together’ which can be seen as the culmination of her looking-glass utopia, a space in which love between women is celebrated in the lyrical and poetic style ‘ “as if ” we could forget the logical and emotional requirements of the phallic economy’ (Burke 1994: 48). Her description of the metaphor of the two lips in her essay is particularly poignant and gestures towards what is potentially at stake in her project: the existence of the ‘double syntax’ in which the two aspects of the self – ‘the mediated “I” of the Symbolic (in the “Name-of-the-Father”) and the immediate “I” experienced as fusion with the Other (in the name of the mother, we could say)’ – disable the phallic economy (Berg 1991: 64). Between our lips, yours and mine, several voices, several ways of speaking resound endlessly, back and forth. One is never separable from the other. You/I: we are always several at once … By our lips we are women … Kiss

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me. Two lips kissing two lips: openness is ours again. (Irigaray 1985b: 209–10) Through the two lips Irigaray eschews the parameters of masculinity as it defines the ‘parts’ of the female sex as simply the vagina. For her the two lips return the female sex to unity: One can never determine of these two, which is one, which is the other: they are continually interchanging. They are neither identifiable nor separable one from the other. Besides, instead of that being the visible or the form which constitutes the dominant criteria, it is the touch which for the female sex seems to me primordial: these ‘two lips’ are always joined in embrace. (Irigaray 1990: 83) It is poetic prose like this that characterises perhaps the most well-known pieces of Irigaray’s writing (although by no means all) and constitute the style that she has become known for. This lyrical language is similar in some respects to the language used by Cixous, and this has perhaps contributed to Irigaray’s work often being confined to the category of écriture féminine, rather than perhaps the more feted canon of philosophy. But like Cixous, this is a conscious methodology and form of critique and one that forms an integral part of her project.2

Becoming Two In the third phase of her project Irigaray turns her attention to institutional and political objectives; this is a concrete exposition of her thinking on sexual difference. These texts are not as widely read as her earlier work and appear to be heavily influenced by her involvement with the women’s movement and her evolving political commitments, particularly in Italy.3 Despite the criticism that this phase has drawn, I would argue that her intellectual journey seems to reflect the complexities of maintaining a commitment to feminist thinking, methodology and political goals in an evolving global society. Her negotiation of these issues continues to reflect the ambition and vision of her earlier work and provides useful insights for feminist scholars working to traverse the chasm between theory and praxis. The change of direction in her work can be seen first in parts of An Ethics of Sexual Difference in which she starts a more programmatic elucidation of her claim for sexual difference as the founding épistémè. Sexual difference, she says, ‘could be our “salvation” if we thought it through’ (Irigaray 1993a:

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5). Irigaray’s project veers off in a number of different directions from here. In one direction she is concerned with the institutional and political mechanics of a revolution designed to nurture sexual difference. In another, she focuses her thinking on a new universal: the fecund couple. In her writing after Ethics, Irigaray is more explicit about the political implications of her thinking on sexual difference and engages law as an important forum through which to rethink women’s civil rights on a basis other than equality (Irigaray 1993b, 1993c, 1994, 1996). Referring primarily to Hegel’s account of the role of family in ethical life, Irigaray argues that the hierarchical organisation of gender roles in patriarchy consigns women to the realm of nature as wife and mother, which not only precludes her entry into the spiritual realm of culture but requires that she renounce her own singular desires (Irigaray 1996: 21). Men operate as citizens ‘within the domain of the universal and the ethical, but also have their particular needs attended to within the family. Women do not have this possibility’(Whitford 1991: 161). Irigaray objects to what she sees as the ‘delusion’ of the neutral or sexless individual as an aspiration for a democratic society based on equality. ‘Claiming to be equal to a man is a serious ethical mistake because by so doing woman contributes to the erasure of natural and spiritual reality in an abstract universal that serves only one master: death’ (Irigaray 1996: 27). For Irigaray, sexual difference is the defining characteristic of human existence and, as such, trumps all other pluralities. ‘Sexual difference is … the most powerful motor of a dialectic without masters or slaves … It necessitates a law of persons appropriate to their natural reality, that is, to their sexed identity’ (Irigaray 1996: 51). Because patriarchy relies for its coherence on the denial of sexual difference it cannot be overcome by either reversal or reform. Replacing men in power with women, for example, fails to transform social organisation; it merely inverts it. ‘When the slave becomes the master, the order remains the same’ (Wingenbach 1996: 118). What is required instead is a wholesale transformation of the civil law as two. Irigaray’s work in this phase traverses a difficult tension between the necessities and realities of equality politics and her commitment to an imaginary cognisant of sexual difference. While she maintains that it is important to continue to lobby for equal rights (Irigaray 1993b: 11), her critique is wary of the need to stay vigilant to the conceptual paucity of equality. The fundamental question for her remains: ‘How can the double demand – for both equality and difference – be articulated?’ (Irigaray 1985b: 81). She seeks to unravel this question increasingly with reference to law and legal reform.

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Irigaray’s later work insists that it is the law that has an important role to play in reimagining the civic subject who is not sexually neutral. Her proposal for sexuate rights is the most explicit exposition of this thesis. Irigaray proposes, in the style of a legal code, a number of specific demands to be made of law with the aim of establishing a civil identity for women (Irigaray 1993b: 86–9, 1994: 60–2, 1996: 132). These can be ordered loosely into four general categories. The first of these include the right to human identity, which Irigaray describes as a right to ‘virginity’,4 and also the right to dignity: Our need first and foremost is for a right to human dignity for everyone. That means we need laws that valorise difference. Not all subjects are the same, nor equal, and it wouldn’t be right for them to be so. That’s particularly true for the sexes. Therefore, it’s important to understand and modify the instruments of society and culture that regulate subjective and objective rights. Social justice, and especially sexual justice, cannot be achieved without changing the laws of language and the conceptions of truths and values structuring the social order. (Irigaray 1993b: 22) A second set of rights is related to motherhood, rights in respect of the protection of children and freedom of choice. A third set are dedicated to the protection of cultural traditions and aesthetic sensibilities of the feminine, and a fourth to socio-economic and entitlements for political representation for women. What is at issue for Irigaray then is not simply access to civil rights that are equally distributed amongst sexually neutral subjects, but access to rights which enable different persons to fulfil her or his existence as a sexuate being (Cheah and Grosz 1998a: 9). This thinking thus connects the legal, the symbolic and the subjective elements of becoming. In essence, Irigaray argues for a law that provides rights guaranteeing citizenship for women, recognising their difference and thus allowing them the public space to think, act, speak and live (Goodrich 1993: 4). Her commitment to theorising law in a positive, and not simply prohibitive, way in this third phase of her work can thus be seen on a continuum with her earlier work which seeks to evacuate a positive sexual difference from the history of philosophy. In conjunction with her increased interest in the practicalities of realising her vision for ‘sexuate rights’, Irigaray also turns to consider the couple as the ideal paradigm of sexual difference. ‘Why there? Because it is there that two subjects exist who should not be placed in a hierarchical relationship, and because these two subjects share the common goal of preserving the human species and developing its culture, while granting respect to their

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differences’ (Irigaray 1995: 12). The couple here represent the foundation of a new ethical social community in which the absolute alterity of the other is respected and in which lives are shared, intersubjectively, in a model that then reflects in civil society (17). This move from critique to construction has inevitably drawn criticism from those who disagree with the trajectory of Irigaray’s work or for whom the ontologisation of sexual difference as man and woman involves an unacceptable foreclosure of different modes of being together. A question that is raised by this phase of her work is whether it is in keeping with her earlier project to maintain a radical openness to becoming in accordance with one’s unique sexual difference. Drucilla Cornell, for instance, has alleged that Irigaray’s schema of sexual difference cannot necessarily account for the complex identifications of different individuals in an increasingly globalised world. Cornell argues that Irigaray’s elevation of sexual difference as the determinative plurality fails to account for an identity such as the ‘Latina’, a feminine identity that describes the coalescence of a complex set of historical, cultural, linguistic and political factors. Irigaray simply cannot grapple with someone who is a woman whose ‘feminine difference’ is inseparable from imposed personas that she has to live within a racist society like our own, one in which Spanish culture and society has been evacuated of cultural significance … [O]ur categories of traditional gender-understanding simply cannot grapple with the kinds of oppressions and alliances that are mandated by a sense of ‘being a woman’. (Cornell in Cheah and Grosz 1998b: 40) Cornell, along with Judith Butler, has also argued that the sexual difference that emerges from Irigaray’s later work promotes a kind of political conservatism whereby the heterosexual couple is privileged over all other expressions of intimate and familial relationships. Butler goes as far as to allege that Irigaray’s conception of masculine/feminine as the paradigmatic interval of difference ‘completely obliterate[s] the way in which an ethically enabling difference exists in homosexual love’ (Butler in Cheah and Grosz 1998b: 28). The intense overt heterosexuality of An Ethics of Sexual Difference and indeed of the sexuate rights discourse, which is all about mom and motherhood and not at all about postfamily arrangements or alternative family arrangements, not only brought to the fore a kind of presumptive heterosexuality, but actually made heterosexuality into the privileged locus of

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ethics, as if heterosexual relations, because they putatively crossed this alterity, which is the alterity of sexual difference, were somehow more ethical, more other-directed, less narcissistic than anything else. (Cheah and Grosz 1998b: 27) Criticisms such as these seem, ironically, unnecessarily reductive of Irigaray’s thinking and her political project. Her ontological claim that the only true universal that unites society – that life is engendered by men and women – is hard to refute and cannot, in and of itself, be labelled heteronormative. In addition, hers is a vision of radical futurity: ‘I am … a political militant for the impossible, which is not to say a utopian. Rather, I want what is yet to be as the only possibility of a future’ (Irigaray 1996: 10). As such, the questions and the alternative that she poses contain not a prescription for sexual life, but a possibility of a particular ethical, but ultimately unknowable, existence. One in which the spectre of life constructed of two, instead of one, could generate desire (including same sex desire) beyond what is currently imaginable. Sexual difference, for Irigaray, is not a model for the appreciation and recognition of other differences, but the most basic universal difference in which the ‘question of relational identity is … realize[d as] the original connection between body and culture’ (Irigaray 2008: 77). And as such, it forms the basis of a ‘practical ethics generalizable to all classes and cultures where both women and men become productive agents in the shaping of their future world’ (Cheah and Grosz 1998a: 14).

Feminist Poststructuralism: Through the Looking Glass The question as to whether poststructuralism’s critical spirit and the possibilities that this is said to generate are ‘enough’ has been especially bitterly waged in feminist circles on behalf of writers who pride themselves on their commitment to the organisation of a coherent alternative politics addressing the oppressive realities encountered in women’s lives. Martha Nussbaum’s excoriating ‘throw-down’ of Judith Butler in the New Republic is illustrative of this debate and what is said to be at stake (Nussbaum 1999). Nussbaum elucidates the concerns shared by other liberal feminists when she notes that ‘feminism in America has [long] been closely allied to the practical struggle to achieve justice and equality for women’. It is Nussbaum’s contention that it is a point of honour amongst those feminists who remain in the academy to connect theory with proposals for social change with their eyes always on the material conditions of real women ‘writing always in a way that acknowledges those real bodies and those real struggles’(Nussbaum 1999: 37). She goes

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on to contrast these aims against those of Butler and her poststructuralist cronies whom, she says, have virtually turned away from the material side of life to a symbolic politics that ‘makes only the flimsiest of connections with the real situation of real women’ (38). Nussbaum here characterises Butler’s poststructuralist focus on performativity, discourse and parodic resistance as involving a ‘proud neglect’ of the material side of life. Resistance, for Nussbaum, is not just some narcissistic parody of self-presentation, but it involves building laws and institutions ‘without much concern for how a woman displays her own body and its gendered nature’. Butler’s feminism lets scores of young women off the hook, telling them that they need not ‘work on changing the law, or feeding the hungry, or assailing power through theory harnessed to material politics’ (44–5). Butler is in this narrative a purveyor of ‘cruel lies’ who ‘delights in her violative practice’ and ‘collaborates with evil’, confining women in desperate conditions to bondage, hunger, illiteracy, disenfranchisement, beating and rape (43–4). I elaborate these competing narratives not to undermine Sotiropoulos’s argument (see the section on ‘Resistance and Limit’ later in this volume) on the importance of poststructuralist thought as itself an event of resistance. Nor is it to lend credence to Nussbaum’s argument that there is simply no room in the urgent feminist agenda for critical theorising, and that doing so is not just counter-productive but damaging. It is, however, to note that Luce Irigaray is a philosopher whose work engages directly with the question of social and political reform in a singular and significant way. Irigaray’s earlier critical project in Speculum and This Sex encompass the understanding of poststructuralist critique discussed by Sotiropoulos, but her later work then makes another movement towards a critical enterprise linking theory to proposals for legal and social reform.5 Her critique of the universal subject is such that it allows her to argue for the substitution of a new universal, that of sexual difference, which ‘respects the totality of the real’ and demands ‘a theoretical and practical refounding of culture’ (Irigaray in Pluhacek and Bostic 1996: 343–4). Her later work exhibits a clear faith and commitment to a radical futurity in which the whole entry into and participation in social life is rethought. She unabashedly deploys the feminine in sexual difference in a way that creates potentially endless openings whilst arguing for a transformative project which has significant implications for the way in which we consider and politically deploy concepts like justice, fairness and equality. This commitment to a project which seeks to traverse the chasm between theory and praxis marks her as one of the most important and original thinkers in feminist philosophy, ‘a kind of cultural prophet …’ (Whitford 1991:

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33) to which the poststructuralist moment, perhaps, owes its conscience. Her work seeks to provide a space in both theory and in social and political life to the suppressed voice of the feminine. In many ways Irigaray’s contribution to philosophy and to feminism extend beyond the pages of her texts to her personal intellectual journey during which she has not always received the accolades that many of the other subjects of this book have. After the publication of Speculum in 1974 she was effectively cast out into the academic wilderness when she lost her job at the Université de Paris VIII Vincennes, the symbolic home of much poststructuralist thinking. She struggled to find teaching work in France and was largely ostracised by the Lacanian community. With respect to the feminist community too, she often writes herself as if she is alone and facing much criticism from within feminism, as well as outside.6 She has spoken a number of times of the disappointment and hurt she felt when, after sending Simone de Beauvoir a copy of Speculum containing a personal inscription, she never got any reply (Irigaray 1993b: 10; Hirsh and Olson 1995: 113). She thus seems to occupy an awkward space with respect to female solidarity, ironic perhaps as the question permeates a great deal of her work, which is in parts about an ethics of intergenerational love between women (Cheah and Grosz 1998b: 20). This struggle for legitimacy and recognition however, seems to have instilled in her a firm refusal to be silenced or to bow down to the philosophical canon in which she was raised. Her critical place as radical was established in Speculum, a project in which she defied her feminine subject position by reading the texts that women were not meant to read. This ethic of defiance is present throughout all of her work as is a steadfast confidence in her own project,7 an attitude that permeates many feminist approaches to scholarship today.

Notes 1. And has, in fact: ‘I have repeated that I do not want to belong to any “ism” category, be it feminism, post-feminism, post-modernism, etc.’ (Irigaray 2008: 74). 2. See Chapter 12 by Tara Puri in this volume for a discussion of Cixous and her use of non-traditional forms of language. 3. Irigaray speaks of her involvement with the Italian Communist Party in Thinking the Difference and in greater detail in the prologue to I Love to You. 4. More than just physiological, virginity involves respect for both physical and moral integrity including the regulation of ‘images and language consistent with the value of women’s sexuality’. ‘This means that public signs, as well as mass

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media programmes and publications, must respect women’s sexual identity. It would be a civil offence to depict women’s bodies as stakes in pornography or prostitution …’ (Irigaray 1994: 74–5). 5. Interestingly there is an argument that Foucault made a similar movement in this later work, a period during which some commentators have discerned ‘an embrace of human rights’ (Dosse 1997: 336). This thinking is not as explicit or programmatic as Irigaray’s legal code and does not, as such, represent a ‘theory of rights’. He does, however, enunciate a series of specific rights of which he is in favour (see Pickett 2005: 97). This work seems at odds with Foucault’s prior disavowal of rights discourse as pointless or contradictory (McClure 1995: 162; Hunt and Wickham 1994: 63). Ben Golder has suggested that Foucault aimed to deploy rights discourse critically in the service of a range of different political commitments (Golder 2011: 286). He argues that his thinking on human rights is not incongruent with his earlier work but ‘constitute[s] a continuation and not a radical departure from his earlier positions on the subject’ (Golder 2010: 354). I am grateful to Nick Piška for drawing this point to my attention. 6. See Hirsh and Olson (1995: 100), commenting on her lack of rapport with many other feminists. See also Irigaray (1995: 13–14), commenting on the critical reception of her work from feminists and non-feminists. 7. A good example of this attitude can be seen in Irigaray’s responses to interview questions critical of her work. In an interview in 1996, she answered a question asking her to explain why her work allowed her the ability to propose positive and concrete alternatives and plans of action by asserting that it was because her critique was ‘right’ (Pluhacek and Bostic 1996: 343).

References Berg, M. (1991), ‘Luce Irigaray’s “Contradictions”: poststructuralism and feminism’, Signs, 17: 1, 50. Burke, C. (1994), ‘Irigaray through the looking glass’, in C. Burke, N. Schor and M. Whitford (eds), Engaging with Irigaray: Feminist Philosophy and Modern European Thought, New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Cheah, P. and E. Grosz (1998a), ‘Of being-two: introduction’, Diacritics, 28: 1, 3. Cheah, P. and E. Grosz (1998b), ‘The future of sexual difference: an interview with Judith Butler and Drucilla Cornell’, Diacritics, 28: 1, 19. Dosse, F. (1997), History of Structuralism: Volume 2, 1967 – present, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Golder, B. (2010), ‘Foucault and the unfinished human of rights’, Law, Culture and the Humanities, 6: 3, 354. Golder, B. (2011), ‘Foucault’s critical (yet ambivalent) affirmation: three figures of rights’, Social and Legal Studies, 20: 3, 283. Goodrich, P. (1993), ‘Writing legal difference: Helena Kennedy’s Eve Was Framed:

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Women and British Justice and Luce Irigaray’s J’aime à toi: equisse d’une félicité dans l’histoire’, Women: A Cultural Review, 4: 3, 317. Grosz, E. (1986), ‘Irigaray and sexual difference’, Australian Feminist Studies, 1: 2, 63. Grosz, E. (1989), Sexual Subversions: Three French Feminists, London: Allen & Unwin. Hirsh, E. and G. A. Olson (1995), ‘ “Je-Luce Irigaray”: a meeting with Luce Irigaray’, Hypatia, 10: 2, 93. Hunt, A. and G. Wickham (1994), Foucault and Law: Towards a Sociology of Law as Governance, London: Pluto Press. Irigaray, L. (1974), Speculum de l’autre femme, Paris: Éditions de minuit. Irigaray, L. (1981), ‘And the one doesn’t stir without the other’, Signs, 7: 1, 60. Irigaray, L. (1984), Éthique de la différence sexuelle, Paris: Éditions de minuit. Irigaray, L. (1985a), Speculum of the Other Woman, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Irigaray, L. (1985b), This Sex which is not One, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Irigaray, L. (1990), ‘Women’s exile: interview with Luce Irigaray’, in The Feminist Critique of Language, ed. Deborah Benson, London: Routledge. Irigaray, L. (1993a), An Ethics of Sexual Difference, London: Athlone Press. Irigaray, L. (1993b), Je, tu, nous: Toward a Culture of Difference, London: Routledge. Irigaray, L. (1993c), Sexes and Genealogies, New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Irigaray, L. (1994), Thinking the Difference: For a Peaceful Revolution, London: Athlone Press. Irigaray, L. (1995), ‘The question of the other’, Yale French Studies, 7. Irigaray, L. (1996), I Love to You: Sketch For a Felicity Within History, London: Routledge. Irigaray, L. (2008), Conversations, London: Continuum. Lacan, J. (2001), Écrits: A Selection, London: Routledge. MacKinnon, Catherine (1999), ‘Points against postmodernism’, Chicago-Kent Law Review, 687. McClure, K. M. (1995), ‘Taking liberties in Foucault’s triangle: sovereignty, discipline, governmentality, and the subject of rights’, in A. Sarat and T. R. Kearns (eds), Identities, Politics, and Rights, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. Nussbaum, M. (1999), ‘The Professor of Parody’, The New Republic. Pickett, B. (2005), On the Use and Abuse of Foucault for Politics, Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Pluhacek, S. and H. Bostic (1996), ‘Thinking life as relation: an interview with Luce Irigaray’, Man and World, 29, 343. Weed, E. (1994), ‘The question of style’, in C. Burke, N. Schor and M. Whitford (eds), Engaging with Irigaray: Feminist Philosophy and Modern European Thought, New York, NY: Columbia University Press.

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Whitford, M. (1986), ‘Luce Irigaray and the female imaginary: speaking as a woman, Radical Philosophy, 43: 8, 3. Whitford, M. (1991), Luce Irigaray: Philosophy in the Feminine, London: Routledge. Whitford, M. (1994), ‘Reading Irigaray in the Nineties’, in C. Burke, N. Schor and M. Whitford (eds), Engaging with Irigaray: Feminist Philosophy and Modern European Thought, New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Wingenbach, E. C. (1996), ‘Sexual difference and the possibility of justice: Irigaray’s transformative politics’, International Studies in Philosophy, 28: 1, 117.

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Form and Institution In Chapter 14, ‘Photography and Poststructuralism: the Indexical and Iconic Sign System’, Edge reflects on how the pecularity of the photographic sign sytem, and the study of photography generally, have been informed by poststructuralist thought in two important respects: one approach is concerned with the unique structure of the photograph, its indexicality; the other with the discursive effect of specific photographs in different locations – the iconic/symbolic element of the photograph. Drawing on the work of Kristeva, as well as an original case study on very early Victorian photography, Edge offers some fresh and very interesting insights on the indexical quality of the photographic message. In Chapter 15, ‘Deleuze and the Image of Film Theory’, we move away from the still image to the moving image, where Holohan focuses specifically on the use value of Deleuze for film studies. For Holohan, Deleuze offers us a set of concepts which engage with the image in all its affective power, proposing a relationship to the image which is not determined by the law of representation and its Oedipal inheritance. Deleuze conceives of desire outside the restrictive terms of ‘mommy-daddy-me’; as a productive force which moves the subject into new and unforeseeable relations. He proposes an ethics of the cinema predicated upon a relationship to time wherein ‘the powers of change are affirmed and harnessed in ways that value life’ (Rodowick 2010: 101). Finally, Deleuze presents us with the cinema as thought, as the production of the new: the very characteristics which define the act of doing theory. In Chapter 16, ‘The Museum of Now’, Cutler uses Guattari’s The Three Ecologies in order to focus on emergent learning practice within the contemporary art museum. Suggesting that a poststructuralist approach is not just

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a theoretical or intellectual endeavour for an institution, but is potentially an opportunity for the very real practical application of ideas, Cutler explores how Guattari’s direct challenge to institutions provokes a pragmatic activism as much as a theoretical reframing. For Cutler, The Three Ecologies recognises how difference might be created and it challenges us to take responsibility to do so. The challenge, therefore, is to explore how Guattari’s ecosophy might be applied to the processes and practices of our institutions, to make the small and larger shifts across the ecosophic registers; shifts that could redesign the institution that is the contemporary art museum. In Chapter 17, ‘Institutions, Semiotics and the Politics of Subjectivity’, Peters emphasises the importance of Guattari’s work more generally, arguing that it immediately connects to the themes and motifs that define the intellectual movement that we name ‘poststructuralism’. Peters points out that Guattari was a philosopher of subjectivity, of ‘schizoanalytic desire’, a theorist and practicing analyst who revolutionised the notion of subjects in their collective and political forms, providing us with a semiotics of institutions that critically relates to the forms of neo-liberalism and capitalism we are confronted with today, as well as providing models of political subjectivity that can resist it.

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Chapter 14 P h o t o g r a p hy a n d Po s t s t r u c t u r a l i s m : T h e I n d ex i c a l a n d I c o n i c S i g n S y s t e m Sarah Edge

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In his final text Camera Lucida, first published in 1970, Roland Barthes gave his closing views on how photographs should be approached as a signifying system. ‘The important thing’, he proposes, ‘is that the photograph possesses an evidential force, and that its testimony bears not on the object but on the time. From a phenomenological viewpoint, in the photograph, the power of authentication exceeds the power of representation’ (Barthes 1984: 88–9). This final reflection by Barthes signposts the peculiarity of the photographic system which is made up of two signs, the indexical and the iconic; one belonging to the realm of physicality, the other to the symbolic world of visual language. This distinctiveness as a symbolic form of communication has been a source of reflection for theorists from its appearance in the 1840s (Baudelaire [1859] 1992) to the present day (Mulvey 2006),1 which, as I will demonstrate, has become a source of reflection for photographic theorists whom engage with poststructuralist theory. In common with the development of structuralism (Saussure, LéviStrauss, Althusser, Freud) to poststructuralism (Lacan, Foucault, Derrida, Kristeva), the study of photography opened with an examination of its specific structure as a communicative medium. Primarily undertaken by theorists from other fields who deliberated on the distinctive structural make-up of the photograph, such considerations were then utilised by photographic critics and theorists to offer fresh insights on the ‘effects’ of photographic messages. These writings were dispersed across different academic disciplines, and it was not until 1982, when Victor Burgin published a selection of essays – as ‘contributions towards photography theory. I say ‘‘towards’’ rather than ‘‘to’’ as the theory does not yet exist’ (Burgin 1982: 1) – that a specific field of photographic theory informed by poststructuralist debate emerged. Included

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was a text by Umberto Eco on the structuralist workings of the iconic sign system which, although not about photography, offered a set of ‘scientific’ tools for analysing how meaning gets into a (photographic) image. Thus Eco approached the image as a form of language in which ‘an iconic sign … is nearly always a seme – i.e. something which does not correspond to a word in the verbal language but is still an utterance’ (Eco 1982: 35). This approach transferred the work of Ferdinand de Saussure to image studies. Other texts included incorporated poststructuralist theoretical debates on ideology, discourse and subjectivity to undertake an entirely new analysis of photographs in key historical moments or contexts. In his analysis Sekula confirms how ‘the meaning of any photographic message is necessarily context-determined’ in which the discourse ‘is a system within which the culture harnesses the photographs to various representational tasks’ (Sekula 1982: 85–7). I would suggest that this ground-breaking text influenced the development of two distinct approaches to the study of photography which were informed by poststructuralist thought: one concerned with the unique structure of the photograph, its indexicality; the other with the discursive effect of specific photographs in different locations – the iconic/symbolic element of the photograph. This chapter will plot how these two debates have developed and by drawing upon the poststructuralist work of Kristeva offer the reader, what I believe to be, some fresh insights on the indexical quality of the photographic message. As already suggested Roland Barthes is a key poststructuralist thinker in relation to photography and for this reason it is important to consider his writing in detail. Barthes is highly valued for his application of structuralist theory to popular culture in which his text Mythologies (1973) was seminal. However, of significance here is his fascination with photography. Victor Burgin offers an intelligent overview on the complexity of these writings in his text ‘Re-reading Camera Lucida’ (1986). Barthes first turns his attention to photography when examining the (now infamous) photographic cover of Paris Match showing a black soldier giving the French salute (1973). Burgin notes how Barthes ‘discerns an additional message at work here’ in which ‘the very “naturalness’’ of the photograph … lends the ideology (“myth’”) of imperialism the status of an indisputable truth’ (Burgin 1982: 75–6). This observation drives Barthes to undertake a structural interrogation of the unique qualities of the photographic message which he terms the photographic paradox: it is ‘a message without a code’ (Barthes 1977: 36). Burgin confirms how Barthes becomes fascinated with this paradox, ‘born of the uneasy union of two inherently contradictory discourses: semiotics and phenomenology’ (Burgin 1982: 77), a fascination which culminates in

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his final text Camera Lucida, (quoted from at the start of this chapter) which Burgin posits as a ‘search for the “essence’’ of photography (79). In this respect Barthes’ writing on photography could be positioned as increasingly concerned with the development of a ‘pure’ theory on the photographic structure. Other theorists have rejected this as having ahistorical tendencies and instead align their research to the poststructuralist reworking of Marx, Althusser and Saussure undertaken by Michel Foucault (1973, 1979, 1981, 1986). In this, as Malesevic has recently indicated, ‘ideology … operates within the concept of discourse’ and for Foucault, ‘discourses are much less totalistic and universalistic than the concept of ideology as used in structuralism’ (Malesevic and MacKenzie 2002: 93). Foucault’s work offers a complex understanding of the interdependent relationship between power, subjectivity and discourse. Under this conceptual model photographs are essentially discursive operations. Hall explains how Foucault’s use of discourse differs from its linguistic usage by referring to ‘a group of statements which provide a language for talking about – a way of representing the knowledge about – a particular topic at a particular historical moment’ (Hall 1997: 291). Foucault then is not concerned with photography but with a historically based examination of the rise of powerful institutional discourses in the nineteenth century and their role in the construction of new identities and subjectivities. However, as photography appears as a new discursive medium in the same historical moment, there is an obvious link to Foucault’s work. This is evidenced in John Tagg’s interrogation of the discursive power of mid-Victorian photography. He argues, ‘it is into the workings of these institutions that we must pursue photography if we are to understand the power that began to accrue to it in the latter half of the nineteenth century’ (Tagg 1988: 66). This link has facilitated the growth of an extensive body of work on nineteenth-century institutional photography – medical photography (McGrath 1984; Tagg 1988; Green-Lewis 1996), prison photography (Tagg 1988; Sekula 1992; Green-Lewis 1996; Edge 2004), anthropological photography (Green 1984; Edwards 1992; Ryan 1997), charity or schools photography (Tagg 1988) and tourist photography (Edge 1998). Of these, Green’s study on the emergence of anthropological photography confirms the use of photography was neither incidental nor peripheral to other discursive forms of anthropological knowledge … at a time when anthropology was laying claim to scientific status, and when particular emphasis was being given to quantitative values and the collection and organisation of

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empirical data, photography was ideally placed to assert its unique contribution to the new discipline. (Green 1984: 31) This approach to photographs has been instrumental in establishing a history of photography which does not treat the photograph as passive illustration or evidence of the past but instead reveals the discursive power of photographs at different historical moments, contexts and locations. While this work is certainly valuable, the emphasis placed on analysing photographs as part of a wider discursive field has, I would suggest, displaced the question of photographic indexicality posed by Barthes. Indexicality has come to be regarded as unrelated to the ‘meaning’ where the ‘indexical nature of the photograph – the causative link between the pre-photographic referent and the sign – is therefore highly complex, irreversible, and can guarantee nothing at the level of meaning’ (Tagg 1988: 3). The implication is that indexicality does not act upon the meaning of the photograph in itself but rather is positioned as part of the wider discourse of technological developments and power. Tagg proposes that ‘what gave photography its power to evoke a truth was not only the privilege attached to mechanical means in industrial societies, but also its mobilisation within the emerging apparatus of a new and more penetrating form of the state’ (61) in which it was ‘the transparency of the photograph’ that served as ‘its most powerful rhetorical device’ (35). There is no doubt that the meaning given to the indexical process of making a photograph was and still is very powerful. Nonetheless I would propose that Barthes’ hypothesis was actually about something else. He was suggesting that to understand photography fully it is essential to also consider indexicality in itself: that is, the part of its structure that is manifest in every photograph, in every context and in every historical moment. This element is not part of the representational system as such but ‘exceeds it’ (Barthes 1984: 8–9). Barthes’ choice of words indicates that he is referring to that which exceeds or is beyond representation and must therefore be located within the realm of the unconscious. In order to examine this further, photographic theorists have been drawn to the work of Jacques Lacan. Lacan is a central figure in the development of poststructuralist conceptions of the split subject. Primarily this was through his reworking of classical linguistic structuralism by drawing upon the psychoanalytical work of Freud. Weedon notes how Lacan stresses the linguistic structure of the unconscious as a site of repressed meanings and the imaginary structure of subjectivity acquired,

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like the unconscious, at the point of entry of the individual as speaking subject into the symbolic order of language, laws, social processes and institutions. (Weedon 1987: 51) Central to Lacan’s hypothesis is the notion that looking, gazing and (mis) identification happens through an encounter with an image and that this is central to the formation of split subjectivity. Once again, because photography is a visual experience, theorists have examined how the unconscious informs it. Discussing film, Metz notes how the ‘photographic lexis, a silent rectangle of paper, is much smaller than the cinematic lexis’ (Metz 1990:155), which has no fixed time but ‘depends, rather, on the spectator, who is the master of the look’ in which, ‘thanks to these two features (smallness, possibility of a lingering look), photography is better fit, or more likely, to work as a fetish’ (155). Metz also examines indexicality suggesting that ‘photography like death, is an instantaneous abduction of the object out of the world into another world, into another kind of time’ (158). Another highly influential text was Laura Mulvey’s ‘Visual pleasure and narrative cinema’ (1975); although not writing on photography, Mulvey demonstrated how preformed scopophilic pleasures structured both the form and content of classical narrative cinema. Photographic theorist Annette Kuhn (1985) translated this across to her study of photographic pornography and demonstrated how voyeurism or ‘lawless seeing’ has emerged as a central protective device against castration when viewing pornographic photography. This is created in the photograph in two ways: the woman looks away/averts her gaze or she is posed to suggest that she has been caught unawares and thus the ‘veracity’ of the photograph offers the illusion that the viewer ‘can gaze as long as he likes at her body, with its signs of difference on display’ (Kuhn 1985: 30). Such theoretical developments verify the impossibility of isolating the context-driven visual discourse of a photograph from its structuring unconscious forces. Nonetheless, these studies also tend to isolate the iconic elements of the photograph for analysis; thus Kuhn reveals how the unconscious informs a woman’s pose or the type of props included in a pornographic photograph. In order to further develop our understanding of how the unconscious informs photography I believe it is necessary to draw from the work of Julia Kristeva. She makes a number of important propositions: firstly her proposal on the semiotic chora. She explains, The chora is not yet a position that represents something for someone (i.e., it is not a sign); nor is it a position that represents someone for

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another position (i.e., it is not yet a signifier either); it is, however, generated in order to attain this signifying position. (Kristeva 1986: 94) Kristeva explains how, ‘because the subject is always both semiotic2 and symbolic, no signifying system he produces can be either ‘exclusively “semiotic” or exclusively “symbolic”, and is instead marked by an indebtedness to both’ (93). Kristeva makes it clear that the study of any symbolic form of communication, of which the photograph is one, must consider the interrelation between conscious and unconscious shaping forces. Furthermore, she also suggests that creative forms of expression have a privileged recall to the unconscious, in which the artist before all other speakers … bears witness to what the unconscious (through the screen of the mother) records of those clashes that occur between the biological and the social programs of the species. This means that through and across secondary repression (founding of signs), aesthetic practice touches upon primal repression (founding biological series) and the laws of the species. (Kristeva 1990: 446) Importing her idea across to still image studies, Kristeva suggests that there are examples of different levels of engagement with the unconscious in painting. This is evidenced in the comparison she makes between the Madonna and Child paintings of Leonardo Da Vinci and Giovanni Bellini. In Da Vinci’s paintings, we witness the child as fetish, an engagement with ‘the symbolic paternal facet … the desire to bear the father’s child’ in which the child becomes an object (443) and where the visual style ‘unfailingly entails a humanist realism. First there is fetishism of the body’ through ‘the techniques of representation by resemblance’ (448). In this case the unconscious is informing the iconic discourse of the painting in its style, content and structure. In photographic terms this is similar to what Kuhn (1985) has identified in her study of pornography cited above. However, in the work of Bellini, Kristeva suggests that a much earlier memory is being recalled through ‘a predominance of luminous, chromatic differences beyond and despite corporeal representation’ in which Bellini’s use of colour and gazes articulates ‘the luminous serenity of the unrepresentable’ (Kristeva 1990: 446). For readings of still images her research offers fresh insights because it suggests that different stages of repression can inform what is ‘placed’ in the painting. One influences the iconic symbolic structure in which the mother/

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child relationship is re-staged to alleviate fears of castration; the other is a deeper memory in which the more open-ended system of colour, abstraction and luminosity, combines with the iconic signs of pose and gaze to allow the viewer (painter) to re-engage with the ‘jouissance’ of the semiotic. In this instance there is no ‘controlled’ re-staging of the iconic sign system to disavow the trauma of castration (entry into the symbolic) but rather there is evidence of the desire to reunite with something much more distant.3 It is important to acknowledge that photography does not primarily operate in the arena of high art and aesthetic challenge noted by Kristeva, but is rather part of everyday mainstream culture. With this in mind I would like to briefly consider Kristeva’s writings on horror and abjection. Kristeva explains how many of the rituals and cultural taboos that structure cultures are influenced by the desire not only to re-engage with the pre-symbolic and the jouissance of maternal authority (similar to its expression in Bellini’s work), but to also reject it. This process is again related to the acquisition of language, entry into the symbolic in which the ‘function of these religious rituals’ of defilement ‘is to ward off the subject’s fear of his own identity sinking irretrievably into the mother’ (Kristeva 1982: 64). There has been little consideration of how Kristeva’s ideas on the ‘human’ need to re-engage with the abject might inform the workings of popular visual culture, and in this respect Barbara Creed’s evaluation of the horror film as ‘an illustration of abjection’ (Creed 1993: 10) is exceptional. In this context it is not surprising that Kristeva’s work has had a very limited impact on photography (far less than the Foucauldian framework noted above). Exceptions to this would be allusions to Kristeva in studies of photojournalism and death (Taylor 1998); studies on surrealism in which the unconscious was a central concept (Bates 2004); and in relation to colonial imagery (McClintock 1995), Carol Mavor’s (1996) impressive text, which examines Julia Margaret Cameron’s photographs of mothers and children, to convincingly argue that the use of colour/tone and focus/blurriness facilities a recalling of ‘jouissance’ and is noteworthy for its detailed application of Kristeva’s methodology. It is perhaps a consequence of Kristeva’s suggestion that artistic/creative practices offer special access to the unconscious that the greatest impact has been on photographic practice. There is now a photographic ‘movement’ classified by critics as ‘abject’. In 1993 the Whitney Museum, New York, staged the exhibition ‘Abject Art: Repulsion and Desire in American Art’, which included the photographic work of Cindy Sherman and Helen Chadwick. The photographic publication Vile Bodies (1998) also includes references to Kristeva’s work in relation to the photographs of Jenny Saville

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and Glenn Luchford and Roberta McGraham; other photographers whose work falls into this category are Andres Serrano, Joel Peter Watkins and Sue Fox.4 To summarise, poststructuralist thought has primarily influenced the study of photography in two ways: the influence of Foucault has led to photographs being analysed as a form of discourse in which photographs, as Tagg confirms, are ‘never “evidence” of history; they are themselves the historical’ (1988: 65). I have suggested that while this approach is important it has a tendency to prioritise the iconic message of the photograph, its meanings and effects within the symbolic order. I have also revealed how photographic theorists who engage with psychoanalytic theory have uncovered the hidden workings of the unconscious within the photographic discourse. In common with more general debates on poststructuralism and psychoanalysis, these approaches are often regarded as ahistorical in contrast to the historical or contextual specificity of discourse studies (this debate between Foucault and Kristeva was raised more generally in the work of Judith Butler (1990)). Thus in order to move this debate on (before undertaking a brief case study) it is important to identify how a number of cultural theorists have connected the historical specificity of discourse analysis with the split subject identified by Lacan and Kristeva. There is, to my knowledge, no work on photography that pioneers this type of analysis and I will have to draw from film studies. Anne Kaplan has undertaken a study of the changing discursive representations of the mother in maternal melodramas and explains how ‘the level of fiction lies at the intersection of … two levels (i.e. the historical, the psychoanalytical)’ in which ‘traces of those two levels exists within the different kinds of discursive texts under study’ (Kaplan 1992: 7). Thus she approaches the symbolic representation as always being informed by both levels; however, she also suggests that this relationship shifts and changes. Through a detailed historical study of the maternal discourses in melodramas she reveals how, ‘in some cases, the mother in the fiction is close to the institutionally constructed mother; but at other times she diverges widely’ and proposes that ‘it is at those moments that the unconscious, Imaginary mother comes to dominate representations’ precisely because ‘some threat has emerged through social change’ (7). She identifies three historical flare-ups: the Industrial Revolution (to be considered in my case study), World War I and post-World War II. Thus Kaplan’s study reveals that when the discursive symbolic order is challenged and social identities become unstable we can witness the repressed/abject breaking through and more forcefully informing symbolic representations. Thus Kaplan’s methodology combines historically located discourse studies with an appreciation of

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debates on universal subject formation. I will attempt a similar approach in my case study on photography. Finally, to return to my opening quote from Barthes, it would seem that his desire to fully understand the workings of the photographic paradox, its dual signifying structure, remain unanswered. Laura Mulvey recently returned to Barthes’ question noting how, ‘for both Bazin and Barthes, the photograph’s beauty and emotional appeal lies in its ‘‘thereness’’, the fleeting presence of a shadow, which is captured and saved’ (Mulvey 2006: 56). She reiterates Barthes’ conclusion that indexicality will always affect the subject’s response to a photograph, which is separate from the symbolic discourse of the photograph. It lies in those ‘aspects of human experience that stand outside the grasp of language’ (58). The photograph, she explains, ‘however influenced it might be by its surrounding culture or its maker’s vision, is affected by the Real, both in its materiality and in the human subject’s response to it’ (58). This engagement with the Real may differ from Kristeva’s ‘aesthetic’ disruption or its manifestation in popular culture at moments of social instability observed by Kaplan. Both of these are primarily articulated through the iconic structure. Instead it appears as a question of whether the indexical nature of making a photograph will always recall the Real.5 An important contribution to this debate might be to return to Kristeva’s proposition on the pre-symbolic semiotic and to consider its relationship to indexicality in the photographic sign system. Metz (1990), Barthes (1984), Bazin (1967) and Sontag (1977) have all deliberated on how photographic indexicality functions as a recall of death. Mulvey concludes that ‘the photograph’s suspension of time, its conflation of life and death, the animate and the inanimate, raise … a sense of disquiet that is aggravated rather than calmed by the photograph’s mechanical, chemical and indifferent nature’ (Mulvey 2006: 61). In a different context Kristeva explains how, if dung signifies the other side of the border, the place where I am not and which permits me to be, the corpse, the most sickening of wastes, is a border that has encroached upon everything. It is no longer I who expel. ‘I’ is expelled. (Kristeva 1982: 3–4) I would speculate that what is recalled here through the photographic recording process is the ‘soul’, that is the ‘essence’ of life – Kristeva’s pre-symbolic subjectivity or Lacan’s the Real. The ‘photograph … represents that very subtle moment when, to tell the truth, I am neither subject nor object who

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feels he is becoming an object: I then experience a micro-version of death (of parenthesis)’ (Barthes 1984: 14). Such a recall will then always accompany its counterpart – the iconic symbolic discourse of the photograph. In this context the photograph’s mix of indexical and iconic signs may function in every viewing as a disconcerting encounter with abjection which ‘simultaneously beseeches and pulverizes the subject’ (Kristeva 1982: 5). In Camera Lucida Barthes suggests: a History of Looking. For the photograph is the advent of myself as other: a cunning dissociation of consciousness from identity … But today it is as if we repressed the profound madness of photography: it reminds us of its mythic heritage only by the faint uneasiness which seizes me when I look at ‘myself ’ on a piece of paper. (1984: 12) Within the theoretical debates I have outlined it would appear that Barthes’ poststructurally informed reflections on the photograph have yet to be fully examined by photographic theorists. The final part of this chapter offers an application of some of the poststructuralist theories outlined above to a key case study: a series of photographs produced in the mid-Victorian period. The photographs are part of an archive compiled by Arthur J. Munby (1828–1910) held at Trinity College, Cambridge in England. Munby was an archetypal middle-class man,6 who had an interest in observing and investigating working-class women and was in this respect a rather conventional flâneur. However, what made Munby unusual was that he recorded his voyeuristic observations of these women in diaries, notebooks, sketches and, remarkably for the period, photographs. From 1859 to 1898 Munby collected hundreds of photographs of working-class women. These can be split into four main groups: photographs from within England (but not London), mostly from Yorkshire, the coast or Wigan and the surrounding mines; early tourist photographs from Europe and beyond; photographs collected within London; and finally the photographs which are to be examined here, of his secret ‘partner’ Hannah Cullwick. Hannah was a lowly servant, a maid-of-all-work and her relationship with Munby lasted from for 1854 until her death in 1890. She also kept diaries and letters which provide a useful source of information.7 The archive contains a significant number of photographs of Hannah Cullwick which depict her in different ways: in her dirty working clothes, undertaking cleaning tasks, sweeping floors, washing steps, as a chimney sweep. She is also depicted in other guises such as a middle-class lady, a working-class man or a rural worker. The diaries offer valuable information

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on the source of the photographs, explaining how they were taken either following instructions from Munby8 or in his presence.9 They were primarily made with the intention of being viewed only by Munby and Hannah. The collection was bequeathed to Trinity College on the understanding that it would remain closed to the public for forty years. While preparing it in 1894 Munby ripped out thirty-one pages from his first diary of 1859 and seventy-eight pages from the 1860 diary, because, as he notes, ‘all the excised pages’ refer ‘so far as I can remember, to my darling Hannah … they describe the hours we spent together; the training and the teaching that I gave her’ (June 1894, quoted in Hudson 1972: 18). It is probable that it was at this moment that he tore himself out of the only two photographs that remain of his ‘training’ of Hannah in which he is visually included. One is of Hannah cleaning his boots (Figure 1), the other of her sitting between his legs.

Figure 1

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The limited existing academic research on these photographs is informed by the Foucauldian framework outlined above. Munby and Hannah’s relationship is understood as being informed by emerging discourses of class, gender and racial difference in which ‘the script for their fantasy life involved theatrically transgressing the Victorian iconographies of domesticity and race’ (McClintock 1995: 138), or as being based on a ‘series of games and playacting in which they used the differences between them to emphasis their love and devotion’ (Davidoff 1983: 40). In this scenario the meanings of the photographs are established by rebuilding the discursive field that operated to give their ironic signs meaning. In this context they are approached as illustrations of their class- and gender-based relationship or a means of visually accentuating it. An example of this is Munby carrying two small cartes de visite of Hannah in a travelling mount; in one she is posed blacked-up as a chimney sweep (Figure 2) and in the other as a lady (Figure 3). Placed together in this small and fetishised format, they allowed him to fantasise about this transgression whenever he chose.

Figure 2

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Figure 3 Studies also employ psychoanalytic theory drawn from Freud to examine the unconscious influences informing their relationship, particularly in relation to dirt, blackness, cleaning and debasement (they reference the work of Mary Douglas (1966), but not Kristeva). This allows them to situate Hannah and Munby’s relationship as a form of debasement expressed through consensual S/M practices (McClintock 1995; Davidoff 1983; Reay 2002) in which they offer a personal psycho-symptomatic explanation for these manifestations located in Munby’s childhood experiences. In light of the approaches I have outlined above, this research offers a useful starting point for a poststructuralist analysis of the photographs. However, my contention is that this research focuses too closely on Munby and Hannah’s relationship as the source for the photographs and does not consider the photographs themselves as a specific communicative system. This approach seems valid because, as Stanley (1984) and Atkinson (2003) note, many of the erotic or sexualised practices ‘reproduced’ in the earliest photographs were already part of their relationship. For example, Hannah records in her diary of 1855 how she blacked herself up for Munby using lead and oil (Atkinson 2003: 39), an act that is photographed in 1862. However, by

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drawing from the poststructuralist theoretical developments I have outlined I aim to undertake a more complex reading of these photographs. On close inspection there are three different ‘types’ of photographs of Hannah in the archive. Firstly, there are the images of Hannah in different guises: as a lady, as a man, as a rural worker. Secondly, there are photographs of Hannah posed in a manner which replicate her cleaning activities as a maid of all work: cleaning Munby’s shoes, sweeping, serving, outside cleaning the dirty steps, and finally, almost straightforward photographic ‘portraits’ of Hannah taken in her dirty working clothes. In the first group it is the photographs’ iconic signs system of dress, pose, photographic studio, cleanliness, gloved hands in accordance with the related discourses of the period that signify a working–class man10 – or a middle-class lady. In these photographs the ‘pleasure’ of visually investigating transgressive boundaries is not actually operating within the iconic message of the photograph itself. It can only work because when Munby gazes at these photographs he knows that the woman depicted in the photographs is in ‘reality’ a workingclass woman. In this context Munby is consciously playing with the discursive field of the photograph to facilitate his voyeuristic desire to investigate class and gender differences. However, this manipulation of the iconic structure creates problems for Munby in terms of photographic veracity because he is aware of the ability of camera to ‘lie’, and I will return to this observation. The next type are the very few photographs which relate to Munby’s training, in which the iconic codes have been controlled to replicate these activities. An example would be the image of Hannah cleaning Munby’s shoes or others that are referenced, but now missing. However, for my purpose, it is the photographs of Hannah in her dirty working clothes (which begin in 1856) that are the most revealing in terms of my investigation of the photographic sign system. As already noted these have two ‘styles’: one follows the rising conventions of portraiture, where Hannah is photographed in her dirty dress and apron, with messy hair and her large biceps and hands on display. In this her class position is sometimes accentuated by the inclusion of a prop such as boots or a duster. In the others Munby has staged Hannah in a kind of tableau of ‘cleaning’ activity, on her knees scrubbing the floor, cleaning the steps outside a house, carrying slop buckets, washing plates or serving. If we interrogate these photographs within the poststructuralist framework I have outlined it is possible to reveal the unconscious processes that are informing Munby’s use of the new invention of photography. Metz’s (1990) proposal that the photograph is a fetish is evidenced in Munby’s use. He seeks a small image which he can posses in order to

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repeatedly gaze at it and in the process interrogate the ‘difference’ of class and gender. However, in order for these photographs to function as a fetish Munby needs to be certain that he is looking at a ‘real’ working-class woman. Munby is fascinated by the technology of photography which allows for the indexical trace; however, he is, as already noted, aware of the possibility of deception through the iconic function of the photographic sign system. In this context, I would suggest, Munby is forced to develop strategies to alleviate or disavow this fear; strategies that, I would suggest, offer clues on how the myth of photographic veracity was first negotiated. The portrait-style photographs were mostly taken without Munby in attendance. These mimic the appearance of early photographic ‘likenesses’ taken of the working class. The photographers’ studios are cheap, signifying the woman’s class position. Hannah is instructed by Munby to go in her dirty clothes after work to have her photograph taken. For instance in 1867, while working in Margate, Hannah was photographed in her dirt for Munby. ‘So I went one morning just as I was … I had slipp’d out without asking leave afore the lodgers’ breakfast, & I was partly black wi’ cleaning boots & grates & that’ (cited in Mavor 1996: 98) (but she had not been dirty enough for Munby’s liking).11 In these photographs the iconic signs of the workingclass backdrops, the props and the signs of her dirty labour are stabilised as authentic by linking them to the material connection of coming dirty from work, confirming the indexical trace as ‘true’. In the staged tableaux Munby attempts to confirm photographic indexicality by connecting the photographs to something he has encountered in the real. An example of this is offered in 1860 when he visited the Crystal Palace on Forester’s Day. Munby notes: passed a tallish young woman, evidently a servant, who was noticeable for the size of her gloveless hands … She was a maid of all work at Chelsea, it seemed … I looked at her hands and spoke my opinion of them … Her right hand lay, a large red lump, upon her light-coloured frock: it was broad and square and thick … the skin was rough to the touch, and hard and leathery in the palm … I lifted it too – it was quite a weight, heavy and inert (21/8/1860). Less than two weeks later Munby takes Hannah to have ‘several photographs taken of her in working dress and attitudes. With what meekness she submitted to be posed, and handled, and discussed to her face; the coarseness of her hands examined and the best mode of showing them displayed’ (1/9/1860). In this example Munby attempts to use photography to recreate

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the ‘excessive’ descriptive detail given in his written encounter through the highly unusual (for the period) use of an extreme close-up of Hannah’s hands (Figure 4).

Figure 4 The photograph’s authenticity, although staged, is increased through its relationship to his previous encounter in the real. In 1862, Munby records meeting prostitutes in Oxford Street: The prostitutes who as usual accosted me in the streets and won’t be shaken off, were tonight peculiarly atrocious … She said that for ten years she had been accustomed to appear before men, not only naked, but in the character of a beast. ‘I’ve practiced going on four legs, till I can do it as well as a dog said the creature; I run about the room like a dog and bark, and pick up bones and things with my mouth from the floor … and I like it!’ (16/5/1862) In August 1862 Munby takes Hannah to Fink to have her photographed as a ‘dog’ ‘crouching and tugging at the chain’ (cited in Atkinson 2003:

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99–100). The photograph has not survived. If we further examine the internal codes of some of these ‘staged’ photographs we can witness something quite extraordinary. In a photograph that appears to have been taken by Fink (Figure 5) Hannah is posed looking away from the camera, busy on her knees scrubbing the floor. In this photograph the props of class employed in other photographs are put to work in a narrative which implies that she has been captured unknowingly at her cleaning tasks. Thus this photograph mobilises iconic signs to signify a type of photograph that was not yet technically possible; the ‘snap shot’. The ‘captured moment’ which, as critics have noted, significantly increased the myth of photographic veracity.

Figure 5 This example is also related to the findings of Kuhn (1985) on pornography and confirms how unconscious drives were informing this restaging. Munby’s desires to examine the ‘signs of difference on display’ (gender and Hannah’s class), which are exhibited for him in the photograph, also recall castration anxieties. Significantly, then, this example of a photograph at the cusp of its popular development has included the protective device of the averted gaze to facilitate Munby’s voyeurism. This example confirms how the iconic signs of the averted gaze functioned to not just establish the veracity of the photograph but to also displace the fears held in the split subject, revealing the impossibility of separating historically based discourse studies from poststructuralist appreciations of the unconscious.

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Finally, as previously noted, Kaplan (1992) suggests that the Industrial Revolution is a moment when social and cultural change instigates a disturbance of the symbolic/discursive order. Elizabeth Wilson explains how, for men like Munby, the voyeurism of the flâneur represents a ‘shifting projection of angst’ in which ‘the flaneur represents masculinity as unstable, caught up in the violent dislocations that characterized urbanization’ (Wilson 1992: 109). In Kristeva’s terms this discursive disruption causes a rupture of the border separating the symbolic order from that which threatens it. In this context Munby’s photographs can also be analysed as evidence of a need to renew contact with the abject. The recurring iconic signs in Munby’s photographs reveal his fascination with dirt and cleaning, as well as the ‘dirty’ feminine body; there are also glimpses of the lure of bodily wastes (this ‘interest’ in viewing photographs of maids undertaking dirty work was not exclusive to Munby in this period; see Edge 2008). The now defaced photograph of Hannah cleaning Munby’s boot (Figure 1) holds such a meaning when related back to Hannah’s diary entry which recalls licking his boots clean when they were covered in horse shit (cited in Atkinson 2003: 106). These traces of the abject reveal Munby’s desire to use the photographs’ symbolic iconic function to allow a renewed contact with repressed pre-symbolic desires. However, he also uses photography to replay the very process of ritual cleansing and this is evident in his most private use of two contrasting photographs held in his travelling case. One captures Hannah covered in dirt, representing her work when cleaning a chimney (Figure 2); the other captures Hannah as a lady (Figure 3). I would suggest that in the first the iconic signs recall the jouissance of Kristeva’s maternal authority ‘and the mapping of the self ’s clean and proper body’ (Kristeva 1982: 72) while in the other the ‘stability’ of paternal law has been restored. To conclude, this short case study on very early Victorian photography, I would suggest, confirms the importance of photographic theorists engaging with poststructuralist theories in order to uncover the complex working of the photographic sign system. This is because such theories offer the tools to ‘order’ communicative mediums in order to isolate and examine their specific workings and effects. In the case of the photograph, whether digital or chemical, its uniqueness remains its stillness and its indexicality.

Acknowledgements Images from the Arthur J. Munby archive reproduced with permission from Master and Fellows of Trinity College Cambridge.

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Notes 1. A key text here would be Walter Benjamin’s 1936 essay ‘The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction’ noted for its influenced on the development of communication theory within the Frankfurt School (Benjamin [1936] 1973). 2. The semiotic is quite different to linguistic theory of semiotics, and refers to a developmental phase close to the infantile pre-Oedipal phase of Freud. 3. Kristeva’s highly theoretical work is relevant to the study of photography because she offers examples on how the unconscious informs cultural production. For example, she suggests that avant-garde modernist poetic practices ‘evade the apparently monolithic control of the symbolic’ through ‘texts which are produced from rhythms and pulses of the semiotic chora – the pre-linguistic, pre-Oedipal’ (Wolff 1990: 74). 4. Here I would like to draw attention to my own photographic practice which operates within this genre (Edge 1999). 5. A digital photograph of a person still operates within this framework; the difference is that the trace is recorded electronically rather than chemically. 6. Born in 1828 in Clifton, a village on the outskirts of York, Arthur Joseph Munby was a product of industrial England’s emergent upper middle class. His father was a clerk to the York magistrates and although his mother was at home, as was common practice for people of this class, the family employed a nanny, Hannah Carter. Munby trained as a Bar student at Cambridge and graduated with a BA in 1851 and an MA in 1856. In November 1857 he moved into central London, taking up residence in the first floor of Fig Tree Court, part of the Inner Temple area, at the rent of fifty pounds per year and he remained a tenant there for the rest of his life. 7. Hannah Cullwick’s diaries are held in box 98 of the collection. There are seventeen items. They start earlier than Munby’s in 1855 and finish in 1872. 8. Munby first asked Hannah to be photographed in ‘her dirt’ in 1856 when she was posed with her ‘sleeves rolled up in her dirty apron and white cotton cap’ (Atkinson 2003: 49). 9. Phillip Fink was a German high-street photographer, his backdrops and location in Oxford Street indicate that he catered for a middle-class rather than working-class clientele. Munby had a long-term relationship with Fink, who photographed Hannah and Munby in their different guises over a number of years. 10. It is these photographs that feminist academics have used to argue that the play with codes of respectability is instigated by Hannah herself. 11. The fact that Stodart the photographer was very pleased with the photograph and displayed it in his shop window for others to see (Atkinson 2003: 161) indicates a much wider interest in these dirty photographs: see Edge (2008).

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References Anon. (1993) Working Women in Victorian Britain 1850–1910. The diaries and Letters of Arthur J. Munby (1828–1910)and Hannah Cullwick (1833–1909) from Trinity College Cambridge, Oxford: Adam Matthew Publications. Atkinson, Diane (2003), Love and Dirt, London: Macmillan. Barthes, Roland ([1957] 1973), Mythologies, London: Granada. Barthes, Roland (1977), ‘The photographic message’ and ‘Rhetoric of the image’, in Image Music, Text, London: Fontana. Barthes, Roland ([1970] 1984), Camera Lucida, London, Fontana. Bates, David (2004), Photography and Surrealism: Sexuality, Colonialism and Social Dissent, London: I. B. Tauris Baudelaire, Charles (1992), ‘The salon of 1859’, in Baudelaire, Selected Writings on Art an Artists, ed. P. E. Charvet, Hamondsworth: Penguin. Bazin, Andre (1967), What is Cinema, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Benjamin, Walter ([1936] 1973), ‘The work of art in an age of mechanical reproduction’, in Hannah Arendt (ed.), Illuminations, London, Fontana. Burgin, Victor (ed.) (1982), Thinking Photography, London: Macmillan Burgin, Victor (1986), ‘Re-reading Camera Lucida’, in The End of Art Theory: Criticism and Postmodernity, London: Macmillan. Butler, Judith (1990), Gender Trouble Feminism and the Subversion of Identities, London: Routledge. Creed, Barbara (1993), Horror and the Monstrous Feminism: Film, Feminism Psychoanalysis, London: Routledge. Davidoff, Leonora (1983), ‘Class and gender in Victorian England’, in J. L. Newton et al. (eds), Sex and Class in Women’s History, London: Routledge, pp. 17–72. Dawkins, Heather (1987), ‘The diaries and photographs of Hannah Cullwick’, Art History, 10: 2, 154–87. Douglas, Mary (1966), Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo, London: Ark Books. Eco, Umberto (1982), ‘Critique of the image’, in Thinking Photography, ed. V. Burgin, London: Macmillan, pp. 32–9. Edge, Sarah (1998), ‘The power to fix the gaze: gender and class in Victorian photographs of pit-brow women’, Visual Sociology, 13: 2, 37–56. Edge, Sarah (1999), ‘Photography and the self ’, CIRCA, 90, 30–5. Edge, Sarah (2004), ‘Photographic history and the visual appearance of an Irish nationalist discourse 1840–1870’, Victorian Literature and Culture, 23: 1, 17–39. Edge, Sarah (2008), ‘Urbanization, discourse, class and gender in mid Victorian commercial photography: reading the archive of Arthur J. Munby (1828–1910)’, Critical Discourse Studies, 5: 4, 303–17. Edwards, Elizabeth (ed.) (1992), Photography and Anthropology 1860–1920, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Foucault, Michel (1973), The Birth of the Clinic, London: Tavistock.

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Foucault, Michel (1979), Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. Foucault, Michel (1981), The History of Sexuality, Volume One, An Introduction, Harmondsworth: Pelican. Foucault, Michel (1986), The History of Sexuality, Volume Two, The Uses of Pleasure, Harmondsworth: Viking. Green, David (1984), ‘Classified subjects’, Ten/8, 4, 30–7. Green-Lewis, Jennifer (1996), Framing the Victorians, Cornell, NY: Cornell University Press. Hall, Stuart (ed.) (1997), Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices. London: Sage Hudson, Derek (1972), Munby, Man of Two Worlds: The Life and Diaries of Arthur J. Munby 1829–1910, London: John Murray. Kaplan, E. Anne (1992), Motherhood and Representation: The Mother in Popular Culture and Melodrama, London: Routledge. Kristeva, Julia (1982), Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Kristeva, Julia (1986), The Kristeva Reader, Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Kristeva, Julia (1990), ‘Motherhood according to Giovanni Bellini’, in 20th Century Theories of Art, ed. J. M. Thompson, Ottawa: Carleton University Press, pp. 441–67. Kuhn, Annette (1985), The Power of the Image: Essays on Representation and Sexuality. New York, NY: Routledge. Lister, Martin (1995), The Photographic Image in Digital Culture, London: Routledge. Malesevic, Sinisa and Iain MacKenzie (2002) (eds), Ideology After Poststructuralism, London: Pluto Press. Mavor, Carol (1996), Pleasures Taken: Performances of Sexuality and Loss in Victorian Photographs, London: I. B. Tauris. McClintock, Anne (1995), Imperial Leather: Race Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest, London: Routledge. McGrath, Roberta (1984), ‘Medical police’, Ten/8, 14, 13–18. Metz, Christian (1990), ‘Photography and fetish’, in The Critical Image: Essay in Contemporary Photography, ed. C. Squires, Seattle, WA: Bay Press, pp. 155–65. Mulvey, Laura (1975), ‘Visual pleasure and narrative cinema’, Screen, 16, 3. Mulvey, Laura (2006), Death 24X a second: Stillness and the Moving Image. London: Reaktion Books. Reay, Barry (2002), Watching Hannah: Sexuality, Horror and Bodily De-Formation in Victorian England, London: Reaktion Books. Ryan, James R. (1997), Picturing Empire: Photography and the Visualisation of British Empire, London: Reaktion Books. Sekula, Allan (1982), ‘The invention of photographic meaning’, in Thinking Photography, ed. V. Burgin, London: Macmillan, pp. 84–110. Sekula, Allan (1992), ‘The archive and the body’, in The Contest of Meaning, ed. R. Bolton, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 343–89.

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Sontag, Susan (1977), On Photography, New York, NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Stanley, Liz (1984), The Diaries of Hannah Cullwick Victorian Maid Servant, London: Virago. Tagg, John (1988), The Burden of Representation: Essays on Photographies and Histories, London: Macmillan. Taylor, John (1998), Body Horror: Photojournalism, Catastrophe and War, Manchester: Manchester University Press Thompson, James M (1990), 20th Century Theories of Art, Ottawa: Carleton University Press. Townsend, Chris (1988), Vile Bodies: Photography and the Crisis of Looking, Munich: Prestel-Verlag. Weedon, Chris (1987), Feminist Practice and Poststructuralist Theory, Oxford: Blackwell. Wilson, Elizabeth (1992), ‘The invisible flaneur’, New Left Review, 191, 90–110. Wolff, Janet (1990), Feminine Sentences Essays on Women and Culture, Cambridge: Polity Press.

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Chapter 15 D e l e u z e a n d t h e I m a ge o f Fi l m T h e o r y Conn Holohan

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To interpret is to determine the force which gives sense to a thing. To evaluate is to determine the will to power which gives value to a thing. (Gilles Deleuze 1983: 54) In the two books he wrote on the cinematic image, Gilles Deleuze proposes a fundamental break in the history of film form. This break occurred, he declares, sometime around the end of the Second World War and finds its first expression in the work of Italian neorealist film-makers such as Roberto Rossellini. In Rossellini’s images of aimless characters wandering through the ruins of a bombed-out Europe, Deleuze uncovers a decisive rupture with the logic of classical cinema, a rejection of the possibility for action upon which classical narrative depends. Cinema 1: The Movement-Image and Cinema 2: The Time-Image were published in 1983 and 1985 respectively and translated into English in 1986 and 1989. Deleuze’s contribution to the theorising of film occurred, therefore, at a moment when the proper goals and objects of film theory were being increasingly questioned from within. The theoretical approaches to film which had dominated in the 1970s, predicated upon a mix of Lacanian psychoanalysis, semiotics and Marxism, had been largely rejected for more empirically based, historically contextualised research projects which decried the search for any single unifying theory of the medium. Yet in his two books, Deleuze not only asserts a semiotic of the image, but a singular history of film which reconfigures the disparate developments of the cinematic medium into a teleological narrative of redemption in which film progressively realises its true expressive potential. In the words of D. N. Rodowick, ‘reduced to its simplest form, the question informing Deleuze’s cinema books is this: How does a sustained meditation on film and film theory illuminate the relation between image and thought?’ (Rodowick 1997: 5).

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Unsurprisingly, perhaps, Deleuze’s contribution to film theorising was largely ignored within the field of film studies during the decade following the publication of Cinema 1 and 2. Indeed, it is not difficult to find fault with his approach to the cinematic medium, or to reason why his work may not have found favour within the intellectual climate of the time. The potential problems which we might discern within Deleuze’s film writings are enumerated by David Martin-Jones in the introduction to his own book on Deleuze and cinema, namely ‘his Parisian elitism, his disdain for popular culture, his dismissal of television, his at times convoluted style, his lack of concrete filmic examples and his disregard for film scholarship outside of the pages (and limitations) of Cahiers du cinéma’ (Martin-Jones 2006: 6). In an era of film writing which was seeking to distance itself from the theoretical excesses of the 1970s, Deleuze’s approach seemed to lack both the empirical rigour and the modesty of aim which was required of any critical engagement with film form. The problem with such a wholesale rejection, however, is suggested by Annette Kuhn in her introduction to the fiftieth anniversary issue of Screen, in which she claims that the retreat from Grand Theory that has occurred within film studies over the past three decades has also ‘entailed a wholesale distaste for the essential activity of conceptualisation, of theorising’ (Kuhn 2009: 5). Thus, in turning away from any over-arching theory of cinema and its institutions, we are forced to question what constitutes film analysis’ proper object of enquiry. Is film analysis an exercise in description, seeking to isolate discreet elements of the cinematic process for empirically verifiable analysis? Or is its nature always inevitably prescriptive, containing within its forensic enquiries an implied vision of the cinema that could be? Is the proper object of film theory to uncover universal mechanisms and processes of cinematic perception which are replicable across all time and space? Or conversely, will engagement with film necessarily involve theoretical lines of flight that contain their own utopian commitment to a cinema that is yet to come? Must we conceive of interpretation, as Deleuze insists, as a will to power, locked in a struggle to impose value upon the filmic object which it recreates in its own image? Every theoretical paradigm inevitably creates its object of study anew, as can be witnessed by even a brief glance back at the history of film analysis. Perhaps the fundamental question that film theory has addressed throughout its hundred-odd-year history is what it is exactly that cinema does. The attempts to grapple with this core ontological concern have inevitably led individual theorists to give particular weight to one aspect of the medium’s operation, which in turn has implied a canon of exemplary texts that

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constitute its history. For André Bazin, cinema’s mechanical reproduction of reality brought the medium ever closer to our phenomenological experience of the object world, and thus he proposed a teleological narrative of development towards this point. For Lacanian film scholars, the play of absence and presence in cinema’s saturated images captures the operation of human desire and the constituent lack at its core. Those films which most forcefully foreground the operations of desire (in particular the works of Hitchcock) are therefore held up as examples which reveal its centrality to the cinematic apparatus. For Cognitivists, cinema consists of a set of cross-cultural cues and codes which stimulate neurological responses in the viewer’s brain. Due to its global reach and popularity, Hollywood cinema is therefore the focus of their analyses, which seek to illustrate how audience response transcends specific cultural and linguistic contexts. In distinguishing between ‘Theory’ and theorising, Kuhn is seeking to move beyond any one of these ‘hypostatized’ images of Theory for an understanding of theorising as an open-ended process of enquiry. For if a fixed notion of ‘Theory’ works to close down what may be considered knowledge, the task of the film theorist nevertheless remains to produce new knowledge through theorisation, through the creation of concepts. It is Deleuze’s commitment to concepts that perhaps explains the belated ‘Deleuzian turn’ within film studies since the beginning of the millennium. For Deleuze, the goal of film theory is to create concepts that ‘relate only to cinema … Concepts proper to cinema, but which can only be formed philosophically’ (Bogue 2003: 2). If, by the 1980s, Theory in its dominant forms struggled to yield useful new insights into the cinematic experience, then Deleuze’s cinematic concepts have offered film studies the possibility of a reconnect between the filmic object and the theorising process. The focus of this chapter, therefore, will be on the use value of Deleuze for film studies. It will consider some of the insights of his two Cinema books into the nature of the cinematic process, focusing in particular on cinema’s privileged relationship to time. However, it will also acknowledge the impossibility of separating Deleuze’s writing on film from his wider body of work and will examine how film theorists have productively applied his understanding of difference or the process of schizoanalysis to a variety of texts. Any understanding of Deleuze’s impact upon film studies must necessarily address the relationship between his ideas and the other key explanatory frameworks that have dominated the discipline, in particular psychoanalysis. It is with just such a comparative approach that the next section of the chapter will commence. However, underlying any such comparisons or evaluations are the questions already raised regarding the nature

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of film theory and its proper goal. To this end, this chapter will ultimately argue that Deleuze offers us an understanding of film theory as creative intervention and an ethical standpoint towards the history of the image which is predicated upon an adequate understanding of time.

The Cinematic Subject Let us begin with an exemplary moment. Karin, played by Ingrid Bergman, struggles through a barren, volcanic landscape, which belches smoke and fumes in her path. The gaseous eruptions fill the screen and her lungs until she collapses, overwhelmed by the relentless force of nature, crying ‘enough, enough’. She falls asleep on the mountainside and awakens to a calmer, smoke-filled mountain. The film ends as her voiceover repeats over an empty screen, ‘My God! Oh merciful God.’ The ending to Roberto Rosselini’s Stromboli (1950) has been cited by the philosopher Slavoj Žižek as an illustration of a proper Lacanian act. In her attempt to escape the drudgery of existence in a small Italian fishing village, Karin encounters the primordial power of the volcano and is overcome. Crucial for Žižek is that the film ends (at least in its original Italian version) at this moment in which ‘the act is already accomplished, although no action is yet performed’ (Žižek 1992: 43, original emphasis). We do not know whether Karin will continue on or return to the village which she has fled. Instead, we are left with an instance of breakdown, in which the symbolic structures through which Karin has experienced reality recede in the face of the Real: The act done (or more appropriately: endured) by Karin is that of symbolic suicide: an act of ‘losing all,’ of withdrawing from symbolic reality, that enables us to begin anew from the ‘zero point,’ from that moment of absolute freedom called by Hegel ‘abstract negativity’. (Žižek 1992: 43, original emphasis) As Maria Walsh points out in her discussion of the scene, for Žižek, Karin’s encounter functions in Lacanian terms as an example of ‘subjective destitution, a moment in psychoanalysis when the subject’s narcissistic delusions are laid bare and they encounter the void at the heart of the subject’ (Walsh 2008). Such an act is always necessarily negative and traumatic, a rejection of any symbolic identification for the vertiginous abyss of the Real. By ending the film at this moment of stasis, when Karin is caught between an identity that she has rejected and a future that is undefined, Rossellini lays bare the structures

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that underpin our sense of self. All the ways in which we might seek to identify Karin, as woman, wife, émigré, fugitive, become so many insignificant fictions besides the overwhelming Real of this encounter. However, the final image of Karin does not reveal a horror at the realisation of this loss of self, but is rather an image of calm acceptance. For Žižek, this expresses her realisation that ‘as soon as we renounce all symbolic ties … [we] becom[e] aware of the fact that we have nothing to lose in a loss’ (Žižek 1992: 43). In other words, when we encounter the void at the heart of identity we realise that losing our identity cannot be a real loss as it was not there in the first place to lose. The Lacanian conceptualisation of the subject is inextricably tied to its understanding of desire. For Lacan, as for Freud, desire is constituted in relation to a fundamental sense of lack, ‘the absence of an original and imaginary wholeness, which is lost as soon as the subject enters society, the Symbolic order’ (Pisters 2003: 18). Although the subject understands itself within the terms granted within the Symbolic field, it remains haunted by that which escapes symbolic expression, what Žižek describes as the Real. For Žižek, the subject is lured by the possibility of attaining full consciousness of itself and its founding conditions. Early psychoanalytical film analysis tended to theorise this in relation to Lacan’s concept of the mirror phase, in which the subject seeks to restore this imagined plenitude by identifying with its own image and by extension with the image on the cinema screen. However, within Žižek’s interpretation of Lacan via Hegel, the emphasis increasingly shifts towards the Lacanian register of the Real. The Real is that which the Symbolic order attempts to symbolise but which nevertheless eludes its grasp. The void of the Real, of that which cannot find expression, lies at the heart of subjectivity, and desire is animated by a disavowal of this absence. It is for this reason that Žižek finds Stromboli so powerful, because it reveals the constituent lack at the heart of the subject, which for him is the most radical of acts. As Ian Parker argues, Žižek’s aim is ‘to keep subjectivity open to negativity’ (Parker 2004: 108), thereby refusing ideology’s false promises of fulfilment. Central to Žižek’s conceptualisation of the subject is the understanding that difference lies at the heart of identity, that identity can never be identical to itself. An adequate understanding of difference is also fundamental to Deleuze’s theorisation of the subject. However, there remains a crucial distinction between the two, as is described by Maria Walsh in a quotation worth considering in full: In philosophical terms, the difference between Žižek and Deleuze might be encapsulated by Robert Sinnerbrink’s formulation of their respective

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positions on difference itself, i.e. between conceptual difference, whereby difference is inscribed within identity, and a conceptual difference, where difference operates on its own terms rather than within a system of representation. The former reduces difference to being constituted in relation to identity, while the latter allows for the emergence of the new or radically different in itself that exceeds systems of identity. (Walsh 2008) For Žižek the choice is between deception or rejection, between the selfdelusional adherence to an identity that denies its own difference from itself and a complete refusal of the symbolic system within which any such identity finds its terms. For Deleuze, however, the subject can be conceived of outside of these binary terms, but this requires a proper understanding of difference. Difference should not be understood in relation to identity, as that which disturbs or displaces identity, but as ‘difference in itself, unfolding into further states of self-differing difference’ (Bogue 2010: 120). In other words, for Deleuze, the subject is in a constant state of becoming, of movement and change in time. ‘The subject is not a fixed and transcendentally controlled entity but an immanent singular body whose borders of selfhood (or subjectivity) are challenged in time and by time’ (Pisters 2003: 20). For such a subject, the challenge is not to confront the void at the heart of its self-identity, but to understand the proper nature of time as that which puts all identity into flux so that there is only difference. To conceive of the subject in such a way also implies a shift in our understanding of desire. For Deleuze, desire is a fundamentally positive force, in contrast to the Lacanian understanding of desire as driven by absence or need. As we have seen, the Lacanian notion of desire is predicated upon a divided subject who yearns for an imagined lost wholeness and therefore desire is intimately connected to lack, desire is an impossible desire. However, Deleuze does not conceptualise desire in relation to a particular object, as desire for some thing which has been lost. ‘Rather, desire is a fundamental wish to live and to preserve life by connecting with and relating to those things and persons that give us joy, that is, that increase our power to act’ (Pisters 2003: 20). If we reconsider the final scene of Stromboli in relation to this Deleuzian conception of desire and subjectivity, we may be able to conceive of Karin’s encounter with the overwhelming force of nature in terms other than those offered by Žižek. As argued above, Žižek can only conceive of this scene in negative terms, as a moment of withdrawal from symbolic reality and encounter with the void of subjectivity. Crucial to this reading is the fact that the narrative does not continue, for this would inevitably see Karin retreating from the abyss and re-entering society in

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some manner. However, in her reading of the scene, Walsh suggests a more Deleuzian approach which conceives of Karin’s experience in terms of time and desire: ‘Rather than the abyss, Karin encounters the non-coincidence of herself with the self she thought she was and this opens up her subjectivity to the pleasures of immanence’ (Walsh 2008). For Walsh, Karin is not confronted with a void but with a proper understanding of difference, which is a positive force of change. This is not the drawing to a halt of subjectivity and narrative but the opening up to variation, wherein ‘Karin has entered into new relations of movement, of life, or in Deleuzian terms, of becoming’ (Walsh 2008). The scene is animated by desire, by the positive force of connections which enable Karin to encounter her subjectivity anew. Such an understanding of subjectivity and desire may enable us to avoid some of the deadlocks encountered by film theory in attempting a politicised reading of Lacan, which have frequently struggled to go beyond the oppositional and conceive of a positive politics of the image. We will see this in particular when we consider Deleuze’s challenge to the Oedipal scenarios which have dominated considerations of gender and sexuality within film studies. For now, however, let us consider in more detail the differing relations to the image proposed by Lacanian and Deleuzian approaches to film.

The Cinematic Image Patricia Pisters begins The Matrix of Visual Culture, her exploration of working with Deleuze in film theory, by contrasting Deleuze’s take on Hitchcock with the more prevalent Lacanian readings of his films. A number of analyses have focused on the operation of the cinematic gaze within Hitchcock’s work, including Laura Mulvey’s psychoanalytical urtext ‘Visual pleasure and narrative cinema’. For Mulvey, Hitchcock utilises the dynamics of identification and looking to force the audience into sharing the morally ambiguous position of his male protagonists, who seek to assert the power of their gaze over an objectified female (Mulvey 2004: 841–2). The gaze functions to shore up the protagonist’s subjectivity, constituting a subject-object relation between self and environment and thereby securing a transcendental identity as that which makes sense of the world. According to Mulvey’s theory of spectatorship, by identifying with this gaze the film viewer guarantees his (but not her) own position of mastery in relation to the object world. However, drawing again on Žižek, Pisters suggests that within Hitchcock’s films, this powerful gaze is increasingly haunted ‘by the stain of the Real’ (Žižek 2003: 19). Giving an example of the birds in The Birds (Hitchcock 1963), she suggests that

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something disturbing enters the image, affecting both the protagonist and the spectator’s relationships of control: It is precisely the Real that stains the Symbolic and therefore threatens not only the subjects on the screen but also the spectator’s sense of security: his or her position of safe distance, bridged by the eye, is suddenly threatened by something out of control. (Pisters 2003: 19) Once again, as with Žižek’s description of Karin in Stromboli, we encounter a subject who seeks coherence and control but who suffers breakdown in the face of the Real. This explains why Hitchcock’s protagonists, such as Scottie in Vertigo (Hitchcock 1958), must work so hard to ward off the Real, which constantly threatens the mastery conferred upon them by the Symbolic order. It is through an analysis of Vertigo that we can clearly understand what is at stake in the distinction between the Lacanian and Deleuzian approach to the cinematic image. In Lacanian terms, Scottie, the protagonist of the film, seeks to affirm his own masculine identity through control of the feminine and by denying the Real of female subjectivity and desire. As the film progresses, Scottie’s gaze becomes explicitly sadistic and identification for the spectator increasingly problematic. In attempting to remake another woman, Judy, into his lost love-object Madeleine (whilst not realising that they are the same woman), Scottie clings to a logic of identity which is unwilling to accept difference regardless of the consequences for others. However, the spectator’s knowledge of Judy’s true identity enables us to see Scottie’s actions for what they are, a desperate attempt to maintain a coherent identity in the face of the devastating impact of time. Scottie is transfixed by the process of representation, literally the process of substituting an image for that which is no longer present. He desires the presence of something which cannot be present. Within the Lacanian models of spectatorship which we have been discussing, his relationship to the female love-object is analogous to that between the image and the spectator, whose desire is directed towards a filmic world which is present yet not present. Time, when considered within this logic of representation, is therefore equated with loss, with the substitution of an original state of presence for an inferior imaged copy. However, it is through a considered understanding of the operation of time that Deleuze offers an alternative approach to the film. What happens, Pisters asks, ‘when we consider the image not as a representation but as an expression of mental relations?’ (Pisters 2003: 34). Deleuze discusses Hitchcock’s cinema as a set of relations which the spectator enters into,

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rather than as a representational object which engenders desire. ‘That is, [Hitchcock] makes relation itself the object of an image, which is not merely added to the … images, but frames and transforms them’ (Deleuze 2005a: 207). The set of relations which Vertigo gives rise to includes those between the past and present; between Scottie, Judy and Madeleine; and between the spectator and the film. As Pisters argues, ‘the spectator is a third term, sometimes consciously addressed by the camera, sometimes presented with a point of view of one of the protagonists, but clearly part of the network of relations, more than just by identification’ (Pisters 2003: 37). Thus, rather than desiring an original object which is lost in time or problematically identifying with a controlling gaze, the spectator is constantly entering into new relations with the film’s images in time. The disjunction between absence and presence which informs the representational logic of the Lacanian approach is replaced here by a metaphysics of presence which positions the viewing subject and image in a positive set of relations upon a single plane of immanence. The crucial point to be made here is that, for Deleuze, images are not impoverished substitutions for objects. Drawing on the philosophy of Henri Bergson, he insists that the image exists ‘in-itself ’ as matter: ‘not something hidden behind the image, but on the contrary the absolute identity of image and movement’ (Deleuze 2005a: 61). As Deleuze states in The Time-Image: the movement-image is not analogical in the sense of resemblance: it does not resemble an object that it would represent … the movement-image is the object; the thing itself caught in movement as continuous function. The movement-image is the modulation of the object itself. (Deleuze 2005b: 26) This difficult concept underlies the entirety of Deleuze’s approach to cinema and distinguishes his ideas from the representational approaches to the image that have dominated film theory. What Deleuze is attempting, after Bergson, is to collapse the distinction between movement, which occurs in the object world, and images, which are internalised representations. If the Lacanian model of the subject positions it in a transcendental relationship with the object world, a place from which it can aggregate its impressions, for Bergson and Deleuze the relationship between matter and mind is continuous and, furthermore, both must be understood as images: Comprehending Bergson means understanding that all matter is Image, and that the Universe is defined as the whole aggregate of images acting

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and reacting to one another on all their surfaces and in all of their parts … Body and brain are Images in the sense of their being receptive surfaces acting and reacting to the propagation of energy and the force of matter. (Rodowick 1997: 29) Thus, the image is already ‘in’ the thing, quite apart from any ‘body’ which might perceive it, and the subject is constantly evolving difference, existing in a network of relations within a single plane of existence, or in Deleuze’s term, plane of immanence. Deleuze’s interest in cinema stems from its ability to put the image into movement. If the fundamental truth of objects is that they are constantly in process, constantly changing and moving, then the art form which permits movement in time necessarily has a privileged relationship to reality. Again, what is crucial to establish is that cinema does not represent an external reality, its movement-images themselves constitute a reality with which the viewing subject interacts. When we encounter a cinematic image we enter into a relationship of process upon the plane of immanence. Conceiving of the image in this way enables us to open up our understanding of cinema to include the notion of affect. As Barbara Kennedy argues, Lacanian theories of film spectatorship, which are usually limited to a discussion of visual representation and which describe the relationship between spectator and image in terms of lack, do not adequately capture our experience of film: We can feel intense and ecstatic resonances in an array of dimensions of experience, specifically through dance, colour, tactility, movement and the rhythmical. Why then should the iconic formations such as cinema be explained through psychical constructions of desire, locked into binarist language … or through the purely visual and scopic? (Kennedy 2001: 46) By constantly referring the image back towards a lost object or lost plenitude psychoanalysis does not acknowledge ‘the processuality of film in duration’, the bodily experience of film in time.

Cine-semiotics Deleuze’s approach to the image relates to his more general understanding of thought itself. As D. N. Rodowick argues, ‘for Deleuze, one might say that there is no thinking other than thinking-through. “Through” what? Images, signs and concepts’ (Rodowick 1997: 6). Just as images are not held to be representations but the thing in-itself, Deleuze critiques the

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traditional model of thought within philosophy which conceives of thought as an abstract system of ideas rather than a material encounter. For Deleuze this ‘crush[es] thought under an image which is that of the Same and Similar in representation, but profoundly betrays what it means to think and alienates the two powers of difference and repetition (Deleuze 1994: 167). Thought, for Deleuze, is inherently temporal and creative rather than something which refers constantly back to preconceived ideas. Similarly, the image ‘must be considered not as a unified or closed whole, but rather as a set of logical relations that are in a state of continual transformation’ (Rodowick 1997: 6). It is for this reason that he critiques Christian Metz’s grande syntagmatique, which sought to develop a taxonomy of the cinematic image, despite undertaking a similar project in his own Cinema books. In Metz’s attempt to develop a semiology of the cinema, the focus is on the basic units of meaning-making which combine within narrative cinema. However, the problem for Deleuze is that Metz does not give primacy to the movement-image in itself, but only considers it in relation to its narrative qualities. In other words, he abstracts the narrative component from the moving-image and thereby loses its essential quality, which is movement. For Deleuze, narrative is a secondary consequence of the images rather than the structuring principle of cinema and he critiques the semiological approaches which apply a linguistic model to film, thereby abstracting linguistic utterances from cinema’s material form. Metz’s structuralism ‘considers narrative as a sort of langue or “grammar”, an external force analyzable in itself regardless of the medium in which it is realised. Here narrative functions as a structure of the same, fundamentally ahistorical and unchanging’ (Rodowick 1997: 41). Thus Metz’s approach repeats the very model of thought which Deleuze argues against. Instead he insists that cinema be considered as a ‘plastic mass, an a-signifying and a-syntaxic material, a material not formed linguistically … It is a condition anterior by right to what it conditions’ (Deleuze 2005b: 28). Although it may give rise to narrative, cinema is firstly a moving-image and any attempt to think the medium must address this material primacy. Deleuze contrasts Metz’s linguistic analogies with his own semiotic approach to the medium, which focuses on the various categories of images which may be encountered within cinema as they relate to the subject. As Joe Hughes argues, unlike the grande syntagmatique, Deleuze’s semiotic of the cinema is not intended to be an abstracted list of the signs which collectively constitute cinema but rather ‘refer[s] back to a Bergsonian theory of the subject’ (Hughes 2008: 15). To return to Bergson’s insistence that the universe is an aggregate of images reacting to each other on all sides,

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there nevertheless emerge certain ‘centres’ in relation to which this constant movement is organised and which constitute subjectivity. As Hughes outlines it: The plane of immanence is the set of all movement-images – images which are themselves indistinguishable from matter – in which each image ‘acts on the others and reacts to others on all their facets at once and by all their elements’. Within this field of matter there is an ‘interval’ – the brain – in which a ‘material subjectivity’ is differentiated into three distinct moments of a sensory-motor schema: perception, affection and action. It is this general structure of material subjectivity which determines cinema’s signs. (Hughes 2008: 15–16) In his Cinema books, therefore, Deleuze is not describing the language of cinema, ‘but the structure … of a “non-linguistic” subjectivity (16). At its most elemental, matter is in a process of constant interaction with the surrounding forces and bodies which constitute its environment. This is the molecular world in which ‘there are not yet bodies or rigid lines, but only lines or figures of light’ (Rodowick 1997: 31). By putting perception into motion, cinema can bring us close to perceiving how images interact at such a level. This is Dziga Vertov’s Kino-Eye, the mechanical eye which can link all points in the universe. However, as Deleuze points out, within this ‘acentred’ universe an interval appears between action and reaction and a special image emerges in relation to which the other images are organised, what he refers to as a ‘centre of indetermination’ (Deleuze 2005a: 63). This occurs when an image does not enter into an immediate stimulus-response relationship with another image (as in one billiard ball hitting another), but interacts with only an aspect of the image, thereby introducing a pause into the plane of movement-images. This is Bergson’s model of subjectivity, which conceives of the brain as a special image which subtracts those elements from the environment which are not relevant to its needs and then executes an appropriate response to this stimulus. Thus the body and brain are just one image amongst others except that ‘whereas the other images act and react on all their facets and in all their parts, here we have images which only receive actions on one facet or in certain parts and only execute reactions by and in other parts’ (63–4). Deleuze’s taxonomy of images is a means of understanding the diversity of images which constitute the cinema in relation to this model of subjectivity. The three varieties of movement-image which Deleuze outlines in Cinema 1 are the perception-image, the affection-image and the action-image.

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Collectively these images constitute the sensory-motor schema which, for Deleuze, defines pre-war film. In order for a particular ‘centre of indetermination’ to occur upon the plane of movement-images there needs to be first a moment of perception, a framing of incoming movements according to the needs or interests of a particular image (the body/brain). If matter (the thing) is image then ‘the perception image, in short, is the “thing” minus those features filtered out by perception’ (Bogue 2003: 35, original emphasis). That is to say, perception is essentially subtractive, ignoring those aspects of the image which are not relevant to its needs. Furthermore, due to the fact that we perceive what is necessary in order to respond to a particular situation, the moment of perception is inseparable from the possibilities for action which it extends into and perception-images and action-images are therefore linked as stimulus-response. Affection refers to those elements of perception which are not extended into action but which are absorbed into the body and experienced as sensation. Affection inhabits the interval between received movement and executed action, the interval which Bergson and Deleuze equate with subjectivity. Deleuze elaborates a number of sub-signs within these three categories, including, for example, the various states of perception which we encounter in cinema, from ‘liquid’ to ‘gaseous’. Under the category of affection-image he discusses the power of the close-up to ‘faceify’ an object, giving us an image of pure affect. He distinguishes between the ‘large’ and ‘small’ forms of the action-image, which are differentiated according to the relation between action and environment in each. For each of these categories and more he offers us numerous examples from the canon of classical cinema, thereby constructing an intricate and comprehensive catalogue of cinematic signs. However, the focus here will be on the relationship between cinema and time which Deleuze elaborates across the two Cinema books and the implications of this for his ethics of cinema.

Movement, Time, Thought Deleuze distinguishes between two regimes of the cinematic image, the movement-image of classical cinema and the time-image which emerges in the modern cinema of post-war Europe. The movement-image is elaborated in Cinema 1 and broken down into the collection of signs and sub-signs discussed above. The defining feature of the movement-image for Deleuze is the indirect manner in which it gives representation to time. If we take, for example, the image of a gun firing followed by the image of a man crumpling to the ground, together these construct an image which contains time – the

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time of a gunshot and death. Crucial for Deleuze, however, is that time is expressed spatially, or indirectly, through the pairing of these images. It is by cutting between the images that time is expressed, as what we see is not time itself but the effect of time through the trajectory of the bullet. Typically, within the movement-image, time is expressed by the movement of the central protagonist through space. Through the coupling of perception and action described above, we are presented with a set of linear, causal connections between time and space which is driven by the trajectory of the main character. Tom Cruise sees, Tom Cruise responds; and through this chain of stimulus-response the film constructs a linear understanding of time in which one image logically follows another. Perhaps the central conceptual figure in Deleuze’s film-philosophy is that of the cut. For Deleuze, cinema is a constant process of division and reintegration. The individual shot isolates or frames a set of objects, entering them into a set of relations which is defined according to its perspective, or in Deleuze’s words, ‘we can say of the shot that it acts like a consciousness’ (Deleuze 2005a: 21). Within the shot, the individual elements enter into shifting relationships in space as the camera or the objects move. However, this set of objects also exists in another relationship, to the whole from which they have been divided by the process of framing. As Deleuze expresses it, ‘the shot, of whatever kind, always has these two aspects: it presents modifications of relative positions in a set or some sets. It expresses absolute changes in a whole or in the whole’ (21). While we may consider the relation between objects spatially, as spatial transformations within the shot, they are also always expressing a change in the whole which is temporal, the collection of all things in an ever-changing process of self-differing. The relationship between the parts and the whole is established by the cut, which puts each shot into a relationship with time through montage. As suggested in the outline above, within the movement-image, the cut expresses a rational perspective on time wherein each action leads to a logical reaction and it is through following this chain of cause and effect that we move through space and time. The image of the world that the movement-image presents is one that is comprehensible and deterministic. As Rodowick argues, such images ‘express belief in the possibility and coherence of a complete and truthful representation of the world in images’ (Rodowick 2010: 107). The movement-image presents a moral perspective on the world, a locus of sense-making which filters the image world according to the requirements of its perception-action schema. It is as if the relationship between images is determined in advance; Tom Cruise finds gun, Tom Cruise shoots gun. The ethical issues that Deleuze raises with such an image regime is that it

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effectively strips time of its power to produce the new, as the image becomes reduced to cliché. As Deleuze describes it, ‘a cliché is a sensory-motor image of the thing’ (Deleuze 2005b: 19); an image of the thing that ignores all its qualities except those which produce the established form of stimulus and response. When Tom Cruise picks up the gun, its meaning or potential is distilled into the singular response to which we expect him to put it: killing bad guys. Not only does this simple sensory-motor response to the image reduce our capacity to think of alternative responses, it also suppresses our properly ethical response to the image as we are more interested in the logic of cause and effect which is unfolding. For Deleuze, ‘sensory-motor situations, no matter how violent, are directed to a pragmatic visual function which “tolerates” or “puts up with” practically anything, from the moment it becomes involved in a system of actions and reactions’ (18). We do not properly ‘see’ the image because of the process of subtraction involved in sensory-motor perception and this prevents us properly experiencing the affect of the violence which the image contains. The crisis in the movement-image occurs, for Deleuze, when cinema confronts, in the devastation of post-war Europe, a situation which cannot produce any appropriate response. The protagonists of these films encounter an environment which can no longer ‘give rise to an action which is capable of modifying it’ (Deleuze 2005a: 211), thereby rendering action meaningless and disrupting the sensory-motor continuity between character and milieu. Unable to intervene through action, these characters become see-ers, wanderers, ‘the sensory-motor action or situation … replaced by the stroll, the voyage’ (212); instead of a logical connection between action-images, ‘chance becomes the sole guiding thread’ (211). It is in the films of the Italian neorealists or the French new-wave that this new type of time-image emerges, which for the first time presents a direct image of time as the force for change. Deleuze gives as an example of this image of time, the famous scene from Ozu’s Late Spring (Yasujirô Ozu 1949) in which the director cuts to a lingering shot of a vase between the daughter’s smile and the beginning of her tears. In this shot: There is becoming, change, passage. But the form of what changes does not itself change, does not pass on. This is time, time itself, ‘a little time in its pure state’: a direct time-image, which gives what changes the unchanging form in which change is produced. (Deleuze 2005b: 16) This still shot makes us aware of duration, of the passing of time, not through the action-reaction shots of the movement-image, but directly. Time, like

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the vase, is the form which does not change, but it is in time that all change occurs. Thus, if the movement-image presents time in relation to the cliché, through stimulus-response in which the outcome is pre-ordained, the timeimage opens up cinema to the true nature of time as the force which admits the new into the world. It was born to restore our belief in the world, to awaken us from our cynical, hackneyed lives … This is the power of the ‘false’ as such; the power to create untruths, the power not to correspond (with the old ‘truth’, the formulaic truth), but to respond to the world of change by instantiating it anew. (Mullarkey 2010: 94) Within the time-image, the cut between images attains a different quality. It is no longer a rational interval, leading from one image to another in a decidable way. Instead, ‘the interval becomes an autonomous value, the division it represents is irreducible’ (Rodowick 1997: 14). As Rodowick describes it, ‘every interval becomes … a “bifurcation point”, where it is impossible to know in advance which direction change will take. The chronological time of the movement-image fragments into an image of uncertain becoming’ (15). In the films of Michelangelo Antonioni or Alain Resnais we are no longer presented with a logical progression of images, linearly constructed along cause-effect lines through montage. Instead, we get the irrational cut, the unexpected image, the loss of linearity and narrative trajectory which force us to become aware of time as a quality which is separate from the movement which it measures. Rodowick specifically connects this image of time as the force of the new to a Deleuzian ethics of the cinema. Drawing on Nietzsche, he describes the deepest ethical problem which confronts man as ‘the problem of choosing a mode of existence defined by the possibility of choice’ (Rodowick 2010: 103). As he points out, the movement-image presents a mechanistic world in which one action logically follows the other, thereby removing the element of choice. In such a way, it offers us a world in which truth is established, in which a film’s images cohere into an organic whole. However, the time-image challenges the coherence and unity of this world by introducing the power of the false, the possibility of something genuinely new which confronts the received truths of the movement-image. This is an ethical image because, for Deleuze, ‘the fundamental ethical choice is to believe in this world and its power of transformation’ (99). Instead of the endless repetition of the same (the same clichés, the same ‘truths’), ‘the future [becomes] a genuine future, in which time matters, that is, in which the forward surge of time makes a

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difference’ (Bogue 2010: 118). The direct image of time gives expression to the potential which the present moment always already contains. An understanding of this ethical approach to the image becomes clear if we consider how it has been applied to the documentary image by Laura Marks in her discussion of Beirut film-makers. The central consideration of a documentary ethics is usually the authenticity or otherwise of the film’s relationship to the images it depicts. The assumption underlying such a debate is that a film can be adequate to the world it represents. This is the logic of the movement-image that believes in the representability of the world and is ‘expressive of a will to truth’ (Rodowick 2010: 108). Marks, on the other hand, insists upon the power of falsification, on refusing any single point that can be referred to as true. Discussing the impossibility of expressing marginalised experience within available discourse, she focuses on how these films break open discourse, productively stammer, and thereby reveal how power constructs what is seeable and sayable (Marks 2000: 193–214). In such a way, film-makers can confront the actual images which have defined the visual representation of an event with the virtual images which remain implicit. This is not to counter the dominant visual discourse around an event with another set of coherent images, but rather to disrupt representation and ‘allow inconceivable events to remain inconceivable, whilst insisting that they must be conceived of ’ (205). Unlike the movement-image, the documentary which seeks to construct an image of truth, ‘the time-image strategy is to create the conditions for new thought in this confrontation amongst incommensurable images’ (207).

The Image of Theory To return to the question with which we began, what is Deleuze’s use value to film studies? In order to suggest an answer, let us briefly confront Deleuze with the psychoanalytical approaches to gender which have been so dominant within film analysis. As outlined above, psychoanalysis proposes a gendered model of cinematic subjectivity, which assigns subject positions in relation to the dominant male gaze. Within this model, the Oedipal scenario becomes the recurring narrative which is played out again and again in cinema, and desire is understood in the triangular terms which such a scenario proposes. However, as Ian Buchanan retorts, ‘desire is much more complicated than mommy-daddy-me’ (Buchanan 2008: 13) and such an interpretative schema risks returning all variations of the cinematic image to another version of the same. Furthermore, as Barabara Kennedy reminds us, psychoanalytical approaches have struggled to account for the fact of female pleasure. As is

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well known, the Oedipal structure struggles to account for female desire and the question therefore remains as to why so many women would take pleasure in repeatedly experiencing such a retrograde scenario (Kennedy 2001: 10). In Anti-Oedipus, the 1983 book co-authored with Félix Guattari, Deleuze counters the Oedipal understanding of desire with his own molecular account of its operation. Deleuze and Guattari reject the idea that desire has an inherent script, instead insisting that it is ‘a synthetic or machinic process with a multiplicity of operating parts and a tremendous power of association and connection’ (Buchanan 2008: 13). Psychoanalysis operates, in Deleuze’s terms, as a traditional model of thought, co-opting the new into its own fixed set of terms. Against this, Deleuze and Guattari propose the process of schizoanalysis which seeks to establish the nature of a subject’s desires outside of such ‘molar’ constructs as gender and familial roles. As they suggest, ‘schizoanalysis proposes to reach those regions of the orphan unconscious – indeed “beyond all law” – where the problem of Oedipus can no longer even be raised’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 81–2). This is the legacy of Deleuze’s philosophy for film studies, to reach into our ‘orphan unconscious’ and explore the multiple processes through which we encounter the cinematic form. It offers us a set of concepts which engage with the image in all its affective power and proposes a relationship to the image which is not determined by the law of representation and its Oedipal inheritance. It conceives of desire outside of the restrictive terms of ‘mommy-daddy-me’, as a productive force which enters the subject into new and unforeseeable relations. It proposes an ethics of the cinema predicated upon a relationship to time wherein ‘the powers of change are affirmed and harnessed in ways that value life’ (Rodowick 2010: 101). Finally, it presents us with the cinema as thought, as the production of the new, the very characteristics which define the act of doing theory.

References Bogue, Ronald (2003), Deleuze on Cinema, New York, NY: Routledge. Bogue, Ronald (2010), ‘To choose to choose – to believe in this world’, in D. N. Rodowick (ed.), Afterimages of Gilles Deleuze’s Film Philosophy, MN: University of Minnesota Press, pp. 115–34. Buchanan, Ian (2008), ‘Introduction: five theses of actually existing schizoanalysis of cinema’, in I. Buchanan and P. MacCormack (eds), Deleuze and the Schizoanalysis of Cinema, London: Continuum, pp. 1–14. Deleuze, Gilles (1983), Nietzsche and Philosophy, New York, NY: Columbia University Press.

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Deleuze, Gilles (1994), Difference and Repetition, London: Athlone Press. Deleuze, Gilles ([1986] 2005a), Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, London: Continuum. Deleuze, Gilles ([1989] 2005b), Cinema 2: The Time-Image, London: Continuum. Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari ([1972] 1983), Anti-Oedipus, trans. R. Hurley, M. Seem and H. R. Lane, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Hughes, Joe (2008), ‘Schizoanalysis and the phenomenology of cinema’, in I. Buchanan and P. MacCormack (eds), Deleuze and the Schizoanalysis of Cinema, London: Continuum, pp. 15–26. Kennedy, Barbara (2001), Deleuze and Cinema: The Aesthetics of Sensation, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Kunn, Annette (2009), ‘Screen and screen theorizing today’, Screen 50: 1, 1–12. Marks, Laura U. (2000), ‘Signs of the time: Deleuze, Pierce, and the documentary image’, in G. Flaxman (ed.), The Brain is the Screen: Deleuze and the Philosophy of Cinema, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, pp. 193–214. Martin-Jones, David (2006), Deleuze, Cinema and National Identity: Narrative Time in National Contexts, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Mullarkey, John (2010), Refractions of Reality: Philosophy and the Moving Image, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Mulvey, Laura ([1975] 2004), ‘Visual pleasure and narrative cinema’, in L. Braudy and M. Cohen (eds), Film Theory and Criticism, New York, NY: Oxford University Press, pp. 837–48. Parker, Ian (2004), Slavoj Žižek: a Critical Introduction, London: Pluto Press. Pisters, Patricia (2003), The Matrix of Visual Culture: Working with Deleuze in Film Studies, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Rodowick, David N. (1997), Gilles Deleuze’s Time Machine, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Rodowick, David N. (2010), ‘The world, time’, in D. N. Rodowick (ed.), Afterimages of Gilles Deleuze’s Film Philosophy, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, pp. 115–34. Walsh, Maria (2008), ‘Žižek, Deleuze, and the feminine cinematic sublime’, Rhizomes, 16: Summer, http://www.rhizomes.net/issue16/walsh/index.html, accessed 12 November 2010. Žižek, Slavoj (1992), Enjoy Your Symptom, New York, NY: Routledge.

Films Late Spring, film, directed by Yasujirô Ozu. Japan: Shôchiku Eiga, 1949. Stromboli, film, directed by Michelangelo Antonioni. USA: RKO, 1950. The Birds, film, directed by Alfred Hitchcock. USA: Universal, 1963. Vertigo, film, directed by Alfred Hitchcock. USA: Paramount, 1958.

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Chapter 16 T h e M u s e u m o f N ow Anna Cutler

tHemes: form and institution t H e m u s e u m o f n ow

There is an ongoing debate in the museums sector about what it means to be a museum in the twenty-first century. This pursuit of meaning is not new to the discipline. Indeed there is a wealth of literature that explores the museum’s shifting social and cultural role since its emergence in the eighteenth century (Bennett 1985). Many narratives follow the development of the museum from private collections for the few, into their current status as public institutions for the many (with all the contention that this might imply). With such narratives to hand, institutions work from a foundation of experience and understanding to take on a more ambitious re-conceptualisation of the museum for the future. To this end, there has been much reflection, soul searching and imagining of exactly what this might look like; what might the museum become in tomorrow’s world? In September 2011, the director of Tate Modern, Chris Dercon, announced in a press conference: ‘Visitors want new and different things from a museum. They want it to be a place for “mental and bodily exercise”, where they can learn and interact. A museum is never ever finished, it is a constant work in progress, a constant process of change and transformation’ (Guardian, 08/09/12). In these terms, is it possible to define a future museum, if change is to be its constant? The museum of ‘now’ is one that finds itself in an interesting paradox, representative of our social and cultural climate. It is situated in the interstices of knowledge, learning and ‘the people’ at a time when all three are undergoing transformations of their own, particularly in terms of new technologies, a shift from the didactic to more participative learning experiences and from knowledge acquisition to knowledge sharing. It is developing sustainable structures within its own discipline, reflected in increasing partnerships and exchange, as well as growing inter- and trans-disciplinary practices. All of which shift the model of supply and demand into a much more complex

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system of ecologically sensitive interdependencies. Meanwhile the museum also exists within an economic system in which these new working practices must, but may struggle to, equate. The question asked is ‘how does one find monetary value in sharing’? The paradox is found in the very nature of building ecological models within a greater economic model; ecological models that may resist and work against the economic model by depending on equal and interrelated sustainable systems, just as the economic model may resist and work against the ecological by depending on wealth creation and profitability. This conflict of type is not unique to the museum, but apparent in broader institutions and institutional practices of today. In order to work out how one might navigate this complex scenario, it is necessary to gain a better understanding of the practices, frameworks and structures on which the institution is built. In doing so one might better grasp the position of ‘now’ and what it might mean in relation to the paradox, the museum, and its future. The work of Félix Guattari and specifically The Three Ecologies is a rich source from which to consider the complexities of this contemporary dilemma. The Three Ecologies is a work produced by a theorist and practitioner who spent years exploring and forming a critique of ‘the institution’ and the roles of the people who populate it. Indeed, poststructuralism more broadly offers a means of interrogating the institution as a system of ideas that is played out through its structures, practices and processes. If one considers poststructuralism in its wide variety as a frame (much like those to be found in the opticians seat) into which lens after lens can be inserted, each revealing something different, sharper, blurred, expanding or curving, one can begin to understand the complex range of inter-related social and cultural systems and discourses at play. What poststructuralism can help us explore is how these exist within the institution, sometimes in balance, sometimes in conflict – the very paradox we find in the museum. Being able to see and understand how these systems and discourses are formed and are embedded helps us get purchase on how they might be reconfigured, and reassembled. If we believe, as Dercon suggests, that the museum is always in a process of constant change and transformation, then we need to disassemble, to reassemble; to make change effectively and deliberately is first to identify what is in need of change, and what is being changed from beyond the museum walls. Some poststructuralist lenses reveal structures up close, some far and distant, but each lens makes visible a range of constructs, often occluded or transformed into habituated behaviours and dominant ideological practices, until the lens drops in place and one is drawn to look with a different focus. The lens Guattari offers helps us look both close up and at

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a distance, making the focus one of focus itself, the process involved in the to-ing and fro-ing between systems, connecting difference with difference. My intention here is to explore the macro and the micro of the institution through Guattari’s The Three Ecologies, giving focus to emergent learning practice within the museum. I do so as much to open up debate concerning Dercon’s call to learning and transformation as ‘to target the modes of production of subjectivity, that is, knowledge, culture, sensibility and sociability …’ as outlined by Guattari (2000: 49). In short, what follows is a study of the museum (and specifically an art museum) through Guattari’s account of mental ecology in relation to its social and machinic ecologies. Through this I would like to suggest that a poststructuralist approach is not just a theoretical or intellectual endeavour for an institution, but is potentially an opportunity for the very real practical application of ideas. I shall consider here what practical application might look like within learning in the art museum today and explore how Guattari’s direct challenge to institutions provokes a pragmatic activism as much as a theoretical reframing.

The Three Ecologies Guattari’s penultimate and possibly best known single-authored publication, The Three Ecologies, written in 1989, is a far reaching text that both articulates with alarming accuracy some of the social and global shifts in behaviours that we have come to see today, and drills down into the construction of the individual as ‘subject’. These are not seen as separate aspects but ecologies that operate together. Guattari establishes his concept of ecology beyond the singular notion of the environmental, which he suggests is ‘generally content to simply tackle industrial pollution and then from a purely technocratic perspective’ (Guattari 2000: 28). Instead, he posits an ethico-political articulation, which he defines as ecosophy, exploring the interplay ‘between the three ecological registers (the environment, social relations and human subjectivity)’ (28). The environment for Guattari is therefore extended to consider the very broadest terms of ‘the ways of living on the planet … in the context of the acceleration of techo-scientific mutations and of considerable demographic growth’ (20). He describes the world in which we live as ‘Integrated World Capitalism’ (IWC). He states that this ‘verges on a strategic infantilization of opinion and a destructive neutralization of democracy.’ He goes on to suggest that IWC ‘tends increasingly to decentre its sites of power, moving away from structures producing goods and services towards structures producing signs, syntax and – in particular, through the control which it

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exercises over the media, advertising, opinion polls, etc – subjectivity’ (42). For Guattari, the mass media and extended systems of communication and signification serve to create a ‘unidimensionalising value system of the West’; that is, a world in which dominant capitalist ideologies create a homogenised mentality – habits of mind and behaviours – that effectively serve as ‘the remote-controlling of human individuals and groups’ (39). Guattari calls for the need to ‘kick the habit’ of sedative discourse, particularly the ‘fix’ of television, in order to be able to apprehend the world through the interchangeable lenses of The Three Ecologies (42). It could not be clearer how damaging Guattari finds these regimes and, what he describes as, the refrains of dominant ideological saturation, but crucially the work is about how this is made manifest in the human subject in such a way that it is possible to resist and interrupt these refrains (see also Deleuze and Guattari 1987: plateau 11 ‘1837: Of the Refrain’). The optimism of agency in The Three Ecologies acts as a counterbalance to the devastating ravages of IWC that he outlines. As Genosko identifies, ‘for Guattari more generally the most important stake was the development of a new kind of subjectivity’ (2008: 103). Genosko usefully draws together the Guattarian concept of the subject thus: [it] is not an individual, an individuated person, thinking and thus being … Rather, the Guattarian subject is an entangled assemblage of many components, a collective (heterogeneous, multiple) articulation of such components before and beyond the individual; the individual is like a transit station for changes, crossings and switches. (Genosko 2008: 106) The argument made by Guattari, himself a practising psychoanalyst and therefore one with some expertise in such ‘transit stations’, is that we need to resist the refrain and interrupt the IWC signals. He suggests, ‘the crucial objective is to grasp the a-signifying points of rupture – the rupture of denotation, connotation and signification’ (Guattari 2000: 56). For Guattari it is the re-assemblage of the subject as a singularity or rather the ‘re-singularisation’ of difference within the individual – as ‘transit station’ – that is necessary to spark divergence from the norm and enable a break or bifurcation of the system itself – from individuated transit centre to social groupings. He says, ‘the imperatives of mental ecology call for an appropriate mobilization of individuals and social segments as a whole’ (57). The individual, in this sense, holds both the potential to be the re-producer of dominant transmission as well as the very vehicle of its interruption, what I would describe as the subject’s potential as an activist-of-mind. The individual subject’s power lies in its

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potential for difference; this is why it is necessary, in terms of IWC, to ensure that such interruption and difference does not happen; for to maintain control is to maintain the dominant transmissions that regulate singularity. Guattari’s key example of the de-regulating activist that disrupts homogenised singularity is embodied in the idea of an artist: or, as I wish to assert, the artist-as-process. Highlighting process in this construction is important here since some aspects of the concept of the artist appear a little vague within Guattari’s text. His description ranges from that of an actual artist identified through the possessive pronoun ‘his’, to a self-reflexive, though constructed subject, able to identify dominant refrains. It is unclear how language (visual, verbal, bodily, etc.) is perceived in the construction of the subject and therefore in the potential limits of individuated creativity, not to mention issues of gender that may complicate still further the nature of the refrain and how this might be understood. That said, we must leave these issues for another time and other poststructuralist lenses, to Kristeva, Irigaray and Cixous and to the wider work of Guattari and Deleuze such as Anti-Oedipus ([1972] 1977) or Difference and Repetition ([1968] 1994). I use artist-as-process here, to clarify that it is not the concept of an artist as a creative ‘self ’ that is at issue, rather that it is in the processes of creative construction that de-regulation can occur. Guattari says: ‘its ways of operating will be more like artists’ [ways of operating]’ (2000: 35). Genosko suggests, ‘ecosophic activism “resembles” the work of artists in extracting details that serve as path-breakers for subjective development and as guidance in responsibly negotiating refrains’ (2008: 110). As such, the artist-asprocess has ways of operating that identify dominant transmissions and in acts of creativity (also one of the ways of operating that ‘resemble’ that of the artist) of imagining, of generating a new idea, of creating and making a difference, disrupting the forces of mass-transmission. The artist-as-process represents a re-singularisation of subjectification, one that is constant to itself and not to the ‘deathly refrain’ of IWC. This artist-as-process is therefore not particular to the artist as ‘self ’, but can be found, according to Guattari, in ‘everyday life’ (2000: 46) since, as he claims, such processes can be found anywhere. However, I would also argue that it is the manifestation of the abstract into the real that is at issue here and why I believe Guattari selects the model of artist as the champion of change for the following reason: to interrupt mass-transmission and create a new refrain is not simply to deconstruct the codes, conventions and significations therein, but to re-signify, re-codify and invent new signification. This means that to create a new refrain is the act of creativity in making a difference, the very act of being an artist. In these terms, despite the potential for the artist-as-process

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to be found everywhere, the concept of the artist is not an accidental choice, since it embodies the notion of pure difference represented by individuated subjects that create the new in the real. From ecosophical activism, developed through re-singularisation, one can begin to see the clear and interrelated connections with social ecosophy. Using the metaphor of the subject as transit station, one may consider how the ecosophic ‘registers’ interweave. If each re-singularisation necessarily involves the reception of dominant social refrains (like radio frequencies) within any constructed subject, then these frequencies have to be interrupted by the subject in order to divert from the norm, the frequency must be altered, and a new and different frequency transmitted back into the social domain. Guattari suggests that, ‘social ecosophy will consist in developing specific practices that will modify and reinvent the ways in which we live … through existential mutations driven by the motor of subjectivity’ (2000: 34). It is therefore the interruption through re-singularisation that will both inform and be informed by the creation of new social practices – the ecosophic ‘to and fro’ that combine to shift the dominant refrain and habituated frequency in relation to the environmental. As such one might consider not just the subject to be an artist, but social practice as artist or in this context museum practice as artist. Towards the end of The Three Ecologies, Guattari draws together re-singularisation and social practices within the play of machinic ecosophy. Again Guattari’s approach is not simply to criticise mass media and technology but bring a positive critique that offers a potential alternative, wherein social media and networking become themselves potential disruptors as much as the transmitters of a mass refrain ‘in which the media will be re-appropriated by a multitude of subject groups capable of directing its re-singularisiation’ (2000: 61). I shall return to this later, but let us travel there by addressing key questions that arise from the challenges set out by Guattari.

The Responsibility of Learning in the Museum Throughout The Three Ecologies, Guattari pulls focus from the theoretical and abstract to the practice-led and material. He states: I have invoked ethical paradigms principally in order to underline the responsibility and necessary engagement required, not only of psychiatrists but also of those in the fields of education, health, culture, sport, the arts, the media and fashion, who are in a position to intervene in individual and collective physical proceedings. (Guattari 2000: 39)

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If one takes this as a real call to responsibility in order to develop ecosophy then it raises some complex questions for any institution and necessarily challenges those within them to make explicit the machinic, mental and social constructs of their own specific practices. But here are some questions: first, how does an institution begin to address the need for all subjects to identify the dominant refrain? As O’Sullivan (2007) suggests, ‘it is … important to point out that breaking with habit requires first and foremost that one becomes aware of such habits, which is to say one must attend to ones already existing reactions and responses’. Is the institution therefore also responsible for making individuals aware of their own construction as subjects? Secondly, how does one not only achieve the capacity for subjects to identify the refrain, but create contexts that enable their interruption and for subjects to be able to see and create difference both individually and as groups? Thirdly, how does one ensure that these differences are given a frequency within the institution that enables a wider communication of new refrains? And lastly, how, in the event that one is able to create difference, do we ensure that these refrains are understood/read as new frequencies and not simply as arbitrary new signification systems devoid of meaning, other than to themselves? We return to the initial question of how one invents a museum of the future without articulating or forming as a basis that which we understand as ‘now’. These questions are, for those of us working in institutions, a real challenge; especially if put to the test of practice. Often limited by short contact time with the public, existing within complex networks of relationships across and between the institution/s, working to the demands of internal and external economic systems and understanding the pragmatics of daily activity, a variety of forces all conspire to make the construction of difference a very tricky enterprise. Question 1: How does an institution begin to address the need for all subjects to identify the dominant refrain? Is the institution therefore also responsible for making individuals aware of their own construction as subjects? I think it would be fair to say that any attempt to give a fixed answer to these questions would be somewhat foolhardy. However, I would also argue that there are practices and approaches that can be employed that engage with these issues in an attempt, at the very least, to draw them into institutional play. This first question may therefore be responded to in terms of applying theory through the creation of a new practice within museum learning and educational teams, a practice that is based on making learning itself visible. Most learning programmes or educational activity within the art museum and galleries

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has, traditionally, been based on activity that looks to create a variety of ways in which to engage with art objects and ideas. In doing so, it does not necessarily, and I would argue, very rarely, make explicit to its participants that they are in a process of learning. The act of doing so, I would suggest, generates a meta-cognitive approach to practice that necessarily encourages professionals and practitioners as well as the general public to reflect on the nature of learning itself, what is being learned and crucially, how and why. Such questions require subjects to reflect on their own learning and give rise to questions concerning the construction of values and perspectives, the ‘for me’ aspects of interpretation that emphasise the contingency of perspective and the concept of ‘self ’ that can then be explored. But how do we make this as explicit as possible? I begin with the institution and the subjects (within the learning and educational teams for the purposes of this chapter) as the crucial starting point, much as Guattari developed iterative and developmental practices of re-articulation within his own institutional domain. It appears clear that unless those whose responsibility it is to construct meaning understand how and why they are doing so, it seems inevitable that the dominant refrain will never be interrupted intentionally, as it will never be recognised (as O’Sullivan so clearly explained). To create a practice that achieves this means that time must be made within any institution for interrogating the practices of the professional subjects as transit stations themselves. In reality this entails a lot of organised time in which shared talk, reflection and learning must take place for staff to become aware of and have made visible what O’Sullivan (2007) describes as ‘not just being about institutional and ideological critique, but as involving the active production of our own subjectivity’. This implies what he goes on to explain as a need for creative pedagogy: teaching practices that involve student participation, workshops, laboratories, and other teaching models that do not mimic top down structures in existence elsewhere. Such pedagogical practices can contribute to the active and practical involvement of individuals in determining their own intellectual and creative projects and indeed their wider lives. (O’Sullivan 2007) For ‘students’ one can replace ‘staff’ and ultimately, I would argue, within carefully constructed learning programmes, the participating public. This process (a creative pedagogy) is in itself an interruption of the dominant professional practice, which tends, for obvious reasons of practicability, time and capacity, to be left unattended. It demands that a creative pedagogy

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be part of the value-base of a learning department and that the languages developed within this be formed into new emergent refrains, refrains that can then be taken by staff-subjects both into the organisation, and to the social and machinic registers. ‘It amounts to a call to creativity, a call to become actively involved in various strategies and practices that will allow us to produce/transform, and perhaps even go beyond, our habituated selves’ (O’Sullivan 2007). If we do not take responsibility from the point of re-construction, of the subjects that are tasked with transmission, then how else are we ever to change the refrain? Question 2. How does one not only achieve the capacity for subjects to identify the refrain, but create contexts that enable their interruption and for subjects to be able to see and create difference both individually and as groups? In ‘Signposting Creative Learning’ (Cutler 2006) I argued that the process of creative learning was itself interchangeable with the process of artists’ practice. Not all artists, of course, but those who seek to worry over an idea, work out problems, test, trial and hypothesise. Those that have divergent and imaginative thinking, stretch themselves to make ideas manifest in new ways, spend time refining their practice and do so towards a valued goal – the making of a material difference. I posited the view that artists were, in this interpretation, effectively professional creative learners and the processes of their practice were synonymous with the practice of creative learning. In this context, therefore, I suggest that the artist-as-process can be articulated as creative learning itself; that is, the process of interruption, of decentring the refrain as well as reconstructing and re-creating a new refrain. This perspective helps clarify Guattari’s suggestion that it is not just the notion of ‘artist’ that ruptures and re-singularises, but the practices of creative learning make possible the idea that they can happen anywhere within any human subject based on both deconstruction and reconstruction. Taking creative learning as the potential for re-singularisation, and this within the context of an art museum, full of singularised objects and ideas, would, one might suggest, be an ideal site for Guattari’s ecosophy to thrive. How then, to translate this into practice through the design and delivery of a learning programme within the art museum? The role of learning and education departments in art museums do vary, although all would, I imagine, articulate their work in relation to the public and in terms of engagement. How deep the engagement and how profound the learning involved depends on the values and understandings of learning held within the institution. Designing a programme that opens up an awareness of one’s own construction and that of the programme itself is central, but it also relies on framing structured activity that generates

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creative learning – the very practice that may enable/be rupture. Developing a programme that is based on creative learning practices is, at its best and with art as its subject and content, a highly effective way of inviting participants, in a co-constructed manner, to be able to explore and make visible the interruptions of artists themselves, demonstrating, as well as practically applying through an activity, the very nature of resisting dominant refrains and the material manifestation of making a difference. This can be done in many ways and working with artists to help co-construct such programmes is one way that can amount to a genuine attempt to interrogate these ideas with the additional benefit of working with those who are already practising resistance through their ideas, their divergent thinking and making. For example, a summer school was run at Tate Modern that worked with both artists and teachers as participants. Planned and facilitated by artists working with the Learning staff, they based the course on the idea and structure of The Art School, creating the environment of such a school, whilst simultaneously making visible its construction: ‘this is the common room’ a space read, ‘you are the student body’ the artists declared. The week consisted of the participants reflecting on and making work for, their designated ‘art school’, and in doing so, the artists leading the course took the participants through the process of deconstructing the codes, conventions and significations of the arts school as well as asking that they re-signify, recodify and invent new signification within their own practices within their own schools after the course – the act of creation as making a difference – this time through their processes as much as in the making of art-objects. Question 3. How does one ensure that these differences are given a frequency within the institution that enables a wider communication of new refrains? Any institution of scale is based on many different transmissions that arise from many different sources. Which frequencies are heard loudest depends on the requirements of the paradox at any given time: it might be a focus on an exhibition or a focus on partnerships, and so on: maintaining balance is complex given economic imperatives and institutional values. One way to strike this balance is to have designated strands of programme within the institution. Although full of their own complexities as terms, having strands of work such as ‘community’ or ‘early years’, ‘young people’ or ‘access’ does give visibility to the needs of having such voices as part of the institution. To take one example, there is much contention around the concepts of ‘community ‘and ‘access’, particularly in terms of the idea that one might ‘target’ those whom the institution feels ‘fit in’ to these categorisations. However, is it more problematic to remove such terms entirely? If one has no language

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to speak, or signal to divergent groups to say that the institution is open for dialogue, then how will this be known? Perhaps with a shift in emphasis the terms can be used to invite voices into institutions (not to be transmitted at by the institution’s own refrains, but to receive from) in an act of creative learning within the institution that attends to the differences that already exist and have value. This might be one way of ensuring that the refrain of differences is always a potential and communicated as such. Currently the un-departmentalisation and incorporation of learning and education teams into broader departments of cultural institutions is becoming more prevalent, b