Victims, Gender and Jouissance 2011046717, 9780415806183, 9780203118603

Table of contents :
Cover
Title Page
Copyright Page
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1 Feminism and the Victim
2 The Birth and Death of the Victim
3 Gender and Sacrificial Violence
4 From Mysticism to de Sade
5 There Are No Victims
6 We Are All Victims
7 Victims, Gender and Jouissance
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Victims, Gender and Jouissance

Routledge Research in Gender and Society

1 Economics of the Family and Family Policies Edited by Inga Persson and Christina Jonung 2 Women’s Work and Wages Edited by Inga Persson and Christina Jonung 3 Rethinking Households An Atomistic Perspective on European Living Arrangements Michel Verdon 4 Gender, Welfare State and the Market Thomas P. Boje and Arnlaug Leira 5 Gender, Economy and Culture in the European Union Simon Duncan and Birgit Pfau Ef¿nger 6 Body, Femininity and Nationalism Girls in the German Youth Movement 1900–1934 Marion E. P. de Ras 7 Women and the Labour-Market Self-employment as a Route to Economic Independence Vani Borooah and Mark Hart 8 Victoria’s Daughters The Schooling of Girls in Britain and Ireland 1850–1914 Jane McDermid and Paula Coonerty

9 Homosexuality, Law and Resistance Derek McGhee 10 Sex Differences in Labor Markets David Neumark 11 Women, Activism and Social Change Edited by Maja Mikula 12 The Gender of Democracy Citizenship and Gendered Subjectivity Maro Pantelidou Maloutas 13 Female Homosexuality in the Middle East Histories and Representations Samar Habib 14 Global Empowerment of Women Responses to Globalization and Politicized Religions Edited by Carolyn M. Elliott 15 Child Abuse, Gender and Society Jackie Turton 16 Gendering Global Transformations Gender, Culture, Race, and Identity Edited by Chima J Korieh and Philomina Ihejirika-Okeke 17 Gender, Race and National Identity Nations of Flesh and Blood Jackie Hogan

18 Intimate Citizenships Gender, Sexualities, Politics ElĪbieta H. Oleksy

27 Overcoming Objecti¿cation A Carnal Ethics Ann J. Cahill

19 A Philosophical Investigation of Rape The Making and Unmaking of the Feminine Self Louise du Toit

28 Intimate Partner Violence in LGBTQ Lives Edited by Janice L. Ristock

20 Migrant Men Critical Studies of Masculinities and the Migration Experience Edited by Mike Donaldson, Raymond Hibbins, Richard Howson and Bob Pease 21 Theorizing Sexual Violence Edited by Renée J. Heberle and Victoria Grace 22 Inclusive Masculinity The Changing Nature of Masculinities Eric Anderson 23 Understanding Non-Monogamies Edited by Meg Barker and Darren Langdridge 24 Transgender Identities Towards a Social Analysis of Gender Diversity Edited by Sally Hines and Tam Sanger 25 The Cultural Politics of Female Sexuality in South Africa Henriette Gunkel 26 Migration, Domestic Work and Affect A Decolonial Approach on Value and the Feminization of Labor Encarnación Gutiérrez-Rodríguez

29 Contesting the Politics of Genocidal Rape Af¿rming the Dignity of the Vulnerable Body Debra B. Bergoffen 30 Transnational Migration, Media and Identity of Asian Women Diasporic Daughters Youna Kim 31 Feminist Solidarity at the Crossroads Intersectional Women’s Studies for Transracial Alliance Edited by Kim Marie Vaz and Gary L. Lemons 32 Victims, Gender and Jouissance Victoria Grace

Victims, Gender and Jouissance Victoria Grace

NEW YORK

LONDON

First published 2012 by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Simultaneously published in the UK by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2012 Taylor & Francis The right of Victoria Grace to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Grace, Victoria. Victims, gender, and jouissance / by Victoria Grace. — 1st ed. p. cm. — (Routledge research in gender and society ; 32) Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Feminism. 2. Equality. 3. Gender identity. 4. Women and religion. 5. Holy, The. I. Title. HQ1150.G7293 2012 305—dc23 2011046717 ISBN13: 978-0-415-80618-3 (hbk) ISBN13: 978-0-203-11860-3 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by IBT Global

Contents

Acknowledgments Introduction

ix 1

1

Feminism and the Victim

12

2

The Birth and Death of the Victim

34

3

Gender and Sacrificial Violence

58

4

From Mysticism to de Sade

80

5

There Are No Victims

101

6

We Are All Victims

122

7

Victims, Gender and Jouissance

144

Notes Bibliography Index

159 167 173

Acknowledgments

I am deeply indebted to Louis Arnoux for many discussions over many years on the issues and concepts at the heart of this work. I am grateful to Louis for reading a draft of the complete manuscript, for his helpful suggestions and ever-willing dialogue, not to mention his support and encouragement. Chris Prentice has always been a friend and colleague on whom I could rely for exacting and exciting discussions that never cease to sharpen my thinking on the issues so central to the work on this book. My profound thanks go to Kaye Cederman for reading a draft of the manuscript before submission; her suggestions and support have been important. Of those with whom I have discussed the questions and debates inherent in this work, I would like to express my appreciation to Renée Heberle, Kim Toffoletti, Leonardo Rodriguéz, Eluned Summers-Bremner, and Gerry Coulter. I am appreciative of the collegial support offered by many colleagues in Sociology and Gender Studies at the University of Canterbury. I am grateful also to members of my Sociology Honours class on psychoanalysis at the University of Canterbury over the last few years for their collaborative engagement in a process that is an ongoing source of learning for us all. In particular, members of our small reading group, Cindy Zeiher, Karyn Stewart and Lois Tonkin. Members of the Centre for Lacanian Analysis in New Zealand have contributed forums for discussion that have facilitated this work. My appreciation is extended to the University of Canterbury for providing a six-month study leave that made it possible to take the sustained time necessary to write a draft of the manuscript. Finally, I would like to express my grateful thanks to the Routledge publishing team who have never failed to assist throughout the publishing process. I would like to acknowledge the helpful suggestions and references provided by two anonymous reviewers of the proposal for this project. In particular I thank Commissioning Editor Max Novick for his patience and the sincerity of his support when progress was delayed due to the devastating earthquakes that struck my hometown of Christchurch in 2011.

Introduction

Feminist theorists and activists claim that there is no universal feminism, that feminism can only be plural, heterogeneous in accordance with its diversity, and even contradictory with a myriad of troubled intersections. They are now careful not to speak of a single feminism because such a gesture excludes the singularity of each manifestation of feminism, thereby presuming a normative ‘ism’ and occluding those that are different, obscuring the fact that there can be, indeed are and have been, cultural constructions of gender that are entirely different from a European-derived Western viewpoint, let alone the multiple concerns and postulates that might give shape to a representational politics. We therefore say there are many feminisms. Furthermore, at least since Judith Butler wrote Gender Trouble (1990), feminist scholarship has had to contend with a critique of the very notion of ‘women’ as the stable and articulable subject of feminism. This term, this concept, is inherently unstable because, as Butler’s critique expounds, ‘women’ are ‘produced and constrained by the very structures of power through which emancipation is sought’ (p.2). The question of whether this precludes feminism from articulating or claiming any status as a representational politics is then raised. Butler’s point is that a critique such as hers renders any identity of the feminist subject as a foundation for feminist politics impossible. She notes the ironical or paradoxical consequence of this position: that ‘representation’ will be of sense to feminism only where the subject of ‘women’ is nowhere presumed. Does this infer that it is impossible even to speak of a thread or trace of commonality that would give the terms ‘feminism’ or ‘women’ some meaning that tracks across these differences, albeit not in any fi nished and completed sense, within a specified yet broad cultural history such as that of the European ‘West’? Butler, after all, continues to speak of women. Insofar as this proposed impossibility is anchored in a rejection of the foundation of the identity ‘women’ as the subject of feminism, it appears possible, permissible, to speak of ‘women’ acknowledging its provisional and non-identificatory signification. If there is a resistance to any notion of commonality of positioning, and therefore a rejection of any ‘Archimedean point’ for theorizing, it ironically becomes a ‘view from nowhere’ and

2

Victims, Gender and Jouissance

erases the possibility of an engaged praxis, of action. For as soon as one takes the impulse to ‘act’ as some kind of orienting or positioning point from which one seeks, or fi nds, then this standpoint of action becomes the basis for establishing the coordinates of theorizing. Taking this view that it is not impossible—on the contrary it is necessary—to make the act a condition of theory (contrary to identity), I begin with an orienting proposition: it has been the case, historically, that a question or set of questions arguably defi ning the basis of the feminist project in the European West has involved some variation of a formulation concerning why it is, and how it is, that being gendered as a woman, or being placed on the feminine side of the m/f divide, is, with few exceptions, to be positioned within psychosocial discourse and cultural politics as the subordinate of the two terms. As such, the feminine position is more readily associated with object rather than subject, is somehow de-centered, lacking or diminished and as such can be subjected to a place of abjection, of danger, taboo, and to protocols of bodily control and social prohibition, all of which have enduring social, psychic and bodily material consequences. Again, even Butler (2004) states that ‘Feminism is about the social transformation of gender relations [ . . . ] [p]robably we could all agree on that’ (p.204). Insofar as there has been a ‘feminism’ cohering somehow around some variation of this question (with multiple, heterogeneous and contradictory positions), a certain dialectic of response to this question has set the agenda and conceptual context for feminist politics and social redress over the last two centuries in the AngloEuropean context specifically. One predominant response condemns inequality, insisting that the liberal project of democracy must outlaw discrimination and that men and women’s equal status as human beings is to be upheld and respected in both the public and private spheres. This social policy program has taken the form of prohibitions that legislate for the ‘freedom’ and protection of the individual, both freedom from violence and freedom of opportunity, with the human taken to be a fully inclusive category. Such a discourse of inclusiveness has been the main point of leverage for feminist concerns to extend to women rights that have generally already been granted to men. This discourse has a moral recourse and insists on an ethical imperative— it is wrong to dominate another, to violate his/her rights, or to subordinate him/her in an exploitative relation, especially it is wrong to victimize. Those who are weak and/or dependent for whatever reason must be protected and accorded their full dignity. Without wanting to diminish the very real achievements that this social intervention has accomplished for those gendered, provisionally, ‘women’ as well as for children and the bodily vulnerable in Western democracies, benefits that Julia Kristeva (1995) believes will have even more significant import than the industrial revolution, it has been countered by, if it is possible to generalize to such an extent, a response that is without doubt in tension with the assumptions that underlie the fi rst. The counter-discourse

Introduction

3

I refer to here cannot accept the spectacular erasure accomplished by the apparent success of what we might call the ‘thou shalt not’ discourse of the fi rst. To attempt to prohibit the visible manifestations of enduring power relations through a socializing influence at the level of the law obscures the ‘human all too human’ dynamics that give such relations their charge, their force; in fact, according to this counter-response, these dynamics can be understood to be integral to the very possibility and vitality of social life, or indeed to the very possibility of human subjectivity. To attempt to outlaw through establishing and policing boundaries that must not be transgressed is to refuse to see that processes of inevitable victimization are byproducts of an inherently sacrificial process that is dialectically immanent in human social relations, energizing their very core. There is a body of writing and theorizing exploring the sacrificial with its social derivation and formation at least since Hegel fi rst outlined the master-slave dialectic. This writing tends to be iconoclastic; it rails against the pious discourse of human rights that, in Kantian terms, is claimed to have emerged alongside the appearance of ‘radical evil’, insisting that we confront the ‘beyond of good and evil’ to cite Nietzsche’s phrase; a confrontation necessary, it is claimed, when an ostensibly moral campaign circumscribes a legalistic machinery pronouncing the ‘no’ of social control. It points to the contradictions of the social contract, grounded as it is in a series of binaries that progressively unravel when confronted with this critique. The paradoxical violence of the law is foregrounded. While conceding the necessity to legislate against and criminalize violating acts, the attempt to outlaw transgression and sacrifice is a source of scathing admonishment, for some because of its impoverished understanding of the role these processes play in the very construction of the social and for others because such attempts can only ever fail. For feminist theorizing of psychosocial experience and the social relations of sex and gender, turning from the field of rights and social guarantees for equality to venture into its critique is fraught. When the sacrificial victim is aligned with the feminine, it apparently becomes essential for feminist theorizing to navigate a course of critique that attempts to recast the sacrificial, deconstruct the terms giving rise to this alignment or take refuge in moral discourse through an appeal to the sheer ‘wrongness’ of violence simultaneously invoking an ethic of care and mutual recognition of vulnerability and otherness. In this book I explore how existing responses to hierarchies of violence and exposure to victimization are limited when it comes to fulfi lling a feminist inquiry into the stakes of gender and the construct of victim; the tension identified in the relation between these responses creates a gravitational field conditioning in a limited way the theoretical possibilities for understanding the construction of sex, gender and the very material, bodily realities of victimization. Taking the need to go beyond the liberal project of establishing and protecting rights as a given, I argue that equally it will

4

Victims, Gender and Jouissance

not suffice to ignore the overwhelming importance of the sacrificial; nor to reduce the problematic to that of a binary logic, or a series of binary logics, to be superseded supposedly by the one or the many; nor to attempt to rescue the ecstatic, the sacred, the mystic or the maternal for their incarnation of a feminine iconography and experience as a feminist intervention into this field. Through a questioning exploration of these contributions, I argue that the stakes are elsewhere. This book is about the construct of the victim in relation to its cultural history, gender and desire. It tracks feminist engagements with the question of how a feminist discourse and praxis might go ‘beyond’ the apparent entrapment of the feminine position within, or against, a victim frame; a frame whereby it is not only that women become victims, clearly not, but importantly that the victimized position is a feminized one. This topic takes its bearings partially through a pressure point created in Western feminist discourse by what I will argue is an inadequacy of current theorizing—a theorizing that can go further: hence this attempt. The point of departure for this work is two-fold. Firstly, a recognition of a broad consensus regarding a dissatisfaction with the liberal political agenda to secure women’s ‘rights’ (uneasily reliant on these rights being granted, and hence so easily undone),1 an agenda which tends to be premised on insufficiently explored assumptions about the role of politics and the law in human social life, 2 not least assumptions about the meaning of ‘freedom’. And yet, secondly, in turning attention to that heterogeneous counter-discourse that would appear precisely to explore and challenge these assumptions, we fi nd, among a variety of perspectives and emphases, a somewhat muscular celebration of a sacrificial, Dionysian cultural form insisting on the valorization of the transgressive. This view tends to argue that that which is denied, controlled, legislated against or pushed out of social consciousness will inevitably return to re-inhabit the social and psychic landscape in ways that, by defi nition, are violating of a precarious tranquility representing the illusion of a tenuously achieved social domesticity. The carnival, the festival, the ecstatic and chaotic force of an energetic libidinal release that has occurred across the broad sweep of human history and culture through a range of social ‘events’ (orchestrated and otherwise) are analyzed by those articulating this particular counter-discourse for their inevitable and necessary presence in the making of social worlds. These analytics of desire, violence and the social have not augured well for a feminist project. My intent here is to go over these tracks, to find exactly those points in various manifestations of this counter-discourse, worthy as they are of attention because of their critique, where they break with their own terms of engagement as critical scholarship. Where do they stop asking questions? Where do they settle for an interpretive resolution that forecloses ongoing analysis and forgoes the praxis of revolt, in Kristeva’s terms, that in turn would refuse epistemic mastery or closure? What do they make of gender or sexual difference? Kristeva’s notion of ‘revolt’

Introduction

5

(2002) is a useful one in orienting this work. She refers to its etymological meaning of ‘return, returning, discovering, uncovering, and renovating’ (p.85) yet makes the point that her emphasis is to go beyond the necessary repetition involved in this return and going over one’s tracks, to point to the potential of revolt to ‘make gaps, rupturing, renewing’ (p.85). The main element, however, is that of a ceaseless questioning that never arrives, never concludes. Why? Because the social world is that of action, of flux, is never static, never wholly repeated, never whole, always contingent. Contrary to some recent claims, the victim as construct and lived experience cannot be wishfully erased through pronouncements on its ‘end’. At the same time my main question is addressed to the way cultural theorizing on the victim in the European Western tradition ultimately fails to move beyond postulating the inevitability of the sacrificial. This work is equally concerned to engage the limitations of feminist theorizing that, although contesting this inevitability, in turn falls short in its endeavors to unravel and confront the impasse it points to at the heart of the structuring of human subjectivity. I wonder what is at stake in this limitation, and what can be gained through such a confrontation and questioning. Before reviewing the progression of chapters, it is useful to provide some reflection on the use of the three terms comprizing the title of this book. The meaning of words is never fi xed and any dictionary can of course only point to the/a meaning of one signifier through recourse to others. The fluidity of meaning, its continual deferral, makes the idea of ‘defi ning’ terms suspect if not redundant. It is rather a matter of circling around the term, discursively invoking its metaphoric correlates, and most importantly analyzing its differing contextual usages. The word (variously signifier, concept, term, sign) ‘gender’ is particularly slippery. ‘Gender’, ‘sex’ and ‘sexual difference’ attempt to conceptually negotiate the continually shifting relations between the social constructedness of masculinity and femininity as social roles, acts and gestures; the materiality of physical bodies (socially perceived and constructed or physically ‘given’) as they do or do not differ according to a designation female and male; and the question of the feminine or masculine, the female or male, women or men as foundational or otherwise to the very possibility of subjectivity. Throughout this study these terms, ‘gender’ in particular, will be used in differing contexts yet in ways that can only be rendered meaningful in relation to that context. The only points to be clarified in anticipation are these assumptions: I do not propose a division of sex and gender that creates an unproblematized biological precedent in anatomical morphology; there is no essence to gender nor any ontic guarantee for any signifier in its assumed relation to a signified. The term used by Oppel (2005: 2) to bypass this problem, ‘sex-gender’, is one I will use from time to time. Where I might propose an argument or claim related to gender as difference or otherwise it is intended as an ‘act’ and as such it ‘enacts’ a discourse that presumes the inevitable fluidity of concept and meaning, not only because of an assumption about the nature

6

Victims, Gender and Jouissance

of language but also because of an assumption about the nature of the social world (an ontological postulate that the world comprises gestures, not things, and as such is continually enacted into ‘being’3). An orientation to the concept of ‘victim’ can usefully begin with a consideration of its etymology. It is clear from its derivation that the meaning of ‘victim’ is inextricably linked to a sacrificial process. The fi rst use of the word in the English language is registered in Chambers Dictionary of Etymology (1988, 1203) as 1497 and meaning ‘living creature killed and offered as a sacrifice to a god’; borrowed from the Middle French victime, and directly from Latin victima as ‘animal offered as a sacrifice, any sacrifice’. It is also noted that the word is of uncertain origin. The authors of the Chambers Dictionary speculate on the significance of the root *vict as ‘something consecrated’ from the root *wik meaning sacred. They go on to hazard that if this hypothetical reconstruction is correct, then the Latin victima is possibly cognate with Gothic weihs meaning holy, and Sanskrit vikta-s as separated, consecrated, from Indo-European weik/wik as set apart. They then state that the extended sense of ‘a person who is hurt, tortured or killed by another’ is fi rst recorded in English in 1660. It is later, in the late eighteenth century, that the ‘weakened sense of a person badly treated or taken advantage of’ enters into English usage. To victimize as a verb does not appear until the early eighteenth century with the meaning of to ‘cause to suffer’. Thus, a victim is always a victim for some-thing or some-one, a relational construct indicating he, she or that which suffers a sacrificial intent on the part of some other. Some purpose is served through victimization. Again, if the hypothetical reconstruction is accurate, there is also a connection between the Gothic weihs and the word witch, appearing around 1250 as wiche from Old English wicce meaning ‘female magician, sorceress’ (about 1000), related to wiccian ‘to practice witchcraft’, which in turn is related to the Old English word wigle meaning divination (wiglian, ‘to divine’) (p.1240). The word victim has, therefore, a history that appears to involve the criss-crossing of meanings related to sacrifice, sorcery, and divination. This conjunction brings into the foreground questions related to the victim’s ‘innocence’, or possibly more accurately, the innocence of the very cause of the harmful effect being neutralized (for example, a crop failure) or the innocence of the powerful potentiality (for example, a god) being appealed to or appeased through sacrifice. While it is not always the case, the use of the term ‘victim’ today tends to imply innocence; a person, most usually, who is an innocent and helpless victim of an act by another, an act of violence or cruelty, or even some form of recklessness or neglect, that causes harm and suffering to the victim, an act to which the victim is subjected without his/her will or consent, but one that s/he cannot be understood to have precipitated in any way or indeed to have resisted, avoided or halted. The victim in this sense is wholly passive, an ‘agentless’ construct, without fault, seemingly chosen at random and suffering an undeserved harm. In

Introduction

7

Chapter Two, below, the shift from sacrificial victimage to an emphasis on the innocence of the victim is discussed through consideration of the work of René Girard. Here, the important point to note is that this contemporary notion of innocence inhabits a term victim whose history was in fact less concerned with the innocence of the victim and rather more concerned with conjuring an effect through social ritual. The extent to which ‘victim’ transcends this history will be a focus for exploration. Jouissance is a French word used by French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan (1901–1981). His usage of this term goes well beyond its usual meaning in French, so is particular to his own work. Having said that, there is no one meaning of jouissance for Lacan. The bewildering range of possibilities for deploying this word, concept or signifier will come into the discussion at various points in the course of this book. The reason for its appearance in the title? The inquiry developed through the course of this book, introduced below, attempts to examine the intersection between the construct of gender and that of victim in the cultural history of the European West and to explore through critique the possibilities for unknotting this intersection. To orient this analysis, the word jouissance is intended to suggest that this critique cannot proceed without fully confronting the way speaking beings (humans as beings who speak, who are ‘of’ language) inhabit the inevitability of language; how language creates human subjectivity. As this work has progressed, the species called human has appeared more and more strange to me, enigmatic, at times horrifying (sometimes comic), mostly extraordinary, and yet at the same time its ordinariness as ‘human-all-too-human’, to use Nietzsche’s well-known phrase, continues to reverberate. Jouissance is a part of this extraordinary ordinariness. Possibly one could say as an opening proposition that jouissance takes place where and when pleasure meets its limit in pain, where and when an exquisite abandon of any coordinates of existence as the ‘self’ that others anticipate us to ‘be’ is met by its inevitable limit, with the necessary reassertion of those coordinates if we are to remain speaking subjects. Jouissance is as much about this inevitable loss, an ecstatic desire, as it is about pleasure or enjoyment. Hence the title of this book: ‘Victims, Gender and Jouissance’ because jouissance has its role to play in the knotting of the intersection of gender and victimage. ******************** The fi rst chapter establishes the field as that of the victim in the context of feminist theory and praxis. A certain impasse has tended to thwart attempts to both theorize the way that sex-gender is implicated in the victim relation and also to invent ways out of this seemingly intractable implication. The circular nature of the problem keeps tripping up on itself: if women are somehow susceptible to victimization, attempts to understand how this might be the case, and then oppose this susceptibility, re-inscribe women into the status of victim. It is as if the very attempt to grapple

8

Victims, Gender and Jouissance

with and shift the problem somehow has the uncanny ability to reinstate it. Feminist discourse reflects a certain ambivalence, therefore, regarding the relation between gender and victimization. After considering the significant intervention by Sharon Marcus in the early 1990s challenging women to actively refuse being a victim of male sexual violence in particular, and Sharon Lamb’s more recent examination of feminists’ ‘new version’ of victims, a prior question follows regarding the binary structuring of the terms at issue: how in fact does the socio-political become separated in analysis from the psychological? And what is accomplished by this separation? This line of questioning leads to a critical comment on Judith Butler’s recent proposal for an ethics and politics of vulnerability. Her critique of gender ‘identity’ opens onto the need for a recognition of the primary vulnerability to the Other, which she claims lies at the heart of subjectivity, but the question of how a recognition of vulnerability might mandate a non-violence is asked. The debate between the Anglo-American emphasis on the performativity of gender and the European construct of sexual difference intersects with theories of subjection. Teasing out elements of this debate helps refi ne the question of innocence and complicity within the victim relation, and clarify what it might mean for feminist praxis. To address the questions opened up in the fi rst chapter, it is necessary to survey the field that connects the notion of the victim to a sacrificial process. Chapter Two traverses this ground, beginning with the seminal work of René Girard (1977). According to Girard’s analysis, sacrifice of a victim was the originary act that served to stem an explosive and contagious outbreak of violence within the human group. The sacrificial act has a cathartic effect. The impetus for the intra-group violence is theorized by Girard through his concept of ‘mimetic desire’. This concept is queried against a psychoanalysis that Girard rejects—I ask how robust is his conceptualization of desire and where does a critique of its limitations lead? A discussion of the Lacanian concept of desire marks the beginning of an ongoing intervention whereby Lacanian psychoanalytic ideas and critique are woven into the fabric of the book. Whichever way this inquiry turns, it does so through considering authors who either explicitly reject psychoanalysis (a rejection that is queried and challenged), or they use psychoanalytic concepts in problematic ways, having Lacan in particular say things that at least require a re-interpretation. A central question for this project is to understand the inevitability of the excited fascination that accompanies a witnessing of, or participation in, the victimizing act. This mesmerized and enjoyed fi xation on, or repulsion from, the sacrificial scene is central to theorizing the connections between sexed subjectivity and processes of subjection. In this way, a Lacanian psychoanalysis assists in making some sense of the jouissance at the heart of the sacrificial process. Chapter Two also begins to delineate strands of analysis of the role of sacrifice in the formation of the social, including that of the so-called radical Durkheimian school with its valorization of sacrifice. Chapter Two also introduces

Introduction

9

the very different perspectives of Georges Bataille (1991; 1992) and JeanJacques Walter (1977). Gender and sacrificial violence is the focus of Chapter Three, particularly Martha Reineke’s (1997) reading of psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva’s voluminous writings on the murderous violence towards the feminine in its incarnation as maternal. A critique of elements of this analysis leads the inquiry out of any interpretation that could ground sacrificial violence in the bodies of specifically women. It is clear from Reineke’s discussion, however, that there is something that must not be dismissed in the bodily focus of the sacrifice. The victim’s body is the sacrificial object; for Kristeva the maternal body is this victim object of violence because it is the very bodily matrix from which (phallic) subjectivity must distinguish itself. It is the symbolic, signifying potential of the maternal body that creates this gravitational focus: to make the soma of the maternal body signify, when a threat of engulfment overwhelms the subject. The significance of Freud’s concept of the death drive is introduced in this context, as ‘death-work’ for Reineke and as death drive for Lacan and Walter. In fact, the significance of the relationship between jouissance and the drive towards the annihilation of the subject, features prominently throughout the rest of the book. Chapter Three concludes with a discussion of what Reineke’s analysis portends in terms of feminist praxis. The claim that ‘death-work’ can be done differently is contrasted to a Lacanian ethics of psychoanalysis; an approach to ethics that counters any usual and prescriptive acceptation of the term. Kristeva’s conviction regarding the maternal reverberates in the scholarship on female mysticism, particularly mysticism in the medieval period of European history, which has been the focus of much feminist interest. This chapter is concerned to question the value to feminist critique of this alignment between the feminine and mysticism. Chapter Four places two unlikely figures together in the one chapter—female mystics and the Marquis de Sade. The ecstasy of the female mystic in her agony and death is analyzed by Reineke as one site of sacrificial violence that is quintessentially feminine. She argues that the feminine as maternal is linked to ‘the sacred’ and therefore to the sacrificial victim. Where mysticism as a somatic practice was more readily associated with women in the middle ages, contemplative and intellectual forms being reserved for men, sadistic ‘perversions’ are more readily associated with the masculine figure, with imagery of domination, power over, and fantasies of subjection. Yet the more we learn about both mysticism and sadism, particularly through Lacan’s engagement with both, the more it transpires that they equally problematize the binary divisions that irrevocably separate the victim from the victimizer, the sacrificed from the sacrificing agent. The jouissance that disturbingly brings pain and pleasure to an unwelcome intersection is not unknown to each of these forms of ‘ecstasy’. The tantalizing nature of the relation to the Other is integrally at stake for both the mystics and for Sade, although in very different ways. A Lacanian reading of the horror of Nazi violation of

10

Victims, Gender and Jouissance

Jewish people in the death camps by Esther Faye (2009) sharpens appreciation of the significance of Lacan’s rendition of sacrifice: the ‘sacrifice to a dark God’, less as an offering and more to conjure the Other as desiring; the speaking being’s fantasy of its encounter with that discarded remnant of ‘being’ whose loss underwrites its very possibility. The resolute determination to reject entirely any possibility of a victimary status for humanity is confronted in the work of Friedrich Nietzsche. The challenge of Nietzsche to any suggestion of feminist, or any other, ressentiment reveals a difficult yet compelling counter-discourse to both any victim claim and also to any moral recourse within the terms of the law. His project of revaluing all values is one that forces the hand, so to speak, of any move that would locate human social life within the confi nes of a protectionist ethos of ‘justice’ and its corollary of blame. Nietzsche’s condemnation of the form of sacrifice arising from ressentiment, speaks uncannily to some feminist concerns. Nietzsche also invokes the concept of sacrifice with a different meaning: away from its bargaining instrumentality and towards the annulment of excess, which is introduced in an earlier discussion of Bataille’s view of sacrifice as the destruction of the ‘accursed share’. A critique of Nietzsche’s figure of the ‘overman’ does not diminish the significance of the force of his opposition to the way ressentiment reflects a world divided into good and evil, buttressed by a dedication to moral certitude. Nietzsche’s insistence that there be no victims paves the way for a consideration of how, today, we are all victims, in the analysis of Jean Baudrillard. The victim today has emerged from the sacrificial shadows into the full glare of a Western-derived consumerism. Baudrillard’s specific critique of how evil has morphed into misfortune in the contemporary world brings the sheer scope of the compensatory machinery to bear on what is now a kind of victim industry. But more importantly, Baudrillard’s commentary on the ascendancy of the figure of the victim (our human right to claim such a status), has to be understood in the context of his critique of the way a generalized exchanged has progressively eradicated a form of exchange he refers to as ‘symbolic’. This chapter takes Baudrillard’s critique as a central point of leverage to further this inquiry into victims, gender and jouissance. Through this discussion it begins to become apparent how Baudrillard’s rendition of sacrifice, following and extending that of Bataille, is clearly differentiated from the sacrifice of Girard, the cathartic sacrifice or that prevailing within a bargaining frame. Baudrillard’s work is problematic for not recognising this distinction. Here, Baudrillard’s commitment to a social formation grounded in ‘symbolic’ exchange, in reversion and illusion is juxtaposed to Lacan’s theory of the subject and the inevitability of the signifier. The fi nal chapter reviews the scope of the discussion to conclude that the victim relation is inherent to the very process of becoming a sexed subject. Any attempts to legislate its abolition will fail. The victim is incarnated in the shadow of the Other; the social is therefore woven into its

Introduction

11

very fabric. The sacrifice of sacrifice can involve a praxis ‘after the letter’ so to speak, an undoing of the dualistic, ontic metaphysics of presence or positivity that is inevitably inscribed by the advent of the subject as an effect of the signifier. Although central, this praxis of systematically and relentlessly undoing the very logic of any dualistic thought is not restricted to the psychoanalytic ‘cure’. This book follows a pattern of writing that is not unlike that described by Ian Parker (2011: 1), when he claims that to ‘circle around the same issues from different vantage points [is] the only way to elaborate an argument concerning a form of psychoanalysis so suspicious of linear thought’. The ‘conclusion’, therefore, is envisaged as a stepping-stone to further critique.

1

Feminism and the Victim . . . if my doing is dependent on what is done to me or, rather, the ways in which I am done by norms, then the possibility of my persistence as an “I” depends on my being able to do something with what is done to me . . . (Judith Butler, 1997: 3)

Feminist theory, in various ways, has had, and continues to have a lot to say about women, men and their positioning in relation to the notion of victim. This chapter asks how (selected) feminist theorists have grappled with the meaning and status of the victim in relation to the construction of sex and gender, and what questions are opened up through this theorizing? Some feminist authors explore the political implications for feminism of the notion of women as victims of a masculine project whose success is indexed to women’s subordination. Invariably feminist theorizing of gender relations engages with the question of how these relations can be transformed; how might we envision a gender beyond victims?

THE AMBIVALENT DISCOURSE OF THE VICTIM When feminists of the women’s movement of the 1970s or thereabouts were intent on exposing the violence of sexual abuse, of domestic violence, of pornography, verbal abuse and discrimination, of all manner of harms inflicted on women, there was a need to confront and re-script narratives about women’s culpability in relation to these acts. This move was one of outrage against a tendency for women to precisely not be cast as ‘victims’ in the sense that their innocence was not assumed. Women were deemed to be somehow implicated in the ‘cause’ of the violence they suffered, implicated in the inducement of aggression against them.1 While insisting on the anger and agency of those violated, feminists at the time were intent on analyzing the social and political conditions of such an assumption. The feminist project radically deconstructed and challenged the political agendas sustaining such an ideology; to do this they proclaimed women’s innocence, insisting that women were innocent victims. Such a proclamation of innocence, of victimization, is to claim the injurious consequences of being subjected to a harmful act, of being overcome or overwhelmed, and to refuse any suggestion whatsoever of causing, inciting or precipitating the event that inflicted harm.

Feminism and the Victim

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The question of the use and meaning of the concept of victim in its application to women suffering particularly the consequences of sexual and domestic violence is one that continues to vex and frustrate feminist theorizing. If being a victim is to be taken up, not to take, but to be taken up by a position so devoid of agency, so undone, so given up to forces beyond control, then from the standpoint of Western liberal discourse, and undoubtedly others, it has the connotation of being degraded; dignity is compromized if not removed. There is here the connotation of innocence in alignment with impotence. ‘At the mercy of . . . ’ No-one would ever choose to be a victim. In such a rendition it is a thoroughly passive state that does nothing but foment the most abject resentment. In fact its passivity is manifestly evident in the absence in the English language of a verb for any action of being or becoming a victim; one can victimize, or perpetrate, but there is no word for ‘doing’ the status of victim; one is ‘done to’. Thus the feminist insistence of women’s innocence, while it drew attention to the systemic nature of violence towards women, insisting on the way the psychic conditions for such violence are implicated in social power, in the same movement it established a certain intensely problematic passivity that recaptured and reiterated the very condition of lack of agency that was implicated in the process of victimization itself. This passive position or assumption was fiercely rejected not only by a militant feminism that would fight back (‘we are your worst castration nightmare’), but also by those who represented a backlash against what was labeled ‘victim feminism’. As Jane Flax wrote in 1999: In insisting upon the existence and power of such relations of domination, we should not fall into the victim’s viewpoint: That is, we need to avoid seeing women as totally innocent, acted upon beings. (Flax, 1999: 181) Voices were raised against any suggestion of women as victims. ‘We are not victims’; ‘we are agents; we are agentic subjects with power and intent’. In fact, according to some, ‘we are post-feminist because we don’t even recognize (literally) any oppressive forces compromising our freedom’; ‘we are not victims’ (how undignified), or at least ‘we are no longer victims’. With this counter-politic feminist analysis was faced with the vexing problem of how to create more nuanced yet politically meaningful understandings of the social power relations of domination and subordination without succumbing to a discourse of victim and without embracing a politically impotent liberal discourse of agentic choice; in other words of re-thinking ways of conceptualizing and talking about the binary of perpetrator and victim. Sharon Marcus’s provocation (1992) to women to fight rape and the threat of rape through self-defense was not only about securing an effective preventative strategy, but was also about re-scripting the very fear of rape that made it possible for women to be placed in this victimized position

14

Victims, Gender and Jouissance

through this injurious violation. Her suggestion was not that women should take up the ethical burden to prevent rape when rape is perpetrated by ‘rapists and a society which upholds them’ (p.400), but rather a recognition that to be solely a victim is to be somehow unable to act. Marcus here tried to navigate the very fi ne line demarcating the boundary of victim by attempting to hold both victim and agency together without allowing for their relationality and without assigning any blame to the position of victim. For Carine Mardorossian (2002), Marcus oversteps this line and falls on the side of ‘victim-blaming’. She condemns Marcus’s attempt to problematize the ‘rape script’ that represents women as rapable because in doing so she (Marcus according to Mardorossian) creates the view that ‘it is up to the woman to recognize that her assailant does not simply have the power to rape but that his power is created by the extent to which she succumbs to the social script’s efforts to secure her participation’ (p.752). This appears to be a mis-reading of Marcus and one based primarily on a series of binaries that structure Mardorossian’s attempt at a critical intervention. For Mardorossian, the event of rape is social and political rather than psychological, a matter that is exterior to the woman rather than one of interiority, of the order of the fleshy materiality of the body rather than of representation and discourse, an act to be understood and reacted to as that of the perpetrator rather than as an experience of a victim, as rooted in historical and social relations rather than as interpersonal in nature. These binaries are precisely those problematized and reworked by those feminists Mardorossiann condemns as ‘postmodern’; she condemns their contributions as ‘postmodern’ because in her words they ‘psychologize’ rape ‘as an inner state that itself triggers crises’ (p.770) rather than theorizing its social, political and historical conditions of possibility. Here Mardorossian is critical of Marcus, Wendy Brown (1995) and others through the lens of her own binary structuring of the field—a structuring that is the object of critique by those authors she berates, an object of critique Mardorossian appears blind to, yet she refers also to the ‘facile opposition between passivity and agency’ (p.771), so through a counter-rhetoric, her argument becomes somewhat incoherent. Mardorossian rails against the ‘reduction of the discourse of victimization to an agentless interiority’ (p.768); she wants to challenge what she refers to as a ‘stereotype’ of victims as ‘passive, incapacitated shells’. This is a worthy call for a re-signification (notwithstanding her own admonishment of a focus on what she delineates as that of representation), however, to do so requires a scholarly scrutiny of the historical and philosophical enactments of this term of victim, of victimization—something Mardorossian also calls for. Sharon Lamb’s edited collection, New Versions of Victims, published in 1999, takes up some of the questions generated by this recent history. Lamb makes it clear that she takes her distance from ‘victim feminism’ with its sterile insistence on the victim as innocent and pure, but equally

Feminism and the Victim

15

she distances her analysis from what she calls the ‘look-at-me feminists’ who oppose it. She charts a divergent course not wanting to track this rather wearisome path between either a position of innocent victim or of liberal (politically ignorant) agent of choice. Lamb’s concern is to focus on the claims and beliefs about the harms of victimization that have permeated social responses to violence and abuse, interrogating the processes that condition the way the victim has become a deeply pathologized, even medicalized, construct. She is critical of the further violence that is wrought in myriad legal, social-work or counseling contexts by this relentless reiteration and insistence of a victim status (for example, to receive state-subsidized therapy or compensation), even as these endeavors attempt to ameliorate the harm sustained. While Lamb and co-contributors point to the problems of the concept of ‘victim’, analyzing how this position is both constructed and might be deconstructed or detoured in a variety of contexts (for example, into a discourse of ‘survivorship’), 2 they do not address the intersection of the position of victim with gender in the light of its cultural and philosophical history. We are still left with a number of questions that seek to deepen our inquiry into the notion of victim and its imbrications with gender. Lamb’s conclusion more broadly, somewhat like that of Mardorossian, is to call for a focus on the problem, which is that of the perpetration of harm. What is needed is to take a step back and re-focus on the very terms that create the possibilities of mastery and submission, guilt and innocence, perpetrator and victim and at root, active and passive. Some argue for the importance of a dialectical understanding of these terms. What are the implications of such an advocacy? What happens when these relational terms are disentangled from their dialectic and constituted as binary terms, as two incommensurably different positions? How are they inscribed into the grammar of possibility for sexed speaking subjects? Are there any other alternatives?

CHALLENGING THE ONTOLOGY OF IDENTITY By asking these kinds of question I am picking up another important, recent thread in feminist theorizing. As the scholarship and activism of the second wave, especially in the Anglo-American world, reached an impasse in its efforts to secure a robust and enduring political subjectivity and presence for women on equal terms with men, albeit after achievements whose importance cannot be over-estimated, attention turned to the claimed hierarchical structuring of the very binary terms on which these efforts were predicated. This ‘step back’ to a prior question cannot be understood within the either/or of either socio-political or psychological, but rather it must be understood as an investigation into how the socio-political became dislocated and bifurcated from the psychological to suggest two entirely discrete

16

Victims, Gender and Jouissance

and bounded domains. Even the radical feminists of the 1970s insisted that ‘the personal is political’, which cannot be reduced to the privileging of the personal at the expense of the political or vice-versa, neither can it be read as a reduction of the one to the other. Poststructural feminists became concerned to critique the hierarchical structure embedded in the very construct of male/female along with other cognate binaries; hierarchical in the sense of a positive construct of identity associated with the masculine position which is therefore the privileged position compared to the feminine as lacking a positive identity and rather taking its bearings from that which is different from the identificatory masculine. A more radical move, possibly; certainly one that attempted to sustain its sights on the anodyne political sphere while interrogating elements of its pre-condition. The political project of rights and opportunities for women might ultimately be sabotaged by the very production of the masculine and feminine as ‘difference’ that accompanies it or which it assumes. Mindful of the need to refuse any tendency to advocate some kind of reversal of the hierarchy male/female, a different kind of question became pressing. What would it mean if masculinity and femininity, gender as difference, did not precede these efforts, but rather was produced through these discourses of agitation for rights as much as through those discourses opposing social change and wanting to re-inscribe polarized gender difference into the entire social fabric? The fact that this question was forced into the forefront of feminist consciousness (if one can abuse this notion by writing in the singular) by the impasse resulting from its avoidance is one reason why Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble, published in 1990, was taken up by feminist scholarship so voraciously (the other reasons relate to the value of Butler’s contribution to feminist theory as a philosopher acutely attuned to gender-related activism). Butler and others thus took up the challenge to address a prior question, and much of feminist theorizing has been preoccupied with variations of this question and its implications during the following two decades. If a defi nitional problem with the binary structuring of language and conceptualization is an ontological essentializing inherent in the dualist logic of identity/difference, it became crucial to re-frame any suggestion of essentialist categorization. Gender identity and therefore difference do not inhere in persons; rather gender is discursively produced and performed. Butler’s theory of performativity argued that gender, rather than being understood as an identity essential to the subject and as such a prior identity that s/ he expresses, it is better viewed as an enactment that performatively constitutes the appearance of its own interior fi xity; this appearance, however, is exactly that, an illusion. Gender identity is reiterated as discursive production veiled by, and made possible through a ‘compulsory order’ of normative heterosexual desire predicated on a notion of a biological ‘sex’, which is given and natural. Gender Trouble rattles this appearance of the fi xity of gender identity, but more than this its argument rests on a critique of the identity/difference binary in which it settles. Butler’s contribution

Feminism and the Victim

17

in particular characterizes a determination to disentangle identity (gender identity in particular) from its mooring in any fi xed and essentializing determination releasing it to a performative possibility whereby ‘identities can come into being and dissolve depending on the concrete political practices that constitute them’ (1990: 16). She claims to critique the ontology of substance—an overwhelmingly important facet of poststructuralist theory—and recast any notion of being within a frame of discursive production. Thus, for Butler, signification is not a ‘founding act’ but is rather a ‘regulated process of repetition’ with the subject resulting from rule-governed, intensely socially regulated, discursive practices. In Gender Trouble and some subsequent work this insight led Butler to seek out and argue for the parodic and subversive potentialities of gender performativity. Being careful to insist that the constitution of the subject through discourse is not equivalent to being determined by discourse if such a notion of determination forecloses the possibility of agency, she proposes that agency be reformulated as ‘a question of how signification and resignification work’ (1990: 144). The agency of the subject is precisely conceptualized to reside in this signifying work.

AN ETHICS AND POLITICS OF VULNERABILITY? I will query some of the gaps and questions opened up by Butler’s theory of performativity insofar as it has a bearing on the feminist problematic of the asymmetrical structuring of gender and the politics of subordination in terms of both signification and social relations. Before doing so, however, it is useful to follow Butler after Gender Trouble to see where this analysis led her regarding this very point. In a book published in 1997 Butler analyzes The Psychic Life of Power—Theories in Subjection. Her aim is to bring a theory of power (specifically that of Foucault) together with a theory of the psyche (specifically Freud and psychoanalysis), something she claims neither Foucault nor psychoanalysis aspires to elucidate. The question she presumes is that of how the subject is formed in subordination. Thus Butler makes the claim, through considering the works of a number of additional philosophers as well, including Hegel, Nietzsche and Althusser, that we cannot be subjects of language without being subjected. Subjection is a very condition of our being as subjects. We cannot avoid being constituted through power, through an inevitable appeal to the Other. The fact that the subject is vulnerable to a power not of its own making is as inevitable as the fact that the subject in turn reiterates this power: ‘no subject comes into being without power, but that its coming into being involves the dissimulation of power, a metaleptic reversal in which the subject produced by power becomes heralded as the subject who founds power’ (1997: 15–16). Butler extrapolates that to be an agent as a social, sexed and speaking being—to be a subject—involves a primary vulnerability to the Other. Power, while

18 Victims, Gender and Jouissance appearing external to the individual, assumes a psychic form that she claims constitutes the subject’s self-identity; we desire this ‘being’ in identity that grounds our social existence. She asks: ‘how is such a desire [a desire to be] exploited not only by a law in the singular, but by laws of various kinds such that we yield to subordination in order to maintain some sense of social “being”?’ (1997: 130). Butler also discusses Althusser’s notion of the subject’s interpellation or hailing: we as subjects are called, or hailed, by the law and respond, hence are constituted, by turning towards it. The learning of language and submission to the rules of the established order provide additional instances of the way mastery and submission are dialectically constituted in Althusser’s terms. The more we master, the more we are subjected. In this sense, Butler observes, Althusser recasts submission to a rule of sociality as a kind of mastery. ‘In this view, neither submission nor mastery is performed by a subject; the lived simultaneity of submission as mastery, and mastery as submission, is the condition of possibility for the emergence of the subject’ (1997: 117). Butler’s analysis draws heavily, albeit very selectively, on psychoanalytic conceptualizations of the formation of the subject (Freudian and Lacanian). Yet the effect of attempting even a critical synthesis with a Foucauldian construction of power, if not fundamentally impossible, at least tends to work as an uneasy super-imposition, creating one of several significant points of divergence from what might be called a theoretical coherence in psychoanalytic terms. Butler argues that subjection to the Other by virtue of an inevitable formative dependence in the early years of the child’s life, rather than creating the conditions for a power relation to be exercised at some subsequent time, constitutes power; this Other to whom the subject is subjected becomes infused with power in this reading, as then does the subject. A Foucauldian productive power is thus deemed to be inherent to the very formation of subjectivity; indeed the subject is an ‘effect’ of power while not being fully determined by it (nor fully determining of it). The agency of the subject is implicated in its own subordination, an observation that points to a complicity and ambivalence regarding the power that constitutes it and the subordination that is the corollary of mastery, the price of subjectivity, the price of existence. In the style of Butler’s text, working as it does entirely and faultlessly through a dialectical logic, it follows that ‘the subject who would oppose violence, even violence to itself, is itself the effect of a prior violence without which the subject could not have emerged’ (1997: 64). It is this observation of a vulnerability to the Other, this potentiality of yielding to subordination as an affi rmation of one’s existence that Butler attempts to mobilize for an ethical and political project of non-violence, to trace a path ‘toward a more open, even more ethical, kind of being, one of or for the future.’ (1997: 131). Butler orients her meaning of ethics through that of Levinas, whose conception of ethics is based on an ‘apprehension of the precariousness of life’ (Butler, 2006). Aggression cannot

Feminism and the Victim

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be eradicated by an ethics of non-violence as such; ethics in the terms of Levinas is ‘precisely a struggle to keep fear and anxiety from turning into murderous action’ (Butler, 2006: xviii). And is it not the case, Butler asks (1997), that the ethical question is one that cannot be divorced from a complicity with what it opposes? Recognition of this ambivalence might defuse the anxiety of risking the fiction of autonomous identity. In connection with a discussion of Nietzsche and Althusser, Butler suggests that there might be an ethical and political point in a resistance to the lure of identity (to being constituted through our response to the law), there might need to be a willingness not to be; a critical ‘de-subjectivation’ that would expose the law as less powerful and determining than it seems. She calls for ‘an insurrection at the level of ontology’ (2006: 33). This ontological disarmament is an ethical accomplice to the inevitable loss and vulnerability that Butler describes as inscribing socially constituted bodies. The contingency of loss, of mourning the death of others to whom we are irrevocably attached, marks subjectivity in its dispossession rather than its possession of autonomy and control: ‘I am gripped and undone by these very relations’; ‘We’re undone by each other’ (p.23). Continuing with this evocation, Butler therefore insists that neither gender nor sexuality, each as a mode of relation, can be understood as a possession of something one has and takes up, but rather as ‘a mode of being dispossessed, a way of being for another or by virtue of another’ (p.24; also 2004: 19). While not resiling from the inviolable claims to bodily integrity and self-determination, Butler’s point is to attend to the vulnerability, mortality and agency of that very body in its inevitable openness to the Other. In a sense this body, formed as it is through its social imbrication, is not one’s ‘own’. Butler’s imagining of a community that ‘affirms relationality’ is informed through recognition of dependence on others in our physical, embodied vulnerability. There is no avoidance of the fact that we are, without exception, vulnerable to the violence of others, acknowledging that different conditions of life make this more so for some than for others. Butler proposes that a ‘mindfulness’ of this vulnerability might become the basis for an ethical and non-violent subjectivity and sociality that refuses violence as a displacement of mourning the grief of loss. She asks ‘[f]rom where might a principle emerge by which we vow to protect others from the kinds of violence we have suffered, if not from an apprehension of a common human vulnerability?’ (2006: 30). It is a social bond wrought between subjects who are ‘beside themselves’—ec-static—through a passion, grief or rage that tears subjects from themselves and binds them to others. It is abundantly clear that the terrain of inquiry has shifted or moved on from a critique of the ontological investments in the notion of gender identity to bring concerns regarding the nature of human subjectivity into the foreground, not only of Butler’s work but also of this question of the oppositional terms that create the possibility of victim, that signify the relations of victimization and articulate the stakes of domination and subordination.

20 Victims, Gender and Jouissance Through Butler’s contribution we see a dialectical alternative in the structuring of these relations; an alternative that she claims contests the ontologizing and essentialism of binary constructs. ‘Power’ and subordination, mastery and submission become implicated in one another, complicity and ambivalence become important to the possibility of any oppositional politics. A question that does arise, however, is whether a dialectical reconfiguration of these oppositional terms is sufficient to radically undo or challenge the ontology of presence and the illusion of enduring essence that inevitably mark the entry of the human being into language through the existence of the fi rst signifier that opens onto the possibility of ‘it’ becoming a subject. Another question arising from Butler’s appeal is why does she draw on specifically Foucault’s concept of power? While Butler’s intent to bring a theory of power and a theory of the psyche into an illuminating conversation actively negates the dichotomous bifurcation of the socio-political and the psychological, the use of Foucault’s notion of power introduces a tangential move. The productivist logic of an abstract and all-pervasive positive (non-reversible, non-dialectical) power in Foucault’s sense does not accord with the psychoanalytic theorizing on the formation of subjectivity, nor does the idea that discourse can be understood to be productive of the subject.3 Similarly, while the performative theory of gender is important for its de-essentializing commitment, it is equally reliant on a Foucauldian productivist logic creating a non-reversible positivity of gender. Gender as performative might be subversive of identity in any ontologically fixed and enduring or originary sense. But it is endlessly produced, never seduced, which, according to Baudrillard’s contention, means it is always produced in the sense of positively identifiable, made to appear, fabricated, manufactured rather than seduced in the sense of the reversion of production— removed from the visible order, veiled, occluded as an accomplishment of its own disappearance. Penney (2006) raises a similar concern when, as also argued by the current author in a previous work (Grace, 2000), he views gender performativity as entirely commensurate with, an epiphenomenon of, the logic of late capitalism. He writes ‘[t]he liberation of global capital has caused the symptoms of today’s sexual deterritorialization [ . . . ]—the recently fashionable proliferation of pseudosubversive forms of gender performativity, the paradoxical coincidence of sexual hypervisibility and erotic entropy [ . . . ]—are part and parcel of the logic of late capitalism’ (p.31). Our discussion of relations of domination and subordination, the psychosocial formation of the victim and the relation of gender in the process of victimization, without doubt cannot proceed without fully taking up the question of their enablement—what are the conditions of possibility for these psychic and social relations, and how and where does power feature? How the concept of ‘power’ fares through this analysis and why Foucault’s conceptualization of power is not persuasive will hopefully become clearer as the discussion progresses.

Feminism and the Victim

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Butler is not alone among feminist theorists and philosophers in what could be called a recent ‘turn’ (or return?) to figuring vulnerability and dispossession as worthy motifs for their ethical import and political leverage.4 What could this remarkably pacific and pacifying gesture, a position of non-violence seeking mutual recognition of vulnerability and subjection, rely on for such recognition by the Other? Can a politics of non-violence be sustained through this morally grounded appeal to such a recognition? Indeed, is it the case that the vulnerability of the self and therefore of the Other is in fact not recognized in the act of violence? Can we be sure that such recognition would quell the impulse to violence? Ann Murphy’s (2009) critique of this ‘return’ to the ‘ethics of vulnerability’ by feminist authors argues that such a provocation is complicated and ambiguous. She makes the very point that not only is there no guarantee whatsoever that the recognition of one’s own vulnerability will ‘motivate an attempt to respect the vulnerability of others’ (p.56), but insists also that there is consistent evidence that points to the contrary. Such a prognostication has to be questioned and in doing so it becomes uncertain that empathy, care and respect will of necessity emanate from an experience and recognition of one’s sense of vulnerability and dispossession, or indeed from the mutuality of such a recognition. It might, of course, but does this experience in itself carry any claim or mandate for an ethics or a politics that might, or must, follow? Murphy states that from the perspective of ethics (although one must ask which perspective?) ‘to argue that one is inherently vulnerable or dispossessed is not to say anything about the ethics or politics that follow upon such a claim’ (p.56). Given Butler’s wish to take up what she refers to as the Nietzschean ‘political insight into the formation of the psyche and the problem of subjection, understood paradoxically not merely as the subordination of the subject to a norm, but as the constitution of the subject through precisely such a subordination’ (1997: 66), one might wonder if Nietzsche, who wrote in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, ‘I have often laughed at the weaklings who thought themselves good because they had no claws’ (1978: 118), would recognize the ethic Butler proposes as a consequential proposition. Butler’s reference to a Levinasian notion of ethics as one at least related to ‘a struggle to keep fear and anxiety from turning into murderous action’ does not necessarily imply the prescriptive ethics contained in Butler’s seeking for ‘a principle [ . . . ] by which we vow to protect others from the kinds of violence we have suffered’ (2006: 30). A Lacanian psychoanalytic ‘perspective’ on ethics—that is, an ethics for and of psychoanalysis—is, on the contrary, one that is arguably more suited to questioning the intersections of gender, the violence of victimization with its inevitable conundrum of guilt and innocence, and the jouissance of desire. According to Lacan, ‘The ethics of psychoanalysis has nothing to do with speculation about prescriptions for, or the regulation of, what I have called the service of goods. Properly speaking, that ethics [of psychoanalysis] implies the dimension that

22

Victims, Gender and Jouissance

is expressed in what we call the tragic sense of life’ (1997: 313). As Lacan describes in his seminar on The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, this specifically human tragedy pertains to the impossibility that inhabits the relationship between action and desire; the impossibility of reconciling the sense of an intentional self necessary to being a speaking subject within a sociosymbolic world of others and the unknowable, indeterminable enigma of a desire that animates that Other. The subject as ethical resides in a recognition of this tragic structure of subjectivity that underwrites something of the order of the impossible within it. Appropriating a Foucauldian notion of power-knowledge and discourse as fully productive in their realizing capacities cannot approach, or a-voids, the trauma of an unknowable void around which the subject necessarily circles. The project embarked upon in this book asks what can we apprehend in the relation constituting gender and the victim through keeping this impossibility in our sights and inversely, what can we learn about this structure of subjectivity through an interrogation of situated historical discourses on the victim, on relations of domination and subordination, and how such discourses suggest they might be contested.

ARGUING WITH THE PHALLIC STRUCTURE OF LANGUAGE The time may have come, in fact, to celebrate the multiplicity of female perspectives and preoccupations. In a more accurate, honest, and less self-serving way, we must guarantee that the fundamental difference between the sexes arises out of the network of these differences. Feminism has accomplished a formidable task by making this difference a painful one, which means it is able to generate contingency and symbolic life in a civilization that has nothing to do besides playing the stock market and waging war. (Kristeva, 1995: 207, emphases in original) Feminist theoretical debates invariably hover between a critical deconstructive analysis of whatever the case at hand might be, and a determination to articulate what ought to be the case. This imperative of critique and construct bears heavily on the very form that scholarship takes. It is as though any epistemic project of critique contributing to knowledge in the human psychosocial and political domain must in the same movement reconstruct, delivering on a promise of a vision of the more ethical, more egalitarian, the greater good and benefit, the less oppressive and exploitative, less reifying and more ‘truthful’ if this expression can be used to imply a position without taint or guilt. James Penney (2006) in his Lacanian-inspired cultural studies analysis of the construct of the perverse makes a challenging claim: ‘what we ought to do remains, like desire itself, both indeterminate

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and undeterminable’ (p.29). I want to keep track of how feminist discourse orients to the ‘ought’ and this question of its indeterminacy; to keep it in mind, but not uncritically. The question of the critique of gender identity as a politically invested construction runs alongside an equally compelling and influential critique concerning the structuring of what is often referred to as ‘sexual difference’. Where gender identity is subverted from its ontological foundation, sexual difference is deemed to be an effect of the structure of language whereby masculine and feminine are subject positions, one of which it is necessary to occupy or take up in the process of becoming a speaker of language, or in psychoanalytic terms necessary to becoming a subject at all. Masculine and feminine are differentiated by virtue of the role this division plays in the possibility of any symbolic order. There is a debate within contemporary feminist theory concerning the inevitability of this differential structure of masculine and feminine, if it is anchored irrevocably in the structure of language, if it assumes this structure of language is itself inevitable and universal. In assessing this debate we might take note of Slavoj Žižek’s provocation when he said ‘[n]ame me a single example of a successful philosophical dialogue that wasn’t a dreadful misunderstanding’ (2009: 49). There have been numerous incarnations of the various possibilities within this debate and in sketching its outline I will draw selectively on a few lines of questioning and argumentation that have contributed to it and hopefully that delineate its contours as they are relevant to the question under consideration, that of feminism, gender and the figuring of the victim. We can also see the extent to which the debate hinges on fruitful dialogue or fails to progress the questions because of ‘dreadful misunderstandings’. Kristeva’s emphatic insistence on the necessity of sexual difference, indeed its fundamental status, is evident in the quotation at the opening of this section. This emphasis emerges from a strand of continental philosophy that, through a process of critique, claims that the emergence of the subject is contingent on becoming an articulator of language, taking up a place within a language, a position from which one speaks, and always from a particular perspective. The subject is an effect of speech. This place involves of necessity a position in relation to the binary possibilities structuring that signifying system; a structuring relation of having or not having, being or not being, that in turn authorizes the positions of masculine and feminine. As a symbolic system language creates the possibilities of differences, of distinctions, of objects, of subjects. The Saussurean theory of language as a signifying system, whereby meaning derives from the difference between symbolic elements and not from the supposed referents of those elements, has been strongly influential in psychoanalysis, especially as Lacan built on Freud’s major contribution. Accordingly, the very existence of the symbolic element, the sign in Saussure’s terms or signifier in Lacan’s, is predicated on a dialectic of presence and absence; the sign or signifier can take the place of that which is not; that which is not materializes symbolically in the

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presence of the signifier. Psychoanalysis—that is, Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis—theorizes the entire drama of becoming human subjects, inevitably social, through an analysis of this dialectic. The binary inherent in the dialectical structure of language, therefore, embodies the materiality of sexual difference; the subject, necessarily sexed, necessarily speaking, is an effect of speech. Although the subject can only become a subject within the terms of sexual difference as a fundamental division—that is, as a cut, as a bar marking a fundamental division—according to Lacan it is evident through the practice of psychoanalysis that the divided subject is constituted through a shifting and uncertain sexual identity. Butler has developed and presented her ideas in acknowledgement and debate with those theorists of sexual difference with whom she has some points of convergence and from whom she differs on others. In her book Gender Trouble, Butler takes up a question asked and addressed in the work of Luce Irigaray—‘is language phallogocentric?’—to engage Irigaray’s project of attempting to challenge, undermine, overturn what for her is a form of psychoanalytic dogma that the master signifier is of necessity phallic—asserting the illusion of wholeness and unity of the One—and the feminine is of necessity of the order of the unrepresentable—the not-whole or not-all, the lacking. According to Butler, while Irigaray contests the positioning of the feminine within what she describes as a masculine signifying economy, her (Irigaray’s) oppositional attempt still remains within a temporal logic that enforces a normative presupposition and cannot allow for a subversive sexuality ‘that flourishes prior to the imposition of a law, after its overthrow, or during its reign as a constant challenge to its authority’ (Butler, 1990: 29, emphasis in original). We see here Butler’s concern to promote the possibility of a subversive sexuality from the perspective of a Foucauldian analytic that in her view precisely allows for such an intervention. It is power rather than the law that is productive of these differential relations and normative frames delimiting subversive sexuality, productions that can be mobilized and detoured in ways that destabilize hegemonic prohibitions. Again this notion of ‘power’ appears as a curiously abstract force invoking what Penney refers to as ‘a transcendental, nonsubjective intentionality which saturates and disciplines these structures [socio-economic, legislative, and juridical] from a place at a remove from the libidinal economies of any concrete actors in the social world’ (2006: 10). A key element in Butler’s critique is that Irigaray refuses the proposition, as Irigaray understands it, within Lacanian theory that women can never ‘be’, a refusal that Butler is concerned remains within an ontology of substances of which she is critical and which she rejects for her theory of gender performativity. Butler’s discussion of Irigaray in relation to Lacanian psychoanalysis introduces some unhelpful confusions; for example she claims ‘Irigaray makes clear that sexual difference is not a fact, not a bedrock of any sorts, and not the recalcitrant “real” of Lacanian parlance’ (2004: 177). Lacan, however, never used the term ‘sexual difference’, and

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his theory of sexuation creates a complex alignment of sexed positioning with his notion of the real; certainly the real in Lacan’s terms cannot be characterized as a ‘fact’ or ‘bedrock’. Criticism of feminist appropriation of Lacan’s theory of sexuation cannot be dispensed with through a focus on Irigaray’s work solely. As well as commenting on Lacan specifically, Butler certainly does discuss the work of feminist authors other than Irigaray— authors for whom the project of rescuing a ‘being’ for the feminine is as much an anathema as it is for Lacan. To come back to Žižek’s point about dreadful misunderstandings, it certainly does seem to be the case that feminist critiques of Lacan’s work have invariably been countered by systematically pointing to the erroneous portrayal of Lacanian concepts, some mis-readings causing outrage by their apparent willfulness. As Kirsten Campbell (2004) makes clear it is the role of the phallus that has been pivotal in giving rise to the most strenuous critiques by feminist authors. She cites the example of Elizabeth Grosz, for whom the phallocentric model codifies sexual difference ‘into the presence or absence of a single feature—the male sexual organ’ (cited in Campbell, 2004: 61). For some critics it is as though the designation of the ‘master signifier’ as the ‘phallic signifier’ authorizing the very possibility of identity somehow elevates the significance and meaning of the male’s penis to endow it with an entirely unacceptable ideological mandate regarding signification and subjectivity. According to this view, therefore, this is the ‘phallogocentrism’ of language that is to be opposed. The phallus as signifier, however, cannot be understood as a signifier standing in for the anatomical male organ, the penis. This alignment is evident in the works of neither Lacan nor Freud.5 Subjectivity emerges through a separation of self from the Other, with a capital letter to represent everything that is of the order of language, the social, the law, that is not the self of the emergent subject (formatively represented in the single other primary figure, usually the mother). This separation, occurring as it does through the acquisition of language (which is of the Other), comes at a price. The subject is s/he who is ‘subjected’ to a law that in itself inaugurates division. The phallus as master signifier is the signifier of that mysterious and unknowable something or object which the Other desires (clearly the (m)Other desires something that is not me and that she does not herself have, or that she lacks)—the phallus is the signifier of the entirely imagined object of desire of the Other. As Lionel Bailly has noted (2009), it is an image of potency, it has no contours but is rather an idea or signified of that which the (m)Other desires, that which draws her away and, for the infant, that which ‘perhaps I have, which brings her back’ (Bailly, 2009: 76). This signified or idea has no particular signifier. When it acquires a signifier (such as ‘Father’), according to Lacanian theory the imaginary object of desire is repressed, becomes unconscious, and the phallic signifier of the lack in the Other transforms the phallus into the word for the signifier that precisely establishes this principle and possibility of division (without

26

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which we would not have language and the symbolic order); it becomes a signifier with no signified, the S1. The subject is sexually differentiated by virtue of its relation to this signifier, which in itself is sexually neutral. It is the relation to the phallic signifier that produces the—albeit tenuous and unstable—sexually differentiated position. This relation can be one of two relational possibilities— having or being. Neither position literally involves having it or being it so the relation to ‘it’ is something in the order of an ‘as if’: either that of representing it (the masculine structure of not having but identifying with that position deemed to have the phallus, what the (m)Other desires; ‘as if’ having it) or of desiring to be it but lacking it (the feminine structure of not being it; but a position of ‘as if’ being it). These two positions, sometimes alternatively rendered as having and not having, are asymmetrical; in particular the phallus as signifier can be taken up as representative in relation to the masculine, whereas there is no signifier in this sense for the feminine sex. Castration is pivotal to this formation and involves a reconciliation with the price of becoming subjected to the law; this price is to be subjected to an ensemble of cuts that are integral to the possibility of language and subjectivity. Castration amounts to these cuts, divisions, separations, bars and the inevitable symbolic loss that accompanies their acceptance. Without them, if they are foreclosed, the only possibility is a massive disturbance in the process of becoming a subject, known as psychosis. Sexual differentiation, according to Lacanian theory, occurs within the symbolic order and has nothing to do with anatomy as such. It is the case, however, that this process of coming into language and becoming a subject is one that cannot and will not occur independently from the intersubjective relation and social context. The social inhabits the very structure of subjectivity. As the demarcation of masculine and feminine in the symbolic precedes the birth of the child, so too do the meanings surrounding its bodily origins through reproduction. Psychoanalysis, particularly in readings of Freud, has been criticized too readily by feminists in the pre-Lacanian years for what was deemed to be its outrageous presumption of the normative heterosexual nuclear family. Yet, as Lacan’s re-reading of Freud postulates, the roles of ‘mother’ and ‘father’ in the Oedipal drama are not of necessity literal parental figures. What these signifiers point to is the function fi rstly of an-Other whose attentiveness to the baby in its early and entirely dependent years is so constant, consistent and bodily that the child experiences an initial continuity with that ‘maternal body’ (most usually a biological mother, but not necessarily); secondly, something other than the baby that the (m)Other desires (for the baby this could be the father, or another woman as her partner, or the mother’s work, friends, hobbies, or the ‘outside world’ in general); and thirdly, the father, in representing that which the m(O)ther desires, is a third term that intervenes and prohibits the desire of the baby to be all for the (m)Other, prohibits the baby’s wish to be what the (m)Other desires (and not forgetting also the desire of the mother

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to be merged with the baby), prohibits this immersion. This third term, as phallic signifier, confronts the child with the fact that s/he is not alone in front of the mother and forbids his/her desire to be the exclusive object of desire of the mother. Without the intrusion of a/the third term prohibiting this desire, or if there is a failure of the third term to enact this prohibition, the child risks psychosis through a foreclosure of the castration. This brief outline in the most simple of terms of the theory of sexuation requires the reiteration of an important additional point and this is an acknowledgement of how Lacan insisted on the constant difficulty, or according to Rose (1982) impossibility, for the subject of ever fully achieving this sexual identification. Contrary to Butler’s claim (2004: 47) that the Lacanian symbolic puts an end to the ‘anxiety-producing field of gendered possibilities’, a field she endorses through the ‘critical practice’ of gender performativity, is the Lacanian observation that sexual identification is precarious and endlessly fraught through the unconscious undermining of any position of certainty the subject might aspire to regarding this (fictive) categorization. Lacanian and feminist theorist Jacqueline Rose, in her joint but separate introduction with Juliet Mitchell written in 1982 to sections of Lacan’s Seminar XX, Encore, was convinced that Lacan was implicated in the phallocentrism he described; this charge of phallocentrism being the uncritically assumed interdependence of the necessary symbolism of the phallus and its privileged status, an interdependence structuring and securing (albeit in the attempt) the coordinates of human subjectivity. Rose does not accept the assumption of this interdependence, claiming that the question of why it must take this form remains open. The point she stresses, however, is that for Lacan the question of the unconscious and of sexuality function at the level of speech and ‘cannot be referred back to a body outside language’ (p.56). In a sense the appearance of the feminine or of women in any bodily identification outside of language is not possible: they are marked by their disappearance. When feminist critics resist the phallic ordering and identity of sexuality, Lacan’s theorization recaptures this resistance through undermining any possibility of an absolute defi nition of the ‘feminine’. Rose concludes by making the following point: While the objection to its [this impossible defi nition] dominant term must be recognised, it cannot be answered by an account which returns to a concept of the feminine as pregiven, nor by a mandatory appeal to an androcentrism in the symbolic which the phallus would simply reflect. The former relegates women outside language and history, the latter simply subordinates them to both. (Rose, 1982: 57) With this quotation we are confronted with the crucial point that the binary construct adheres to, or inheres within the phallus as signifier. And that to postulate the precession of the binary construct (prior to or outside

28 Victims, Gender and Jouissance of the acquisition of language) is as problematic for feminist critique as suggesting the binary construct’s status as somehow internal to the symbolic order as language and the phallus merely represents it. The point is that the phallus as signifier cannot be thought outside the specificities of desire, the unconscious, castration, sexuation and the formation of the subject. As Rose writes, ‘For Lacan, to say that difference is “phallic” difference is to expose the symbolic and arbitrary nature of its division as such’ (1982: 56). To refuse the phallus does indeed imply the refusal of the symbolic and therefore as Rose indicates, the grounds for such a refusal are far from clear. The difficulty of navigating a course of critique in relation to this predicament of the notion of the phallus and to the question of the structural inevitability of the binary differential or otherwise is evident in Butler’s discussion of ‘sexual difference’ as the Anglo-American term for a Lacanianinspired theory regarding sexuation. I want to introduce this discussion as it further highlights elements of this central debate in feminist scholarship regarding the terms under which ‘difference’ and its hierarchical relation is understood; the impetus for such ‘understanding’ for Butler, as mentioned earlier, being to progress the possibilities of the ‘transformation of gender relations’. Butler’s book Undoing Gender (2004) to some extent indexes a Foucauldian-inspired construction of the historically and culturally specific power-knowledge of gender relations to the nature of its divergence from the Lacanian-inspired discourse on ‘sexual difference’. As she gravitates towards these points of difference the weaknesses she attributes to the latter are invariably located at those junctures where she detects there is a suggestion of, or reliance on, any notion of structural inevitability. Even if she concedes this inevitability is an artifact of construction (not biologically determined), Butler requires a fluid theoretical landscape that disallows the very possibility of authorizing any point of closure that would make impossible her desire for a free play of transgressive, subversive gender performativity. Of course for this subversive act to exist it must subvert something—and this something must be able to be subverted; anything else would be intolerable, making these performances mere epiphenomena of the very structure that is abhorred for being politically and personally injurious. There is therefore an aversion to any theorization that refuses the free flow of a power that can be diverted and channeled into the re-signification of even the most sedimented constructs. This aversion can mean that points of closure are detected when they may or may not in fact exist in the theory’s own terms. There are many such points in Butler’s work. One important concern for example is that there is ‘a theological impulse within the theory of psychoanalysis that seeks to put out of play any criticism of the symbolic father, the law of psychoanalysis itself’ (2004: 46). It is the ‘putting out of play’ and the notion of a ‘law’ that the theory is assumed to presume which is of

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concern to Butler. However, rather than being prescriptive or essentialist, the symbolic Father as in the Name-of-the-Father has the status of a ‘myth’ in psychoanalysis. The ‘father’ as a kinship term denotes the third term. The phallus in Lacan’s theory as outlined above is fi rstly the signifier of that which the (m)Other desires; it becomes that which signifies the lack in the Other, and the third term that intervenes in the mother-child dyad and says ‘no’ to the child’s desire to be exclusively whom/what the (m)Other desires. That is, the phallic signifier, or Name-of-the-Father, makes it possible for the child to take up a position within the symbolic order; thus it is only secondarily that the imagined object of the mother’s desire becomes the signifier of Father. ‘Father’ is the word in Lacan’s psychoanalytic vocabulary that becomes the phallic signifier, but is effectively a metaphoric stand-in for whatever the mother desires (this is why the Name-of-the-Father is also called the paternal metaphor). Freud’s myth elaborated in Totem and Taboo (1955) features the killing of the original omnipotent father of the ‘primal horde’, meaning that the imaginary phallus is no longer, and is replaced by the ‘Name-of-the-Father’ as symbolic emblem or phallic signifier, a totem, a name with which the sons/brothers can identify themselves and take up a position of enunciator within the symbolic order. The myth correlates with the patriarchal and tribal systems of kinship. Like that of Oedipus, it plays a role in characterizing an aspect of psychoanalytic process. Butler’s perception of the role of the gendered position of ‘the symbolic father’ being ‘beyond criticism’ implies a fi xity associated with this notion, a fi xity that she rejects. But it is crucial to be clear what it is exactly to which this fi xity attaches—does it have to be ‘Father’? From what I have outlined above it seems that ‘Father’ is a proxy; the particular signifier is not ‘inevitable’ although it follows that it will be one imbued with potency and desire. What are the grounds for rejecting theoretical ideas because they introduce a place or a relation that is deemed indisputable and incontestable? Any theory is of course disputable and contestable, but does this rule out the theoretical postulation of specified social relations that repeat and repeat themselves in ways that suggest for some reason they cannot be disputed or contested in the normal course of events? To rule out this possibility seems to have an idealist flavor of only entertaining the hypotheses that we ‘like’ or that suit our political interests or ideological investments. Butler’s concern appears to be that the notion of ‘sexual difference’ tends towards naturalizing some inevitability of a sexed binary form. Any Lacanian psychoanalytic perspective would be in agreement with the mandate to critique and reject all forms of ontologizing and essentializing, but can we accept the dismissal of a theory that attempts to understand how the apparently enduring reality of human sex as a male/female differential is embedded in our acquisition of language and the formation of subjectivity because it refuses to theorize it as easily changeable? What is sexual difference for Butler? By a curious logic she applauds Irigaray’s critique of Lacanian psychoanalysis for its insistence of sexual

30

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difference as not being pre-given, yet then seems to make it into something it is not, in Lacanian terms, and attacks it from a position and set of assumptions that are closer to what a Lacanian theory of sexuation actually suggests: that is, that sexual difference is non-ontologically grounded, not of the order of substance, is rather an effect of division that appears to be necessary to the act of speech, making it possible to address an Other. If this were not the case, presumably we would not have a ‘gender binary’ and the performative theory of gender would not be necessary as a subversive proposition because, well, this would be in evidence everywhere, meaning it could take on no parodic valence or subversive import. Butler (2004) rejoins Kristeva with a desire for a ‘future symbolic’ in which the feminine has ‘multiple possibilities [ . . . ] released from the demand to be one thing’ (p.196). Where she departs is to then ask ‘[b]ut must the framework for thinking about sexual difference be binary for this feminine multiplicity to emerge? Why can’t the framework for sexual difference itself move beyond binarity into multiplicity?’ (p.197). However, we cannot conjure it into existence exactly as we’d like it to be, or as we might politically agitate for it to be. This is where the positions are divergent—for Butler it is a matter of social power constructing, policing, or disciplining this gender binary and prohibiting the multiplicity she desires, and for the Lacanians it is not not about social power, but it is fundamentally about the structure of language, the bar it assumes and the role of the symbolic in the formation of subjectivity. Where this latter is accepted to be the case, the argument for multiple ‘genders’ (diachronically or synchronically), desirable as it may be, is a discursive intervention that does not function at the level of the subject. To conclude this discussion of Butler’s engagement with ‘sexual difference’, the point needs to be made that she does nuance her critique of contemporary Lacanian scholarship on this question. Butler takes the time to reiterate what some Lacanians have insisted to her regarding ‘sexual difference’ (giving them the title of ‘formalist Lacanians’, these include Joan Copjec,6 Charles Shepherdson and Slavoj Žižek), and it seems that she does not wish to contest their position as profoundly different from her priorities regarding gender and its subversion of any ontologically invested foundationalism. Their points she summarizes as emphasizing the ‘formal character’ of sexual difference, meaning that nothing follows from this concept of sexual difference regarding social roles or meanings about what she calls ‘gender’. It is not a matter of a semantic meaning of sexual difference but rather its alignment with the very possibility of semantics. This being said, it becomes possible to critique the way that a specific sexual difference has become ‘concretized in certain cultural and social instances’, and that this reduction to such an instance is a mistake that forecloses the ‘fundamental openness of the distinction itself’ (2004: 210). This view is close to that followed in the portrayal I have outlined above. Butler contrasts this critique with the work of Rosi Braidotti, for whom a ‘stronger feminist argument’

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is proffered whereby retaining the framework of sexual difference is considered important because it enables the visibility of ‘the continuing cultural and political reality of patriarchal domination’. Butler interprets this view to argue that whatever various permutations of gender might be enacted they do not effect a challenge to the framework within which they take place, for that framework is ‘at a symbolic level that is more difficult to intervene upon’ (2004: 210). Butler is intent, understandably, on intervention and transformation, yet surely she would strenuously reject the suggestion of avoiding a challenge to the level of the symbolic framework because of obstacles to its transformation—such a suggestion could sound like the proverbial looking under the streetlight for the key lost in a dark street because that’s where one can see best. If the ‘symbolic level’ has some structural purchase on the question of sexed subjectivity then this is where we must look regardless of how difficult it might be as a point of ‘intervention’. Butler writes, however, ‘[b]ut I worry still, actively, about understanding sexual difference as operating as a symbolic order. What does it mean for such an order to be symbolic rather than social? [ . . . ] If it is symbolic is it changeable?’ (2004: 212). Again, echoing Žižek, it seems we have some dialogue and some further misunderstandings. The work of Lacan is clear that the symbolic simply cannot be dissociated from the social in this way—the Other as the Symbolic Order is the social. Changeable? That is another question, yet in my view, while obviously important, it is not the question that should drive critique in the fi rst instance. ********************** The question is surely not to wonder if sexual difference is or is not ‘important’. It is to wonder what it is made of, how it comes into ‘being’, what is at stake in this genesis, where it is located within human experience and how it becomes implicated in systematically differentiated social, gendered relations of power and privilege. Following these lines of inquiry opens up the question of how to act and why. This chapter has attempted to set a scene of feminist debate for considering the way sexual differentiation, or gender, could be implicated in the construct of victim, or the social relation that invokes victimization. We have seen how feminism has grappled with this positioning of victim for women who have experienced violence or diminished dignity marked by its gendered and controlling intent. Both insisting on the innocence associated with being a victim and equally rejecting its implicit passivity are alternate positions played out in the activist discourses and social dynamics constituting this social relation. The desirability and feasibility of an ethics and politics of vulnerability has opened a number of additional questions, not the least being that of the nature of ethics for a feminist praxis. Without considering the social stakes of victimization it is difficult to evaluate this proposal of recognition of vulnerability to violence. The binary division of sexual difference, something psychoanalyst Leticia

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Glocer Fiorini (2007) refers to as a ‘psychic violence’ of the masculine/ feminine polarity, cannot be readily fi nessed by an incitement to parodic performativity. The argued inherence of this polarity in the structure of subjectivity leads to a consideration of the very terms of this structure and to a questioning of its inevitability. The problem of this dichotomy that the notion of victim unleashes, the binary that Rose refers to as ‘the glaring inadequacy of any formulation that makes us as women either pure victim or sole agent of our distress’ (1993: 98) is one that feminism is well placed to challenge or re-think as Rose goes on to suggest, along with the dualisms of ‘inside/outside, victim/aggressor, real event/fantasy’ that she suggests it relies on and fosters. The question is how? It appears that a deconstructive move according to the work of those feminist authors who contribute to this debate is preconditioned by a refusal of the either/or, which then morphs into a both–and. This inevitably means that women are not consigned to a place of absolute innocence but are to be understood to be ‘complicit’ in some ways in the very violences they experience. I hasten to be clear that this does not imply a reversal whereby women are viewed as the ‘sole agent’ of this distress, defi nitely not, but the very notion of complicity as the means to move on from and reconfigure the binary of victim/ aggressor is one that needs to be questioned further. Indeed it is imperative to question and interrogate the attempt to resolve the binary form by means of a dialectical move that enables this notion of complicity. The provocation of such a notion of complicity is evident in Butler’s theorizing of subjectivity as we have seen above in her commitment to the Althusserian notion of the subject’s already being ‘subjected’ or ‘subordinated’ through an inevitable appeal to the Other, to a power that constitutes it. For the subject as an effect of power, the agency of the subject is implicated in its own subordination. The notion of complicity also features for Rose, ‘ . . . which is how we can begin to think the question of violence and fantasy as something that implicates us as women, how indeed we can begin to dare to think it at all’ (1993: 106). Rose refers subsequently to Kristeva making a similar point in her poetic style, where she shows how the question of feminism and violence extols ‘a centripetal, softened and becalmed feminine sexuality, only to exhume most recently, under the cover of idylls amongst women, the sado-masochistic ravages underneath’ (cited in Rose, 1993: 106). While being mindful of the differences, this notion of complicity suggests a curious sense of return to the second wave feminist outrage with which this chapter began. Before it is possible to explore the psychodynamic and social contours of innocence and/or complicity of the victim and what that might mean for feminist praxis, something revisited in Chapter Three and throughout, it is necessary to nuance this concept through addressing the question of the victim as a construct of specifically social significance for its status as sacrificial object. Kristeva (1995) proposes that the symbolic contract is a sacrificial contract and claims that a ‘newly emerging feminism’ is rejecting

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its terms. The following chapter broadens the discussion to consider the central role of the long history of practices of sacrifice and the role of the sacrificial in the process of subordination and the creation of the victim; of he, she or it as the one subjugated; by whom and for whom. The necessity of psychoanalytic theorizing on sexuation, jouissance and the death drive for this project begins to transpire.

2

The Birth and Death of the Victim In Aztec mythology, Chicomecoatl was Goddess of food and the produce of the harvest, especially maize. Every harvest season, a young girl impersonating Chicomecoatl would be ritually sacrificed. First she would be decapitated, then her blood poured over a statue of Chicomecoatl. After this her headless corpse would be ritually fl ayed and her skin worn by a priest of Chicomecoatl. The same would occur at the festival of Hueytozoztli, when an impersonator would be sacrifi ced in order to encourage the growth of young corn. http://atheism.about.com/od/aztecgodsgoddesses/p/ Chicomecoatl.htm (accessed 10 December 2011)

She [Chicomecoatl] appeared in three different forms: as a young girl carrying fl owers; as a woman who brings death with her embraces; as a mother who uses the sun as a shield. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicomecoatl (accessed 10 December 2011)

As indicated in the Introduction, the meaning of ‘victim’ in its etymological derivation has to be understood in terms of its resonances with that which is sacrificed, or he/she who is sacrificed. What is it about the sacrificial process that seems to have had, and continues to have, such a grip on the human psyche and on human societies? What does it mean to bring the sacrificial nature of the figure of the victim into the foreground? Is it an historical remnant or still active in our cultural imagination and practices? In addition to considering these questions, through this discussion it becomes possible to scrutinize the ambivalent oscillation between the perceived complicity or guilt of the victim in his/her status as the object to be sacrificed, and his/her innocence. The very question of guilt/complicity or innocence has a relatively recent history. In this chapter I focus on the construct of the sacrificial victim and move towards the question of gender and sacrifice as the focus of the following chapter. The trans-historical, trans-cultural phenomenon of sacrifice has been the subject of a huge range of scholarship within and across the social sciences and humanities, with every possible perspective represented. Early sociologists such as Emile Durkheim, Max Weber and Georg Simmel theorized the importance of sacrificial practices to the instantiation of the social, followed

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by the next generation of scholars such as Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno; anthropologists including James Frazer, Henri Hubert, Marcel Mauss, Edward Evans-Pritchard and Claude Levi-Strauss integrated their descriptions of sacrifice into their understandings of magic, rituals, totemism, exchange, and kinship regulation. Feminist writers such as Nancy Jay, Julia Kristeva and Luce Irigaray have placed sacrificial processes at the heart of their analyses of sex and gender.1 For this discussion I draw on the works of René Girard, possibly one of the pre-eminent recent theorists of sacrifice, and to a lesser extent Jean-Jacques Walter. Girard, professor of French literature and culture, started to write on this topic in 19722 with his book La Violence et la Sacré (translated as Violence and the Sacred, 1977) and continued to develop his ideas in the late 1970s and into the 1980s. Jean-Jacques Walter published a comprehensively researched book in 1977, Psychanalyse Des Rites: La Face Cachée de L’Histoire des Hommes (Psychoanalysis of Rituals: The Hidden Face of the History of Humankind). Walter originally graduated as an engineer, and although he spent his early career in technological fields, he moved on to engage in anthropological and psychological scholarly endeavors. He produced this work using Freud’s psychoanalytic theories to understand sacrificial practices through analyzing literally tens of thousands of myths and rituals world-wide. Walter referred to Girard only once and very marginally at that, while Girard’s subsequent work makes no reference to Walter. How these two streams of work could unfold without ever meeting is extraordinary. Both Girard and Walter engage to some extent with psychoanalytic concepts, either to incorporate them into their analyses or to situate their interpretations in tension with psychoanalysis. In 2007 Serge André’s Le Sens de L’Holocaust: Jouissance et Sacrifice (The Meaning of the Holocaust: Jouissance and Sacrifice), was published (notably containing no reference to either Girard or Walter). André, a psychoanalyst and writer in Brussels, died in 2003. While the works of Girard and Walter take in a huge scope in terms of history and culture, André’s focus brings the sacrificial process into our current epoch in the heart of the twentieth century West. Each of these authors is clearly deeply stirred by a wish to understand what is driving and sustaining the sheer magnitude and horror of the violence humans can inflict on other humans and in particular how these practices can become ritualized and built into the institutional forms of social, religious and political life of a community. What role have these practices played, and does this enactment continue to haunt the social? What is it about this phenomenon called ‘sacrifice’? Why is it that numerous very different cultural groups have long histories and pre-histories of cutting and maiming the flesh of sacrificial victims in very systematic and ritualistic ways, dismembering and eviscerating them, flaying and devouring them, engaging in homophagia, which means consuming the blood of a living victim whose flesh has been shredded with nails and teeth (diasparagmos)? Who is this victim and does it matter? When does it matter? To whom or what is he or she sacrificed? Why do these questions linger?

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DESIRING VICTIMS Desire clings to violence and stalks it like a shadow because violence is the signifi er of the cherished being, the signifier of divinity. (Girard, 1977: 151) The very nature of Girard’s theoretical work mirrors or reflects the content of his key argument. He takes one very important idea and extrapolates its implications into every nook and cranny of intellectual endeavor. As the founding murder is argued by him to explain so much, so does Girard’s theoretical impulse render it universally explanatory. In a kind of breathtaking theoretical imperialism, insight into the dynamics of human violence and the sacrificial in terms of mimetic desire explains, according to Girard, the origins of culture, language, religion, the sacred, desire, myth, time, psychosis, psychopathology and ritual; it explains the functioning of power, exploitation, sexuality, homosexuality, heterosexuality, sadism, masochism, difference, hypnosis, shamanism, all aspects of memory; it reveals the truth of Shakespeare’s theatre, the literature of Proust and of Dostoyevsky; Nietzsche had it wrong, as did Freud, Marx, Lacan; there is no such thing as the unconscious; Girard’s theorization is capable of reconciling Charcot, Bernheim, Janet and Freud. Skepticism regarding the way Girard’s analysis takes such confident strides across the innumerable pages written on the history and pre-history of civilizations and archaic through to modern cultures, must not detract from the significance of his key theoretical insight. In Girard’s analysis, at the core of human being there is a propensity to mimetic desire. Human beings imitate one another. Desire, according to Girard, is quite simply imitative, in that we desire what the other desires. Desire does not transpire from within, but is mimetic. With reference to early human societies, Girard claims that where two desires converge on the same object, confl ict ensues. The multiplication of these desires across a social group means that violence resulting from mimesis can escalate to involve the entire social group, leading to what Girard calls a sacrificial crisis. At a critical point the dynamics of a pattern of all against all within a group flips to that of all against one. A sacrificial victim is sought (any sign of ‘difference’ will act as a satisfactory proxy, meaning that in practice the victim is randomly chosen) and collectively murdered. The resulting catharsis reinstates a pacific state within the group. According to Girard, these processes have been historically encapsulated in myths that mask the very functioning of the sacrifice. The sacrificial victim is thus a scapegoat, perceived to carry the origin of the violence. While mimetic violence escalates within the social group, differences between individuals are progressively reduced until the antagonists effectively mirror each other in a relationship of doubles. Restoration of differences, the delineation of one from others, will be achieved through the sacrificial annihilation of an-other, a different other. Sacrifice thus becomes a mechanism to control violence that

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Girard considers inherent in the human condition through mimetic desire and rivalry and evident in the earliest of human cultural artifacts. The murdered victim, once sacrificed, becomes valorized by the community, as the source of peace and restoration of differentiation. He/she becomes the communal focus of a sacralization. This process, according to Girard’s argument, represents the founding of religion, the sacrificed victim becoming valued as sacred and worshipped or appeased as such. Ritual processes pre-historically and historically have developed to re-enact the sacrificial murder, and myth has emerged to simultaneously erase the evidence. According to Girard, the reciprocal, imitative nature of violence means that it invariably becomes caught in a vicious circle of vengeance and reprisals that sustain it indefi nitely. Walter’s work (1977) suggests that even a slight outbreak of violence can lead to an exponential escalation through a kind of contagion that has been studied and documented in thousands of myths and legends. On the basis of studying anthropological literature and myths Girard can claim that ‘once a community enters the circle, it is unable to extricate itself’ (1977: 81). The only way this extrication can happen is to identify a surrogate cause of the disastrous contagion of violence. In the destruction of a surrogate victim, Girard argues, not only does the community believe that it is ridding itself of its ills, but it effectively is, because surrogate victimage precisely does break the circle and provides a reprieve from the emulative process that grips the collective imagination. The victim must in fact be ‘innocent’ for the rite to work. In other words, the scapegoat must be free of the very ills and dangers to be placed on it if it is to take on itself the collective unease or guilt and expel it (with the connotation of cure in the case of the pharmakos). For Girard (1987), desire must be formulated in the fi rst instance as desire without object. Desire as a mimetic process means that the individual will take another as his/ her model, as the other whose desire he/she imitates. In this way the object under dispute in the rivalry is secondary, or derivative; desire is fi rst of all activated by imitating the other who is desiring, as if this process is somehow innate. While there is sufficient (social) distance between the model and the ‘disciple’, imitative processes do not create conflict. However, when the distance between them closes, when the model and the ‘disciple’ become more and more alike specifically through the mimetic process, the disciple becomes a rival, and this in turn leads to confl ict. When there is no longer any way to differentiate the two from one another, this is what Girard calls the relationship of doubles; they are potentially locked into a reciprocal violence. Girard’s research plots the elaboration of religion throughout the ages as the primary mechanism to control violence grounded in mimetic desire through the sacrificial process; the control of violence through violence; the murder that underpins the sacred; the destruction of a victim for the sake of the continuation of the community or group. Indeed, he wrote that ‘sacrificial crisis [is] the most terrible danger that can confront a society’ (1977:

38 Victims, Gender and Jouissance 95). Girard highlights the millennial struggle of civilizations to extricate themselves from violence: this struggle is evident in the shifts from ritual human sacrifice, to surrogate victims, to animals, to offerings of fruit, to the formation of royalty, to the law, and eventually some forms of democracy. This interpretation is supported by the work of Walter (1977) who provides copious and meticulously-analyzed evidence of human sacrifice among the earliest human social groups across all continents including Europe. While the sacrificial process is undoubtedly attenuated through the more rigorous utilization of legal frameworks in the post-Christian era, it is this phenomenon of a sacrificial economy that is sustained. A sacrificial economy is one in which the loss of differences, the threat of the loss of that which secures the subject in his/her singularity is offset, or defended against, through the annihilation of that which is seen as bearing the marks of difference to produce some kind of deliverance; a sacrifice, to assuage the threat of engulfment. Although his focus is primarily historical, Girard did reflect on mimetic desire and sacrificial processes in the world of the late 20th century West in which he wrote. As Western modernity has less and less recourse to the sacred in Girard’s analysis (although this is debatable), the control of violence is mediated more explicitly through legal frameworks and practices of ‘criminal justice’. According to Girard, the revolution of the Christian message was to insist that the victim is innocent; to see that the victim does not embody the sources of violence within the community; that the victimization of a surrogate is a delusionary mechanism. As Girard argues, the intent of the imploring Christ figure was to draw attention to the fundamental problem of mimetic desire and break the circular contagion of reciprocal violence in its vengeance through a transformation of ethical responsibility and action. Christ was intent on exposing the founding murder as that original cultural formation involving the killing of an innocent scapegoat. The crucifi xion was meant to be the sacrifice to end all sacrifice. Instead of responding to this plea to end sacrifice and make this break, the institution of Christianity in part negated this message;3 it worshipped Christ precisely as a sacrificial victim—who would function to take away their sins—yet continued to ignore and erase the founding murder through mythologizing the crucifi xion and enabled mimetic desire to proceed apace, constrained through the ritualized religious mechanism as well as the law. The law insists that we must identify the guilty perpetrator, shift our rage and reprisal to he/she who is really the cause of our pain, and protect the innocent from being burdened with a guilt that is not theirs. At the time of writing Des Choses Cachées depuis la Fondation du Monde (1978, translated as Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World, 1987), Girard was of the view that today the spirit of competition ‘gets increasingly inflamed.’ With no fi xed points of reference, such as a connection to one’s birthplace, ‘everything rests upon comparisons that are necessarily unstable and insecure’ (p.307). If this was the case in the

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late 1970s, then the fi rst decade of the 21st century possibly attests to an intensification of this very phenomenon. For example, the obsession with competitive game shows on television, and reality tv shows, in whatever cultural context of mediatized consumption, is reaching a state of utter delirium; the saturation of images of, the imaginary mimetic desire for, to be, the celebrity attests to an amplification of Girard’s observation. He wrote in 1978: As he sees that everything around him [sic] consists of images, imitation, and admiration (image and imitate derive from the same Latin root), he passionately desires the admiration of others. He wishes for all mimetic desires to be polarized around himself, and he lives through the inevitable lack of certainty—the mimetic character of what develops—with a tragic intensity. (1987: 307) The desire for ‘all mimetic desires to be polarized around himself’ is the desire to be the model, to be or embody the very image of desiring that others want to imitate. From this vantage point, even a very slight sign of either approval or rejection, esteem or criticism, can reverberate through the psyche as an extreme of ecstasy or abject humiliation—something Girard (1987) relates to the prevalence of ‘manic-depression’. The significance of sacrificial processes in the constellation of violence within and between human communities is brought into clear relief through Girard’s analysis. Sacrifice is deemed to be constitutive of the social, of culture and of the control of a violence among human beings that arises through what he calls mimetic desire. When Girard writes that ‘[de]sire clings to violence and stalks it like a shadow because violence is the signifier of the cherished being, the signifier of divinity’ (1977: 151), this appears to invoke a signifier of divinity threatening yet desirable in its supreme command of violence, embodying the sacred power of ending violence through a fi nal act of victory—the act of violence that disallows response—effecting calm and community through this cathartic denouement. There are two concepts that require more elucidation in Girard’s work to be able to evaluate the contribution this analysis makes to the current project: these are ‘desire’ (mimetic desire) and ‘victim’. Girard’s notion of mimetic desire seems somewhat ‘thin’ to carry the conceptual weight that is demanded of this rather singular, and apparently simple, term. What exactly is the understanding of ‘desire’ in its mimetic rendition that strides in a relatively unexamined form across Girard’s copious writings and appears everywhere as a kind of explanatory horizon? What is this desire that is so closely linked to violence, a collective violence that can consume members of a social community and annihilate human sociality, a chaotic and mad violence to which human beings can abandon themselves and only be returned to their social differentiation through an

40 Victims, Gender and Jouissance act of supreme and cathartic sacrifice? As ‘mimetic’ desire in Girard’s writings, it appears to be simply some inbuilt propensity to imitate, to want to imitate, to want to have what the other has not so much in the acquisitive sense—as mentioned above the object is secondary—but to imitate the desire for the object. Thus, to take another as a model of desiring who then quickly becomes a rival for the desired object; the gesture of taking what the other has leads to violence, with its inevitable escalation and ultimately the formation of doubles and loss of differentiation. Although mimesis clearly plays an important role in the contagion of social violence, this remains unsatisfying; what are the grounds of this concept of desire? As Goslan (2002) observes, in Girard’s rendition of mimetic desire our desires might not be deemed to be innate and rather they are copied or imitated; what remains somehow unaccounted for is this propensity to mimesis, to desire to desire as the other does. Desires can be specified in the Girardian conceptual lexicon (sexual desires, social and political ambitions and desires for aesthetic experiences are those noted by Goslan); but they may not be of the order of the psychoanalytic unconscious because ‘Girard does not believe in the unconscious’ (Goslan, 2002: 2). Goslan goes on to claim that Girard’s grounding for the mimetic process is in innate, instinctual impulses that exist at the level of the organism and as such are those we share in common with other animal species. These sources of action or behavior are glossed as instinctual, biological formations and ‘are channeled by the mimetic process’, which in turn is presumably, de facto, innate in the biological sense also. Surely this biological sharing of ‘mimetic desire’ across animals and humans is something to be questioned. Lacan discusses the significance of imitative behaviors in both humans and animals and indeed analyses ‘mimicry’ less in terms of its adaptive and survival-enhancing features and more in terms of the creature ‘becoming a picture’ where the effect is indeed one of camouflage (1998a). Desire, on the other hand, is solely human, in Lacanian terms, and is an effect of becoming a subject of language. No animal engages in sacrificial victimage, which points to sacrifice being mobilized at least in part through the symbolic. The symbolic is one element of Lacan’s tripartite conceptualization of the symbolic, the imaginary and the real. These conceptual spheres, or registers of the subject, are central to his work; they have discrete characteristics yet are metaphorically knotted together, forming shifting zones of interconnection. They cannot be understood independently of one another. The symbolic can be understood as language, as the network of signifiers. Girard rejects, or at least takes a considerable distance from, the psychoanalytic contribution to theorizing desire, myth and the sacrificial process. Although he makes relatively regular reference to Freud—often in passionate, sometimes scathing terms4 —and engages with Freud’s writings in relation to the Oedipus complex and narcissism in particular, Girard’s approach to psychoanalysis is dismissive, variously referring to it as at best

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misleading or mistaken and at worst ludicrous or essentializing with reference to a presumed ‘thing-like’ quality of the unconscious. One consequential absence from Girard’s account is the way that gendered subjectivity articulates this sacrificial violence along differential axes. To theorize this gendered differential the notion of desire requires a greater elaboration than that afforded by the notion of mimetic desire, if such theorization is not to have recourse to some form of biological foundationalism. Because, in Girard’s terms, desire is mimetic, understandably discussions of Girard’s notion of mimetic desire have tended to focus their critical elaboration on its mimetic characteristics, meaning its desiring facets remain somewhat more shadowy. Desire and mimesis are not, however, identical; they are not synonymous. If desire is something other than a reductive synonym for biological ‘need’ or ‘instinct’ and, as Girard also argues, is specifically human, then how is desire understood? Girard (1977) is explicit that his notion of desire differs from that of Freud, whose conceptualization of desire he refers to as object-directed. In accordance with his thesis regarding mimesis, desire in Girard’s terms (1966) must be understood as the desire according to the Other (le désir selon l’Autre), in the sense of following the Other. It has to be noted that this phrasing, albeit not the intended meaning, is uncannily like Lacan’s ‘desire is the desire of the Other’. In fact, a number of Girard’s concepts are described in terms that have echoes of Lacan; this has also been noted by Fleming (2004). As will become apparent, however, the similarity stops with the phrasing. With respect to Girard’s repudiation of psychoanalysis, in some instances there may be instances of Žižek’s ‘dreadful misunderstandings’. For example, while Girard insists that the mimetic process does not function in a way to mean that an individual is conscious of the dynamics at play, he is also adamant that this non-conscious recognition or awareness is not one that can be equated to a psychoanalytic unconscious. The reason Fleming identifies for Girard’s rejection of such a notion is that the Freudian unconscious assumes that intersubjective relations can be ‘individualized’ with the repressed unconscious being ‘inside’ the individual. This conceptualization of the psychoanalytic view of the unconscious is radically different from that of Lacan, who avers that the unconscious is neither ‘inside’ nor ‘outside’ the individual; it is precisely in the place of the social Other. The statement that the unconscious is ‘the discourse of the Other’5 is one of Lacan’s repeated observations. The points of genuine theoretical disconnection between Girard and Lacan, however, are clearly drawn, and one crucial one is indeed the conceptualization of ‘desire’.6 Where Girard’s notion of desire is thinly elaborated in any detailed way, Lacan’s discourse on desire makes it one of the most important signifiers in the Lacanian corpus. For Lacan, desire cannot be understood to be in any sense of biological substance or derivation. While Lacan does not dismiss the importance of consciously articulated wishes or desires, the desire of

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concern to him and to psychoanalysis is that of unconscious desire. The concept resonates with a sense of ongoing force that is not attached to this or that object or thing; desire in this way transcends any particular object, connoting an impossibility of anything other than ongoing desire. As the unconscious is not located relative to an ‘inside’ or ‘outside’ of the ‘individual’ per se, so desire is ‘the Other’s desire’ (le desir de l’Autre) in that it is as Other that the subject desires (Lacan, 2006a: 690); we do not have an image of the Other’s desire, and it is this unknown, this lack or absence, that causes our desire (Copjec, 1994). Human desire as unconscious is not representable and is not circumscribed or bounded within any signifying structure nor by any possible finitude. As Copjec points out, however, this infi nity of the subject’s desire must not be conflated with the subject itself; the psychoanalytic subject, she insists, is not infinite but rather is fi nite and limited, and it is precisely this limit that ‘causes the infinity, or unsatisfiability of its desire’ (p.60–61). Unlike Girardian mimetic desire following innate instinctual propensities, Lacanian desire emerges with the formation of the subject as a speaking being. Desire is given effect, one could say, through the castration, that is through the giving up of an infi nite jouissance, or giving up the fantasy of an infi nite jouissance, in the acceptance of becoming a subject (of language). To desire is therefore to be a subject, and thus for the subject desire is nothing less than the desire to be desiring. Commentary on Lacan’s notion of desire would invariably refer to its concurrence with lack, emphasizing importantly that this is a lack that can never be fulfi lled; a lack that is structurally integral to subjectivity. Evoking desire as unable to be articulated, Bailly glosses Lacan’s notion of ‘desire’ as ‘the result of a failure of speech to express what the Subject lacks’ (2009: 220), in other words desire is the point where the subject exceeds any conformity to symbolic identity. Desire is associated with jouissance (sometimes translated rather blandly as ‘enjoyment’), and yet an infi nite, boundless jouissance, or a jouissance able to be possessed fully, is always impossible. Jouissance is a term that will progressively clarify through numerous contextual usages in the course of this current work; it is not generally translated into English because Lacan’s use of the term has no equivalent. It could possibly be argued that Girard’s notion of mimetic desire presumes a lack (indeed it would be difficult to imagine desire without some concept of lack), and, as suggested by Goslan (2002), this lack for Girard may be ‘a radical insufficiency in the very being of the desiring individual’ (p.12). For Girard, writing on the works of Stendhal, there is reference to an ‘emptiness’ that ‘grows’ inside the character of Eclesiastes to mean a shallow imitation of another forms a substitute: ‘because he cannot face his own nothingness he throws himself on another who seems to be spared the curse’ (1966: 66). Goslan makes the point that ‘[t]he individual must be painfully conscious of his or her own emptiness to crave so desperately the fullness of being that supposedly lies in others’ (2002: 12). This horror of an unapproachable emptiness has some tantalizing resonances

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with elements of Lacan’s discourse on what is at the heart of desire, what it circles around and cannot reach. As desire, according to Lacan, is an effect of a gap in speech, a hole in the system of signifiers, a point where the symbolic fails, and as sexuation is formed through the act of becoming subject to language, Lacan’s concept of desire appears to have greater theoretical possibilities than a more restricted notion of mimetic desire for exploring the way gender or sexual difference is implicated in the jouissance of sacrificial victimage. There is undoubtedly a certain jouissance in the human observation of human antagonism: a certain fascination, lured by the intensity of a moment in which enjoyment intersects with abject repulsion. Girard describes the sacrificial scene as one where a chaotic, contagious and socially destabilizing violence between doubles, motivated by a mimetic desire, shifts to a dynamic of sacrificial victimage. It is unclear in Girard’s analysis how desire as mimetic is now figured in the actual scene of sacrifice itself; in other words the identification of a surrogate victim and his/her sacrifice by the collective is a scene of intense excitation and fascination driven by a desire that can only be understood as mimetic if it is the catharsis that is being repeated through mimesis. Yet it is in this very spectacle that a kind of raptured jouissance is sustained. As observed by Pascal (discussed by Penney, 2006), there is a certain thriving on tension and confl ict evident in the attraction of an agonistic, or we could say sacrificial, encounter; we can think of all manner of socially legitimized contests and ‘sports’ today all over the world that appear to mesmerize those who watch. The point being that, according to Pascal, and as Girard would agree, it is not the thing itself for which we search that sustains and embodies human desire, but the search itself, for desire itself: ‘desire is thus a desire to desire’ (Penney, 2006: 95). This scene of complicit witness, however, testifies to a jouissance that Girard’s theorization cannot comprehend. What is it about the figure of the victim in Girard’s formulation that profi les its sacrificial character? In the originary cathartic form of sacrificial victimage, Girard emphasizes how the dual role of the victim emerged. Initially, it was simply observed that a ‘plague’ of contagious violence was abruptly calmed if a single individual, a victim, was identified and thrown over a cliff to his/her violent demise (or otherwise hacked, burnt, eviscerated to death). Through this process, the victim came to be viewed as embodying both the source of the violence that threatens the social group and the source of its peaceful transformation whereby the cycle of violence, sacrifice and catharsis would be renewed. As the death of the victim brought a calm, the very same victim became a source of awe for his/her pacifying ability. The victim is ‘guilty’ in the sense that s/he embodies the source of the community’s troubles. And at the same time the victim is beneficent, thus both powerless and powerful. As this practice was reiterated, it appeared that there was an insatiable ‘other’ for whom there could never be enough victims to secure a lasting calm. Sacrificial victimage may have evolved from

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one centered solely on catharsis to one involving the offering of a victim to a deity as an imaginary and powerful recipient of sacrifice. From this perspective, the deity emerges from the repetitive victimization process as the permanent entity endowed with both the power of causing trouble and bringing about calm, to whom victims must be offered from time to time. Hence, the victim is not considered to be violated by the sacrifice, but is taken as the figure whose sacrifice (or, rather sinisterly, ‘transformation for the worse’) will bring reconciliation, rewarding the social collectivity with an ordered differentiation and a certain, albeit temporary, calm (‘transformation for the better’). The victim’s omnipotence and power brings reconciliation. He or she is dedicated (by others) to this ‘effect’, one could say. This tantalizing concept of the victim as simultaneously doomed to destructive annihilation and yet embodying the singular source of an awesome power that, in the process of sacrifice, halts destruction and enables a flourishing of sociality opens onto a victim who is, and must be, worthy of sacrifice. As victimization evolved towards propitiation to a deity, in some forms, the victim ceased to be effectively random. As the process became ritualized, the perceived need to follow a strict protocol without deviation was associated with the specificity of a victim. Not any victim would do; the victim must be s/he who can fulfill this task, bring this release and end the cycle of reprisal and vengeance. This awesome potency imbues the victim with a status of divinity, prior to their sacrifice. This victim most definitely cannot be perceived to be selected at random; s/he must manifest this embodiment and potentiality for dual transformation, must be the culprit, so to speak, otherwise the sacrifice will not ‘work’. The victim’s recognition of his/her ‘guilt’ and potentiality for this role assists in securing this conviction, a recognition that becomes further ritualized in sacrificial reenactments including the preparation of a victim precisely for his/her role.7 It becomes clear how the notion of the scapegoat is central to Girard’s construction of the victim; yet this is a scapegoat who is neither innocent nor guilty. Rather s/he is destined, and the very nature of the sacrificial act as Girard describes it inspires a resignation to this fate. A victim must literally become the manifestation of abject contamination, who, like a sponge, will absorb the threat and evil devastating the social group, so in being expelled and destroyed will free the community of its ills through the purification effected by the victim’s death.8 Although a victim will be sought by virtue of any identifiable stigmata of differentiation from the increasingly undifferentiated group, a stigma acting as an incitement to victimization, Girard stresses how these signs in fact make victims to some extent interchangeable. When the sacrifice ‘worked’, its ritualized repetition became modified over time with substitutes. The shifts in sacrificial victimage are, according to Girard, evident in the etymological evolution of ‘sacrifice’. The term ‘sacrifice’ has the same Latin root as sacred, to make sacred, and its earliest meanings related to the performance of priestly functions or sacred rites. In the early forms of

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sacrifice analyzed by Girard, in which catharsis resulted from an act of violence unleashed on a victim, the act of sacrifice had to be carried out to the letter as it was not known how the ‘magic’ worked. This led to its ritualized re-enactments. As noted above, such a cathartic model of sacrifice must be distinguished from its subsequent rendition whereby a kind of bargaining with the gods occurred. This bargaining reveals a different way of perceiving the stakes: if some highly regarded item is sacrificed, will the gods leave me, or us, alone or provide us with bountiful harvests (there are many documented stories, myths and images of humans with a finger missing, a hand missing, a limb, an eye and so on, as documented by Walter, 1977)? This shift in the concept of sacrifice from its meaning as a purely religious ritualized procedure to reflect a more profound sense of what such a procedure subsequently entailed occurred as late as the sixteenth century in English. ‘The transferred sense of the act of giving up one thing in return for another is fi rst found in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet (1592)’ (Chambers Dictionary, 1988: 949). The force of Girard’s analysis lies in analyzing what prefigured this latter meaning, the processes that have obscured the role of sacrifice in human culture, and arguably continue to do so. At first glance today, it seems that in the legislatures mandated with the attempt to stabilize the paroxysms of a late-capitalist West there is an imperative that the victim be entirely innocent and the condemned be entirely guilty, suggesting that surrogacy is no longer functional on either side of the crime. This suggestion must be scrutinized for those vestigial traces of sacrificial victimage activated in the name of criminal justice and the whole baggage of guilt and blame that accompanies its logic. Fleming (2004) notes that Girard’s work is considered ‘atypical’—possibly for its curious propensity to be both critical yet universalizing in tendency—from the point of view of both the Anglo-American and continental European academies, and Girardian scholarship has indeed tended to engage in a selective way with his work. With a few exceptions, most are cautious of various elements, claims, concepts and presuppositions while acknowledging the significance of his thesis regarding the connection between violence, sacrificial victimage and the sacred, and the significance of myth and ritual in this connection. There are dangers in placing too much weight on the etymology of key terms such as ‘victim’, as obviously in the contemporary Western world its meaning has evolved through changing contexts and usage. The history of a term’s meaning can, however, mark a trace that rarely disappears and continues to have an uncanny bearing on later conceptualizations, even where associated practices may be entirely a thing of the past. The historical and ethnological contribution from Girard records elements of such a past and alludes to many contemporary resemblances and remnants across continents and islands, including hierarchical forms of social organization. As noted above, Girard rejects the value of any Freudian psychoanalytic interpretation of the processes at stake in sacrificial victimage, the sacred

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and its myths, albeit through a repetitive and therefore suspicious recourse to this very rejection. These processes have, however, been analyzed from very different points of departure and different conceptual lenses with Freud and, following him, Lacan. Consideration of such an alternative theorization does not diminish what can be learned from Girard in some senses, even while it affords a potential for critical insight into some of the myriad questions that Girard’s work points to yet fails to ask, or where his parsimonious critique refuses to venture. I will return to the question of what a Lacanian view on a sacrificial logic might entail, but fi rstly it is necessary to situate Girard’s view alongside a number of other theorists for whom sacrifice is also crucial to consolidation of the social.

SACRIFICE OF ONE FOR THE OTHER(S) Where Girard’s analysis compels a rejection of sacrificial victimage for the inherent wrongness of an atrocious scapegoating, it also points to its assumed necessity. Without this control of what for Girard is a quasi ‘natural’ violence in human social groups that escalates through mimetic desire, there would be no possibility of any form of social project cohering or enduring. In this way, for Girard, sacrifice has played a functional role in the formation of human society over thousands of years, but in his view it must be forgone. The advent of legislatures of empires and states to protect the innocent and dissuade uncontrolled riotous outbreaks has been one development. Girard’s work, however, moves resolutely towards a moral (Catholic) theology as the only resolution and transformation of mimesis and violence. The moral resolve that generates a radical refusal of sacrificial victimage and abandonment of the myths obscuring the foundational murder is to be found in Christianity: ‘Following Christ means giving up mimetic desire’ (1987: 431). Such an apparently disappointing foreclosure creates a premature stepping-off point and leaves so many unanswered questions it is positively dizzying in its simplicity if not outrageous in its incitement to slavishly ‘follow’ a master discourse; we are not only to give up the sacrificial victimization of innocents and dedicate our lives to an alternative more enlightened religiosity with its single-minded message of innocence because Christ said, but also to say ‘no’ to what Girard claims as our originary mimetic desire. This detour from critique into an invocation of belief in a revealed truth is an intellectual closure that will achieve nothing but further the mirage of the ‘thou shalt not’ discourses of law and order. The limitations of such an injunction rest precisely in the ‘following’ being interpreted as a mimesis in and of itself. To ‘follow’ Christ has invariably involved Christians in attempting to imitate Christ, to take him as a model. This following will fail because the only way to respond to the letter of Christ’s plea that sacrifice be dropped is not to piously refuse our desires

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but to cease apprehending the world and the Other in dualistic terms with the essentialism that accompanies this dualism. To propose the functionality of sacrifice in relation to the very possibility of the social is not limited to the work of Girard. Unlike Girard, however, numerous others valorize the archaic cultural memory of an imagined Dionysian world tending to characterize practices of sacrifice and the festivals that surround it by the role they play in social symbolic consolidation and exchange as much as the apparent radicality of the inevitable contradictory tensions surrounding the transgressions enacted. In the words of Georges Bataille, ‘Men [sic] are swayed by two simultaneous emotions: they are driven away by terror and drawn by an awed fascination. Taboo and transgression reflect these two contradictory urges’ (2001: 68). Girard vehemently opposes any suggestion that analyses of ‘the human condition’ and its oscillating desires should lead to an acceptance of the sacrifi cial process designed to mediate them, let alone valorize such events: ‘There can be no question of returning to mystical formulations or their philosophical counterparts such as [ . . . ] the power of the negative, and the value of the Dionysian. There can be no question of returning to Hegel or Nietzsche’ (1987: 63). For others this is not so clear, and their influence in cultural theory is not insignificant. In Emile Durkheim’s anthro-sociology, the creation of gods and the sphere of sacred rites and rituals of ‘primitive’ societies constitute means whereby the social as a collectivity is sustained and renewed. Durkheim’s writings are considered by some contemporary sociologists to ‘reveal the importance of understanding how societies and religions are constituted through the embodied intoxication of their members’ (Shilling and Mellor, 2011: 18). According to Durkheim, sacrificial enactments are periodic, functioning through ‘alimentary communion’ and oblations to mean that communal feasting with the gods recreates the social sphere and natural world that sustains it. Where Girard writes of the origins of the sacred in sacrificial victimage evident in archaic myths and rituals, Durkheim’s analyses of ‘elementary forms of religious life’, published in 1915 (1971), are concerned with anthropological accounts of totemic rites in tribal and clan-based societies contemporary to his time of writing in the early twentieth century. The sacrificial rites and their accompanying anthropological narration described and analyzed by Durkheim would, from a Girardian perspective, be considered rather to reflect those ritual forms that have mythologized and precisely obscured the mechanism of sacrificial victimage. Durkheim’s sociological project of ‘understanding the religious nature of man [sic]’, is one he explicitly claimed only to have any interest or validity if it assisted in ‘an understanding of humanity as it is at present’. His concern was not with any specifically historical questions nor with the rightness or wrongness of religious belief but rather with the question of what can be learnt about the social through religious life as a manifestation of

48 Victims, Gender and Jouissance human society. It was his view at the time of writing that a focus on those ‘primitive’ religious practices and beliefs of societies variously referred to as ‘lower’, ‘simpler’, ‘less advanced’, would provide greater insight into ‘the fundamental states characteristic of religious mentality in general’ (1971: 5). Durkheim’s comprehensive study arrives at a sociological conclusion: religious feasts, rituals and ceremonies uphold and reaffi rm the collectivity, creating and reiterating the society’s collective sentiments and ideas about itself. This communal life, although intermittent, is at its greatest intensity when members of the social group are assembled together and ‘in immediate relations with one another, when they all partake of the same idea and the same sentiment’ (p.345). These necessarily unifying practices were in his view in a state of decay in his own contemporary European society. This ‘moral mediocrity’ could not, however, be sustained, and he was moved to claim that ‘[a] day will come when our societies will know again those hours of creative effervescence’ (p.427–428), in the course of which the renewal they promise will re-enliven the social and play their role in consolidating collectively imagined explanations of the world. To this end, for Durkheim, religious and scientific pursuits have a common intent and similar means, scientific thought being ‘only a more perfect form of religious thought’ (p.429); he considers both to be manifestations of social cohesion and creativity, where ‘the reality which religious thought expresses is society’ (p.431, my emphasis). And hence its renewal through collective communion is perceived to be a necessity. Given Durkheim’s overriding intent regarding the religious as an expression of the social, it is possibly not surprising that he does not dwell on any discourse of the victim in the ritualized practice of sacrifice. On the contrary, the focus is placed on the benefit assumed to accrue to those participating in the ritual as members of a transcendent ‘social’. As mentioned above, according to the work of Girard the examples Durkheim analyzes are those where already the societies concerned have mythically transformed the sacrificial victimage of human beings and obscured this derivation through these ritual forms. That which is sacrificed in the examples he describes, examples taken mostly from writings on the practices of Australian tribal groups, is conceived as being instrumental for the dual purpose of communing with the gods and as an oblation, or offering to those gods. The status of that which is sacrificed (often an animal, or human blood) is already inscribed within the collective representation of a totemic structure that defi nes the boundaries of the tribe or clan and the membership of individuals within it. His interest is in the social logic of the ritual and what it ostensibly aims to achieve (increased fertility, the continued sustenance of the totem animal or plant), the beliefs that are invested in its power, and the role the rites play in the constitution of society through the creation of communal life. The strictly formalized and formulaic nature of the ritual process would often be accompanied by an extravagance of prolonged feasting, the use of intoxicating liquors and trance-induced drumming and

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dancing. The often violent libidinal energy unleashed through the festival would generate a ‘collective effervescence’ that effectively intensified the individual’s experience of some force beyond himself or herself, a force constituting the social group. This ‘force’ Durkheim insisted was society, and the experience of it was of the order of the religious. Durkheim’s analysis of ‘elementary forms of the religious life’ through festivals, ceremonies and rites has provided a background for a strand of cultural theory that will valorize the sacrificial processes evident in the festivals of ‘primitive’ societies as one in a whole sequence of practices that make the social, as transcendent of the individual, possible. For example, William Merrin (2005), in his discussion of the work of Jean Baudrillard, distinguishes between a more conservative and functionalist interpretation of Durkheim’s contribution and that of a ‘radical Durkheimian school’. It is the latter that he identifies as providing the intellectual moorings for subsequent authors such as Marcel Mauss, Georges Bataille, Roger Caillois, and Jean Baudrillard. The radicality Merrin identifies is that associated with a particular formulation of the symbolic. Rather than the symbolic in its significatory acceptation, the symbolic that Merrin locates within the ‘radical Durkheimian tradition’ is, quoting Baudrillard, ‘an act of exchange and at the same time a social relation’ (Merrin, 2005: 13). The challenge of Baudrillard’s conceptualization of the symbolic will be explored through a discussion of Baudrillard’s provocation regarding the victim, gender and sacrifice in Chapter Six. Here, I am not so much concerned to evaluate Merrin’s interpretation but rather to highlight the way an influential strand of cultural analysis, illustrated by Merrin, has taken its point of departure—or at least one, another may be that of Nietzsche—from Durkheim’s theorizing on the vitality and renewal of the social through transformative religious festivities in societies of symbolic exchange. As Merrin writes with reference to his perception of Baudrillard’s debt to the Durkheimian ‘mode of relations’, symbolic exchange is a concept through which he (Merrin) considers that Baudrillard: unifies the festival, the gift and sacrifice around their central theme: their creation of a mode of relations and communication. This is a strong, active, full, present, dual or collective, human relationship, founded on or created through these customs, rituals and exchanges, whose meaning is actualized in the moment. (2005: 16) This veritable rehabilitation of the sacrificial festival in its Dionysian eff usion is argued for by authors such as Mauss, Bataille and Caillois against the inscription of social life into the confi nes of the economic. The matheme of economic exchange counters the symbolic and dislocates the social into an increasingly fragmented wasteland of consumerist anomie. Baudrillard is less concerned with any nostalgia for the festivals and sacrifice

50 Victims, Gender and Jouissance of the ‘primitive’ world, focusing rather more on the radical and critical portent of the symbolic logic underwriting these formations. I return to Baudrillard’s critique later (at length in Chapter Six), reviewing his extrapolations of symbolic exchange into notions of reversion, seduction, impossible exchange and the dual relation, specifically to confront them with an alternative ‘symbolic’: that of the subject in Lacanian psychoanalysis. The hope is that this confrontation will produce a more supportable orientation to theorizing gender in relation to sacrificial victimization. Bataille’s analysis specifically of the role of the sacrifice (1991, 1992) was integral to his delineation of the symbolic social relation from that of the economic. In his work The Accursed Share, he focused briefly on the mass human sacrifice of the ancient Aztecs and also of the Mexicans prior to the arrival of the invading colonial powers. The economic relation disaggregates the social, emphasizing production through a logic of utility and the consumption of commodities. Societies of symbolic exchange, also societies of ritualistic sacrifice and festivals, were those for whom the removal of objects from the sphere of utility was the driving force of their cultural formation. Rather than the accumulation of goods and power as a means of creating social distinctions among other things, such societies of symbolic exchange dis-accumulated goods through extravagant festivals of ‘expenditure’ (the potlatch) in which wealth that was surplus (‘the accursed share’) was destroyed and/or consumed. The accursed share was to be removed, or sacrificed; its consumption was an act of annulment; power was to be laid waste in a kind of squandering of excess through its very display. ‘Sacrifice restores to the sacred world that which servile use has degraded, rendered profane’ (1991: 55), the sacred realm being that of continuity that Bataille alludes to through the metaphor of ‘water-in-water’ in his work Theory of Religion (1992). The profane world is that of separated things and objects. In this sense the destruction through sacrifice was a negation of a utilitarian relation of the society to the world that sustained it. The restoration, according to Bataille, pertained to the intimacy of the relation of humanity to its natural world, which the logic of utility had severed. This ‘intimate participation of the sacrificer and the victim’ annulled the separation of the human from that which had been reduced to a ‘thing’ through use. Such an orgy of intense consumption releases a violence, according to Bataille, that ‘breaks forth without limits’ (1991: 59). His interpretation of the purpose of sacrifice to control this violence connects with Girard’s analysis: it ‘is always [ . . . ] to give destruction its due, to save the rest from a mortal danger of contagion’ and thus through sacrifice ‘the community is saved from ruination’. He adds ‘The victim is given over to violence’ (p.59, emphasis in original). For Bataille this violence is, however, released not as a result of an escalation of mimetic desire, but through the sheer intensity of the communal consumption, a jouissance he assumes rather than explores in these texts, but does engage in an earlier work, Inner Experience (1988), to which I will return in Chapter Four.

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The victim in this reading is the accursed share. S/he is chosen for a ritual enactment of violent consumption in which s/he is ‘utterly destroyed’ in a ceremony of anguish and frenzy. The ‘curse’ that the victim embodies ‘tears him away from the order of things; it gives him a recognizable figure, which now radiates intimacy, anguish, the profundity of living beings’ (Bataille 1991: 59, emphasis in original). The sacrificer surrenders and destroys the wealth that the victim could have been for him/her; the victim is rescued from utility and profanity and returned to the sacred. Bataille’s reading of the sacrificial process and its ‘symbolic’ economy, which is importantly not an economy, is one of a kind that brings into focus why and how the term ‘radical’ might conceivably become associated with the study of the social formation represented in these societies of ‘symbolic exchange’. As entirely ‘other’ to the capitalist ethos, disdaining accumulation and the power that accrues from it, apparently dissolving the cut that severs humanity from its world of objects and annulling its binary form, these societies of a certain kind of violent jouissance represent literally another world. For the current project, however, a three-fold inquiry opens up: what is it about the victim in such readings that continues to reverberate in our (Western) contemporary hierarchical and violent structuring of difference and how is this inscribed by or within sexual difference; what is this jouissance at the boundary of an experienced continuity and how is it articulated with gender; and what is at stake in this valorization of symbolic exchange? The ‘radical Durkheimian school’ seems to be populated by authors whose celebration of energetic, collective, symbolic expenditure takes a somewhat rebellious delight in the prospect of the excess, eroticism and jouissance at the boundary of the law or some limit. There is something transgressive in the works of authors such as Bataille, as noted by sociologist Chris Jenks in his book Transgression (2003). The transgressive has a certain attraction; it is risky and exciting, critical and potentially, or apparently, emancipatory through its challenge to the law and its push to and beyond limits, by comparison to its pious, cautious, disciplinary and conservative alternative. And yet obviously the agency to transgress relies on a prohibition; thus transgression suggests both denial and affi rmation of the law, a crossing yet, in the same movement, a redefi nition of limits. For all its dynamic and generative qualities, to foreground the transgressive can too easily (albeit not of necessity) obscure the stakes of victimization and assign concerns with gender to the sidelines of ressentiment,9 with its connotation of oppressed groups always already victimized. In raising ‘gender’ in this context, what precisely is meant? What is absent from these analyses that can be termed ‘gender’? This is not an easy question and could be answered in a number of ways, the most obvious being the crude observation of the relativity of males or females as perpetrators and victims, or the less obvious being the observation that the jouissance of transgression appears phallic, which of course does not

52 Victims, Gender and Jouissance restrict it to men but invokes a masculine structure. This gives pause to reflect on Walter’s (1977) observation that throughout history and through the orally transmitted myths of pre-history it is not the case that women have been predominantly the victims of sacrificial victimage; although not solely, overwhelmingly these have in fact been men as surrogates of the king/victim, often slaves or captured enemies of war. Furthermore, female figures have featured among the most energetic seekers of sacrifice and the female gods, or goddesses, have been those to whom sacrifices have repeatedly (predominantly) been made. Is there a specific modality of female sacrifice? This will be considered through analyses of the lives of mediaeval mystics whereby women are claimed to represent the vast majority of those sacrificed as surrogate victims (see Reineke, 1997). What is important is to consider the way a differential structure might be in play in the festivity and ritual of the sacrificial scene, how it can be accounted for, and how it is articulated with gender? This dimension does not feature in the analyses of the ‘radical Durkheimian school’. To understand how gender, or sexual difference, is implicated in these sacrificial dynamics and in the construct of the victim that I am arguing today retains the trace of these cultural histories, it is imperative to consider the conceptualization of gender, or sexual difference, as structurally integral to the human as a species of language, or what in the post-Enlightenment, post-Cartesian era of Europe would be called by Lacan the formation of subjectivity.

THE IMAGINARY SURROGATE Although obvious, it needs to be stated that those men and women of archaic tribal and clan-based societies of symbolic exchange, those engaging in the trance of sacrificial festivals and initiation rites, could not be assumed to have the same psychic functioning and orientation to what it means to be an ‘individual’ as those who inhabit the society that is the subject of Lacanian psychoanalysis. Lacan acknowledged as much himself, and Lacanian analysts such as Parker (2011) actively situate Lacanian psychoanalysis within its socio-historical capitalist, European context.10 What is important for the current work is to track the sacrificial derivation of the victim and to ask how the trace of these sacrificial acts might enlist and catalyze victimizing constructs in the contemporary context. Where do the uncanny resemblances reverberate? Given these observances and their theoretical reflections, what can we say about how to act? There is something unheimlich11 about the sacrificial process with its pattern of the identification, isolation and dedication of the victim, the ceremonial representation of a giving up of the victim or of part of the victim for, or to, that which somehow transcends the individual and that is at the same time a source of affi rmation and gratification. For Girard this sacrifice is rewarded with pacification and calm, with a renewed differentiation and harmony within

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the social group; for those of the Durkheimian tradition it renews and consolidates the social bonds of the collectivity; for those studying Lacan’s contribution, it means something different again. Lacan is only too aware of the way that critical discourse on the social relations and psychic enactment of cruelty, sadism and their inevitable victimizing can too easily succumb to those philosophical equivocations surrounding the jouissance associated with catharsis. When he is discussing Freud’s recoiling from the commandment ‘love they neighbor as thyself’ in Seminar VII, Lacan makes the point that the sophism of the term the ‘selfsame’ he uses to suggest that the ‘evil’ that is apparently so hard to ‘love’ in one’s neighbor is ‘no different from the evil I retreat from in myself’, is one most defi nitely not referring to the loss of differentiation of the kind discussed by Girard with his notion of the double. Lacan said: Panic drunkenness, sacred orgy, the flagellants of the cults of Attis, the Bacchantes of the tragedy of Euripides, in short, all that remote Dionysianism lost in a history to which reference has been made since the nineteenth century with the expectation of restoring, beyond Hegel, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, the vestiges still available to us in the sphere of the Great Pan, in an apologetic, utopian and apocalyptic form that was condemned by Kierkegaard and not less effectively by Nietzsche—that’s not what I mean when I speak of the sameness (mêmeté) of someone else and myself. [ . . . ] Great Pan is dead. (Lacan, 1997: 198) This point is quoted at length because it represents the unequivocal distancing Lacan takes from any such possible confusion. Interestingly, Lacan places Hegel, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche ‘beyond’ such restorative intent, an intent he claims was actively ‘condemned’ by the latter two. This view contrasts with that of Girard in the quotation cited earlier where he specifically refers to Hegel and Nietzsche as exemplary for their incitement to return to the ‘power of the negative’ and the ‘value of the Dionysian’. It would seem that this assessment is at least open to some ambiguity. To introduce Lacan’s ideas on sacrifice and its significance or otherwise, I will use an example from Penney’s (2006) study of the logic of perversion. This focus, I think, brings useful elements to light for the subsequent discussion. Penney analyzes the trial of Gilles de Rais in mediaeval France. De Rais was condemned as a sodomite whose victims over many years were young pre-pubescent boys whom he sexually and brutally tortured, killed and ritualistically mutilated; de Rais claimed he took great pleasure in these acts. Penney characterizes the sacrificial dynamic in the context of the logic of perversion from a Lacanian perspective as a desperate effort to escape the enigma of the Other’s desire. In other words, de Rais tried to act, through these unspeakable crimes, with respect to this desire of the Other (God in this instance) in such a way that this imagined desire could

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be, fantasmatically and symbolically, met or fulfilled, indeed that it could be precisely imagined. Penney’s point is that the object to be sacrificed, the victim, had to represent, and thus come to embody and symbolize fully, the transgressive act that wounds or affronts the Other, and at the same time the victim must manifest the results of reparation. To explain this a little more while trying to avoid the risk of simplification: it seems that for de Rais, the means to contain and signify God’s desire was to conceive of it as a desire to give grace and forgiveness, which is to be fulfi lled, logically, through His granting such grace and forgiveness; for God to grant this forgiveness, and thus to fulfill His desire, required de Rais to transgress God’s will—the greater and more heinous the transgression, the greater the forgiveness. De Rais was convinced of his redemption by God no matter what punishment he would receive from those condemning him: his fellow human beings whose propensity to experience such pleasure put them beyond any position of judgment in the view of de Rais, a judgment that could only be that of God. Penney analyzes the way the criminal acts in this case created for de Rais a sacrificial enactment of a completed cycle of degeneration and redemption. It was the completed nature of this cycle that is important; it accomplished an imaginary closure. Only in this way could de Rais attempt to avoid exposure to the enigma of the Other’s desire; in this way he could create the delusion of being ‘exempt from the painful consequences of castration’ (p.65), that is from the painful consequences of being subject to the enigma of the Other’s desire, to the lack in the Other, and to the loss of an imagined limitless jouissance, such consequences including the confrontation with the cycle of life and death. This example is leading towards the concept of the death drive; an important concept for this current study and which will be introduced and discussed in the following chapter. The significant point here is the overriding role of the signifier in the formation of subjectivity. According to Lacan, the human who speaks, who is the subject of language, who submits to the signifier, is ‘subjected’ to a relationship to the signifier whereby ‘at the level of the signifier every cycle of being may be called into question, including life and its movement of loss and return’ (Lacan, 1997: 236). This ‘calling into question’ is an anguish that inevitably accompanies the separation at the instance of the signifier. The entrance of the young infant into the symbolic register (the net of signifiers in Lacan’s terminology) inscribes a cut or a bar that gives effect to the real beyond the signifying chain. The signifier as cut or bar marks a word in its material form of lines or sounds as that which signifies in the absence of, or taking the place of, that some-thing which is supposedly signified. This signifier includes of course the name of the child, the name of the mother and of others in his or her entourage. The place of being subject to the signifier is in a sense a place of non-being—or a place of being that is negated, not known, unconscious. Lacan’s work encircles this dynamic whereby the subject accepts to become a human subject at a cost; there is

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a price to be paid, a sacrifice to be made, a castration to be accepted, and this price, sacrifice or castration is the loss of what is fantasized as ‘being’ before, beyond or without the cut. A fantasmatic plenitude of jouissance without the division marked by the signifier is variously conjured into discourse particularly in connection with the sacred. For example, where Bataille evokes the sacred in terms of ‘continuity’ or ‘water-in-water’, his metaphor gives a sense of immersion in an undivided realm where the subject does not exist as one forced to confront the castration, or divided subjectivity that signification legislates. This sacred realm into which the victim or object of sacrifice is received is the other side of utility for Bataille. I want to foreshadow here that the way Bataille conceptualizes the boundary between these two domains (the sacred and utility), and the nature of the relationship between them, is radically different from that of the division or bar of signification. Baudrillard also distinguishes these same domains precisely through describing their relation, which he characterizes by the expression ‘symbolic exchange’.12 An aim of the current study is to progressively identify the points of difference in the contours and stakes of Lacan’s Symbolic and Baudrillard’s ‘symbolic’ and to interrogate the implications of each for an understanding of the gendered relations of victimage. At this point, however, it must be observed: that which severs the subject from the world is not necessarily to be understood solely as ‘utility’, but equally as the foundational motif of subjectivity itself—the cut of language and the castration it inaugurates. For Bataille and Baudrillard it is the (historically and culturally contingent) modality of value and the means of exchange that are the primary markers of this severance (in Baudrillard’s analysis, varying structures of signification follow or at least accompany this primacy). For Lacan, it is the structure of language and the creation of the human subject as speaking being that initiates the coordinates of this severance. In both cases an excess is produced. For Baudrillard and Bataille, this surplus can be reversed through sacrifice; for Lacan this surplus drives the repetition of sacrifice. Baudrillard’s orientation to the phenomenon of sacrifice is discussed in Chapter Six; before concluding this chapter, a few further points regarding Lacan’s interpretation. That which is sacrificed is the price to be paid for becoming a subject as s/he who desires and who confronts the impossibility of desire; the sacrificed is nothing less than the (fantasmatic) infinite jouissance. That object which is sacrificed for desire is sacrificed for ‘that desire which is lost for the good’ (Lacan, 1997: 322). To have the ‘good’, to obtain access to the Symbolic Order from which proliferates what Lacan calls ‘the service of goods’, is to obtain a desire that is in fact an impossible desire, a desire for that which is lost. Desire is mobilized through this sacrificial necessity, and Lacan notes also that this loss, this payment of the infi nite jouissance, is precisely what the religious function proclaims to recuperate. There is an additional twist that is vital to the Lacanian concept of sacrifice. Lacan (2006a: 696) insists on the distinction between the principle of sacrifice

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and its ‘imaginary function’. Sacrifice has a logic that must be followed at the level of the signifier; it is the Symbolic that authorizes the principle of sacrifice. With reference to Freud, Lacan makes the point that ‘nothing can be grasped, destroyed or burnt except in a symbolic way, as one says, in effigie, in absentia’ (1998: 50, italics in original), thus highlighting a different facet to the ‘imaginary’ surrogacy of the victim. Alfredo Eidelsztein (2009) remarks on the principle of sacrifice in the following way. The ‘signifier of the lack in the Other’ is the mark or trait of the prohibition or interdiction of the infi nite jouissance. This signifier of the lack in the Other is the phallus. Thus the very constitution of this mark, trait or signifier implies a sacrifice—to signify ‘it’ (the infi nite jouissance) is to mark its absence, its loss. In other words, to obtain what is gained as a mark—the access to the Symbolic and to desire—implies this loss. Jouissance, in Eidelsztein’s rendition, is that bodily place of resistance where the subject refuses the nullification that accompanies the presence of the signifier; jouissance is the place of that remainder, or place of ‘Being’, refusing non-Being. In this sense jouissance is determined fully by the Symbolic, and in Eidelsztein’s argumentation it is what ‘gives meaning to the universe’ (2009: 260). To distinguish between the principle of sacrifice and its ‘imaginary function’—the Imaginary referring to its specular incarnation in the field of vision—suggests that the entire domain of cultural enactments of sacrifice with its identification, annihilation and consumption of a victim embodying the price to be paid, is not only underwritten by the Symbolic principle that authorizes it but also obscures the operation of this very principle. Lacan writes that the ‘specular image is the channel taken by the transfusion of the body’s libido towards the object’ (2006a: 696). The victim, or that which ritually takes the place of the victim in a Girardian regression to the ritual, is indeed a surrogate. But rather than the random surrogate doomed to embody the totality of evil threats to the community as Girard argues for societies of sacrificial victimage, the imaginary surrogate in Lacan’s contemporary argument re-enacts bodily the anguish of the lost infi nite jouissance that accompanies subjection to the order of the Symbolic. From the viewpoint of this distinction, the scope of Girard’s theorization is immediately narrowed. In fact this viewpoint forces an inevitable question: is Girard’s notion of mimetic desire not only confi ned to the Imaginary but also an artifact of one element in the formation of subjectivity in our contemporary era which is then read back to retrospectively construct the psychosocial relations of a time and place long passed? The Imaginary in Lacan’s terminology is the register in which relations of self and other are (mis)understood, grounded as they are in specular images that, amongst other things, incite competition and rivalry. As Lacanian analyst and theorist Ian Parker notes, ‘it [competition] appears both when another appears to be too much like oneself and when they [s/he] depart from that presumed likeness’ (2011: 98). Thus, from a Lacanian perspective aggressivity ‘erupts in the imaginary [and] is seen as the function of a

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particular dialectic of identification and rivalry rather than as biological or cognitive process, or instinct or error’ (Parker, 2011: 99). Aggression itself is ‘an existential act linked to an imaginary relation’ (Lacan, 1991: 177). This is indeed the plane on which Lacan’s formulation that human desire is ‘the desire of the Other’ is to be understood, albeit in the negative as the lack of an image of the Other’s desire. For Girard, myth obscures the founding murder and sacrificial victimage; for Lacan, the imaginary function of sacrifice (the myth of the founding murder and its sacrificial drama) obscures its symbolic principle. ************************** This chapter has raised many questions that will be followed through the subsequent chapters; in particular, a central issue for this study is that of the jouissance invested in the imaginary sacrificial victimage. The social and psychic weight that is loaded onto the figure of the victim with its sacrificial connotation is a point of agreement across a number of different approaches to its cultural meaning. It is clear, however, that there are widely diverging theoretical perspectives on the ‘why’ of sacrifice, and the ‘what’ of the victim. As well as raising questions, this chapter has also opened up some lines of pursuit. The following chapter turns to consider the way gender and sexual difference have been analyzed in relation to the sacrificial, in particular the role of what Kristeva refers to as the ‘sacrificial economy’ in gendered violence, how it is constituted, and how the very construction of subjectivity and sexual difference are arguably implicated in this violence.

3

Gender and Sacrificial Violence I do not believe it is possible for a rational system, based on the data of consciousness, to respond to the evil and horror that exists in the world.1 (Julia Kristeva, 1993: 94)

In this statement, Julia Kristeva invokes the necessity of psychoanalytic concepts and understandings for, importantly, the response to ‘evil and horror’. Where Girard relies on religious and legal responses, on the conscious recognition of the surrogate victim and repudiation of cycles of violence, Kristeva insists that we need to fully engage unconscious processes animating our desires. Martha Reineke’s (1997) reading of selected works by Kristeva (1982, 1984, 1986, 1987), which is influenced by Patricia Elliot’s reading (1991) as well as those of Cleo Kearns (1993) and Kelly Oliver (1993), foregrounds the sacrificial aspects of Kristeva’s writings that are central for an understanding of the way Kristeva engages the question of gender and the systematic nature of violence and victimization. Reineke claims that without the notion of an economy of violence shaped by sacrifice, and the precision such an analysis entails, ‘feminists cannot hope to come to terms with the intractable nature of violence’ (1997: 6). Kristeva, as a psychoanalytic ‘theorist of sacrifice,’ argues that patterns of substitutionary violence, or imaginary surrogacy, are linked with societal patterns of sexual differentiation. Through this understanding, not only can the contours of the sacrificial contract grounding sexual difference in such an economy of violence be brought more clearly into view, according to Reineke, but also ways can be sought to challenge and transform investments in sacrificial relations, to suggest what is at stake in advocating that a non-sacrificial ethic could and should flourish. In this chapter I will outline the central strands of Kristeva’s theorization, to illuminate how, in her rendition, the violence of victimizing processes can be understood as a symptom of a deeper violence in the very constitution of the gendered subject. To progress these ideas it is imperative to confront various theorizations on the role of human knowledge of mortality, the way the specter of death inhabits life, and the notion of the death drive, which is subsequently introduced. The interpretation of the death drive as a pursuit of jouissance is centrally important to any account of sacrificial processes within a victimizing culture; how gender or sexual difference is implicated in this process makes it doubly so. Differing emphases within these various interpretations of the death drive can, however, lead in surprisingly

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different directions, offering provocations whose ethical praxes are radically contrasted.

THE FEMININE AS VICTIM IN THE ‘SACRIFICIAL ECONOMY’ As introduced previously, in psychoanalytic terms, the subject is not the ‘self’, not the conscious individual, not the ego. Following Lacan, the notion of the subject is not the subject of the statement ‘I . . . ’, but rather has no presence, does not appear, in what is said. The subject, in part, is constituted as the very split that is the inevitable accompaniment of acquiring language as a symbolizing system; the subject is divided between its conscious and unconscious. Of Lacan’s order of the Real it is difficult to say much more than that it refers to that which is not representable; it is ineffable and cannot be contained or identified within the web of signifiers; while the Real emerges as an effect of the instantiation of a signifying order, it is through our imaginary and significatory practices that we construct something different that we might call ‘reality’. Following Saussure, it is understood that signifiers do not obtain their meaning through some kind of attachment to that which is (apparently) signified. The meaning they acquire is constituted through their relation to other signifiers, through their linkages in a dialectic of presence and absence. From a Lacanian perspective, this linking of necessity involves the Imaginary. The Imaginary in Lacan’s vocabulary is that register in which the human infant fi rst constitutes its sense of itself as a bounded, unified individual. Prior to this, the experience is one of bodily fragmentation, with the baby, then infant, experiencing a multitude of chaotic sensations that have no basis in any sense of a bounded self separate from world or separate from others. Lacan’s notion of the ‘mirror stage’ is a metaphorical device to demonstrate how the emergence of this sense of ‘self’ is accomplished, albeit precariously, through recognizing an image in a mirror; an image that others interpellate as the totality of the child, reinforcing the spatial demarcation or bounding of where s/he begins and ends. This image is of the order of the Imaginary, and furthermore, it is a mis-recognition. The unified, idealized image of the infant appearing in the mirror, and to others, as ‘me’ is constituted through the process of signifying, entering into the Symbolic Order; as Reineke outlines, ‘the human subject establishes itself at the site of that image’ (1997: 19). There are two points fundamental to a Lacanian notion of the subject at this juncture: one is the fundamental split and alienation that accompanies this imaginary constitution, and the second is that the subject is not the result of that split, but rather is (at least in part) that split (see Fink, 1995). The very logic of the signifying act means the signifier stands in place of, replaces, that which is assumed to be signified. The presence of the signifier in its guise of representation marks the absence of that which is assumed

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to be signified, that which is designated, or apparently (the apparent, the visual, the image, the Imaginary) called into being. Thus meaning is present through the Imaginary, through the ‘imagined’ relation of signifiers; it is a social construct embedded in social relationships, largely independently from the Real. As Bruce Fink interprets Lacan, he (Lacan) refers to this paradoxical or ambivalent construct as the ‘barred subject’: the signifier stands in ‘for the subject who has now vanished’ (1995: 41). In this way, the ‘barred subject’ is effected in this split between the conscious (ego of the order of the Imaginary) and the unconscious (the linkages, or chain, of signifiers) that comes from elsewhere as the discourse of the Other (the Other referring to that which is constituted as not the child, not me). 2 In alienation the subject is barred from being, from having a place, and instead the Symbolic Order is ‘it’, relegating the subject to what Fink refers to as a ‘mere placeholder’; the Symbolic Order that enables the subject to constitute itself in the Imaginary. Thus, the subject can be conceptualized as that split between two forms of otherness: to quote Fink, ‘the ego as other, and the unconscious as the Other’s discourse’ (1995: 46). Against this Lacanian background, the fragility of human subjectivity grounded in negativity comes into focus, and this is central to the way Reineke develops her engagement with Kristeva as a theorist of the sacrificial. The ‘Law of the Symbolic Order’ must be abided by for the subject to secure this fragile position as ‘subject’. As Reineke writes, this Law is ‘a Law of absence for the subject’, noting that its ‘self-possessed status is essentially a façade’ (1997: 19). The double irony in this securing is that, although unacknowledged, it is fully reliant on the Other for that very mirroring and for its significatory investments. This constitution of the subject is of course not innocent of the accomplishment of sexual difference, rather, the latter is profoundly implicated in it. Reineke claims that Kristeva’s understanding of the way subjects take up positions in relation to sexual difference very much follows Lacan’s theorization. As discussed in Chapter One, this observation asserts that being placed within the Symbolic Order is to be placed as gendered. This placement is structured in relation to what is commonly called the phallus, or the ‘master signifier’; there are only two places available for this structuring (masculine and feminine), and the master signifier, or phallus (in our context of Western modernity), functions as that point of division. It ensues that the two sexed positions are structured in terms of one of two possibilities in relation to the master signifier. The dualism of sexual difference is thus a product of positioning within language; sexed subjectivity is integral to the founding alienation that is at stake in becoming a subject of language. Reineke (1997) claims that Kristeva departs from Lacan in placing an emphasis on the nature and implications of the transition to the socio-symbolic order. Where Lacan describes a point of entry (albeit gradual) into the

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Symbolic (and departure from the heterogeneity that precedes it), Kristeva focuses on the ambivalences surrounding this transition, and the constant boundary work that needs to occur throughout his/her life, for the subject to maintain its place. The term semiotic3 is used by Kristeva to invoke the bodily experience that the pre-Oedipal infant has of the ‘mother body’ or ‘the maternal matrix’. Importantly, the maternal matrix is not a person, is not an actual mother who is subsequently nameable, is not an object to or for a subject; the maternal space is precisely not an ontological entity or phenomenon identifiable within the significatory practices of the Symbolic Order. Kristeva ‘associates the semiotic with the infant’s perception of the world through the rhythms, melodies, and gestures of the maternal body’ (Reineke, 1997: 22).4 Becoming a subject of/to the socio-symbolic order, however, does not mean a completed departure from the semiotic. The legacy of the semiotic continues, not in a nostalgic sense, but as an on-going reminder to the subject of that which undermines any (mis)recognition of its place and status. The legacy of the semiotic is not uncomplicatedly that of an idyllic ‘before’, it also is marked by the abject. With reference to Kristeva’s Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (1982), Elliot characterizes abjection as a kind of ‘revolt of being’, as ‘an ejection of whatever threatens one with non-being, ambiguity, or of whatever forces upon one the experience of lack or loss’ (1991: 53). Abjection alludes to the in-between, neither one nor the other, crossing borders, obscuring boundaries, not respecting the rules and positions required by the Symbolic Order. As a ‘mechanism of subjectivity’, abjection not only reminds the subject of his or her inevitable ‘living at a loss’ (because of the fundamental alienation, estrangement or split which is the price of becoming a subject of language), but this reminder is attached to the (abject) marks of the maternal matrix. In the context of discussing the dynamics of ejection, the abject, as this reminder, induces nausea, associated as it is with the bodily debris of blood, vomit, and other fluids of the pre-objectal experience. [A]s the subject emerges out of undifferentiated existence, it becomes aware of fragmentation and disunity. Its awareness is marked not by language, but by bodily refuse: blood, excrement, and vomit. Suggested to the emerging subject by this refuse are borders and the violation of these borders. (Reineke, 1997: 55) The abject, by defi nition, is repulsed, rejected; it is to be violently overcome in the identity-securing efforts of the subject. The child is urged to contain that which is of itself within its (imaginary) boundaries and to expel whatever might threaten that effort. That the abject appears to be inevitably inscribed into the feminine is a consequence of how that feminine is socially constructed in the Symbolic

62 Victims, Gender and Jouissance Order. As Elliot observes, Kristeva’s analysis of sexual difference is based on a difference that ‘rests on the sacrifice of the feminine’ (1991: 191). Before going on to consider the work of this sacrificial process and its implications for figuring gender and victimization, it is important fi rstly to discuss Reineke’s notion of death-work. Are we faced with an inevitable, intractable violence at the heart of the constitution of gendered subjectivity, one that will erupt in the psycho-socio-political domain of gender and sexual relations? Kristeva’s response to this is that, although it is likely (and indeed prevalent), it is not structurally inevitable. The critical question is how the inevitable negativity that is definitional of being human, is engaged; how is a practice of absence undertaken? The term death-work is preferred by Reineke (to Kristeva’s death-drive) because of the way it alludes more directly to both the labor involved (a labor of the unconscious) and the socio-cultural domains within which this ‘work’ is enacted. The founding estrangement and sense of lack at the heart of subjectivity moves the subject towards a desire for a plenitude or fullness of being: an absolute state that is associated with an infinity of time and space, in other words with that which is not mortal. Death is defended against and rejected within an economy of signification, yet at the same time desired and embraced as jouissance—as that which cannot be captured by this economy, and which constantly challenges it—because it makes creation, newness, pleasure, communion possible. How subjects approach this paradoxical imperative, how they do their ‘death-work’, raises the question of whether we live within the terms of a sacrificial economy or reject these terms in the sense of moving beyond and outside of them. Reineke is clear about it: ‘Although all subjects live at a loss, not all death-work is sacrificial’ (p.49). Before discussing how death-work might not be sacrificial, it is helpful to explore how Reineke understands the sacrificial process in this context of death-work, and how she considers that substitutionary violence reflects a sacrificial logic and practice that is gendered. Following the earlier discussion on the work of Girard, it was clear that the notion of sacrifice importantly implicates the body of the victim in its process. The use of substitute objects in ritual often replaces the actual body, even though the actual body is symbolically intended; in fact the ritual is impossible without it. Possibly the death-work outlined by Reineke tracks the transition from the originary cathartic sacrifice to the sacrificial offering, in which a bargain is struck with the deity in return for keeping individual or group boundaries intact. Death-work involves securing boundaries of the subject as a subject of language, against the threat of boundary-failure, a threat that is summoned by negativity. To engage this death-work through bodily violence is to substitute the ‘murder of soma’5 for the original violence that language imposed: the substitution (and hence absence) of embodied experience of the semiotic for the presence of the signifier. As Reineke states:

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According to Kristeva, sacrifice puts an end to the vicissitudes of the semiotic by focusing, confi ning, and translating forces of negativity— the jouissance and rejection in death-work that makes human society possible—onto the body of a victim (p.69). This sacrifice is caught up irrevocably in (impossible yet compulsive) attempts to master the ‘thetic’, to ‘be’ the subject whose place within the symbolic economy enables him/her to signify fully in the positive, having overcome all negativity, the subject who can say what ‘is’ (take up the impossible position of the phallus, the primordial, master signifier). If we accept the earlier argument that sexual difference can be understood to be constituted structurally precisely through a relation to this signifier, the stakes for the masculine and the feminine in securing boundaries against the threat of negativity are constructed and played out differently. As Reineke notes, ‘the female body is a favored site to which persons have turned throughout history to reproduce their origins’ (p.68). The bodies of women manifest the materiality used to mark and re-mark the boundaries of negativity. Departing from Reineke’s more general claim that women are therefore more likely to be the victims of sacrifice, I interpret this to mean that when a thetic crisis erupts, specifically and more directly putting at stake the subject’s relationship to the mother-body, this feminine will be, in some form, the site around which a sacrificial process will gravitate. As Reineke indeed notes, the bodies of women become the privileged site when a threat incurs a need to go back, return, and re-inscribe the very processes of negativity (jouissance and rejection in death-work) that secured them (those threatened by boundary failure) in the world in the fi rst place. It is the significance of the emergence of subjectivity as an embodied process that is so acute in Reineke’s rendition of Kristeva’s work. The emphasis on the creation of borders through ambivalent processes of mimesis (including the mother as model), of incorporation and ejection, fusing and re-fusing, signifies Kristeva’s departure from Lacan and also from Girard, whom Reineke claims also does not attend sufficiently to the significance of soma in his rendition of mimetic desire. According to Reineke’s reading of Kristeva, boundary-securing processes in the face of a thetic crisis will necessarily involve the re-enactment of those bodily processes that were productive of those very boundaries. The subject as social and as an apparent (imaginary) agent within the symbolic was created through moving in and out of, across and between soma; that origin, evoked through the abject marks of the maternal body, will be sought to re-mark those boundaries, to re-place soma under the control of the sign.6 ‘And only Kristeva, in focusing on death-work and its material markers, follows violence into the body and out of it again’ (Reineke, 1997: 85).7 The notion of the calm that follows the sacrificial crisis, so evident in Girard’s analysis, finds parallels in psychoanalysis with the concept of

64 Victims, Gender and Jouissance catharsis. Lacan (1997)8 notes how the original meaning of the word in ancient Greek means purification. Through a medical route in classical antiquity it came to take on a meaning of purging, in addition to ritual purification. Purification and purgation both evoke the sense of getting rid of that which is contaminating, or evil, to retain and even protect that which is uncontaminated and therefore pristine in its association with good. Lacan cites Aristotle to emphasize the role of a certain kind of music in provoking an energetic crisis within a group, which is followed by a calm: Well now, says Aristotle, once they have experienced the state of exaltation, the Dionysian frenzy stimulated by such music, they become calm. That’s what catharsis means as it is evoked in Book VIII of the Politics. (Lacan, 1997: 245) This Girardian dynamic of an escalation of emotion into a frenzied, trancelike state amongst a group is known to be contagious and plays a role in the abrupt shift from all against all to all against one sacrificial victim. Lacan goes on to suggest, though, that it is not everyone who enters easily into such states of hyper-excitement, even if we are all ‘at least slightly susceptible’. In Reineke’s terms, this would mean there are differences among people in the way death-work is engaged and accomplished. Such a pattern of collective passion of affect followed by an equally collective calming is evocative of reports of the rise in domestic violence against women in New Zealand following a loss of a World Cup rugby match; the hype and obsession of masculine identification with the national team’s success, frustrated in its climax, is cathected onto the bodies of women (even though they may well share elements of the frustration). Sacrifice, understood as an exercise in representation, recalling Lacan’s notion of the principle of sacrifice, specifically places death-work under the sign in order to secure human experience against threat. In other words, the securing will be accomplished through forcing signification; sacrifice ‘describes a defi ning aspect of acts that turn bodies into signs: sacrifice kills soma in order to create symbols’ through placing a boundary around, or barrier to, the threat that negativity poses (Reineke, 1997: 70). Citing Kristeva, ‘killing substance to make it signify’ is cathartic when death-work is sacrificial. The mastery of the sign reinstates the (illusory) borders of the subject threatened by negativity. Judith Butler (1997), in her reflection on melancholy, ambivalence and rage, also with reference to Freud, evokes the role of mourning in what is arguably an aspect of this process. For the subject to live as subject, s/he must break with the object (although this break is never fi nal or full); ‘the “death drives” are marshaled in the service of breaking with the object, “killing” the object in order to live’ (Butler, 1997: 194), or in the service of bargaining with the deity in the sacrifice. The framing of Kristeva’s insistence on the centrality of sexual difference to sacrificial processes, albeit mainly in the modern context, is thus

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clearly highlighted by Reineke. In addition to the abject marks of the maternal body (literal or ritualized) being important to the bodily abjection of the victim, women and men are positioned differently in relation to deathwork: the ‘sacrificial gesture’ is ‘deployed along sexually differential lines’ (Reineke, 1997: 91). Mimetic violence that ‘explodes’ in sacrificial focus on a victim (men, women, animals) tends to align with the masculine (Reineke claims it is literally more common among men), whereas for the feminine, an implosive sacrificial process is more characteristic and means women’s violence tends to turn inward (women are more likely to withdraw into melancholia and even suicide). How this observation might relate to the commonly noted statistic of suicide rates for men being considerably higher than for women across many countries, remains unclear in Reineke’s text. The support for her observation of a gender distinction in modalities of specifically sacrificial violence is made, however, with reference to Kristeva’s theoretical linkages between sexed subjectivity and such violence as articulated in Black Sun and Powers of Horror. It is important of course to situate this observation within the Western context that does not extend beyond antiquity. Reineke (1997) relates this sexually differentiated sacrificial logic to the positioning of the masculine and the feminine in relation to the Symbolic Order, in relation to the phallus. The threatened masculine subject who is shaken in his belief that the Symbolic Order can fully secure his subjectivity against the threat of negativity resorts to an explosive act of sacrificial violence that acts to reinforce his power. The threatened feminine subject who refuses the necessity of the symbolic work involved in negativity, refuses that which is necessary for participation in the social order (gives up on castration), may have recourse to an implosive act of sacrificial violence. It is important to acknowledge that these sacrificial processes take on their own dynamics at the social, collective level and yet are not separate or independent from their enactment at the individual level. As Reineke interprets Kristeva: although it is inescapable for human subjects to not ‘live at a loss’ (unless they take the route of the psychotic whose suffering in exile is far greater), not all death-work is sacrificial. They jointly claim that a re-orientation to the work of negativity within language can open subjectivity to its own ambivalence, its own internal structure of alterity, instead of projecting fears of negativity onto (the bodies of) others. I will return to this ‘ethical’ proposition later in this chapter, and also at a number of points as this current work progresses. The concern here is to reflect on the concept of the ‘death drive’ in its sacrificial context in greater depth. FIGURING DEATH’S JOUISSANCE There is something about ‘death’ that is central to the construction of gender, or sexual difference, the sacrificial victimizing process, and a jouissance that somehow suspends the subject across a chasm with its portent

66 Victims, Gender and Jouissance of annihilation that is both desired and frantically defended against. For Jean-Jacques Walter (1977) in his psychoanalytic analysis of sacrificial myths and rituals across continents and eons, the death drive features in his explanatory thesis as a deadly destructive force within the subject that is in constant battle with the conscious ego, driving towards its annihilation. Across huge variation in myths and rituals through place and time, Walter identifies a repetitive and coherent common thread or structure that pertains to what he found most compellingly described in the work of Melanie Klein. Walter is not assuming that the ‘subject’ and the ‘ego’ or ‘id’ of a Freudian terminology is directly applicable to the lives lived by the early humans behind these myths and rituals, yet this framework enables him to conceptualize elements of the patterns he identifies. In her psychoanalytic work with children, Freud’s follower, Melanie Klein, identifies a destructive impulse she calls the death drive that is evident again and again in her case studies. Through the evidence he establishes in his analyses of myths and rituals, Walter theorizes that a precarious balance between creative and destructive drives can be readily de-stabilized, with the death drive running riot in human communities. The drama of countless human communities can be seen as one of an endless struggle to come to terms with this death drive. For Kristeva, the death drive not only threatens the bodies of its victims (in the guise of the feminine) and the maternal with its creative potentiality, but is stalking a path of negation and misery across the socioscape of late capitalist consumerism, in fact across the globe—she notes that ‘what one today calls freedom of expression and human rights remains our only response to global expressions of the death drive’ (2009: 80–81). It appears that this ‘death drive’ is a drive to destruction that is both directed towards the subject in its imaginary unified coherence, as well as towards that which threatens this perceptually reiterated boundary. What exactly is this ‘death’, this apparently paradoxical death ‘drive’, where does it come from, and how might we take our bearings in relation to it? It seems that for the Freudo-Lacanian inspired Kristeva, the death drive inheres in an inevitable, and inevitably ambiguous, confrontation the subject will have with its division and its subjection to the Symbolic Order. The separation from the ‘mother-body’ that creates the conditions of possibility for the subject is itself the site of a return to re-mark and re-inscribe the signifier of that separation when this boundary is threatened. The violence of this marking could possibly be indexed to the very strength of the desire to precisely eradicate this boundary and dis-appear into a fantasized fusional state of imagined bliss or dire oblivion. The death drive in this case would be the pursuit of (drive to) the jouissance that must be forgone through a reinscription of the signifying mark. While Reineke’s emphasis in her discussion of Kristeva’s ‘death-work’ is on the possibility of other, non-sacrificial, means to detour this death drive, Walter’s focus is on the death drive as a self-destructive impulse, which is only secondarily and derivatively aggressive towards others.

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Walter’s primary research impetus is to theorize the patterns he observed through an analysis of the widespread myths and rituals of the ‘Great Goddess’ and the ‘Great God’. Only in the lore of the ‘Great Goddess’ does he fi nd variations of human sacrifice (either involving the death of the victim or the sacrifice of a limb or other body part); these sacrifices were systematically and elaborately enacted in relation to the female divinity. As noted above, to develop an understanding of these acts, he fi nds the notion of the death drive to be pivotal, following Freud in acknowledging the central importance of the death drive to psychoanalytic theory. He takes Freud’s rendition of the opposition of life and death drives and in particular develops his case through a close reading of Klein’s psychoanalysis with children where the ‘ego’s battles with its unconscious, or id,’ are, he agrees with Klein, more readily observable. Following Freud’s 1923 depiction in The Ego and the Id (1960), Walter proposes that the ego of the subject is formed through the process whereby the id (the ‘deep unconscious’ in his terminology) is differentiated from the world beyond the subject. He uses Freud’s spatial metaphor (which is also portrayed by Freud in a visual picture or diagram) of an entity with a surface covering an interior to convey this: the interior is the id and the exterior encircling and at least partially enclosing the id is the ego. The surface of the ego is clearly differentiated from the outside world, but on the inside the differentiation with the id is less clearly marked, to the extent that the ego is a part of the id: ‘its lower portion merges into it’ (Freud, 1960: 17). The ego is the part of the id that has undergone modifications as a result of its exposure to the world outside of the boundaries of the surface, and the ego endeavors to try and extend this influence to the whole of the id: according to Freud, this constitutes the ego’s endeavor to substitute the reality principle for the pleasure principle, ‘which reigns unrestrictedly in the id’ (p.19). In this depiction, the ego represents what Freud was moved to call ‘reason and common sense’, and the id ‘contains the passions’. At one point, Freud depicted the struggle between the two with his famous horse-riding analogy (ego as rider wrestles with id as horse). For Walter’s purposes, the id is the source of a death drive; this unleashing systematically undoes this differentiation, with the resultant dissolution, or dis-evolving of the ego, which brings it back to its original state of non-existence. For Freud, the relations among the ego, id, super-ego triad and the two drives of life and death constantly evolved throughout the later stages of his work. He speculated that it is a matter of the existence of a ‘displaceable’ and ‘neutral energy’ (the narcissistic store of libido) that, active in both ego and id, can be ‘added to a qualitatively differentiated erotic or destructive impulse, and augment its total cathexis’ (p.42). To the extent that Lacan ‘returned’ to Freud, Walter’s analyses arguably have this same potentiality for a Lacanian reading. The points of difference between Walter, Freud and Kristeva are less interesting at this point and more compelling is the way elements of their observations contribute to augmenting a theoretical nexus that provides

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some purchase on the gendered nature of the death drive in its sacrificial imperative, and most importantly its implications. The relentless sacrifices that Walter analyzes have some uncanny resemblances to Kristeva’s claim regarding the role of sacrifice in literally dealing with the ‘vicissitudes of the semiotic’. The rituals of sacrifice analyzed by Walter are made in relation to, or ‘for’, figures of female divinity as if the goddess could be appeased or kept at bay by the enactment of a kind of castration, sometimes enacted physically on male worshippers, of the self or symbolic victim; in Kristeva’s work it is with the mother-body, the maternal matrix—simultaneously a site of a forbidden jouissance and a terrifying but unknown desire—that the subject must negotiate the vicissitudes it inevitably faces. The embodied maternal matrix, therefore, is not solely a sacrificial object but is at the same time a terrifying manifestation of a devouring monster (representative of the id in Walter’s terms) whose ultimate power the humble subject, or collectivity of subjects, could only hope to mitigate. For both Walter and Kristeva, the death drive is a force that threatens the subject’s ability to mark its singular presence in the world, a marking that is activated and symbolized by a differentiation from the embodied feminine. For Walter this is destructive if it unfolds independently from the life drive, because the ‘ego’ is the carrier of the life of the subject and its renewal, whereas for Kristeva it is an inevitability that accompanies the formation of subjectivity; in Reineke’s analysis of Kristevan theory, it is not the death drive itself that is of necessity destructive of the subject, rather she avers that its destructive effects can be avoided through doing ‘death-work’ in a way that is non-sacrificial. Through this discussion the observation that processes of signification are entirely imbricated in the sacrificial cannot help but transpire. The signifier instantiates a Symbolic presence that in this same movement annuls that which it signifies, rendering ‘it’ paradoxically absent. Sacrificial gestures either act to secure the subject’s place within the Symbolic Order through a signifying act marking a boundary that separates life and death, subjecthood and annihilation, or through enticing or cajoling a goddess with sacrificial offerings to keep death and annihilation at bay. Either way, the death drive can be characterized as the lure of a fantasized, infi nite jouissance, and sacrifice as a response that mitigates it. This ‘death’ only exists for the speaking, sexed subject; it is not a death of the body-as-organism, but a death of the subject in his/her imaginary, significatory and unconscious manifestation. In Kristeva’s terms, the human subject (possibly with the exception of the psychotic for whom the bar creating the interval of signifiers is either unstable or at times non-existent) cannot avoid confronting the ambivalence involved in dealing with the ‘vicissitudes of the semiotic’. According to Walter, Lacan and his followers have failed to realize the crucial importance of the death drive. Given that Lacan has explicitly stated that without understanding the death drive one cannot understand Freud, this claim by Walter possibly points rather more to what Walter’s account

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might be missing with regard to Lacan’s work (insofar as he had access to it while writing his book, published in 1977). With both Girard and Walter there is still a question that is left in suspense—how to account for the death drive? In each case there appears to be an uneasy and variously explicit recourse to some ‘natural’ derivation. From a Lacanian point of view, both Walter and Girard engage with sacrificial acts in their ‘imaginary function’. This could possibly also be said with regard to a Kristevan analysis. It is the significance of the emergence of subjectivity as an embodied process that is so acute in Reineke’s (1997) rendition of Kristeva’s work. The emphasis on the creation of borders through ambivalent processes of mimesis (including the mother as model), of incorporation and ejection, fusing and re-fusing, not only links with Girard’s work but, according to Reineke (1997), signifies Kristeva’s departure from Lacan. While Lacan does not discount the importance of bodily experience in its full imaginary dimensions, his focus turns to the Symbolic (which is not in itself non-material or disembodied). Although, differently from Girard or Walter, Kristeva’s account is fully reliant on the role of signification, it would follow from her emphasis on the Imaginary that in her view Lacan fails to give sufficient weight to the vital importance of the materiality of the semiotic, to the embodied existence of the baby in continuity with the mother-body and the constant ‘work’ that is carried out in an ongoing way by the subject to secure and reiterate this separation, this status as subject. Could it be equally the case, however, that highlighting the ‘imaginary function’ means insufficient attention is paid to what Lacan refers to as the ‘symbolic principle’ that underwrites the very possibility of sacrifice in its imaginary, embodied drama? At face value, the notion of a ‘death drive’ sounds counter-intuitive; where do we see evidence of a death drive when there appears to be an overwhelming, almost fetishistic, emphasis on the importance of life and its continuation for as long as possible? On the contrary, there appears rather more to be an avoidance or radical denial of death inscribed in the logic of the political economy of contemporary societies of Western influence. This superficial appearance obscures what is meant by the ‘death drive’ and serves to render it improbable or incomprehensible at fi rst encounter; indeed, some would counter that it is repressed. It is important to register what ‘death’ is being referred to in connection with the ‘death drive’: it both is and is not the physical death of the organism. The reality of the physical death of the organism becomes meaningful in this context when the sexual condition of human beings forces an awareness that new life is a function of the mortality of the individual. But having said that, it must be quickly followed with the observation Lacan makes that this access to a knowing about, or having a relationship to, one’s own death can only be possible by virtue of the signifier. He insists that the death drive ‘is articulated at a level that can only be defined as a function of the signifying chain’ (1997: 211). With the cut that establishes the subject of (subjected to) a signifying order there is loss of that which Lacan, following Freud, calls the unsymbolizable

70 Victims, Gender and Jouissance ‘Thing’ (Lacan’s term for Freud’s das Ding) from which the subject was separated, and a repressed desire, an unconscious fantasy of an infinite jouissance in its recovery. The drive to pursue this jouissance, it follows, is a death drive because its impossible accomplishment must, by defi nition, coincide with the death of the subject (and as a consequence, eventual bodily death). According to Copjec (1994), the desire for the infi nite jouissance was already repressed, already lost, before the moral law prohibiting access to it (the taboo of incest that creates the conditions for the subject of language). The ‘no’ of the ‘Name-of-the-Father’ (the law) and the inevitable castration that being named and taking the name entails give rise to the subject-as-place within the chain of signifiers. And yet at the same time there is a remainder in the sense that there is some ‘Thing’ lost, sacrificed, given up, some‘thing’ unrepresentable, that cannot be found and for which there is a repressed desire. In Bailly’s discussion of this aspect of Lacan’s conceptual schema in a chapter with the title ‘that obscure object of desire’, he casts the Thing as ‘outside the Symbolic but exist[ing] at the point at which the Imaginary touches the Real’ (2009: 139). He distinguishes the Thing and its inevitable association with the Mother (a Mother both absent and impossible) from the objet a, which, although having similar effects, is different by virtue of its origins. The objet a (discussed in more detail below), again as remainder, arises from the phallus and is therefore desired as lost object in its connection with the desire of the Mother. The Thing, on the other hand, ‘arises from the primary affects of a relationship with what-is-notyet-represented—the unforgettable-but-already-forgotten other’ (p.139). The desire for the object of ‘total jouissance’ is structurally impossible to fulfi ll and, as such, in Bailly’s reading of Lacan and in accord with the discussion above, the Thing can be considered as the object of the death drive. Jouissance does not precede the human’s entry into language, as some kind of ‘experience’ that is animalistic, pre-human and ‘holistic’; equally the same can be said for the Real, which is not the ‘real’ that is the object of the ‘natural’ sciences. Jouissance and the Real are each specified by Lacan to arise from the Symbolic, to be an effect of the subject’s entry into the Symbolic Order, an effect of the cut or bar of the signifier. The Real is not that which is ‘signified’ and annulled by the network of signifiers; the Real is not subsumed by or within representation and is a source of trauma for the subject because of this very fact. The subject’s drive towards jouissance is the death drive, and (usually) the subject retreats from this unbearable, annihilating enjoyment (particularly, in Copjec’s reading, under the conditions of the utilitarianism of the modern era). Although the accounts of both Kristeva and Lacan provide possibilities for an understanding of how gender difference might be inserted into the core of a victimizing relation, Lacan’s emphasis on the signifier leads to a different insight from that of Kristeva. For Kristeva, the sacrificial moment that produces a victim is effectively a moment of violent reaction to

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a threat; an aggressive act to signify that is motivated by a bid for survival of the subject against she whom he perceives to be an object luring him towards a death through an engulfment and disappearance of the boundaries that mark his existence as a subject. The emphasis is on the threat and the subject’s energetic and violent defense; it is sacrificial in its unleashing of a destructive force against a symbolic instantiation of the mother-body: an imaginary surrogate victim. For Lacan, the emphasis is on the pursuit of a deadly jouissance; deadly because the subject would be extinguished as a speaking being if this desire was fulfi lled. Foregrounding the drive towards introduces an important sense of compulsion that leads towards a different praxis from the violence attending a defense against; the latter in its ‘imaginary function’ is immediately cast into the discursive terrain of pronouncement of what is ‘bad’, ‘evil’, and must be averted strenuously by whatever socializing and ‘civilizing’ means possible. The former, on the other hand, is of the order of an integral logic that, in itself, is not so readily subject to the law (a prohibition); how to legislate a ban on the logic that is inscribed in the unconscious drive of a repressed desire for an infi nite jouissance? It is only in the Imaginary that such prohibitions can be imagined, enacted and have their effects, the incest taboo being the primary instance. Sexual difference in Kristeva’s analysis of the sacrificial economy is inscribed in the bodily semiotic. She mistakes the feminine for ‘the motherbody’ and as such takes it to be the object of a hostile rejection because of the lure and deadly promise associated with this mother-body in an embodied memory. In Lacan’s terms, this bodily matrix functions as an imaginary ‘reality’. The body is not the body of the organism but the imaginary body initially of the mirror stage, indeed gendered in its illusory identifi cation and invested with the very potentiality for aggression and gestures of destruction that both Klein and Kristeva observe. Lacan’s theory of sexuation leads in a different direction. As discussed earlier, and to recap somewhat, the subject is inevitably divided in/by/through language. A certain ‘alienation’ occurs as the child confronts the Other as language; a language that is literally of the Other. In addition to the process of alienation, Lacan proposes that of ‘separation’, involving the alienated subject’s confrontation with the Other, this time the Other as desire. In Lacanian analysis, desire, coextensive with lack, marks the emergence of the subject—there can be no subject without desire. The infant’s wish or fantasy is to be all for the mother, to be all that she desires. As the infant becomes aware that the mother’s attention is focused at least partly elsewhere (her partner, work, interests) the infant becomes aware of the lack in the Other. The Other’s desire, the lack in the Other, becomes the cause of the subject’s desire, furthermore, as such it becomes the cause9 of his/her ‘being’. Where alienation creates a kind of ‘forced choice’ (as an either/or) whereby the only choice is to take up the position of subject within the symbolic order and thereby embrace the possibility of ‘existence’10 but to give up ‘being’ (the full plenitude of being), separation forces

72 Victims, Gender and Jouissance the alienated subject to grapple with the desire of the Other (see Lacan, 1998a: 212; also Fink, 1995). Unlike the either/or of alienation, separation is structured as a neither/nor. The elusiveness of being comes from neither the subject nor the Other; rather the child tries to make the two lacks (that of the subject and the Other) coincide or overlap so the one might fulfill the Other. It is the intervention of the third term (the paternal metaphor in the form of the master signifier) that enables language to effectively ensure that the mother-child dyad does not close over itself. This occurs through the substitution of a name for the mother’s desire; in other words a signifier, fi rstly as the Name-of-the-Father (signifying that which she desires), which then in turn creates the conditions for the mother’s desire to be symbolized, to circulate in the field of signification. Fink points out that this allows for the child to mediate the desire of the Other by symbolizing ‘it’, signifying in the place of its absence, and the result, he argues, is the ‘advent of a desiring subject’ (1995: 58). The signifier of the Other’s desire in Western culture is the phallus (according to Fink, this is by no means a necessary designation, and it could be otherwise and probably is in some other cultures, but the fact that it is the case in the West is, he claims, attested repeatedly in clinical psychoanalytic practice). The phallus, as signifier of desire, is nothing more than a signifier; it is the signifier of lack. There is an additional point that needs to be grasped before addressing the question of how jouissance, with its fantasmatic character, and the relation with the Real might be implicated in the very phenomenon of sexual difference. This is the notion of objet a, the contribution to psychoanalysis that Lacan considered his most significant. As outlined, Lacan argues that the cause of desire lies in the desiring-ness of the Other, and this also originates in some aspect or directedness of the Other’s desire that seems to have nothing at all to do with the child, which in fact takes the attention of the Other away and beyond. Objet a is this cause of desire—in the sense of that which seems to escape the child and creates a rupture in the (illusory) mother-child unity. This rupture or rift occurs because of desire and leads to the advent of objet a. As Fink writes, ‘Object a can be understood here as the remainder produced when that hypothetical unity breaks down, as a last trace of that unity, a last reminder thereof’ (1995: 59). It is through a ‘cleaving’ to that rem(a)inder, to objet a as cause of desire, that the split subject can ‘sustain the illusion of wholeness’, and ‘ignore his or her division’. The important point here is that Fink underlines how ‘[t]hat is precisely what Lacan means by fantasy’ (p.59). In its complex and multifaceted relation to objet a the subject achieves the fulfilling fantasmatic sense of wholeness and well-being: fantasy [ . . . ] takes the subject beyond his or her nothingness, his or her mere existence as a marker at the level of alienation, and supplies a sense of being. It is thus only through fantasy, made possible by separation, that the subject can procure him or herself some modicum of

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what Lacan calls ‘being.’ While existence is granted only through the symbolic order (the alienated subject being assigned a place therein), being is supplied only by cleaving to the real. (Fink, 1995: 60) Objet a, as fantasmatic formulation of the desire of the Other, as a hallucinated jouissance that is unrepresentable, anxiously animates the subject as desiring. How does jouissance differ for the masculine and the feminine? In Lacanian terms, the sexual difference of masculine and feminine is nothing other than a differential structural relation to the Symbolic Order, as discussed earlier; in other words, different ways of being split as subjects; different positions in relation to existence as a practice of absence, in Kristevan terms. As such it has nothing to do with biological males and females. It is not about bits of bodies and how they differ. It is not about ‘sexual identity,’ which is rather the result of social identifications constituted within the ego and thus of the order of the Imaginary. Sexual identity can itself be highly self-contradictory and is not necessarily in harmony with the masculine or feminine structure, which is of the order of sexed subjectivity. Masculine and feminine structures, typically men and women but not necessarily, take up a different relation to jouissance. Lacan’s concept of castration, more generally characterizing a structure or logic of lack or loss, focuses most specifically on that part of jouissance that must be given up, sacrificed, renounced by the subject in the processes of alienation and separation; this sacrificed ‘part’ of jouissance being the greater ‘part’ in that what is left is described by Lacan as a ‘mere pittance’. This is particularly the case for the masculine: the feminine position requires less renunciation of jouissance than is required by the masculine position, a conclusion Lacan tracks back to Freud.11 In Lacan’s analysis, masculine and feminine are structures positioned or defi ned differently in relation to loss or lack; the alienating function of language splits, and constitutes, masculine and feminine subjects differently. The masculine and the feminine take on their difference, not from one another, but from their differential, asymmetrical relation to a third term: that of the phallus making possible the signifying order. This appears to be the key point with respect to Lacan’s claim that ‘there is no such thing as a sexual relationship’. With reference to Fink’s analysis, masculine subjects (and he is clear that this categorization is referring not to men in biological terms, but to masculine subjects in psychoanalytic terms, which includes many ‘women’) are determined fully by the phallic function; in other words they are ‘wholly alienated within language’ (1995: 106). They are, in their subjectivity, completely and altogether subject to the Symbolic Order. In Lacan’s Seminar XX (1998b), sexual difference is most defi nitely not rendered significant primarily through the embodied semiotic and processes of identification but is rather a structural imperative imposed by the nature of language.

74 Victims, Gender and Jouissance This masculine structuring of subjectivity has implications for men’s pleasures. According to Lacan, these are limited to a phallic jouissance that is circumscribed, allowed by, or determined by the play of the signifier itself: the phallic signifier. The master or phallic signifier (the phallus as prohibition against incest as the Father’s ‘No’) acts as a limit in absolute terms. As Fink writes: ‘Insofar as it is related to the body, phallic or symbolic jouissance involves only the organ designated by the signifier, which thus serves as a mere extension or instrument of the signifier’ (1995: 106–107). At the level of fantasy, men’s fantasies are confi ned to, or as Fink writes, ‘tied to’ that ‘aspect of the real that underwrites the symbolic order’ (p.107) which is objet a. This is precisely the point that leads to the conclusion that men do not have a sexual ‘relation’ with women per se, but with fantasy, with objet a (even though the ideal of non-castration, of no boundaries and limits might, as Fink suggests, live on in each man). Women, or better, the feminine structure of subjectivity, take their definitional characteristic, however, precisely through not being defi ned wholly by the phallic function, whose alienation within language is therefore not total or complete. By virtue of her different relation to the master signifier, the phallic signifier, she is not limited by it in the same way. ‘With respect to the symbolic order, a woman is not whole, bound, or limited’ (Fink, 1995: 107), as Lacan said woman is ‘pas-toute’ (‘not-all’). As Elliot analyzes with a slightly different emphasis: Man can only imagine himself as a self-determining, independent subject insofar as he projects his own lack elsewhere. At the same time, woman, in assuming her status as other, as object, as cause of man’s desire, repudiates her own desire and reinforces man’s position as the ‘one supposed to know’. (Elliot, 1991: 84) This different relation means that women’s jouissance is not limited to the solely phallic jouissance; where the masculine subjection to the phallic signifying structure is complete (to exist as masculine, this existence is fully circumscribed within meaning), the feminine subjection is not complete, a part escapes, and as such she can access (at least in terms of structural potential) an Other jouissance. The ‘mere pittance of pleasure’ left to the masculine who cannot step beyond the limits and boundaries set by language does not comprise the same constraint for the feminine who can in some unidentifiable way go beyond these limits and boundaries.12 To return to the question, is sexuation, or sexual difference with its differential jouissance, inherent to the logic that is productive of the victim in its role as object for a bargaining process? Insofar as the victim is sacrificial, resulting from a remarking of boundaries to defend against the apparent threat of that which the mother-body represents, Kristeva’s answer would in the affi rmative. Is the victim an imaginary surrogate who or which is

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symbolically sacrificed (destroyed) to sustain subjectivity and deflect the annihilation that would result from a death drive? Is the victim an unfortunate proxy enabling the subject to re-inscribe the signifying mark of an already compromised existence? Is the victim a logical construct issuing from the urgent pursuit of a phallic jouissance, dramatized through various sacrificial ventures? As this current discussion progresses the strands of thought these questions suggest will be unraveled and at the same time further questions raised. Before continuing with this task, it is useful to take stock of the discussion at this point with respect to the question of a praxis, or standpoint, in relation to gender, sacrifice and the victim.

THE DEATH DRIVE AND THE SUBJECT’S ACT I have considered all too briefly a spectrum of authors who have studied in depth an uncanny human drive whose passionate gestures exceed the boundaries of the subject or the social, taking victims hostage to its tormented struggle to maintain a precarious subjectivity and sociality: Girard’s escalation of violence resulting from mimetic desire, Bataille’s sacrificial expenditure of the accursed share, Durkheimian festivals reiterating and securing the possibility of the social bond, Kristeva’s inevitable confrontation with the vicissitudes of the semiotic, and Walter’s immortal id in its determination to dis-evolve the subject’s ego. With the exception of Lacan, whose view on the victimizing process has yet to be explored, the victim is invariably, and variously, caught up in this process as a surrogate object whose victimization is violently dedicated to, and necessary for, a kind of instrumental role in either creating a catharsis, reversing the drive, appealing against the lure, or keeping it at bay. In all cases the death drive, as portrayed by these authors, amounts to the release of an all-too-human passion that subsumes the subject in its singularity and differentiation, is violent and destructive, demanding a response that is instrumentally victimizing. This formulation of a condition apparently integral to humanity’s predicament compels an ethic, or moral law, that seeks to detour the sacrificial and victimizing imperative as a means of dealing with the death drive, through other, more acceptable and socially benign channels. On the contrary, according to Lacan (1997), it is precisely the moral law that detours the subject away from its division, comprising an unethical gesture and, furthermore, one leading to the violence and aggression so evident in the imaginary domain. In Copjec’s (1994) reading of Lacanian ‘ethics’— ‘ethics’ in quote marks because Lacan’s ethics of psychoanalysis is so profoundly different from the prevailing ‘ethical ideology’, as Alain Badiou terms its contrary preoccupation with alterity—it becomes evident that the death drive is conceptualized as an inevitable and unavoidable ‘corollary of symbolic life’ (Copjec, 1994: 47), the pursuit of an infinite jouissance whose impossible fulfillment would annihilate the subject. With respect to

76 Victims, Gender and Jouissance the distinction made earlier, the death drive does not (necessarily) result in a biological death with reference to the order of life in the biological sense of vitality and evolution (Lacan, 2006a). Copjec refers to Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams (1953), where he cites Bergson’s reference to the singularity and uniqueness of every moment in the complexity of the biological cycle of life and death; no moment is ever repeated exactly the same. Recurrence is not only excluded, but the progressive nature of this biological history means this history cannot be reversed; the past cannot be destroyed; what’s done is done. Human history, on the other hand, takes place within the order of the signifier as a symbolic history. And Copjec’s point is that this symbolic history is not ‘immortal’; it cannot be understood as immutable and always progressive, never reversed. Because the signifier ‘always receives its signification retroactively’ (1994: 46), thus only establishing signification within a chain of signifiers, the signifying act can always be undone, can always be reversed. Where any possibility of the same event happening a second time is rendered impossible within the Bergsonian universe of biology, she claims that this is not only not excluded from the Symbolic Order but, on the contrary, marks its radical difference. Repetition is not only possible, but of central importance when it comes to the death drive: ‘The death drive, then, which recognizes the possibility of the past’s destruction, is inextricably linked to repetition’ (p.46). As Lacan repeatedly emphasizes, the drive cannot be considered to be the same as ‘instinct’, conceptually aligned as it is to the biological field (see Lacan, 1997: 111; 1998a: 49; n.d. V: 11; 2007: 15–16); the ‘being’ of the drives, in Copjec’s discussion of Freud, ‘is the compulsion to repeat’ (1994: 46, emphasis in original). With reference to the ‘life’ of a human subject and not the biological life of the human organism, she adds, ‘the aim of life is not evolution but regression, or, in its most seemingly contradictory form, the aim of life is death’ (1994: 46). The key point here is that the death drive with its signature of repetition cannot be reduced or assimilated to that of biological death. This point remains, even if Copjec’s recourse to Freud’s recourse to Bergson follows an inheritance that has been superseded by theorizing within biology that renders this discourse somewhat simplistic (see Elsasser, 1998; Oyama, 2002). The death drive, therefore, cannot be dissociated from the signifying order. In this sense, therefore, the aim of the life of the subject (its life as a speaking being, subject of language, desiring subject) is directed by its repressed desire. This repressed desire is for that very part of the subject that had to be sacrificed, and is thus outside of, or beyond, that which is signifiable; it is not within language; it is of the order of the Real. The subject—constituted as an effect of speech—of the Symbolic Order will repeat and repeat its impossible acts to reunite with its fantasy of itself as a complete being; as Copjec observes, ‘th[e] part [lost] being the objectcause of its desire’ (1994: 52). It is in this sense that Lacan insists that all drives are death drives because they are all drives concerned with the

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pursuit of jouissance (Parker, 2011: 102). It is in this sense that Žižek refers to Freud’s notion of the death drive as one that paradoxically pushes the subject towards life; as a name for ‘the way immortality appears within psychoanalysis: for an uncanny excess of life, an “undead” urge that persists beyond the (biological) cycle of life and death, generation and corruption’ (2006: 62–63); as the perceived on-goingness of a continuity it must sacrifice to be a subject. The ethics of psychoanalysis for Lacan derive from his analyses, following Freud, of the subject’s act in relation to its inevitable death drive. The superego, appearing as it does in Freud’s (1960) tripartite structure of ego, id and superego, is depicted by him (Freud) as a kind of moral agency within the subject that judges and censors the ego in the service of the repressive process. In Lacan’s psychoanalysis, the relation of the superego—not a term he used very often—to the moral law takes on a more tyrannical, even ‘ferocious’ coloration. The superego for Lacan is to be located ‘within the symbolic plane of speech’. It features as speech, as ‘the totality of the system of language’, ‘it is speech itself’, and as such is consonant with the law (1991: 102). As Evans (1996) notes, the superego in Lacan’s work is related to the voice, and through this to the invocatory drive. The insistent superego, as Lacan describes it in Seminar I (1991), both conveys the law and at the same time is its destruction. He describes the superego as an imperative: the ‘you must’. And at the same time these demands are senseless, blind and tyrannical. In Seminar VII he makes the point that the superego is not at all to do with the moral conscience as such: ‘What the superego demands has nothing to do with that which we would be right in making the universal rule of our actions’ (1997: 310). There is something cruel and persistent in this command, always the command of the Other, which is categorical in its injunction to enjoy. The superego delivers an incitement to jouissance that is uncompromizing and boundless in its destructive insistence. Rather than characterizing the moral order as one that commands us to renounce the immediacy of our own pleasure for the sake of the wider good, Lacanian psychoanalysis on the contrary proposes an ethic, as moral order or law, as one resulting from our recoil from this cruel and sadistic superegoic injunction that will stop at nothing. This moral law, emerging from this repulsion, acts as a barrier preventing the subject’s aggressive and uncompromizing pursuit of jouissance. In Copjec’s rendition, as subjects resist the superego, what they give effect to, in the same movement, is the prolongation of their conflict with themselves. They remain constantly reminded of their inevitable division. It is this recognition that is at the heart of the ethical maxim of Lacanian psychoanalysis. Lacan said, ‘the only thing of which one can be guilty is of having given ground relative to one’s desire’ (1997: 319). Copjec restates Lacan’s intent as ‘do not surrender your internal confl ict, your division’ (1994: 92). The corollary of these two statements is that there is precisely a pressure to give ground, to surrender, to turn away from one’s desire, and in turn

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to disavow the death drive. This is where Copjec’s analysis is useful for the current discussion. She analyzes the conditions of utilitarianism in the modern era as those promoting exactly this disavowal, whereby the subject is enjoined to accept the enticements of reward that is offered within the society in return for the surrender of its desire. The psychoanalytic ethic, on the contrary, enjoins the subject to maintain its desire and not succumb to these ‘pathological’ incentives that are typically grounded in the subject’s perception of his/her own self-interest. This radical move counters any suggestion of ethics being grounded in the ‘good’. The psychoanalytic subject is subject to a principle that is beyond pleasure, meaning that the subject is not driven to seek his/her own good. This ethic, in fact, is not one that removes suffering but one that rather prolongs the subject’s ‘truth’ as conflicted and divided from the object of its desire. This ethic of psychoanalysis makes a claim regarding freedom. I will quote Copjec here because she describes it with such clarity: ‘the subject’s only freedom consists in its ability to disregard all circumstances, causes, conditions, all promises of reward or punishment for its actions’ (1994: 96). The subject does not succumb to the conditions of a moral law when such a law sustains the ideology of a utilitarian logic, invoking the lure of the pleasure principle, the logic of self-interest, its own ‘good’ and ‘happiness’, to shore up the subject’s disavowal as divided and subjected to its repressed desire. As suggested earlier, in Lacan’s terms, it is the disavowal of the death drive that wreaks havoc, compelling relentless unacknowledged and violently destructive efforts to keep its bewildering and overwhelming lure at bay and not the recognition that the subject’s desire, and death drive, can be assumed and traversed. *************************** Through Reineke’s discussion of Kristeva, the intimacy with which the sacrificial process is implicated in the life and desire of the subject becomes apparent. Kristeva brings into focus a particular thesis regarding the gendered nature of what she calls the sacrificial economy. Acceptance of this thesis entails accepting the role of the semiotic and its locus of the maternal matrix, along with an ethical commitment to a re-working of each subject’s relation to the loss that initiates sacrificial violence—a violence directed towards a symbolic incarnation of the mother-body; in other words, a detouring of the death drive away from this sacrificial enactment. Lacan’s divergence from this view complicates Kristeva’s emphases. The death drive, or the drive in all its forms, is a function of the Symbolic in the primary instance. This view dislocates any imperative to fi x its Symbolic focus on the Imaginary of the mother-body. Where sexual difference figures for Lacan in the connection is through a different possibility for jouissance. The pursuit of jouissance is not only implicated differently in relation to sexed subjectivity; according to Lacan’s formulation, it features centrally in the apparently very different domains of mysticism and sexuality. In the

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following chapter, the relation of the feminine to mysticism, the sacred and the maternal, is considered. There is a sense in which appeals are made to the female mystic’s attempt to uncover a supposedly feminist ethical path to a metaphysical ‘place’ that is beyond or outside any possibility of the violence and jouissance of a victimizing culture. Lacan also is persuaded by the Other jouissance of mystical experience. What is it about this relation of feminine and mysticism, how do feminist theorists make a case for this connection, and what to make of it? In tracking a path from the lofty heights of mystical ecstasy to the abysmal depths of Sadean depravity—also ecstatic—what might emerge regarding the way jouissance is articulated with gender and victimization? This is the focus of the following chapter.

4

From Mysticism to de Sade Human violence is murderous because only humans, at the very borders of language, linger over the flesh they tear in their accession to a social space. These fi rst lessons in violence teach them that, should they ever fi nd themselves back at the very threshold of meaning because of life-threatening confl ict, if they hold close to the fl esh of a victim and probe it, they will be able to summon the very powers of life itself from within its somatic depths. (Martha Reineke, 1997: 89, emphasis in original)

There is something instrinsically problematic in talking about ‘women’ and ‘men’. In making such a reference, it is never just the cultural load of the signifier that is at stake; there is something else, some anxiety pointing to that which exceeds any possible signification, something that cannot be experienced in ‘being’ a ‘woman’ or a ‘man’. The terms are entirely unsatisfying. The subject referred to is never that; never only that, never fully that, neither does any aspect of the subject seem to escape ‘that’. And yet ‘women’ and ‘men’—made and not born as de Beauvoir (1953) has famously written—can be counted in terms of their assigned sex; they form a series of ones, of units, given the imaginary misrecognition of the subject with their illusory and precarious sexual identity. Theorists of sexual difference explore the lives, acts and ethics of medieval mystics as women, to investigate the relation of specifically the feminine and the maternal to ‘the sacred’, and as a consequence, to the sacrificial victim. Lacan, along with other psychoanalysts, speaks and writes of de Sade as a writer contributing important insights into a particularly masculine theater of sexual perversion. Whether the ecstatic body is given in sacrifice as mystic (hysteric?) or enacts sacrifice as sadist (obsessional-perverse?), it is going to tell us something about gender, the victim and the relation of the victimizing impulse. Does a gender polarity neatly overlay a victim/ perpetrator binary? The following discussion suggests not. And yet there is an association of the victim with the feminine in Sade. While masculine and feminine retain their structural incommensurability, the opposition of victim and the perpetrator are constantly rejoining each other. An exploration of the desire of the sadist is furthered through Lacan’s notion of sacrifice as a lure to conjure the Other as desiring. The stakes of sacrifice are amplified in Esther Faye’s analysis of the Holocaust in Lacanian terms. A ‘sacrifice to a dark God’ has as its ultimate aim in the Nazi imaginary the recreation of all subjective division as a purified unity.

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WHY ECSTASY AND THE FEMININE? MYSTICISM Feminist scholars who have felt inspired for whatever reason to turn their attention to the figure of the female mystic, have approached their study from numerous angles and with a variety of questions. Some, such as Luce Irigaray (1993a, 1993b), are concerned to counter what is argued to be the masculine appropriation of the sacred, to counter the masculine hegemonic dominion over some apparently mysterious domain, yet clearly of some claimed importance, called ‘the divine’, and want to establish the grounds for a ‘feminine sacred’ that would provide the necessary supports for a ‘feminine subjectivity’. Julia Kristeva, in her published dialogue with Catherine Clèment, goes further and wonders if women might now be able to ‘give’ another inflection of the sacred assimilated through their ‘giving’ of ‘the miracle of human life’ and thus living ‘the impossible but nevertheless sustaining connection between life and meaning’ (Kristeva and Clèment, 2001: 14). Others, such as Reineke (1997), take the female mystic less as a figure of feminist hope and valorization, and are rather more concerned to critically analyze how it is that the female mystic of the medieval period in European history can be understood to have been a sacrificial victim. Others again emphatically reject any suggestion of ‘romancing’ the assumed connection between women and the poetic, the mystical, the sacred and maternal as sacrifice for others. Such an alignment is analyzed as a product of a victimizing social economy dominated by the masculine for whom this association serves to elevate their dominant position (for example, see Hampson, 2007); as Hampson asks, ‘how could it help women to idolize these things’? (p.66). My interest is in the work of those whose analyses of female mysticism serve to highlight its sacrificial investments and pave the way for a thorough critique of the alignment of ‘women’ with some kind of supposedly ‘ethically’ elevated position in relation to ‘the sacred’. To re-sacralize the female sacrificial victim arguably more fi rmly entrenches ‘women’ in a subjected state, albeit one that is either sanctimonious in its hallucinated freedom from guilt, or alternatively fermenting in its scathing ressentiment. Possibly both. For all that Kristeva’s more recent reflections on the sacred and the feminine (2001; 2009) appear to uphold some kind of reverence for the ‘need to believe’ and all that this entails, Reineke (1997) analyzes Kristeva’s earlier work (1982, 1984, 1986, 1987) for its critique of the medieval mystic’s sacrificial victimization within the socio-cultural order of the time. With a parallel yet different concern, Amy Hollywood (2002) traverses particular writings of Bataille, de Beauvoir, Lacan and Irigaray to explore new ways to articulate and negotiate what she describes as a feminist project regarding the relationship between the political, the religious, and the mystical. Engaging with these reflections and analyses pushes the discussion further into helping isolate the way the problematics of the figure of the victim are tied to a relation of ‘self’ to ‘other’ and how, from this

82 Victims, Gender and Jouissance problematic construction, flows an inevitably prescriptive ‘ethics’ (an ‘ethical ideology’) attempting to regulate that relation. Unsurprisingly, the emphasis within Reineke’s reading of Kristeva foregrounds the body of the mystic as the scene of her sacrificial suffering and ecstasy. Recalling how, for Reineke, the sacrificial gesture is one that works to replicate the process whereby the symbolic is produced—the thetic moment is reiterated in bodily form to counter that which threatens the subject’s very possibility—the sacrifice of the mystic through her bodily suffering follows this same logic. Reineke’s reading is thoroughly, and explicitly, Girardian; we see how the community is served as it secures its borders and re-establishes its safety as a symbolizing, communal entity of differentiated subjects through the mystic’s retracing the steps of emergent subjectivity. In other words, when the order and stability of the community is threatened by destabilizing forces and threats, as it was by numerous sources of strife in late medieval Christendom, the ecstatic body of the suffering mystic served then as a means through which any such ‘disrupting forces could be placed under the control of the sign and neutralized’ (p.124). Reineke is clear about it, in her application of Kristevan theory to the ‘signifying practices’ of the female medieval mystics, their asceticism can be interpreted solely to mean that they were ‘victims of a sacrificial economy’ (p.105). Through this analysis, Reineke laments the sacrifice of the body of the mother that the suffering and death of the female mystic represents and re-enacts. It is the mother, or the maternal matrix, that is the ‘space of loss that brings the social order into being’ and which is therefore both ardently sought and desired, yet also feared for its dangerous jouissance. The fact that the intake or renunciation of food features so strongly in the ascetic practices of the medieval mystics, sometimes starving themselves to death, is not surprising given its role in symbolic rituals surrounding pollution and purification as well as the ambiguity of its role in both sustaining the materiality of the body and at the same time in-corporating the body of God in the Eucharist. Periodic fasting was quintessential to what it meant to be a Christian; to eat the ‘holy food’ of the Eucharist as the incarnation of the body of God was to become one with this God and to receive salvation. For the mystic, to eat only this ‘holy food’ was a path to sainthood that was preserved for women in the main. The more they hungered, the more they desired God; thus abstinence from eating non-‘holy’ food became the central metaphor not only for the jouissance in the uniting with Christ’s suffering and achieving a mystical union with God, but also for the salvific portent of their sacrifice. Through their sacrifice they saved others.1 Where both Caroline Bynum (1987), whom Reineke cites extensively, and Luce Irigaray (1993a, 1993b) valorize the apparent agency, even rebellion, of the female mystics for their speech and acts that, they claim, were neither shaped nor controlled by the patriarchal social order, Reineke is concerned to foreground the contradictions they lived. Along with the

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ecstasy of a jouissance that was transcendent, the asceticism of the mystics meant not only the suffering from starvation but also enduring the agony of nails and thorns as they would re-enact the crucifi xion of Christ. Their actions meant equally an immersion in the body as a fl ight from it, a formula that would inevitably lead to the ‘fracture’ of the body, when the mystics ‘plummeted into the abyss of being’ (Reineke, 1997: 117). Rendering the body as one suspended by this contradiction to the point of death is to endure to the limit of signification; or as Reineke states, to the point of the ‘collapse of meaning and boundaries in the mystics’ bodily dissolution’ (p.119). Such an act can be understood in Kristevan terms as a manifestation of a sacrificial economy for the way it is productive within the social order of the time. To ‘linger over the abyss of being’ as signification is sundered in bodily death re-instantiates this boundary that makes signification and subjectivity possible: ‘those who shadowed the mystics’ death-work could grasp life itself from the mystics’ dying bodies’ (p.121). Here Reineke re-links with the practice of death-work, arguing that the asceticism of the mystics manifested a ‘founding contradiction’ of what it means to be a human subject: ‘humans come to be at a place where they are not’ (p.119). Human subjectivity is a practice of ‘absence’ and human life is death-work. In Reineke’s analysis, as the mystics lived this practice of death-work literally in the very viscera of their bodies, their death-work was transformed into sacrifice. Why? According to Reineke, it constituted an act of sacrificial victimization by a Christendom intent on securing its dominion in the face of the boundary failures that threatened the social order. This conclusion is read at least in part from the process of surrogate victimization that Reineke claims was active at the moment of crisis in medieval communities. There would be a collective focus on a scapegoat, and the starving body of the mystic ‘embodied the intrinsic culpability of a victim’ (p.121). She was both sinful and polluting as well as sacralized as she neared death: ‘Bearing the community’s violence, the mystic was a scapegoat: in the wake of her sacrificial gift, the community returned to stasis’ (p.121). In the late Middle Ages this same attention turned to the figure of the witch. The fact that the mystics, whose asceticism rendered their bodies both abject and sacred, were mostly women (Bynum, 1987) is accounted for by Reineke with reference to the maternal investment in women’s bodies. This meant that the mystic could intensify the power and danger of the abject and metaphorically produce its transformation from that which threatens and pollutes (for example, menstrual blood) to those somatic fluids that are salvific (such as blood from stigmata). Men were of course also numbered among the ascetics, but it was relatively rare that their asceticism was ‘somatically productive’ when compared to that of women. It cannot escape note that the mystics were both sacrificing as well as sacrificed; they were both sacrificial victims and also instigators of a sacrifice. In a movement that turns back on itself, they murdered the very Thing that was to be the source of their jouissance, which of necessity

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eluded them. The connection between women and mysticism is the object of comment by Lacan with specific reference to the Other jouissance of the feminine. This jouissance of the Other—that is not a phallic jouissance, that is somehow beyond, a jouissance that is only possible if one is ‘situated on the side of the not-whole’ (or not-all) of sexuation, the feminine—is a jouissance Lacan associates with the religious ecstasy of the mystics (Seminar XX, 1998a). He makes specific reference to Bernini’s famous statue in Rome of Saint Teresa portrayed in a moment of religious ecstasy on being pierced by an angel, a moment described by her in her autobiography: In his hands I saw a great golden spear, and at the iron tip there appeared to be a point of fi re. This he plunged into my heart several times so that it penetrated into my entrails. When he pulled it out, I felt that he took them with it, and left me utterly consumed by the great love of God. The pain was so severe that it made me utter several moans. The sweetness caused by this intense pain is so extreme that one cannot possibly wish it to cease, nor is one’s soul then content with anything but God. This is not a physical, but a spiritual pain, though the body has some share in it—even a considerable share. So gentle is this wooing which takes place between God and the soul that if anyone thinks I am lying, I pray God, in his goodness, to grant him some experience of it. (St. Teresa of Avila, The Life of Teresa of Jesus [1515–1582] Translated and cited by Warma [1984: 510]) The jouissance to which Lacan points (but of which he says one cannot speak) is one that might be experienced but is not ‘known’. According to Lacan, the mystics say they experience it, ‘but they know nothing about it’ (1998b: 76). He asks if this jouissance might ‘put us on the path’ of ‘exsistence’, in the sense of being? The term ‘ex-sistence’ is a neologism coined by Lacan to suggest that the subject’s center is outside him/herself to mean the subject is effectively de-centered; in the words of Evans, this term refers to the idea ‘that the heart of our being is also radically Other, strange, outside’ (1996: 58). Being only ex-sists (Lacan, 1998b: 121). This is not to suggest that Lacan is valorizing the excesses of the mystics or is in awe of their predicament; he also quips elsewhere, with reference to the mystics, that ‘[u]nfortunately, many of their most notable qualities always strike me as somewhat puerile’ (1998a: 187). The jouissance as an exquisite agony and ecstasy of the mystics in their bodily comingling of somatic suffering and ‘sweet’ communion with the ‘love’ of ‘God’, beyond the possibility of signification, has to be one that complicates the separation of victim from that victimizing Christendom in whose name the sacrifice is performed. The jouissance, specifically for the mystics, of being sacrificed, of being sacrificially given over to the pain of the Other’s violence, the Other’s jouissance, is to be confronted in this instance. Yet at the extreme of a binary torsion, it seems that the poles of

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sacrificial victimizing agency and surrogate victim inhabit the same space, partake of the same jouissance, and are therefore transformed into something else, something that can be conceptualized readily within neither this polarizing vocabulary of the victimizing relation nor that of sacrifice. Yet there has to be a sacrificial victim for this drama to be enacted: for some mystics of medieval Christendom, Christ’s torturous death is the sacrifice that has to be approached, faced, re-lived, explicitly imitated, and taken up as their own sacrificial agony. The significance of this ‘process’ can possibly be tracked through the writings of Bataille (1988), discussed as they are by Hollywood (2002) in her project of analyzing what the possibilities of mysticism might be for feminism. For Bataille, as we have seen partly from an earlier discussion, sacrifice is the return of that which has been profaned through its use in the domain of utility to the order of the sacred. In his book Inner Experience (1988), Bataille writes of his own experience as the grounds for articulating the struggle or tension he perceives at the heart of human subjectivity. The subject is caught between the desire for ‘continuity’ on the one hand (in Lacanian terms this might be cast as the infinite jouissance), which of necessity implies the loss of the subject’s discontinuity (the death of the subject per se), and on the other hand, as a discontinuous subject, the desire to embrace the fantasmatic whole that transcends his/ her isolation in discontinuous existence. This desire to embrace the whole, in Bataille’s terms, leads the subject to an endless immersion in ‘project’ or ‘work’—in other words, in that which distracts him or her from the very tension at the heart of what it is to be human. Bataille (1988) calls this immersion the ‘narcotic’ that is necessary to suppress the pain of the subject’s inevitable insufficiency. For Bataille himself, his determination is to live the ‘inner experience’ of this tension. He does this through confronting the image of a Chinese man being tortured to death by laceration. Like the mystic he takes this suffering to an extreme whereby an ecstasy of ‘continuity’ is coexistent with bodily agony, although, unlike the mystics, he does not lacerate his own body. Through the obviously long-since-dead Chinese man’s sacrifice, Bataille can partake of the victim’s return to continuity, he can go to the brink, but without having to undergo the dissolution of his own subjectivity, at least not in any absolute sense. This is the meaning of sacrifice to Bataille. The surplus of ‘energy’ that has been channeled into ‘project’ to detour it from confronting the experience of ‘existence’ is spent, or expended in sacrifice, enabling the subject to sustain its discontinuity while also fulfilling the truth of its loss and achieving some ‘pittance’ (to echo Lacan) of ‘intimacy’ or ‘communication’ (in Bataille’s own terms). ‘Communication’ is achieved when subjectivities are shattered and the one can encounter another in recognition of their contingent existences. Towards this sacred realm of continuity is indeed the aim of religion for Bataille; he describes religion as the ‘search for lost intimacy’ (1992: 57). Hollywood (2002) points out that Bataille seeks ‘inner experience’ without ‘God’ or hope of redemption. Indeed, his book is more Nietzschean in

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this regard and the translator of the English version cites Nietzsche’s koanlike statement at the end of her introduction: ‘Night is also a sun’ (from Zarathustra). Hollywood’s discussion of Bataille focuses to a large extent on a debate with Sartre, which is not of concern here. What is of interest is how the question of gender or sexual difference in relation to the mystics, and the ‘mysticism’ of Bataille, is engaged by Hollywood. At the core of her inquiry is the question of how the tension or ‘struggle’ that consumes the human subject is lived, is gendered, and how it might be lived and gendered in a way that does not associate women, through their bodies, with loss and death, echoing the direction of Reineke’s reading of Kristeva. With the work of Bataille, as with Lacan, Hollywood sees an effort to link the subject’s encounter with loss, suffering, mortality and death with mysticism. The recognition of the fundamental nature of the doubleness or split at the heart of subjectivity connects these endeavors in differing ways. She interrogates, through an analysis of these works, how this split is lived and signified as a contradiction that implicates the binary structuring of gender. Through Bataille we contemplate the shattering of the subject through his vicarious witnessing. It is the other’s subjectivity that is shattered, and through this his subjectivity is ecstatically led to the brink of its discontinuity; we, as readers, may (or may not) contemplate. This sacrificial ‘encounter’ is one of several routes through which Hollywood creates a convergence of focus on an inevitable split or duality at the formation of the subject, to explore how this split is signified with respect to sexual difference. She writes that mysticism, as a quest for the absolute, for that which would ensure meaning, stability and being, ‘encounters instead that which radically destabilizes subjectivity and meaning—mysticism seeks the transcendental signifier but discovers the paradoxical interplay of presence and absence through which signification is made possible’ (2002: 149). For Lacan, as Hollywood acknowledges, this doubleness is rooted in language, which is embodied and yet at the same time cannot be reduced to the materiality of the body. Human subjectivity is embodied and yet at the same time is ‘ex-sisting’ as split from the body. Hollywood grapples for a way to envision what she considers to be the paramount project: the dissociation of women, women’s bodies from lack, loss and death. She does so within the imperatives of a Lacanian theorization that is buttressed by the inevitability of sexuation, of speaking subjects of language being sexed, their possibility of speaking being indexed to a relation to the phallic signifier that designates their subjectivity as masculine or feminine. While considering the work of Irigaray in some depth, Hollywood critiques Irigaray’s resolution of this very same problematic for its tendency to attempt a reversion of terms. She supports Irigaray’s call for social symbolic supports to enable women’s loss to be recognized and mourned; what she rejects is any suggestion that a positive solution (women’s agency, the pleasure taken in women’s bodies) can replace a negative (women’s bodies as repositories of pain and fear). For Hollywood, both pleasure and pain, both natality and

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death, traverse all embodied subjects; the important move is to break the association of specifically women’s bodies with pleasure and pain, natality and death. Her discussion of Lacan’s Seminar XX, Encore, progresses this exploration more fruitfully. In Hollywood’s reading of Lacan, it is not Lacan himself who fabricates and supports a reproduction of masculine power through an association of the phallus, as ‘the transcendental signifier through which meaning is stabilized’, with the male body. Rather, she considers he shows this to be an investment on the part of a male-dominated culture, and further, he ‘suggests that only by loosening the illusory hold of the body over language can other, more egalitarian symbolic systems be formed’ (2002: 151). She identifies a goal of Lacanian psychoanalysis, and one Lacan’s own discourse rhetorically enacts, as one of prizing apart the conflation of objet a and the Other (A); a conflation that occurs ‘at the expense of women’ (p.167). While the woman’s body, the mother’s body, as Other is the imaginary locus of plenitude (objet a) and also phallic (source of fear), she will always be maternal from the masculine point of view and threatening, fuelling in part ‘men’s desire, a desire to dominate and oppress women’ (p.156); in other words, she will always be both the Other and the a as lost object to which the infant subject wishes to return. The masculine fantasy of totality, created by the identification with the bearer of the phallus, is to be recognized, through the psychoanalytic encounter, as exactly that, a fantasy relying on the conflation of objet a and A. Once the subject ‘recognizes that the object a as object of desire is merely a fantasy of its desire for unification and totality, then it can attain the “truth” of its being, namely that it is split and lacking in being’ (p.158). It is in this sense that Hollywood considers that Lacan’s account of the aims of psychoanalysis ‘demands it be feminist in its subversion of the masculine plenitude’ (p.168). On the basis of her thorough-going analysis, Hollywood advocates a need to ‘reject claims to the primacy of (dual) sex difference in the constitution of human subjects’. This is supported by her critique, and she adds a proviso in brackets: ‘(although without losing sight of gender and sexuality as crucial axes of subject formation)’ (2002: 277). She writes with optimism that ‘[e]verything in Lacan’s seminar leads to the conclusion that another symbolic, one not governed by the phallus and so not privileging male subjects is possible’ (p.168). This ‘other symbolic’ of necessity retains ‘the’ fundamental cut in the relation of signifier to ‘being’, thereby presumably referring to a re-signification of the phallus. She concludes her discussion of Lacan with the view that ‘what is required is a symbolic system in which the site of the transcendental signifier/signifi ance is not symbolically associated with either sex—one in which the privileging of particular kinds of bodies is no longer made viable by their symbolic association with that which tends to wholeness within language’ (p.170). Psychoanalysis, along with other practices, furnishes considerable evidence of the cultural force this privileging unleashes in the psychic lives of subjects and in the

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socio-cultural domain more generally, precisely as a division between sexed subjects. Hollywood’s critique raises the question as to whether sexual difference has to be ‘the’ difference reflected in the cut that is ‘inevitable’, ‘endemic to language’, ‘integral to subjectivity’. If this cut is an artifact of language, a cut that has to amass subjects on one or other side of ‘it’, it becomes possible to ask if there might be alternatives to sexual difference being the dimension of this divide. It is also necessary to ask if the same problems would not be reiterated. And can such an alternative be engineered? Possibly the bodily practices of mysticism and sadism make clear the necessity for this dimension of difference to be fully embodied and charged with libidinal potentiality. If mysticism is one practice that crystallizes the point where the subject confronts the embodied intensification of its own lack and desire, amplifying the gendered investments in sacrificial passion, a consideration of sadism may also precipitate features of the victimizing relation that are pertinent and enlightening, albeit in a very (somewhat?) different way.

WHERE ECSTASY AND THE MASCULINE? SADISM Hollywood (2002) argues that the association evident in the Middle Ages of women with an affective, somatic form of mysticism and men with a contemplative and intellectual form of mysticism is an artifact of the gendered structure of medieval society. Women were not permitted to interpret biblical texts, or to engage in the more scholarly pursuits that were the privilege of men. Without wanting to attempt to theorize this perfectly reasonable observation in relation to the exclusively feminine possibility of the Other jouissance, we might equally ask, what about the masculine and embodied practices that tend towards the ‘ecstatic’? Bataille’s gaze at the torture scene—how is this different from the mystic’s unflinching gaze that repeats the wounding of the Christ figure? When Bataille’s ‘inner experience’ is intensified through calibrating a fantasy of the other’s agony to his own ‘experience’ of jouissance, then surely something else is ‘going on’?2 The sadistic act is one that is reliant on a victim’s subjection. Although acts of sexual violence are not necessarily sadistic in the sense of their being an ‘enjoyment of cruelty’, there are some parallels. As Ann Cahill (2009) has pointed out, the female victim of an act of sexualized violence is not reduced to an object as such but is rather, importantly, a subject. Rather than ‘objectification’ being the concern of a feminist critique, Cahill suggests the concept of ‘derivatization’ to make visible the ‘peculiar intersubjectivity’ that characterizes this form of violence. It is important for the rapist, or violator, that the victim is not a mere object, but that she is actively registering the fact of being-subject to violation. As such her being violated is the derivation of the violator’s satisfaction. The act of sexual violence is intensely gendered: the prototypical scenario is that of a male violating

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a female victim. Although this is not exclusively the case, possibly it can be argued, and indeed has been argued, that the position of violator or sadist is of the order of the masculine, and the victim is of the order of the feminine, or feminized. Through analyzing what is at stake in sadism, this ‘derivatization’ is more fully drawn. From Andrea Dworkin’s outrage at the vile ‘pornography’ of de Sade’s works and his orgiastic life that she envisages as one of violating and torturing female victims, to Camille Paglia’s insistence that de Sade cannot be dismissed by feminists (or anyone else), there has never been a cool reception among feminists of de Sade or the sadism that derives from his name. 3 Donatien de Sade (1740–1814) was a nobleman born in the mid-18th century in Paris, into an aristocratic family from Provence in the south of France. His mother had very little to do with him, and at the age of four years, after a skirmish with the equally young Prince de Condé, his father sent him to live fi rstly with his paternal grandmother in Avignon, and then to his paternal uncle, the Abbé de Sade. The Abbé lived on one of the family estates, the Chateau de Saumane, in a forbidding castle that could easily conjure up the atmosphere of the steep and narrow stairways plunging to dungeons, featuring later in Sade’s writing. The Abbé, while a reputed linguist and scholar, was known for his irregular sexual life, and equally irregular library containing, amongst other things, items for the titillation of those of a hedonistic and libertine inclination. The young de Sade had unrestricted access to his uncle’s library and no doubt was well aware of his debauched existence at the Chateau. The combination of this influence on his youth and the automatic and unquestioned entitlement that accompanied his aristocratic birth were important factors in the formative years of the Marquis de Sade. Reading Francine du Plessix Gray’s biography of Sade (1999), one would have to reject Dworkin’s rather stereotypical reaction to Sade’s writing and life. Rather than actively pursuing torture, rape and violation, Sade wrote all of his works while in prison. Those that document with monotonous repetition an entire catalogue of what would be called a century later ‘sexual perversions’ (much of his writing in fact is not of this order), represent an outpouring of fantasmatic, imaginary fiction. Sade was an aristocrat and a libertine of the time. He was imprisoned on the fi rst occasion because of an incident in Paris where he subjected a prostitute to a cocktail of sexual blasphemy against the Christian religion and a request that she beat him with a cat-o-nine-tails. He offered to beat her with whichever whip she chose, but she declined. In these incidents of ‘debauch’ he was in fact often enough the masochist requesting to be beaten or whipped (not unlike the way he was whipped and witnessed the public whipping of his peers when at a Catholic boarding school in his youth). He was also known to be not precisely Dionysian in his ardor but rather cool and clinical, bringing his intense interest in the theatrical arts to the rather self-conscious staging of his sexual scenes. This event led to a short imprisonment in Vincennes.

90 Victims, Gender and Jouissance His subsequent life-time imprisonment in various prisons around Paris, including the Bastille at the time of the French Revolution and concluding at Charenton, was ostensibly because of another event in Marseille in 1772 in which it appears that a number of prostitutes were in fact subjected to whipping; he offered them more money for sodomy, which they refused. The testimony of the prostitutes suggests that their distress was mostly related to their being overwhelmed by the extent to which he demanded that they beat him, initially with a parchment scroll with nails embedded in it, and later by literally hundreds of blows with a broom handle, to fulfill his fantasies (apparently, in such encounters de Sade sought beatings upon his own body more violently and more often than he ever sought to inflict them). Most importantly to the courts at the time, however, is that de Sade gave the women a drug in candy crystals to induce flatulence (related to the cause of his own sexual arousal). The charges were poisoning and sodomy. The concern that this drug could be potentially fatal (one of the charges that led to his imprisonment) was later overthrown by expert testimony on the matter, but this never led to his freedom or indeed to an attenuated sentence. It is clear from Du Plessix Gray’s biography that Sade’s sustained imprisonment was the result of the manipulations of his mother-in-law Madame de Montreuil, who, after a long period of being delighted with her daughter’s match, wanted de Sade out of society. Gross and unacceptable as Sade’s escapades seem to us today, at the time it was not very different from many such ‘activities’; most every brothel in the cities had a range of whips for exactly this kind of encounter. His outrageous excess appears in fantasmatic form in a selection of his writings. The illustrated writings of de Sade have been described as everything from third rate to having been written by the most free spirit that ever existed. Dismissed as depraved, pornographic and corrupt on the one hand, they have equally been exalted for their philosophical insight as writings that tell us something of vital importance about the horror of humanity’s ‘true nature’. His writings detail innumerable tortures that, according to Lacan, achieve ‘an absolute of the unbearable in what can be expressed in words relative to the transgression of all human limits’ (1997: 200). Lacan claims that de Sade indeed paved the way for Freud’s pleasure principle (2006b: 645); without Sade’s intervention, closely following that of Kant, Freud’s departure from the long history of associating pleasure unproblematically with the ‘good’ would not have been intelligible. While acknowledging that ‘in no other literature, and at no other time, has there been such a scandalous body of work’, Lacan categorizes the writings of de Sade as ‘experimental literature’ (1997: 210). Lacan brings the gendered nature of the pursuit of jouissance into the heart of his analysis of sadism and the works of Sade. Through this he also connects sadism with mysticism. It is necessary, however, to back-track and consider how Lacan situates Sade in relation to Kant and how Lacan portrays the ‘aim’ of sadistic desire if we are to be able to address his claim that the victim is quintessentially feminine.

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Lacan is clear that, in his assessment, Kant created a ‘turning point’, in particular with his Critique of Practical Reason published in 1788, that was a fi rst step in a subversion of all that went before regarding the moral law, a step that was, Lacan argues, ‘completed’ by Sade. In “Kant with Sade” (in Ecrits, Lacan, 2006b), where he discusses Sade’s Philosophy in the Bedroom, 4 Lacan describes this break as one involving the simple recognition that ‘it feels good to do evil’. The idea that there is a ‘law’ that could articulate the association of pleasure with an act of will, or conscious intent, is ruptured with Kant’s observation at the beginning of the Critique that ‘[n]o phenomenon can lay claim to a constant relationship to pleasure’ (Lacan, 2006b: 646). As soon as this critique is accepted, then it is not possible to postulate any ‘law’ that connects a subject’s feeling good with an act of his or her will. In other words, it is not possible to engineer ‘feeling good’, to exact the experience of ‘pleasure’ through the practice of will; there is no constant relationship between willing and pleasure. The very quest to feel good, Lacan continues in his reading of Kant, is therefore ‘reborn’ in the form of the Good; the Good that is the object of the moral law. As the subject cannot will his/her own pleasure or ‘feeling good’, this is recaptured through a categorical imperative that one will feel good if one acts in accordance with some transcendent moral law. This law commands the subject in the sense that the subject hears these commandments within his/her own psychic parameters: the superegoic injunction to ‘enjoy!’ This moral law therefore transcends the subject’s idiosyncratic interest in his/her objects; it is universal, as law, and therefore appears to be superior to the subject. In this way, the sheer ‘weight’ of this universal Good is manifest solely through the fact that it excludes ‘everything the subject may suffer from due to his [sic] interest in an object’ (2006b: 646). These ‘sufferings’, or possibly ‘experiences’, Kant designates as ‘pathological’. The pleasures that the subject might derive from his/her objects become therefore subordinate, private in the sense of personal and not a source of pride when submitted to the countering imperative weighed in by the Good. There is a paradox Lacan observes in this move, one that is crucial to his reading of Sade. At the very moment of surrendering the specific object in front of the subject—an object around which his/her idiosyncratic pleasures and sufferings may circumnavigate—the subject encounters in his/her conscience the voice of a law, purely signifying and devoid of any phenomenal object, that simultaneously articulates a moral maxim and proposes the order of a will or order of ‘practical reason’ that can be instrumental in securing his/her pleasure. Lacan further notes that for this law to be universal, Kant insists it must conform to the logical requirement that it be valid in every case (that is, ‘it is not valid in any case if it is not valid in every case’). In Lacan’s analysis, Sade extends the Kantian formula to effect a subversion. Philosophy in the Bedroom, like many of Sade’s other books, is not of any considerable literary value, but this is not the point. Lacan claims

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that this ‘diatribe’ contains a ‘maxim’ that proposes a ‘rule for jouissance’. Sade’s maxim Lacan writes as follows: ‘I have the right to enjoy your body,’ anyone can say to me, ‘and I will exercise this right without any limit to the capriciousness of the exactions I may wish to satiate with your body.’ (Lacan, 2006a: 648) What is striking about this statement, as a maxim, is that it is couched in terms of a universal ‘right’ (a right which therefore by defi nition applies to everyone), and it is ‘coming out of the Other’s mouth’ to use Lacan’s words. The two imperatives—the rejection of the ‘pathological’ and the binding of the will to the law through excluding every reason that is not based on the maxim—are ‘imposed on us, according to the Sadean paradox, as if upon the Other, and not upon ourselves’ (Lacan, 2006b: 649). In other words, as the moral law commands us, it does so by requisitioning us as Other (here Sade links with Kant). In this move of making the voice explicitly that of the Other, Sade’s maxim makes visible a split in the subject that is otherwise masked (as in Kant’s commanding voice within). In Lacan’s analysis, the bipolarity that founds the moral law, that makes the moral law possible ‘is nothing but the split in the subject brought about by any intervention of the signifier: the split between the enunciating subject and the subject of the statement’ (p.650). This important distinction is at the heart of the Lacanian theorization of the split or divided subject. The ‘I’ (that might be characterized as the big ‘I’) acts as the consciously articulated subject of the statement in its abstract and generic meaning in discourse; the ‘I’ (possibly the small ‘i’) also acts to designate, but not signify, the subject of the specific instance of speech addressed to an-other, this ‘i’ being the subject of the enunciation.5 The ‘I’ appears to present a unity of the subject, but this illusory unity is divided between a consciously articulated statement and the source of speech as an unconsciously derived enunciation. The universality of the Sadean maxim reflects a paradox whereby the ‘I’, as Other, who is posited as free to exercise this right to jouissance, is also the ‘i’ who is speaking, as the ‘me’ to whom ‘anyone can say’ that this is the Other’s freedom. This ‘i’ as subject of the enunciation is equally committed to the freedom proclaimed by the discourse. And in this bipolarity of the Sadean maxim, jouissance is one of the two poles; the other pole is the ‘hole that jouissance already drills in the Other’s locus in order to erect the cross of Sadean experience in it’ (Lacan, 2006b: 650). This metaphorical phrasing of Lacan’s possibly points towards the assumption that any infi nite jouissance, impossible because of the fact that the subject’s death of necessity accompanies it, cannot be pursued to some limit of experience but with an intensification of pain. The Sadean conception, proposed in imagination, opens the floodgates onto the furthest reaches of our desire whereby everyone has the ‘right’ to pursue to this limit the realization of his/her

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‘lust’. The paradox can be stated also to the effect that while everyone is equally free to pursue their right to jouissance and to be liberated from any restraint in this regard, they are equally subject to the absolute power of the Other. This paradox is also evident in the juxtaposition between the sadistic ‘right’ to enjoyment on the one hand, and on the other hand, the observation made by Copjec that the ‘pervert’ does not make any claim to a right to enjoyment but rather ‘busies himself’ with his fetishes ‘only for the sake of the Other’ (1994: 115). It is both the Other jouissance and the jouissance of the Other that is at stake. In what Lacan refers to as Sade’s ‘fantasmatic creations’, it is not solely the infl iction of torture that excites the sadistic event but the grueling cruelty of the victim’s subjection to a certain knowledge of his/her fate. It is the anticipation, the pain to come, that incites the most extreme moment of the sadist’s desire. What is this about? If anticipated infi nite jouissance is dedicated to the pursuit of the impossible Thing, das Ding, there is something essential about the limit point of this pursuit, the point beyond which the subject cannot go. Lacan analyzes this limit point as one in which the pain of the subject pursuing the infinite jouissance meets the pain of the Other as the sadist’s victim. To make this link he refers to Kant’s claim that pain is implicated in the moral law in a consistent way. In the Critique of Practical Reason, there is one experience acknowledged by Kant that correlates with the moral law, and this is pain. As we have seen, in Kant’s philosophy the moral law determines, or enlists, our will by setting it against the inclinations of the singular subject; this setting against, he states, ‘must produce a feeling that one could call pain’ (cited in Lacan, 1997: 80). As such, this feeling of pain comprizes the only instance where it is possible to determine a connection or relationship between a specific knowledge, coming from conscious practical reason or the moral law, and ‘a feeling of pleasure or pain’. Here Lacan views Sade in agreement with Kant to render this point in Sadean terms: when the absolute pursuit of the Thing is forced, and there is pain intensifying to the limit point of the subject’s possibility, this pain is not only that of the Other, but also that of the subject. Thus, to come back to the question of what is at stake in the cruelty of the subject’s anticipation of his/her fate, this can only be addressed through the aim of sadistic desire. What the sadist seeks, according to Lacan’s analysis, is the Other’s anxiety; not his/her suffering, but ‘his essential existence as subject with respect to this anxiety—this is what the sadistic desire wants to make vibrate’ (Lacan, n.d. VIII: 5). What is induced in the Other, through imposing the unbearable in its anticipation as much as its event, is the manifestation of the moment where the subject quivers on the boundary, or in the gap, of his/her existence as a subject and what s/he can undergo by way of bodily suffering. What impresses itself upon the reader of Sade to render his scenes of torture and victimization as ‘fantasmatic’ is the fact that the victim appears to be indestructible. It is absolutely not a matter of the victim being destroyed and immolated, but rather of a

94 Victims, Gender and Jouissance kind of eternal suffering that is renewed over and over. As Lacan (1997) observes, whatever the victim endures, the image of ‘her’ is never spoilt, does not ‘wear out’; she always survives for her next ordeal and not only that, the sensual power of her attraction for the sadist appears to be perpetual and is not tainted or damaged. The fantasmatic renewal of beauty acts as a lure for desire. The sadist can start over again, a fantasmatic repetition of the destructive drive that Lacan claims is only possible in relation to the signifying chain. What Lacan concludes is that here we see emerge the notion of eternal punishment. This endlessly renewable suffering functions as the signifier of a limit; it is a kind of stasis that, in the harrowing anxiety of the victim, affi rms that ‘that which is’ cannot ‘return to the void from which it emerges’ (1997: 261). It is as if the torturer’s victim will ‘retain the capacity of being an indestructible support’ for the sadist’s desire. Lacan uses an observation from the analysis of patients (in the normal course of things) to the effect that the subject creates a double of him/ herself that is simply not accessible to destruction; this double, with its discourse observing and interrogating its own pain, functions to support ‘what one cannot help calling the play of pain’. For Sade, it is always by way of pain that one arrives at pleasure. The link Lacan makes of the sadist to the obsessional (1997: 203) can also be linked, with caution, to the masculine structure.6 The victim of the sadist in Sade’s works is archetypically feminine. This feminine imperative is detected by Lacan through the structure of the sadist’s aim, exemplified as it is in the ‘diatribes’ of Sade when the agents of torment ‘enter into this bizarre, singular and curious trance’ (Lacan, n.d. XIII: 8). The aim is not only the victim’s anxiety; it is also how this anxiety appears through the imposition of the limit of what is bearable, as outlined above, whereby a division or gap appears between what it is to be a subject and what can be suffered. In one instance the tormentor makes a triumphant gesture to the effect that his mutilation of the female genitalia had effectively given him ‘the skin’. Evident in this trophy, according to Lacan, is the aim: what is sought is that ‘which is in a way the reverse of the subject, which takes on here its signification from this feature of the glove turned inside out which underlines the feminine nature of the victim. It is the passage to the outside of what is most hidden’ (Lacan, n.d. XIII: 8). The feminine is associated with that which is not of the order of appearances and must be made to appear, with that which conceals a disturbing absence that must be made present. If women, according to Lacan, are always apprehended by men as maternal and by connection as the Other, this ‘turning inside out’ appears to replicate Reineke’s claim that the sacrificial gesture is one determined to make soma signify. And yet in the Sadean context it is unavoidably about a sexual jouissance (some perverse desire) as well as the agent’s own masked anxiety. Lacan does not pretend that attempting to illuminate what is happening in the sadistic relationship is by any means brought to a conclusion through his discussion. On the contrary, he insists that it remains dimly perceived

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and understood. The enigmatic jouissance of the Other, the big Other, features in the Sadean drama. Lacan suggests that this transpires through the formless, nonexistent body of the Other. The father who beats the child in Freud’s ‘A child is being beaten’ takes his jouissance from this beating, plays his role as a certain jouissance to be had, and yet is unnamed— he can only be formed through having a body, and yet he does not exist. Lacan asks ‘what has a body and does not exist?’ He answers his own question with ‘the big Other’ (2007). Lacan observes that throughout the writings of Sade, the agent of torment repeatedly takes his bearings from what Sade refers to as ‘God’, this ‘being of supreme evil’, contra Kant’s ‘being of supreme good’. In Lacan’s analysis, it is as if the sadist is going to these exhaustive lengths to realize the jouissance of God. In Seminar XVII Lacan (2007) comes back to Sade again. It is not just the jouissance of God, but God is jouissance. Jouissance, indeed a ‘surplus’ of jouissance, is the result of language. It is not so much the case that we ‘use’ language, but that language ‘uses’ us: ‘Language employs us, and that is how it enjoys. This is why the only chance for the existence of God is that He—with a capital H—enjoys, that He is jouissance’ (2007: 66). The sadist is an instrument of pain and suffering to realize God’s jouissance (to be had like a kind of sacrifice); the mystic suffers pain to enjoy the Other jouissance of the woman, beyond the phallus, which is also the jouissance of the Other (God).7 Lacan is adamant that Sade’s work is not a ‘treatise on desire’ and cannot be approached in these terms. In fact, as stated above, the object in Sade supports a form of suffering as the signifier of a limit, and this limit is also contained within the image of the crucifixion—an ‘exemplary image’ that Lacan wonders might be apt to refer to as the ‘apotheosis of sadism’ (1997: 262). In other words, the signifier of this limit point in which suffering is sustained is divinized. Obviously any ‘real’ of infl icted sadistic torture would crush any possibility of desire. Lacan also makes the point that experience in analysis reveals how for young girls and women the image of Christ on the cross means that the very fantasm of feminine desire may ‘be literally poisoned’ by such a contemplation (p.262). The way Christianity has been ‘crucifying man in holiness for centuries’ clearly receives the full force of Lacan’s critique. Sade’s work is less of an incitement to sexual arousal (in the sense of pornographic) but, as someone once said, more like a dose of saltpeter. His writings such as those evident in the Boudoir reveal an author who resiled from weakness and, rather like Nietzsche, exalted in the potency of strength and conviction, with a passion for freedom of sexual expression in all of its possible (impossible) extravagances. He loathed all that was puritanical, and his most intense disgust was for religion of any kind, with its inevitable hypocrisy. The fantasmatic female victim in Sade, and the female mystic whether or not understood in victimary terms, must not be abstracted from the materiality of injurious assault on bodily integrity. Sadistic torture does not

96 Victims, Gender and Jouissance only happen in novels and fi lms. If such relations were only ‘fantasmatic’, this inquiry would either not come to pass or would begin from different premises. The fact is that the violence and agonies that humans infl ict on other humans are very real, have a lengthy, trans-cultural history, and appear to know only the most extreme of limits. What we can attempt to extract from the Sadean ‘literature’ and the mystics’ ineffable experience of which they cannot speak is some tenuous insight into yet another facet of sacrificial logic in the drive to jouissance. The idea that the Other is itself a site of jouissance, exacting a sacrificial debt, will be explored in the final section of this chapter.

SACRIFICE TO A DARK GOD The Lacanian figure of the Other has appeared in this work thus far as the totality of the system of language (the Symbolic), as the mother—as (m)Other, as God (the Father, the third term), as being of supreme evil, superego as the command of the Other. And yet its existence is in question. Possibly the non-existence of the Other has a greater implication for our topic than its claimed phallocentric hegemony? To progress this question, it is helpful to consider further the way desire and the notion of a debt to be paid are implicated in the sacrifice. Using an economic discourse, Lacanians propose that access to language, to subjectivity, to desire, is acquired at a cost. There is a price to pay: the giving up of a mythical, infi nite jouissance, giving up access to the Thing to become a subject ‘at a loss’, endlessly desiring and searching for that which is already given: the objet a. The objet a is described by Lacan in Seminar X as ‘the remainder of the constitution of the subject at the locus of the Other insofar as it has to constitute itself as a speaking subject’ hence as a barred subject (n.d. XXII: 6). Objet a, as the being beyond and not within language, is referred to by Lacan as the ‘pound of flesh’ or ‘the inch of nature’ that is surrendered and, detached, is the object cause of the subject’s desire. Lacan (1997) notes that the common thread across the majority of religions is the promised recuperation of that pound of flesh. The sadist seeks the anxiety of the Other, yet behind this production of the Other’s anxiety is the search for objet a. The pound of flesh as object or good, with which desire is exchanged, is of course in the body, but it is inert and separated or detached from the subject. As Lacan said in Seminar X, ‘it is always with our flesh that we must discharge our debt’ (n.d. XVII: 7). Sacrificial practices, however, cannot be understood, Lacan insists, to be of the order of an offering or gift; in something of a departure from other theories of sacrifice Lacan avers rather that the sacrifice is destined to ensnare the Other to reveal or produce its desire: ‘to be the capture of the Other as such in the network of desire’ (n.d. XXI: 10). The sacrifice acts as a lure; by its very act it casts that to whom, or to which, the

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sacrificial gesture is made, the Other, as desiring. It produces the Other as desiring. Lacan describes how, when civilizations were populated with gods who lived among the people, the crucial question was whether the gods desired something, and sacrifice involved acting as if they desired like ‘us’. As Nietzsche wrote, ‘“God” is useless if he doesn’t want anything’ (1968: 377). Rather than appeasing the Other, whose ferocious jouissance threatens to annihilate the subject, the sacrificial act elicits the desire of the Other. But it must do so without arousing the Other’s anxiety, which it is prone to do because anxiety—as the mark of every subject’s dependence on the Other for the very possibility of its emergence—appears when desire is veiled or hidden. This sacrifice—enacted through many ‘daily little mutilations’ that we ‘impose on ourselves, validly or not, in the field of our desires’ (Lacan, n.d. XXI: 10)—provides a reassurance that the sought after ‘being’ of the subject, the objet a, is of the same structural order as the desiring subject: ‘Sacrifice consisted in behaving as if they [the gods] desired like us: therefore objet a has the same structure’ (p.11). The desire of the subject is implicated fully in its relationship with the Other, mediated by objet a. Esther Faye (2009), recuperates this Lacanian interpretation of the meaning of sacrifice as she engages the works of Serge André (2007) and Giorgio Agamben (1998, 1999) to analyze the way the stakes of sacrifice and jouissance were activated in the Holocaust. In particular, Faye’s project is to reflect on the association of hate and the jouissance of the Other, with reference to Lacan’s view that hatred is directed towards the very being of the Other. Taking a bearing from Freud, the formation of the subject is accompanied by an expulsion or repudiation of an excess of jouissance, as a reaction of hate to a ‘traumatic encounter with an aspect of itself—the real of its drive’ (Faye, 2009: 5). Its hatred (bound up with anxiety as Faye comments) is directed towards that which it has expelled from itself in the process of establishing itself as subject separate from the Other. It is in this sense that the manifestation of hate can be spoken of by Lacan as ‘the call for the destruction of being in us’. In the words of Faye: Hatred, we could say, addresses that unheimlich Other in the other and in ourselves. It addresses the Thing that cannot be assimilated either to the image of the body or to the signifiers which identify the subject and give him/her a compensatory imaginary and symbolic existence; the Thing that nonetheless ex-sists in the real. Hatred addresses that impossible Thing which ex-sists but doesn’t exist, and which, although foreclosed and unremembered, is that very thing which is ruinously sought as the most intimate and living bit of our/the Other’s real being. (Faye, 2009: 6) In this context of reference to Nazism, Lacan (1998a) speaks of ‘a dark God’ whose desire the subject seeks. The dark God to whom the Jews were sacrificed was, as Faye reads André, a new God of jouissance; new and

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therefore no longer a God of love and law, but one that only knows jouissance. And the aim of the sacrifice is analyzed here precisely as the creation of a lure through offering the ‘living pound of flesh’ to entice and capture, or trap, the desire of the Other. In so doing, the effect is to produce the God as desiring, as lacking, which fi rstly realizes the existence of the God, and then in turn the God’s existence provides a ‘guarantee [of the] ideal of lost purity, the ideal of eternal jouissance—to overcome the division of the people so that desire and jouissance, ex-sistence and being are ONE’ (Faye, 2009: 19). This guarantee was, according to Faye’s analysis, integral to the Hitlerian fantasy that fuelled Nazism. Faye pays close attention to the significance of Agamben’s (1998) notion of homo sacer (sacred man in archaic Roman law), or ‘bare life’, the characteristics of which resemble the horrendous and unspeakable abjection of those called ‘muselmann’ in the Nazi death camps. According to Agamben, homo sacer is so reduced that, as the ‘sacred man’, he cannot be sacrificed. The conditions of ‘bare life’ are created through placement in a zone of indistinction between sacrifice and homicide; only subjects can be sacrificed. Some human ‘life’, according to Agamben, is not worthy of sacrifice, even though it can be killed. And importantly, this killing is not punishable. Homo sacer is included within the sovereign state but only through a paradoxical juridical exclusion. As Faye writes, ‘In this sphere of sovereign rule the one deemed to be homo sacer exists in a state of internal exile in the law’ (2009: 11). This zone of indistinction seems to also extend to a status where ‘bare life’ neither is nor is not human. As Faye notes, this figures in the Holocaust literature as a ‘grey zone’ between life and death. For all that she accepts the supreme relevance of this figuration to the history that is the Holocaust, Faye takes issue with Agamben’s argument that homo sacer, or ‘bare life’, cannot be sacrificed. As a Lacanian analyst and theorist, Faye takes a different view on the very nature of sacrifice to articulate this counter-position. As the object of a gesture of ‘hatred addressed to being’, the muselmann is that pound of flesh, that abjection of being, that is offered in sacrifice to the ‘dark god’; offered by way of bargaining in exchange for desire. To address the question of the intelligibility of such a sacrifice within an economic framing, with its tropes of debt to be paid, from another angle, the critical observation might be made that this sacrifice-as-economic is itself constituted by a prior, primordial sacrifice. Before there can be a sacrifice that pays, a space of ‘economic’ exchange where a system of equivalences can be imagined, sacrifice itself both is sacrificed and must be sacrificed. This interpretation of Dennis Keenan (2005) draws from a Žižekian reading of Lacan, among others including Hegelian dialectics. He argues that it is inadequate to foreclose an understanding of sacrifice in terms of an economic transaction, in other words as a sort of bargain with the Other. This very possibility in itself requires theorizing. Keenan proposes to do so through the notion of the sacrifice of sacrifice. The sacrifice of sacrifice

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is ‘a pure, negative gesture of withdrawal’ (2005: 106) in which nothing is ‘given’ as such and nothing is received. In a sense it comprizes radical negation, loss per se, necessary for the emergence of the Symbolic Order. This gesture creates the possibility of economic exchange, of a sacrifice enabling debt to be paid. This throwing the condition of sacrifice into question puts the Other on the line. The point is that the Thing, the infinite jouissance, that to which the subject desires to return, in fact was never lost because it was never there. The only ‘entity’ to which it is possible to return is the radical negation, the sacrifice of sacrifice, the Real. The primordial gesture creating the conditions of possibility (and impossibility) for the Symbolic Order, creating the construct of an entity that was somehow present and now is lost, also produces this ‘retroactive deception’ as if there was such an entity that preceded its loss. The aim of Lacanian psychoanalysis is for the subject, or analysand, to experience the coordinates of this deception, to know its ‘truth’, and to repeat the dialectic of its possibility, or in Keenan’s terms, to repeat the sacrifice of sacrifice. In other words, psychoanalysis aims to repeat the recognition that the very construct of sacrifice in its ‘economic’ form is enacted by the subject; the presence of the absent Other to whom one must pay one’s debt is an illusion supporting its subjectivity. Lacanian psychoanalysis thus aims for the subject, the analysand, to traverse and fully assume the conditions of both possibility and impossibility of the ‘forced choice’ discussed in Chapter Three, between being and meaning that is required for subjectivity. To reiterate, Lacan (1998a) outlines how the subject necessarily confronts two mutually exclusive positions as a condition of the entering the Symbolic Order, resulting in alienation. Choose being, the subject disappears (collapses into non-meaning); choose meaning, being disappears. The subject may vacillate between these positions but cannot occupy both at the same time. What this means for Keenan (2005), and for psychoanalysis, is that the subject, in traversing the fantasy of its subjecthood and its positing of the Other, ‘keeps unconcealed’ the condition of possibility and impossibility of the consistency of the Symbolic Order, which is also the condition of possibility and impossibility of the subject (p.113). In doing so the subject’s singular and ethical act is the sacrifice of sacrifice, and in doing so s/he assumes the position of the objet a, assumes the death drive as radical negation. *************************** In the previous chapter Reineke claims that sacrificial violence is enacted differently by men and women. Women, embodying the maternal matrix, are more likely to turn their sacrificial violence inwards, into the depth of their own experience in melancholia or even suicide. Men as subjects who must bear the phallus (both senses of the word ‘bear’ are intentional here) are, in Reineke’s terms, more prone to explosive sacrificial acts that violate a victim, to defend an imaginary unified subjectivity. While this

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observation is sustained in the current discussion of the female mystics and the male sadist, this exploration entirely complicates this portrayal. The mystics are both sacrificing and sacrificed; the poles of victimizing agency and victim appear to inhabit the same space. It seems that the polarizing vocabulary of perpetrator and victim only functions superficially. Similarly in the case of Sade, the pain of the Other pushed to the limit of endurance is also the pain of the subject. Indeed, Lacan connects mysticism and sadism (the sadism of mysticism, the mysticism of sadism). While there might be one of two subject positions, masculine or feminine, available for the subject to establish his/her sexed speaking being, other binary oppositions are not forged in the very construction of a subject. Victim and perpetrator disturbingly implicate one another. And yet the victim is claimed by Lacan to be ‘quintessentially feminine’ in Sade because of the intransigent link of the feminine with the maternal and the subject’s history embodying its libidinal investments. Such a claim appears to recoup Kristeva’s analysis to an extent, but there is a divergence in their renditions of this personal history: for Kristeva the bodily investments are somatically imbued with the semiotic, whereas for Lacan the signifier regulates their bodily bordermaking at the juncture of the Imaginary and the Real. The figure embodying the projected fantasy of objet a is a sacrificial victim in female mysticism in the Sadean theater of sexual perversion and in the sacrifice of the ‘pound of flesh’ to the ‘dark God’. Through the mystics’ re-embodiment of the Christian passion and the sadist’s very different staging of absorption in the limit point of subjectivity, there lies the desire that drives the sacrificial process to a fantasized infi nite jouissance only able to be pursued to its limit point through the intensification of bodily suffering. Jouissance creates and is created by the subject’s foundational division. Through Lacanian psychoanalysis we confront the challenge to traverse this projected fantasy, to sacrifice these sacrificial enactments. Before relinking with this ‘ethic’ of psychoanalysis in the concluding chapter, the contributions of Nietzsche and Baudrillard will deepen and broaden the possibilities for being or not being a victim or victimizing agent.

5

There Are No Victims How can I help it if I am wretched! But somebody must be responsible, otherwise it would be unbearable! (Friedrich Nietzsche, 1968: 400, emphasis in original)

Does the feminist refusal of the association of women with being victims have any point of convergence with Nietzsche’s articulation of this very refusal? For the nineteenth century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, to accept or embrace the status of victim is nothing short of servile and degenerate. On the one hand it is to hold some Other responsible for one’s misery, for the wretchedness of the oppressed group, and to hold a festering resentment (ressentiment) against the power that is deemed to subject one to this position. As such it is a position of helplessness and impotence, harboring petty-minded fantasies of revenge. On the other hand, equally, one is a victim if one accepts the societal incentives offered in return for obedience and subjection to the moral law. To live in accordance with social injunctions to receive the perceived benefits of security, happiness and peace is indeed to sacrifice one’s very life-blood in conformity to a ‘herd’-like mediocrity. According to Nietzsche’s impassioned philosophy, there are no victims! This ignoble construct of ‘victim’ is an artifact of a politics that functions at the level of individual conviction and through a metaphysics that dominates the species. Unlike assuming the victimhood of ressentiment, to refuse the figure of victim is, in Nietzsche’s discourse, an act of fatality. In this chapter this possibility of refusal is discussed with reference to Jean Baudrillard’s notion of fatality and reversion, an anti-humanist attitude that pushes humanist philosophy to its vanishing point. As individuals we confront Nietzsche’s imperative that (conscious) intention, ‘free will’, is not the cause of the deed and never can be. We can never be victims; there can be no moral actions if the ‘nonsense’ of freedom of will (as determining) is the definitional term. These ideas are pursued here also for what Nietzsche has to say about evil, cruelty, enmity and malice and what they suggest by way of a meditation on the desire for abolition of suffering. In some ways Nietzsche, with the possible exception of the German philosopher Schopenhauer who preceded him, presents the fi rst inklings of a foreshadowing of Freud in the notion of the unconscious. Through Nietzsche there is the inevitability of an unconscious that is thoroughly social. The ultimate exaltation of human sacrifice reflects the new feeling of power amongst the weak, timid, depressed and

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humiliated whose condemnation of the apparently guilty provides them with some sense of strength. Nietzsche’s social theory of the role that this intoxication and excess in the sacrificial process plays is one I critically juxtapose to the Durkheimian interpretation discussed earlier. The ‘social’ that is renewed through the sacrificial drama is one Nietzsche disdains and of which he despairs. This chapter examines where and how far we can go with Nietzsche’s refusal of the victim, his damning critique of the appeal to ‘equality’ and ‘human rights’, when considering the question of gender and processes of victimization. Is the radicality of his iconoclastic campaign against ‘morality’ and for a ‘beyond good and evil’ not rather more a ‘beneath’ good and evil, as Alain Badiou (2001) suggests? How might some of the important insights from Nietzsche be recuperated, including the refusal of any inherent victimary status, while rejecting what appears to be the somewhat juvenile excess evident in his fantasies of mastery and power? I say ‘appears to be’ here, being mindful of Frances Nesbitt Oppel’s (2005) interpretation of Nietzsche’s reference to the Übermensch,1 where, in her discussion of Nietzsche on gender, she reads his intent in a more sympathetic light.

THE PATHOS OF WEAKNESS AND STRENGTH In a way one could hazard that the entire work of Nietzsche is concerned with a refusal of any kind of construct regarding social relations that gives ground to the notion of victim. As soon as a victimizing relation is posited, it is reliant on a concept of responsibility and moral approbation, both of which Nietzsche not only rejects, but rails against. The idea that an-other is responsible for my misfortune, or my abject fate, is a concept he abhors. The idea that any such relation and its associated act are wrong and should be legislated against to protect potential victims is equally abhorrent. This abhorrence relates to the erroneous presumptions these ideas make regarding the cause of human action and also because of a form of ‘weakness’ they posit at the heart of human sociality. Nietzsche’s campaign against ‘morality’, and all that the imposition of the moral law implies, has been at the heart of his writings throughout. It represents an extraordinary departure from even the most radical tensions traversing philosophy in an industrializing and democratizing Europe of the nineteenth century. Furthermore, it signals a departure from the feminist refusal of victimhood, grounded as it is in the claim to moral goodness and rightness of each person’s inviolable right to dignity, autonomy and respect (with the apparent exception of those who are proven, or judged, to have been ‘responsible’ for transgressing this prohibition on violation). The crucial point of the Nietzschean claim is in a sense a psychological one, in that the cause of human action, he states, is not known; in fact, is not knowable. The very idea that a cause can be elicited from an effect in

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this regard, that there is a causal relation between ‘right knowledge’ and ‘right action’ is misguided, or worse delusional. In one of his early works, Nietzsche possibly anticipates Freud with the observation that ‘nothing can be more incomplete than his [humankind’s] image of the totality of drives which constitute his being’ (1997: 74). Whether his reference is or is not to a Freudian unconscious, the unknown of the drives is certainly explicit. When the notion of conscious intent is so drastically undermined, any philosophy of a freedom of will (and of chance as the corollary of purpose or intent) is overshadowed by whatever this negation or critique might reveal. Reading Nietzsche one gains the impression of his intense and passionate desire for an existence that is somehow more wild, exuberant and courageous than one circumscribed by the societal rule, let alone the law. Placing blame on someone else for our suffering, and through this deriving at least some satisfaction from the societal revenge that such a blame might unleash, is the gesture of the weak and humiliated, according to Nietzsche, a gesture that gives, even momentarily, a ‘feeling of power’. This is the case, whether or not the blamed ‘someone’ is guilty of the act that is fi rstly assumed to be an intentionally harmful act, or that is secondly assumed to have ‘caused’ the suffering experienced. Unlike Girard, for whom the law’s insistence that guilt be determined mitigates the wrongness of violence directed towards an innocent sacrificial victim, for Nietzsche the law merely reincarnates this same logic. The so-called criminal who is punished is ‘never he who performed the deed’ but is rather ‘always the scapegoat’ (1997: 143). It is obvious that this claim by Nietzsche stands, in his view, regardless of the criminal justice system’s endeavors to determine guilt. The law that assigns guilt and apportions punishment, or in our contemporary context possibly that apportions coding, surveillance and imprisonment, is one that surreptitiously perpetuates a sacrificial victimage that is not far from the sacrificial rituals of group intoxication and excess in the commentaries of Girard and Bataille. In Nietzschean terms, the law and its enforcement provides a barrier behind which those whose injuries invoke a fury of blame can take shelter as they seek the violence of revenge. When Nietzsche demands that ‘man must be delivered from revenge’ (1978: 99) clearly he considers that neither the prohibitions and protections offered by the law nor the moral dictates of religion accomplish any such deliverance. If anything, they continue the sacrificial practices in other guises that serve, at least partially, to obscure the vengeance they serve. For the ‘victim’, it would seem, to not be a victim, would be to disavow any form of protection from the ravages of social life, from the passions of an unpredictable collectivity, or the violating intent of an opponent. To make sense of such a view it is necessary to reflect on the philosophy that underpins it. In the name of what kind of ‘society’, or manifestation of humanity, does Nietzsche leave the ‘victim’ so exposed in his or her apparent vulnerability? Before moving to this reflection, it is useful to consider fi rstly the way Nietzsche’s opposition to the notion of

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conscious responsibility for the deed, and the morality that flows from it, is also implicated in any societal quest for ‘equality’. In Nietzsche’s philosophy it is quite simple: ‘men [sic] are not equal’ (1978: 101). The entire enterprise demanding equality and human rights is, in his discourse, one motivated by vengeance. Vengeance in the sense of a reactive emotion fuelled by a bitter ressentiment that calls for those responsible to pay for their imposition of suffering on others; equality will be forced upon us. Or possibly also less a vengeance and more a condemnation fuelled by envy; the powerful will be damned for their enjoyment. This view of Nietzsche is one that Žižek aligns with Lacan and Freud when he makes the point that these authors share ‘the idea that justice as equality is founded on envy: our envy of the other who has what we do not have, and who enjoys it’ (2006: 37). The demand for equality and justice is therefore one that insists on the curtailment of the excessive enjoyment of the other ‘so that everyone’s enjoyment will be equal’. This demand imposes a kind of asceticism on all, an imposition that is ironically sustained through the injunction to ‘enjoy!’ the very conditions of our imposed constraint. For Nietzsche, the campaign for equality represents hardly the struggle of the free in spirit and rather a numbing kind of leveling that has, at its root, a desire for the abolition of suffering. The ‘levelers’ are ‘unfree and ridiculously superficial’: What they would like to strive for with all their powers is the universal green-pasture happiness of the herd, with security, lack of danger, comfort, and an easier life for everyone; the two songs and doctrines which they repeat most often are ‘equality of rights’ and ‘sympathy for all that suffers’—and suffering itself they take for something that must be abolished. (1989: 54, emphasis in original) The conformity that is engendered by what, to Nietzsche, can only be a phantom of equality is nothing short of deadening and productive of nothing less than a lifeless obedience. In fact, he views the principle of constraint founding such a societal ethos to be a ‘denial of life’ and ‘a principle of disintegration and decay’ (p.203). His rejection of a principle in the name of its denial of life that would, on the face of it, appear to be protective of ‘life’, might seem to be contradictory. Yet this rejection by Nietzsche is unequivocal precisely because this principle attempts to shore up life against death, integration against disintegration, flourishing against decay. Such a bifurcation is deadly because it disdains any form of destruction and violence that is, according to Nietzsche, integral to that which is ‘life’, indeed, to that which affirms life. The construct of ‘equality’ must, by definition, rely on a measure of equivalence. Equivalence, not identity, presupposes a standard as a third term against which items can be assessed by virtue of their approximation to, or degrees of difference from, this standard. The postulate that all

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humans are equal is clearly and ironically revealed as a vacuous claim when the absence of equality is evident by almost any measure. Alternatively, the commandment (rather than assertion of some prior and transcendent truth) that all humans should be equal (have the right to be treated equally and so on), is reliant on the notion of ‘right’ as a kind of overlay that simultaneously declares and obscures the compensation necessary to create the ‘as if’ equal. 2 Tracing equivalence to its originary term of the economic relation through exchange (purchase, sale, barter, trade), Nietzsche analyzes how this dubious notion of equivalence is at the base of the construct of punishment. The moral idea of ‘ought’, he asserts, originates from the materiality of ‘owe’ in the sense of being subject to a debt. When an ‘evildoer’ transgresses the societal law, Nietzsche claims that, throughout the longest period of human history the punishment infl icted cannot be understood to be directed towards the transgressor because s/he is deemed guilty of ill-intent and therefore is deserving of punishment. Behind or beyond this appearance is rather the unleashing of anger at the pain of an injury; an anger that is vented on whomsoever is deemed to be the author of the injury. Nietzsche observes that this anger is moderated in accordance with the idea that an equivalent price, in some form of infliction of pain, can be extracted for every injury. He asks ‘Whence is it that this ancient deeprooted and now perhaps ineradicable idea has drawn its strength, this idea of an equivalency between injury and pain?’ (2003: 39) And his answer is that it lies in the contractual relationship between a creditor and a debtor, with its roots in processes of economic exchange, a relationship whose history originates with that of legal rights. Deeply skeptical of the balance sheet approach to social ‘harmony’ expounded by the likes of John Stuart Mill, Nietzsche rejects, with no hesitation, the ‘reciprocity’ accompanying these notions of what is ‘right and fair’; reciprocity with its assumptions of equivalence is, he states, ‘a piece of gross vulgarity’ (1968: 498). Thus, as Nietzsche claims in The Genealogy of Morals, the moral vocabulary of concepts such as ‘guilt’, ‘conscience’ and ‘duty’ began with this contractual relation. Nietzsche’s determination is to show how this beginning was ‘saturated with blood’ because of the ‘happiness’, or ‘satisfaction’, or even, we could say, ‘jouissance’ to be had in the ‘claim to cruelty’ through the infl iction of suffering to extract the price to be paid for one’s suffering. This compensation for injury reveals, according to Nietzsche, a ‘joy in sheer violence’, not only for the payment it represents, but also for the power it even temporarily bestows on the creditor. The creditor as victim can ‘despise and ill-treat’ the ‘ower’ (or witness him/her being despised and ill-treated) and in doing do, ‘participate in the rights of masters’ (2003: 40). This satisfaction of s/he constituted as victim originates with his/her ressentiment against those very masters. Nietzsche’s famous and controversial concept of ressentiment is one that has proven too challenging in its agonistic import for advocates of social justice and human rights to contemplate seriously. Ressentiment is a

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‘morality for the slaves’ according to Nietzsche; cast as victims in their very act of contestation and revolt, ressentiment is an emotion of hatred and vengeance towards those deemed guilty of infl icting oppression and degradation. Masters may have contempt or disdain for those on whom they rely and oppress, but the slave’s emotion is hatred, vindication and desire for the power of the master. Nietzsche’s ‘moralities’ of master and slave are of course in themselves constructions deriving from his ‘campaign’ specifically against morality. The very notion of ‘morality’, as one assuming that actions can and should be performed out of sympathy for others, produces a ‘social effect of timidity’ and conformity (1997: 105). This assumption of sympathy in itself is reliant on a common desire for a fantasmatic existence free from danger, so that the sense of communal security becomes equivalent to the ‘good’. Evil, by contrast, is that injurious source of harm, that dominating and powerful cause of my suffering, which I am powerless to prevent or overcome. It follows that the ‘good’, the ‘we who are homeless’ (1974: 338), are defi ned by our weakness, mildness, and righteousness; the good are inoffensive, humane and to be pitied for the harms that evil others inflict upon them. Through the words of Nietzsche’s Zarathustra: ‘I have often laughed at the weaklings who thought themselves good because they had no claws’ (1978: 118). The good in turn do not and cannot oppress; the good do not even seek revenge directly but hand this over to ‘God’ as a sublime form of self-deception that effectively sustains the delusional belief in the association of weakness with freedom. Nietzsche’s cynicism regarding the ostensible values of the ‘good’ and its apparent rule is evident in his description in The Will to Power: Datum: the oppressed, the lowly, the great masses of slaves and semislaves desire power. First step: they make themselves free—they ransom themselves, in imagination at fi rst, they recognize one another, they prevail. Second step: they enter into battle, they demand recognition, equal rights, ‘justice’. Third step: they demand privileges (—they draw the representatives of power over to their side). Fourth step: they demand exclusive power, and they get it. (1968: 126, emphasis in original) This ‘democratic’ accomplishment represents a victorious supremacy of the mediocrity of the ‘herd instinct’; the political spread of an insipid and deadening morality that, in Nietzsche’s vocabulary, ‘naturalizes’ Christianity, instituting a desire for ‘justice’ as the compensation for the inability to overpower. In a sense, therefore, democracy in these terms is the product, or extension, of a slave morality producing a fantasy of power through ‘justice’. What is Nietzsche’s point of departure for these caustic and derisive attacks on what might also be called, in other contexts, the protection of an

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inevitable human vulnerability? Why does he juxtapose strength and weakness in such absolute terms? What countervailing vision does he propose? Nietzsche’s critique of ressentiment and ‘morality’ provide an entry point to the stakes of an uncompromizing confrontation with the Other. How this confrontation is predicated on a counter-philosophy, a ‘revaluation of all values’ that celebrates an affirmation of ‘life’, is what Nietzsche wishes his readers to accept as a challenge. Through this, the pathos of humanity’s fi xation on a binary of strength and inviolability against weakness and vulnerability becomes available for scrutiny.

CONDEMNING SACRIFICE For Nietzsche, revenge, punishment, and sacrifice are all manifestations of our human propensity to fall prey to an overriding belief and reification of the notion of will and conscious intentionality. Pointless suffering would be unbearable. If we suffer pain, someone must be (made) responsible for this suffering—establishing (or hallucinating) the reason for suffering enables blame; the imputation of intent or will to that source of pain enables punishment and the extraction of payment in return, the whole point, in fact, being to punish and get paid. The concept of will legitimates the act of revenge; it almost becomes a ‘right’, even if handed to ‘God’ or the law enforcement agencies of the state. The ‘instinct of revenge’ is the fundamental moving force that ‘has so mastered mankind in the course of millennia that the whole of metaphysics, psychology, conception of history, but above all morality, is impregnated with it’ (1968: 401). And of course, the point is not lost that punishment does nothing to generate any sense of guilt or remorse but simply reiterates the very violence for which the guilty party is being punished. Vengeance, Nietzsche claims, acts like a kind of narcotic in that it deadens the feeling of being subject to pain by deflecting consciousness onto the infliction of pain. In The Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche considers the figure of the ‘ascetic priest’ and the meaning of ‘ascetic ideals’. The asceticism accompanying the imposition of the moral law of justice has its ‘herdsmen’; it has the ascetic priest, who shepherds the weak and oppressed as they gravitate willingly towards the ‘herd’. Functioning like a kind of channel for an intense emotion of ressentiment, the ascetic priest of Christianity (that ‘treasure-chamber of ingenious consolations’, 2003: 94) reverses the violence of revenge through insisting that the blame can only be directed within. Equally, the ascetic priest will, from time to time, orchestrate the unleashing of emotional excess, yet always authorized by a religious meaning and justification. This outlet for emotions of rage that fuel revenge must be paid for—with their measure of guilt. In Nietzsche’s words: Every emotional excess which hurt; everything which broke, overthrew, crushed, transported, ravished; the mystery of the torture-chamber, the

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For Nietzsche, although different from pleasure, pain cannot be understood to be the opposite of pleasure (1968: 371). Possibly the translation of ‘pain’ from the German is intended to encompass the meaning of ‘suffering’.3 According to Nietzsche, there is no ‘pain as such’. It only registers as a judgment of harm; it is the retrospective appraisal of the consequence of harm that hurts. In Will to Power he notes that ‘in countless cases we first make a thing painful by investing it with an evaluation’ (1968: 150, emphasis in original). Pleasure accompanies an increase in a ‘feeling of power’ in its sense of an affi rmation of life, and in addition, the ‘little’ stimulus of pain in encountering some form of resistance shares the ‘exciting’ qualities of pleasure and can enhance the ‘feeling of superabundance’. The jouissance of such enhancement of stimulus is a form of ‘enjoying’ that extends through a kind of dialectic of pleasure and pain. Thus, pleasure does not exist independently from pain (‘pleasure is a kind of pain’, p.271; ‘the happy man’ is a ‘herd ideal’, p.370). In this sense, Nietzsche’s view that pleasure and pain are not opposites because they share the quality of stimuli is different from, for example, the notion that hot and cold are not opposites because they share the quality of temperature. Unlike the dichotomy (if posed as such) of hot and cold, pleasure and pain (or suffering) are mutually sustaining in the particularities of their experience or inducement. In The Genealogy of Morals he refers to sacrifice as the repayment of debt. In Nietzsche’s assessment, this conviction of owing a debt, whether it be to a god(s) or to ancestors, is something that has become more prominent throughout human history. Thus, the extraction of payment through revenge and punishment is mirrored by the payment of a debt that is felt to be owed. In this context of humanity’s early history, he relates the infliction of pain to the inscribing of memory in the very flesh, so that the obligation to be repaid, or the pledge to be fulfi lled, is remembered. The human being makes promises and enters into obligatory pacts—these need to be remembered to be honored: ‘[o]nly that which never stops hurting remains in memory’ (2003: 37). The most ‘dreadful sacrifices’, ‘loathsome mutilations’, and ‘cruel rituals of all the religious cults’ are, according to Nietzsche, manifestations of this system of mnemonics. After listing the most appalling of tortures (mostly in mediaeval Europe), he claims that the purpose they served was to fi x in memory ‘five or six “I will nots” with regard to which he had already given his promise’ (p.38). His scorn for such means used ostensibly to establish the ‘good’, with its attendant asceticism, is palpable. In the light of the subsequent analyses of authors such as Girard, Walter, and Maertens, this interpretation of Nietzsche regarding mnemonics is to be approached with caution for its limited scope.

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Yet there is another dimension to sacrifice for Nietzsche. The sacrificial gesture, as a communal act of cruelty, is, in Nietzschean discourse, of a piece with the emotion of revenge at the heart of ressentiment. In Daybreak, he claims that the collective release is a means through which the community ‘refreshes itself’ (1997: 16), with human sacrifice achieving the greatest exaltation as it brings with it the greatest feeling of power. It is this ‘feeling of power’ that is central to Nietzsche’s analysis. To sacrifice oneself—or more accurately, as Nietzsche is translated, ‘making a sacrifice of yourselves’—is to enjoy ‘the ecstatic thought of being at one with the powerful being, whether a god or a man [sic—presumably also, although differently, goddess or woman], to whom you dedicate yourselves’ (p.134). In doing so ‘you revel in the feeling of his power, to which your very sacrifice is an additional witness’ (p.135). Nietzsche then suggests that what is actually happening in this process of self-sacrifice is a semblance only; it is the transformation in thought into gods that facilitates a certain transport of power to mean ‘you’ can enjoy as the god, or in Lacanian terms one might say as the Other enjoys. In this remarkable passage, Nietzsche observes that the heights of this hallucinated enjoyment afford a view on the very locus of oppression inhabited by the hallucinator, and from this vantage point, the imposition of ‘morality’, obedience, duty and rationality appears positively ‘disagreeable’. What is desired is the ‘intoxication and excess’; what is duly despised is the very morality that forbids it and to which the subject of ressentiment succumbs. It is this particular form of social collectivity, with its docility, cowardice, conformity and submission that Nietzsche condemns. This analysis of the self-sacrifice is recuperated by an element of Lacan’s notion of sacrifice discussed in Chapter Four. Sacrifice is possibly, in a sense, always a self-sacrifice, if the focus is less a matter of what is sacrificed and more a matter of what is conjured by the sacrificing subject in the process. We saw how, for Lacan, sacrifice brings into existence the Other as desiring; the Other is lured by the sacrifice and appears therefore as desiring, this apparition creating a structural alignment between the desiring subject at a loss and the locus of the Other whose jouissance holds the subject’s very existence in its power. The sacrifice elicits the desire of the Other and enables the subject to partake in this jouissance, even fleetingly, ‘in thought’ as Nietzsche would have it. Is it possible that Nietzsche’s consequential ‘feeling of power’ bears a similarity to Lacan’s consequential reassurance that the elusive objet a (as the subject’s sought-after ‘being’) is, because they (the gods, the Other) desire like us, of the same order of the desiring subject? Nietzsche turns the tyranny more usually associated with the awesome will of the perpetrator of violence on its head; it is the tyranny of the will of the one who suffers, the one who evaluates his/her injury and suffering as being caused by another, and who then, in his/her fury and powerlessness, struggles to turn the singularity of this experience into an abstraction of law that will bind and compel revenge for all suffering. The whole edifice

110 Victims, Gender and Jouissance of ‘higher culture’, he insists, can be attributed to varying abstractions or ‘spiritualizations’ of this very process of cruelty. Rather than take refuge in the satisfaction of revenge through a righteous justice that apportions payment by means of punishment in accordance with a spurious logic of equivalence, Nietzsche appeals to his readers to attend to a certain ‘discipline’ of suffering. In Beyond Good and Evil he writes of the ‘inventiveness and courage in enduring’ and the creative profundity that results from perseverance in the face of unhappiness or ruin. Blame and its petty satisfactions of infl icting a counter-suffering does nothing more than nourish weakness, whereas to fully recognize and confront the fact that there is no-one or -thing to blame cultivates strength. The writings of Nietzsche are compelled by a conviction that the strength of the exceptional human being, who does not succumb to any variation of revenge and its ideological supports in ‘morality’ and ‘justice’, is the only hope for the species. Even more profoundly than the refusal of blame, with its refusal of the status of being a victim of someone else’s supposed intent to harm, Nietzsche insists on the eradication of any notion of blame for the human condition per se. He proposes his wish to ‘restore innocence to becoming’ in the superiority of the idea that: no-one has given man his qualities, neither God, nor society, nor his parents and ancestors, nor he himself—that no one is to blame for him. There is no being that could be held responsible for the fact that anyone exists at all, that anyone is thus and thus, that anyone was born in certain circumstances, in a certain environment.—It is a tremendous restorative that such a being is lacking. (1968: 402) This Nietzschean notion of personhood is devoid, not only of the Other of the Other, but of the Other. It is not even a question of the ‘individual’, a figure of vanity, he suggests, but a form of the subject reconciled to its exsistence as one owing nothing and to whom nothing is, or can be, owed. Such a subject ‘is’ only its acts, including its acts of speech, and its ontology is that of becoming. There is a wild kind of freedom that Nietzsche claims for this vision of the exceptional human being whose subjectivity lives and breathes this ethos. Where it appears that Nietzsche has overturned the tyranny of the perpetrator to make visible the tyranny of the victim, what has really occurred through this maneuver is making evident the tyrannical nature of both poles of this binary opposition or dialectical construct. The perpetrator is the victim is the perpetrator, in an endless rotation that renders the positions increasingly indistinct; the prey becomes the predator, the good becomes the evil it endeavors to expel. Only through the exception can an alternative be envisaged, an alternative that Nietzsche romances with notions of ‘life’ and the ‘species’, ‘strength’ and the ‘will to power’. Where a

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‘slave morality’ says ‘no’, turning away from the rigors of inevitable contingency, retreating into a vindictive form of nihilism and petty-minded protectionism, Nietzsche embraces a ‘master morality’ in exuberance that says ‘yes’ to life, that is strengthened through confronting challenge, affi rming what he is famous for calling the ‘eternal return’, which is discussed briefly below. The brazen provocation of Nietzsche is to valorize the exceptional singular, countering the mediocrity of the herd; valorizing the strong as the fortunate masters, whose place the weak desire to take. While condemning sacrifice as a variant of vengeance, there is another rendition in Nietzsche’s writings where he insists that sacrifice, in the sense of giving up a decaying or weak and lesser part for the sake of conserving the living, vigorous and stronger part, is necessary for revitalization: ‘The species requires that the ill-constituted, weak, degenerate, perish’ (1968: 142). It is, in his analysis, Christianity that insisted and instituted that noone be sacrificed. It is precisely the position exemplified in this kind of idea that has concerned (or appalled) critics over the years, as Nietzsche seems to provide a proxy rationale for the ideology of National Socialism that took root in Germany not long after his death. It becomes extremely difficult to conceptualize how his vision of the Übermensch could possibly be supported in the face of Nazi, or any other, totalitarianism. Yet this difficulty needs at least to be faced. There is nothing in Nietzsche’s writings that would in any way inhibit massive and uncompromizing opposition to the Nazi regime, even in the face of torture and death. On the contrary, possibly, the acquiescence of the majority of the German people represents the very herd propensity to conformity that he so disdains. He addresses the ambiguity of destruction in acknowledging that the desire for the destruction associated, of necessity, with change and becoming can be an expression of a Dionysian overflowing of energy; and yet it can equally be a manifestation of the hatred experienced by the ‘weak’ who must destroy to extract payment and to partake of the hallucinated ‘feeling of power’. Possibly National Socialism represented the latter, dressed up in an ideological semblance of the former, reflecting the way acts of ressentiment desire the position of ‘master’ and therefore mimic a perception of its character. Sacrifice is a word used by Nietzsche for this necessity of destruction and decay when approached from the point of view of ‘life’. The overflowing of energy, which is creative in both its making and destroying, is what Nietzsche calls the ‘will to power’. This will to power is an ‘active determining’ (1968: 298), a kind of drive to overcome and achieve mastery, but in the absence of any telos or fi nitude. Simply, ‘life’ is will to power (1968: 148; 1989: 203). There is an elemental, organic reference to which Nietzsche has recourse in his celebration of the will to power: appropriation, violence, injury and exploitation are, he claims, integral to ‘what lives’, along with creativity (1989: 203). Becoming, with its energetic, Dionysian innocence, cannot be approached conceptually from a dualist logic that would divide the creative and the destructive. Both are integral, necessary and mutually

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sustaining. Nietzsche is clear he is not talking about the will to life in the sense of survival; the will to power is importantly a more active construct encompassing a drive towards mastery. Furthermore, the will to power and the innocence of becoming, are ‘beyond’ good and evil; he writes of ‘nature’s magnificent indifference to good and evil’ (1968: 448). Good and evil represent elements of the ‘slave morality’ of ressentiment. From the point of view of the ‘slave morality’, the ‘weak’ and harmless are those considered ‘good’ and those who inspire fear and dread are deemed ‘evil’; from the point of view of the ‘master morality’, those who are ‘good’ want to inspire fear and dread—the ‘bad’ are not ‘evil’ but are, rather, merely contemptible. Yet from the point of view of ‘life’ and the will to power, to be a creator in the domain of good and evil one must annihilate and make a break with values of the ‘good’. It is in this sense that he can write in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, ‘the highest evil belongs to the highest goodness’ (1978: 116). As with creativity and destruction, it is not possible to have good without evil and vice versa, nor life without death: they cannot be opposed. As soon as a virtue is fully embraced to the radical exclusion, or sacrifice, of any counter-veiling possibility, one becomes a victim of this virtue—a dedicated slave to it, no less. Dualist modes of thought create the very contradictions that traverse the entire domain of morality. The notion of a drive inspired by an overcoming, a becoming, a mastery, is not a stance of human being against the world, according to Nietzsche—such a view would be negating the world and would assume human and world to be separate. That these dualisms, and their attendant negations, are fabrications of a propensity to weakness and ressentiment is evident in the non-dualist construct of the ‘eternal return’. Life in its organic, destructively creative, sheer ongoing-ness is what Nietzsche refers to as the ‘eternal return’, or ‘eternal recurrence’. From this perspective, there are no impediments and no fi nitude. In his book The Will to Power, he refers to the eternal return as follows: ‘Let us think this thought in its most terrible form: existence as it is, without meaning or aim, yet recurring inevitably without any fi nale of nothingness: “the eternal recurrence”’ (1968: 35, emphasis in original). The figure of Dionysus recurs in this context throughout the writings of Nietzsche. As translator Walter Kaufmann writes in a footnote in The Gay Science (1974: 331), Nietzsche’s celebration of Dionysian abundance is not opposed to the alternative Greek figure of the Apollonian. It is ressentiment that Nietzsche opposes, a phenomenon that he associates with Christianity in particular and not with the Apollonian. In fact Nietzsche does comment that the Apollonian grew out of a Dionysian soil. That which he describes as Dionysian is alluded to in numerous different contexts, for example, in The Will to Power, the ‘sensuality and cruelty’ of Dionysus appearing in the transitory instance, is viewed as an enjoyment of the combination of productive and destructive force, and, as such, as ‘continual creation’.

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The exceptional human being is one who refuses the self-interested retreat into the apparent, albeit ambivalent, safety of the group, the collective (or the ‘herd’ as Nietzsche disparagingly coins it, drawing attention to its rather bovine passivity and conformity); ambivalent, it seems, because the safety is rather more in not distinguishing oneself from the group rather than any inherent safety in the nature of a group. The Übermensch is, above all else, a creator; as such s/he is not inhibited by the pressures that make the ‘average’ human being establish its sense of itself through the comforting reinforcement it derives from its identification with group belonging. Nietzsche elevates this figure with spatial metaphors giving it a locus of superiority and heightened vision and scope. The Übermensch inhabits an aristocratic4 world that cannot be compared to the impoverished mentality of the ‘herd’. The herd is threatened by the actions of the Übermensch because the very act of ‘rising above’ the crowd, of distinguishing oneself from those conforming pressures, shakes the confidence of the collective in the basis of its very existence. Hence the Übermensch is experienced as dangerous and is the object of slander, insult, aggression and fear. The writings of Nietzsche present a huge challenge to the oppositional relation of perpetrator and victim, forcing us to at least consider the revaluation he proposes of the usually assumed evil inherent in the perpetrator’s guilt and the unsullied ‘good’ inherent in the victim’s claim to innocence. The moral injunctions regarding the payment for the criminal act spring, uncritically he would claim, from this assumed relation. In the following section the discussion is drawn into conversation with contemporary critical debate on the nature of ethics and evil to clarify where Nietzsche’s arguments and provocations might contribute to the question of sex-gender, the construct of victim, and the enjoyment or jouissance that possibly, and problematically, ‘knots’ this relation.

THE POWER OF LACK There is a paradox to be navigated in Nietzsche’s writings: the affi rmation of ‘life’ is only possible through a simultaneous radical negation of just about everything familiar that authorizes social relations, systems of morality, justice, and politics. To successfully chart a course through his works without falling into the trap of assuming contradiction requires of necessity that one drops any dualist perspective that insists on an ontological boundedness asserting either the One or the Other. His rejection of such an ontology is fundamental to his philosophy and is evident in the following statement in The Gay Science: Such erroneous articles of faith, which were continually inherited, until they became almost part of the basic endowment of the species,

114 Victims, Gender and Jouissance include the following: that there are enduring things; that there are equal things; that there are things, substances, bodies; that a thing is what it appears to be; that our will is free; that what is good for me is also good in itself. (1974: 169) These ‘erroneous articles of faith’ form a web of entrenched beliefs from which it is extraordinarily difficult for human beings, across histories and cultures, to extract themselves. And yet, according to Nietzsche, for all the reasons discussed above, it is vital that they do so. In The Will to Power, there is a rejection of any illusion of ‘the all’ or ‘the unity’; Nietzsche proclaims that ‘we must shatter the all; unlearn respect for the all’ (1968: 181). Such an appeal is entirely consistent with the critique of ‘things’ ontological in the preceding quotation.5 Nietzsche’s critique of ontology both follows from and leads to a refusal of the status of victim, a status implicating the comfort derived from the very security of a boundedness of ‘things’ that, in turn, allows for discourses of inclusion, exclusion, rights and morals. Possibly the most important point we can take from Nietzsche is that to refuse the possibility of being a victim is to also refuse all of the societal protections, prohibitions and injunctions that shore up the subject (the big ‘I’) against the possibility of being vulnerable to becoming a victim. This discussion has been silent on the question of Nietzsche and sexgender as I am less interested in whether there is a feminist argument to be made that there is a deconstruction of the binary of male and female evident in his work (see Oppel, 2005, for such an argument, not an unimportant one) and more interested in the implications of his critique of ressentiment for feminist concerns regarding gender and the construct of victim. If refusal of the victim involves equally a relinquishing of the concept of blame or the possibility of invoking any notion of responsibility qua cause in the sense of intent for transgressive acts—in other words, a turning away from the Other as problematically both potential violator and protector—the debate around the work that the status of ‘victim’ accomplishes or otherwise for women, or for sexed subjects, shifts onto an altogether different terrain. It becomes necessary to back up from the observations Nietzsche lays before us and ask, why does the human subject have a propensity to ressentiment, and how does this propensity connect with its sexed inevitability? Rather than presuming woman, or the feminine, as prior to violation, sacrifice and victimhood, we must ask instead how the very structure of the subject-as-sexed is topologically configured in relation to the possibility of this refusal. The question of victim thus moves away from a debate defi ned in terms of assertions of autonomy, rights to integrity of body and personhood, even from claims regarding the feminine or maternal as object of sacrificial violence. It shifts to the structure of sex-gender, masculine and feminine, as these subject positions are differentiated, and the stakes involved in their ‘relation’, their differential jouissance, their desires. To explore these questions, introduced

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already in the preceding pages, we can only go so far with Nietzsche. Trying to see past his explicit and baldly stated misogyny (a feature of his writing that Oppel, 2005, tries to convince us is a product of his times and therefore a non-essentialist manifestation of how women as feminine were constructed in the late nineteenth century milieu in which he wrote), we need something more than ‘beyond’ the male and female binary. Why the binary? The works of both Lacan and Baudrillard provide important points of entry to these questions that can be analyzed in relation to the figure of victim; their articulations and divergences throw up compelling problematics that open onto new elements in this theoretical debate. Here I focus on Lacanian contributions, and the following chapter takes up the questions from a Baudrillardian viewpoint. What is missing from the discussion on Nietzsche above is an indication of what he envisions regarding the human being who refuses ressentiment. What is the nature of this exceptional state of becoming that is infused with life in its non-dual radiance of creative abundance and violent, even cruel, destruction? There is an innocence and delight associated with the absence of meaning or purpose in life, which appears particularly in the frequent image of the child playing and the child-like attributes of an apprehension of the eternal return. Oppel maintains that those who have overcome ressentiment in Nietzsche’s texts have ‘learned to love’ (2005: 192); furthermore, she claims that the overcoming that characterizes the Übermensch involves, importantly, overcoming the ‘resentment towards women’ and towards their connection with the cycle of life and death (p.14). Far from being misogynist or sexist, Nietzsche is read by Oppel as a critical philosopher regarding sex-gender, claiming that his writings cannot be interpreted in any way as essentialist. This would certainly be consistent with the critical ontology and indeed the broader critique of knowledge practices that Nietzsche explicitly espouses. There are significant moments in Nietzsche’s work where love appears as the very source of the boundless creativity productive of strength and the will to power. In The Gay Science he asserts ‘One must learn to love’ (1974: 262)—love does not precede ressentiment but involves a learning and an overcoming. In a typically lyrical passage, he opines that the abundant fruits of this overcoming would surely have to result in a happiness that humanity has not known so far: the happiness of a god full of power and love, full of tears and laughter, a happiness that, like the sun in the evening, continually bestows its inexhaustible riches, pouring them into the sea. . . . (1974: 268–269) The inseparability of ‘unhappiness’ and ‘happiness’ is evident in this ongoing overcoming. This love is not one prescribed by command, nor one associated with any pious or paternalistic gestures of comfort or the stasis of pleasure; love is passionate and without predation.

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In Lacanian psychoanalysis, love in the context of the sexual relation (which, as discussed, Lacan argues does not exist) is approached from its fundamental impossibility: to give what one does not have—what one lacks, in its association with desire. In Seminar XX Lacan reiterates the inseparability of love and hatred. To not know hatred is to not know love— in fact ‘one knows nothing of love without hate’ (1998b: 91). Love, related closely as it is to knowledge (p.144), to this ‘knowing’, is addressed to the Other’s resemblance (semblance) to objet a as cause of desire, and as such, to the semblance of being. Hatred is also ‘addressed to being’, to objet a, when the Other (as locus of knowing) does not know (the Other always does not know), and in not knowing presents the specter of ‘ex-sistence’. To quote Lacan: ‘Nothing concentrates more hatred than that act of saying in which ex-sistence is situated’ (p.121). By way of extension, Faye (2009) analyzes the Holocaust, taking up André’s (2007) argument and rendition of the sacrifice (discussed in Chapter Four), as a singular, monstrous incarnation of such hatred addressed to being. Faye, following André who draws on Lacan, positions this hatred as one directed towards the very division in which the subject is fatally imbricated. When this division was constructed ideologically by Hitler and then through National Socialism as one that threatened the purity of the German people in their wholeness, the Jew was to be destroyed as the semblance of being, of objet a, of the Thing. This Thing was the object of hated and destruction because it was made to symbolize that which divided the German people from themselves. The ‘solid hatred addressed to being’ (Lacan 1998b: 99) was addressed to ‘the being of jouissance of the other’. Separating the Jews from others, removing their civil status, rendering them less than human and fi nally killing them to incinerate their bodies as nothing more than non-human waste shows the progressive steps through which this hatred aimed to remove this ‘being of jouissance of the other’ from humanity. To sacrifice to the ‘dark god’— making the god exist, as Lacan would have it—aimed to guarantee the ideal of a lost purity, to restore this wholeness and the ideal of an eternal jouissance ‘so that desire and jouissance, ex-sistence and being are ONE’, to cite Faye again (2009: 19). In Lacanian discourse, to love or to hate is to address the semblance of being as objet a. How does the co-existence of love and hate in Lacan relate to the parallel claim for the forces of creativity and destruction, or life and death, in Nietzsche? For both authors, neither of the two terms can be sectioned and excluded, separated or removed (to have one without the other), and any fantasy of so doing is delusional, if not the prelude to ruination, whether at the level of the subject or an entire nation. For Nietzsche, the ‘good’ is predicated on a fantasy of the abolition of suffering; for Lacan, any fantasmatic ideal of the One or the whole inclusive of desire, jouissance and ex-sistence, while intrinsic to the formation of the subject, is illusory and can be deadly while objet a is not differentiated from the Other. Nietzsche’s Übermensch overcomes ressentiment to learn to love, Lacan’s subject traverses the

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fantasy (of wholeness and omnipotence) to avow its jouissance and know the truth of its division. Love is integral to the analytic process whereby the analyst occupies the position of objet a; analysis aims to dislocate, or detach, objet a from the Other. The propensity to ressentiment is arguably inherent in the agitations that stir and challenge the subject as split and divided when that division is disavowed. The Übermensch is a figure, as a projection of Nietzsche’s imaginative, even ecstatic6 philosophy, confronting the multiplicity of becoming without creating this becomingness of existence as a series of ‘its’, as this or that, and without carving ‘it’ up into a multitude of inclusions and exclusions. The refusal to succumb to ressentiment and the social conformity it nurtures and defends has some echoes in Copjec’s Lacanian refusal to fall prey to the incentives of comfort, security and pleasure offered within the utilitarian ideology in return for surrendering one’s desire. Not giving ground relative to one’s desire could be the signature of the Übermensch. There is a power, in the Nietzschean sense of will to power, in the avowal of desire as lack. While Nietzsche proclaims the exceptional figure of the Übermensch to be ‘beyond good and evil’, where ‘beyond’ suggests the sense of having traversed and overcome this bifurcation to arrive at a locus of neither, there is also an argument to the effect that this ‘beyond’ is rather more a ‘beneath’. Alain Badiou (2001), in Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, follows both Nietzsche and Lacan in his radical vision that would see a rejection of an ethics premised on a universal subject of ‘human rights’ and moral law and an inevitable victimary status of human beings that he claims accompanies such an ethics. He considers that the human subject understood within such a framework of ethics is defi nable precisely in terms of being a victim, or at least as ‘the being who is capable of recognizing himself [sic] as a victim’ (Badiou, 2001: 10 emphasis in original). Badiou argues vehemently against this assumed victimary status of humanity, insisting that the victim is the human being reduced to its animality, stripped of its subjectivity; the victim begins when human subjectivity has been eclipsed and the victim emerges as one who is no longer resisting, or able to resist, its annihilation as subject. To remain a human being, to retain subjectivity in the face of a victimizing process, is to resist becoming coincidental with identity of the victim. This figure of the victim in these terms has some similarity to Agamben’s ‘bare life’ as homo sacer who, in his terms, can be killed but not be sacrificed. To Badiou, the victim is a being-for-death, mortal, whereas the human subject is ‘immortal’. It appears that Badiou considers the animal, the image of the ‘suffering beast’ (2001: 11), to be the motif of the victim; presumably, if an animal in its wasted state is a victim per se, it can be made a being-for-death by forces and events that are not infl icted upon it by humans. Everything discussed thus far would suggest that the victimizing process is thoroughly human and can only be understood as a predicament that

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pertains to the drama of human subjectivity. The animal is never a victim; when it is a sacrificial victim it is a symbolic replacement for the human, or a process associated with human subjectivity, in a ritualized enactment. Rather than conceptualizing the victim to be manifest only in its animal state, greater theoretical leverage is possible if the victim is considered to be precisely the human who is ‘being’ subject to a dehumanizing attempt. The attempt to dehumanize, to push the subject to the very boundary of his/her subjectivity, can be enacted on a human subject (or its replacement in ritual) only by other humans. It is also an act that the human subject can resist. The importance of this resistance is highlighted by Badiou in his argument; his discourse, however, is one of remaining a human subject and not becoming a victim. Obviously, in one sense, this difference is only a matter of terminology. My point is that the signification of victim, and victimizing, is less a matter of identity and more usefully conceptualized as a process. What is of central importance is the act, the push to the limit of subjectivity, the push to extinguish the subject, and the subject’s endurance, or otherwise. The subject who endures, even to the point of physical death—and there are many extraordinary instances of such enduring throughout history and across cultures—will possibly be the subject for whom ressentiment is absent, the subject who assumes the death drive. In this sense yes, one could aver that the subject is therefore not a victim— through their radical refusal to succumb to the process of victimization, even to the point of their physical death. Thus the victim is both the subject who is subjected to a victimizing process and the subject who has succumbed to it and become a ‘being-for-death’. The subject who is filled with ressentiment will not only be the victimizer, but as victimized will take recourse to what Badiou calls evil. Badiou’s conception of evil can be aligned with Nietzsche’s insurrection against morality, with Lacan’s rejection of the ‘good’ and its ethics, and also with Baudrillard’s critique of generalized exchange. In each case there is some kind of foreclosure of a fundamental challenge at the heart of human subjectivity, the occlusion of this challenge by the law: the moral law, the injunction of the super-ego, the ethical commandments, truth and, for Baudrillard, capital, value, economy, and meaning. The effort to transform a response to suffering into a general principle or system of thought (invariably separating good from evil for inclusion and exclusion) and subsequently prescribe action on this basis is, Badiou claims, fundamentally religious. He derives this insight, at least in part, rightly or wrongly, from his reading of Levinas. In this critique of ‘ethical ideology’ he shares Nietzsche’s campaign against morality (and religion). It is the production of the ‘good’ (or as Badiou writes, the Good) inscribed in such an ideology through ‘truth-processes’, that is the precursor to Evil: ‘If Evil exists, we must conceive of it from the starting point of the Good’ (2001: 60). That which is Evil is precisely that which is resulting from the order of truths as Good in their generalized and abstracted reification. In Badiou’s analysis,

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the Evil that results can be crystallized into three concepts: terror (a simulation of truth; mimicking a truth-process), betrayal (by the subject of his/her status as the ‘becoming-subject’, as immortal, that s/he is) and disaster (the absolutization of truth). Unlike the ‘impotent morality of human rights’ (p.71), an ethic of truths, which he advocates, acts to keep Evil at bay, ‘warding off ’ terror, betrayal and disaster. By contrast, Baudrillard reserves the word ‘evil’ for precisely that which is ‘evil’ from the point of view of the system of the ‘Good’, in Badiou’s terms. Thus instead of an ‘ethic of truths’ to ward off the evil that results from the good, Baudrillard wants to activate evil as that which refuses, undermines, terrorizes and renders chaotic any such attempts to make the world intelligible in terms of any generalized system of the good in its imaginary function of opposing evil. The implications of this alternative construct will be discussed in the next chapter. Badiou’s argument is that evil exists only as a category that pertains to humanity and cannot be meaningfully applied to other animals. From this viewpoint, Badiou makes a distinction between evil and a violence that is a part of life and necessary to persevere in organic being—this latter, he claims, is ‘beneath’ good and evil. Hence Nietzsche’s ‘beyond’ good and evil—as a state that is immersed in the flux of life and the cycle of life and death, flourishing and decay—is really a ‘beneath’. Good and evil (and he does not disagree with Nietzsche on this point) are the products of humanity’s attempts to deal with its suffering. But Nietzsche’s vision of the Übermensch is delusional, according to Badiou, because it imagines a state of humanity that is restorative of some kind of primordial innocence. Given the process of learning that is essential to the ‘overcoming’ that Nietzsche details particularly in Zarathustra, this ‘beneath’ appears to pertain to the motif of the state of arrival for the Übermensch, and certainly ‘restoration’ is a concept Nietzsche uses in this context. Badiou’s point is that ‘life’ in any sense of natural power of ‘life’, or lives of animals including the human animal, cannot be considered to be ‘beyond’ good and evil. The very emergence of the duality of good, and consequently of evil, is exclusive to human beings, and to go ‘beyond’ this conundrum is not to ‘return’ to any kind of immanent state that could be innocent of it. Badiou’s essay on evil appears to share numerous points of agreement with Nietzsche’s critique of ressentiment and its implications for an ‘ethical ideology’ of the ‘good’ but has grounds for rejecting the more ‘ecstatic’ elements of what an overcoming might in reality mean. Thus Badiou argues convincingly that an ‘ethic(s)’ that rejects any form of ‘ethical ideology’ cannot take its bearings from some primordial Nietzschean innocence. An innocence of the ‘cosmological’ and teleological values of ‘aim’, ‘unity’ and ‘being’ cannot be attained ‘beyond’ their constitutive role in the formation of human subjectivity. But more problematically, there is some overriding ‘truth’ inherent in Nietzsche’s proclamation that clearly is of concern to Badiou: he likens Nietzsche’s generalization of the ‘great Dionysian “yes” to Life’ to the call for complete suppression of self-interest by the Red Guards of the Chinese

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Cultural Revolution. Indeed, in this connection also it is noteworthy that one of the ironies of this ecstatic Nietzschean vision is evident in the way his celebration of the Dionysian immersion in the flux of ‘life’ has moments, fleeting or otherwise, of merging with the jouissance of the carnival festivities giving vent to a surplus of orgiastic sacrificial desire. Whichever way we approach these apparently elevated declarations, their consequences, Badiou avers, are inevitably disastrous. And the reason for this is the totalizing power of truth they portend to embody. Whether we are referring to Badiou’s notion of Evil as the disastrous result of a totalizing of truth, or of evil as that which undermines it, as Baudrillard would have it, for each author there is a sinister, totalitarian implication in the dream of realizing the fantasy of bringing the world into full correspondence with any as yet unrealized ‘truth’. Badiou writes of such a totalitarian ideal in Lacanian terms: ‘to name the whole of the real’, adding ‘and thus to change the world’ (2001: 83). As the translator of Badiou’s book notes in his introduction, Lacan’s ethics of psychoanalysis was a source of inspiration for Badiou’s critique of ethical ideology. Badiou’s conviction regarding the ‘ethic of truths’ lies in the valuing of opinions as the nourishment for situated truth-processes that are in a constant state of revision, repelling any totalizing power. As such, there will always be an element (only one?) that he refers to as ‘unnamable’. It is as if this unnamability is the singular force of exchange enabling an ongoingness and creativity of a social life that does not succumb to totalizing impulses. It needs to be asked, however: what does it mean to ‘communicate’? Badiou states that ‘We all need to communicate, we must all express our opinions’ (p.85), but what kind of exchange is possible? Opinions of themselves can be petty tyrants of quite monumental proportion. Claims to truth about the world—opinions—can be devastatingly ‘total’ at the level of the individual and infl icted on his/her immediate associates. Surely Badiou’s vision requires tempering with the acknowledgement that absolutism can function, and indeed flourish, if there is no recognition of the unstable and ultimately ‘unnamable’, or provisionally ‘nameable’, nature of all ‘elements’ in ‘communication’, including the subject articulating the opinion.7 ****************** As the discussion continues to circulate around the construct of victim from differing perspectives and questions, there are elements that continue to maintain their ground and others that leave less of a trace. Clearly Nietzsche’s critical discussion of the concept of ressentiment is important, not only for its searing analysis and rejection of vengeance predicated on a flawed notion of ‘will’, but also for the way ressentiment leads to a generalization of response to injury, into an ethical ideology or moral law, or indeed discourses of human rights and equality. To refuse the possibility of ‘victim’ is to equally refuse the systems of social protection that enshrine the necessity of a safe haven for the ‘good’ against the threatening, supposedly

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evil, Other. These dualisms, such as that of good and evil, can be seen, ironically, to reinforce the very conditions they are designed to overcome. To articulate a ‘beyond’ of good and evil requires, however, a theorization of the subject’s imbrication in these binary structures: the subject as sexed, no less. Nietzsche’s triumphant Übermensch is at once too imbued with a kind of Dionysian fantasy of innocence, immanence, omnipotence and eternal jouissance to warrant the ‘overcoming’ attributed to this figure. There are aspects of Nietzsche’s trope of ressentiment, and the very structural supports that sustain the mediocrity of the ‘herd’ in its victimary predicament, that can be critiqued. One of these structural supports is the construct of a fi xed and transcendent standard of measurement against which vengeful punishment might establish the price in pain to be paid. Debt owed is predicated on a notion of exchange requiring a measurement of equivalence. In the next chapter, Jean Baudrillard’s reflections on the status of victim in our contemporary society will throw further light on the significance of this standard that enables measurement. Given that Nietzsche was writing more than one hundred years ago, what are the coordinates of the construct of victim in the hyper-consumerism of a decaying, globalized capitalism? The question of sacrifice will also be revisited to track between arguments requiring sacrifice for the expenditure of surplus to annul the accumulation of power and those repelling sacrifice, insisting that problematic death-work is its signature. The themes of the book will be re-evaluated in the fi nal chapter, particularly with respect to sex-gender, jouissance and the construct of the victim.

6

We Are All Victims Evil is made over into misfortune. Evil is soluble in misfortune. That’s what victimhood is. (Jean Baudrillard, 2007: 91)

Jean Baudrillard (1929–2007), though not exactly a contemporary of Lacan and Bataille, was one of a number of prominent intellectuals writing and lecturing in the second half of the 20th century in Paris. Baudrillard was always something of a maverick, or ‘lone ranger’, whose style of critique and provocation was never quite considered acceptable, even to the critically minded ‘establishment’. He became Professor of Sociology at the University of Paris-10, Nanterre, and published prolifically throughout his life. Many critical scholars are praised for the radicality of their insights, even to the point of achieving a kind of heroism for their ‘transgressions’. Baudrillard’s writings, however, were always too radical, possibly too disturbing in their relentless departures from the existing coordinates of even the most critical of cultural theory to be incorporated into any coherent intellectual genealogy. And yet he was highly respected for this very singularity by numerous intellectuals across the spectrum of critical theory and cultural philosophy. He has always had a readership world-wide, and in the later years of his life his books were published in English and other languages very soon after they appeared in French. To some extent academically exiled, he inhabited a parallel universe: a sphere that could be entered but not engaged if one remained with one foot in the familiar universe of dialectics. Baudrillard’s work set up a duel between two major systems of thought: that of what we might shorthand with the expression ‘generalized exchange’ and that of reversion, the impossible exchange. The focus of the current work, exploring the notion of the victim as it is constructed and analyzed in critical philosophical discourse and sociocultural practice, has revealed a divergence of views regarding sacrifice. The concept of the victim has its genesis in sacrifice, and sacrificial processes continue to be invoked in association with victimizing acts. Yet within a critical philosophy insisting on a dialectic of presence/absence, on the impossibility of the one without the other, on the necessity of the negative—loss, void, absence, the unrepresentable, unsaid—sacrifice itself can be enlisted into a praxis of the dialectic on the one hand, or condemned for its manifest denial of the negative (loss, absence, void) on the other. In other words, while authors like Bataille and Mauss elevate and valorize the

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meaning and role of sacrifice for its practice of radical annulment, authors like Nietzsche, Girard, Lacan and Kristeva take a very different view. The latter theorists analyze sacrifice variously as a violent cathartic resolution of a chaotic escalation of mimetic violence, as an incarnation of vengeful ressentiment, as aggressivity towards that which threatens the positivity of the subject, or, in a different register again, as a lure to catch the desire of the Other. How these differences of viewpoint and interpretation might be explored through the lens of sex-gender to generate something else besides is the focus of the fi nal chapter. In the current chapter the focus turns to Baudrillard’s contribution, which both extends and complicates the discussion thus far. The way the victim is implicated in the discourses and practices of contemporary hyperconsumerism brings into the foreground the proliferation of ‘victims’ seeking to gain from a market of compensation. I explore how this observation is analyzed by Baudrillard’s critique of ‘generalized exchange’. Yet through this discussion it becomes clear that Baudrillard’s incorporation of the sacrificial into his critical standpoint of reversion raises a number of questions that gravitate around the status of the subject, particularly the sexed subject, in Baudrillard’s theoretical provocation. ************************** VICTIMS OF GENERALIZED EXCHANGE The proposition that we are all victims and at the same time that there are no victims can only be understood from a perspective that somehow differentiates subjectivity as it is constructed, from the condition of that very (constructed) subjectivity itself. The former conceals something of the grounds for the latter. In this sense, we are all victims from the point of view of subjectivity as it is currently constructed, according to Baudrillard, and yet there are no victims from the point of view of that which underwrites the possibility of a constructed subjectivity. Subjectivity as it is constructed (the imaginary ego?) is entirely situated culturally and historically, thus ‘we are all victims’ pertains, if we listen to Baudrillard, to the state of affairs in the current world of Western, globalized, hyper-consumerism. The condition for the possibility of subjectivity, however, prescribes no such victimary status. In the previous chapter, the problem of Nietzsche’s ‘beyond’ of good and evil was countered by Badiou’s ‘beneath’, in that any ‘beyond’ of ressentiment cannot, of necessity, represent a return to a prior state. This exact issue of a progression from a before or ‘beneath’ to a beyond that occurs through some radical overturning of that which is current and productive, and how this progression cannot represent a return, is discussed in an illuminating dialogue-that-is-not-a-dialogue between Jean Baudrillard and Enrique Valiente Noailles that was recorded in Paris and fi rst published in

124 Victims, Gender and Jouissance 2005 (Baudrillard 2007). In the context of discussing the shift from generalized exchange to impossible exchange, Noailles offers the following by way of analogy: It’s the same with Zen, which says: ‘Before studying Zen, the mountains are mountains and the rivers are rivers. During the learning of Zen, the mountains are no longer mountains and the rivers are no longer rivers. Once you’ve learned Zen, the mountains are mountains and the rivers are rivers’. (2007: 21) Although the fi rst and third stages might appear to be the same, the ‘being’ that emerges in the third phase is not the same as that of the fi rst stage. In the fi rst stage the ‘being’ is, in Noailles’s apt expression ‘a kind of petrifi ed identity’; whereas the ‘being’ of the third stage is rather a reversion of the fi rst, which, furthermore, is something entirely distinct from the negation represented by the second stage. Reversion, in this example, can be seen as a process that is about neither identity nor difference—that which was there in the beginning has been reversed, thus having none of the qualities of identity with which it began, nor the quality of difference from that which contested its identity in oppositional terms. These two interlocutors outline their views on how this progression is related to Baudrillard’s critique of the hegemony of a generalized exchange. The word ‘generalized’ designates a shift from the singular instance of exchange to a generalized system that transcends the unique and singular to establish a common measure. Exchange that is singular and unique in time and space is one that Baudrillard refers to in his early work as ‘symbolic’ exchange. This can be imagined as an exchange that takes place between, for example, two individuals in the absence of any concept of economic ‘value’—there is no third point of reference to establish the value of what is exchanged. What is exchanged takes on its ‘being’ in the very act of transferal from one party to another—its ‘value’, to use this term, is established by virtue of the unique symbolic coordinates of that transfer. This concept is most easily illustrated by the notion of the gift. A piece of jewelry, for example, that is given by one person to another in gratitude and recognition of an act performed such as saving a life, is symbolic in the sense that no other piece of jewelry can take its place. Although it can be given, and passed on, as ‘symbolic’, it cannot be exchanged in accordance with any economic value. If it is lost, it cannot be replaced by any other, no matter how similar or even apparently identical. There is no yardstick against which its value can be measured. What the item of jewelry ‘is’ in fact ‘becomes’ what it is in the symbolic act of its gifting. As soon as a ‘market’ is established, as soon as there is a common measure against which the value of three chickens can be evaluated against a weight of grain, we enter the ‘economic’. Economic exchange introduces

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the concepts of value and equivalence, identity and difference, all terms that Baudrillard analyzed in his early work for their parallel constructions in the field of semiology and the construct of reality (see especially 1975, 1981; Grace, 2000). Baudrillard’s work analyzes the progression in eras of value as these have changed in European history. ‘Symbolic’ exchange, as a means of social exchange, was gradually followed, but not replaced, by a simple form of market economy. The exchange value of an item was established through evaluating its apparently ‘given’ and transcendent use value. To establish how much the utility of a chicken is worth to an individual and how much a weight of grain is worth, and so on, involves the creation of a scale of value, a metaphorical measuring stick of sorts that has gradations of utility marked on it, to represent measures of usefulness. This scale can then be used to establish the exchange value of any single item relative to another. This move is the beginning of a generalized concept of ‘use’ predicated on a notion of ‘need’ that transcends the specifics of any individual’s so-called need at any point in time. The notion of generalized exchange begins here with the subtle but momentous displacement, or structural barring, of singularity and the ‘symbolic’.1 Its significance reverberates in its very ontology in that the ‘being’ of an item is intrinsically recorded in its value and its differential place in a ‘system of objects’2: how similar to or different from other items is the item in question? The dichotomous separation between an abstracted use value and a subsequent exchange value is necessary to then establish their relationship. This split or bar, necessary to the inauguration of the economic, is something Baudrillard claims institutes a ‘code’. This system is reliant on a logic of equivalence, which is axiomatic to economics. Baudrillard claims that this systemic generalization is mythical and as such is ideological. The use value/exchange value dichotomy is paralleled by that of nature/culture, from which it mythically took its bearings. ‘Mythically’ because the nature/culture dichotomy on which the use value/exchange value dichotomy purportedly rests is, in itself, equally mythical as Baudrillard argues. Use value was assumed as the ‘natural’, and therefore given and prior, referent for exchange value. While economic exchange postulated this natural alibi of use value, semiology functioned on the basis of the idea that the signifier and signified as ‘sign’ was based on the prior and given existence of a naturalized referent. A subsequent historical shift saw the abandonment of use value as the anchor point for economic exchange value (concretized in the abandonment of the gold standard), with the flotation of value without any referent at all. This flotation probably is better understood to have preceded the abandonment of the mythical gold standard, which rather more simply became completely irrelevant as value had already become dislocated from any, albeit notional, grounding in a material construct of utility. In the parallel logic of signification, with Saussure the sign no longer took its bearings from any notion of reference to prior ‘being’ but rather its meaning was established purely

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on its difference from other signs. The flotation of value was mirrored by the flotation of reality into the orbital circulation of signs. Baudrillard saw this parallel eventuality as one marked by ‘simulation’, but even there, he claims, there was still some vestige of the real or reality as referent—it was still hallucinated as lost. The most recent shift to what Baudrillard calls ‘integral reality’ witnesses the systems of signification and economic value as having achieved a kind of total lift-off, now circulating in an atmosphere that is without any gravitational coordinates of the real or reality at all. Such a state is ‘integral’ because it is without any negativity, is fully positivized, nothing whatsoever can counter or oppose any other element within this system: an integral calculus of the virtual ‘accelerates into the void’, to use an expression Baudrillard has written many times. It is as if the very possibility of a generalized measure for exchange, reliant as it was on some alibi of utility grounded in an apparently generalizable concept of need, has not only become disengaged from that grounding, but has lost any shimmering of anything other than its own existence to become immune to any possible detractor. In its fi nal paroxysm economic value seems now, having exhausted the possibilities of its own delirium, to be in a process of falling back to earth at dizzying reverse speed. Given Baudrillard’s parallel analysis, what the implications of this crash will be for the significatory system is a question worth contemplating. The ‘symbolic’ exchange does not counter or resist the system of generalized exchange because it cannot be understood to be oppositional to it. These two systems of thought cannot be understood to be in a relation of either binary opposition or dialectics. They can only be conceptualized in terms of what Baudrillard calls the ‘dual relation’, and the dual relation is marked by the impossibility of exchange in any sense other than reversion. This immediately brings to mind the impossibility of the sexual relation in Lacan’s Seminar XX. I will re-link with this connection at a later point, but here wish to re-link with an earlier question posed in Chapter One: is a dialectical reconfiguration of oppositional terms sufficient to radically undo or challenge the ontology of presence and the illusion of ongoing essence? Clearly, for Baudrillard the answer is no. Reversion is not of the order of dialectics. Baudrillard’s notion of the impossible exchange originates with his concept of ‘symbolic’ exchange and the process of reversion. Other satellite concepts he uses include ‘seduction’, ‘fatality’, ‘illusion’ and ‘duality’ or the ‘dual relation’ (see Baudrillard 1990a, 1993b, 2001). Reversion is neither inversion nor subversion; it does not turn something into its opposite, it does not annihilate or remove it from its place. In fact, recently Baudrillard likened his concept of reversibility to Nietzsche’s ‘eternal return’: it is ‘the working of the world itself’ and not an act played out by the subject (2007: 69). Difficult as it is to conceptualize, Baudrillard’s ‘duality’ is evoked through the trope of disappearance. 3 Rather than an ontology of the one, the existence of the bounded essent, or its extension to/derivation from

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the two or multiple, Baudrillard’s notion of the dual relation proposes a non-ontology of presence and absence of forms; the ontological existence of forms are illusory. Absence is at the heart of illusory presence. Baudrillard plays on the term dual and duel (the same word in French) to suggest a challenge or an antagonistic stand-off between the terms of duality. In a duel, nothing is exchanged: it is only in duality that radical alterity can exist (Baudrillard, 2001). By extension, there is no victim in a duel. Like Nietzsche, Baudrillard takes a distinct philosophical distance from any possibility of nihilism, referring to nihilism as the denial of the nothing.4 When nothing is exchanged, this is the impossible exchange because the nothing is inexchangeable: ‘It’s the resurgence of the nothing at the heart of the essent, at the heart of the something’ (2007: 133). And this resurgence of the dual form ‘creates and preserves the void’, whereas oneness, always one of something, of a whole, erases, leaves ‘no space’ for the nothing. The dual relation sustains the illusion of forms, which is a challenge to the system of reality based as it is on the domain of value with its positivity, its logic of equivalence and its structure of identity/difference. Any irreversible process, although structurally exclusive of duality, is decisively undercut by reversion from within. If the irreducible (and irreversible) antagonism of duality, of reversibility is the ‘working of the world’, it cannot in fact be excluded, and its inevitability will irrupt, often violently, at the heart of even the most ‘obscene’5 and absolute posturings of irreversibility. As our globalized society consolidates the absolute quality of a generalized exchange, which Baudrillard has referred to as totalitarian in its completely sealed and apparently irreversible positivity, he claims we are seeing today the transformation of evil (which cannot be exchanged) into misfortune, configured then as a whole system of equivalence and hence exchange. This system of equivalence provides the basis for a formula to evaluate suffering in terms of the price to be paid in compensation. Such compensatory systems now cover the entire social field, according to Baudrillard (2005a), hauling in vast claims for compensation for everything from being the victim of a criminal event or sexual harassment, to having the misfortune to be born with a ‘defect’.6 Everyone, every group, becomes a claimant, clamoring for recognition as a victim; ‘everyone becomes both victim and an accomplice in this’ (1998b: 55), or in even more radical terms ‘we are all simultaneously victims, murderers and accomplices’ (p.67). Not only are we all victims of misfortune, but ‘[t]o have yourself recognized as a victim is one of your human rights’ (2007: 90). Baudrillard refers to this veritable industry of the victim as ‘a whole political economy of misfortune’, in which misfortune can be exchanged. As the quotation at the beginning of this chapter suggests, such a transformation of evil into misfortune is something of an attempted solution to the problem of evil. Instead of the unbearable chaos of evil irrupting to undermine the smooth functionality of operational systems, misfortune can be identified,

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assessed against a measure providing a calculus of its distress, and can be compensated in turn. In the process misfortune is made bearable, and its effects are incorporated into the seamless and inescapable enclosure of a generalized exchange. In discussing this point, Baudrillard is reminded of a film, Charles Najman’s Can Memory Dissolve in Evian Water?, in which a group of survivors of Auschwitz spend a luxurious holiday at a spa enjoying everything it has to offer, courtesy of ‘the Germans’. The point being that they are returning ‘to the primal scene of the camp’ and reliving what they went through then, but of course entirely differently, in a ‘mode of reconciliation’. Baudrillard’s observation that their being pleased with this compensation in fact reflects how this gesture of payment is the manufactured solution to the impossible exchange of death. On the question of innocence and responsibility, Baudrillard, like Nietzsche, contemplates the ‘subjective illusion’ that we are ‘invested with total power over ourselves’. There is a curious twist to the stakes of identification or otherwise of the victim with the status of being a victim. To claim innocence and victimhood is to claim one is nothing more than a completely passive precipitation of what can effectively, in many cases, only be understood as a chance event—it could have been anybody, therefore there is nothing whatsoever I can do about it. Such a position weakens any grounds for a counter-challenge, relying as a counter-challenge does on some form of active complicity with one’s predicament. For Baudrillard, therefore, the victim in today’s terms is an epiphenomenon of a society entirely constituted within the terms of generalized exchange. To construct victimhood in this way effectively wards off what he refers to as evil, where evil is the spirited, irreducible event that would undermine the totalitarianism of an apparently irreversible social order. In Baudrillard’s lexicon, evil, like reversion and duality therefore, is ‘the world as it is and as it has been’ (2005a: 144), and in this sense shares a commonality with Nietzsche’s eternal return. Baudrillard quotes a statement by Montaigne: ‘If the evil in man were eliminated, you would destroy the fundamental conditions of life’ (p.144). The condition of ‘man’ that strives against this ‘condition of life’ therefore clearly indicates the existence of a discord at the very heart of what it is to be human. In placing this observation at the center of his philosophy, Baudrillard shares at least something of a perspective with Lacan. Where Baudrillard’s strategy can be confronted is in his association of sacrificial practice solely within his paradigm of duality and reversion. How his claims bear up and where a questioning of it leads is the focus of the following section.

THE ANNULMENT OF SACRIFICE The most profound commitment of Baudrillard’s work appears to be to a kind of ecology of the world, an ebb and flow of the cycles of life and

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death, flourishing and decay, from which humanity departs at its peril. His vision, however, is not that of a benign ecological harmony; rather it is one that encompasses an inevitable tearing and destruction not only in the non-human world, but also, and most radically, in humanity’s mode of being in this very same world. Acts of sumptuary expenditure of ‘surplus’, of that which is laid to waste, precisely mark an exuberance of living, a sense of ‘affluence’ that distinguishes the very human condition of a will to live beyond mere survival. Baudrillard’s incorporation of sacrifice as one aspect of his thesis of ‘symbolic’ exchange, reversion, the dual relation, seduction, the impossible exchange and the transparency of evil, draws on Bataille’s ‘theorem’ of the accursed share (discussed in Chapter Two). Sacrifice works to annul any accumulation that is not reversed in the conventional processes of exchange. Unlike Bataille, Baudrillard claims that the sacrificial processes in which humankind engage are not seamlessly a part of the natural order of things, in other words, any reversal of abundance in the natural, non-human world cannot be understood as sacrificial. Also unlike Bataille’s rather more naturalist construction, sacrificial expenditure in Baudrillard’s analysis is ‘anti-productive’ (and ‘anti-reproductive’), (1993b: 157). Sacrifice, as the annulment of the accursed share through its sacrificial destruction, establishes or ‘recovers’ a ‘form of functional equilibrium’ (1998b: 26); it cannot in any way be understood to add to what is already in excess. In fact, far from being continuous with the non-human world, Baudrillard draws attention to the heightened significance of the artificial, socially controlled nature of death in the case of sacrifice. Violent death that takes place through ‘the will of the group’ holds a fascination that is specific to sacrificial processes, and the same would not be the case for a death occurring in other, non-sacrificial circumstances. The significance of this jouissance precisely needs to be elaborated beyond Baudrillard’s single comment in relation to our contemporary contemplation— unlike those of what he refers to as ‘primitive’ societies, (presumably ‘our’ ancestors), we only have recourse to contemplation—regarding ‘the enjoyment that follows’ from the ‘aesthetic doubling in the imagination’ (1993b: 165). Presumably he means that the ‘primitives’ who actually conducted human sacrifices experienced an enjoyment of the symbolic event that was not reliant on an ‘aesthetic doubling in the imagination’; we do not know, however, what this enjoyment of a violence governed and controlled by the social group is considered by Baudrillard to be made of. Sacrifice does not only bring about the reversion of an excess. In Baudrillard’s analysis, it also is concerned centrally with the repayment for that which has been given. There is a danger to the society when that which is given cannot be exchanged in some form of return; the reciprocity of the gift and counter-gift is paramount. The cycle of sacrifice is outside, or parallel to, the usual cycle of exchange within the society and represents a form of expenditure; it is a ritualized, sumptuary destruction of that which is surplus, be it wealth, status, food, goods, or individuals. The sacrifice of

130 Victims, Gender and Jouissance the king, according to Baudrillard (1993b), can be understood to expiate the privileges associated with this office. The ritual murder of the actual king means that the very forms of wealth that would accumulate and become attached to the person of the king could be dissipated and removed through that person’s ritualized destruction; in so doing the flow of exchanges is reestablished, preventing them from being blocked, so to speak.7 Baudrillard refers to the act of symbolic exchange in the ritual of sacrifice as having a sense of ‘giving thanks’, a recognition of the gift received from the gods or God, with a sacrifice when a counter-gift is not possible. The sacrifice in the ‘symbolic’ exchange of which Baudrillard writes thus acts like a countergift. It is this possibility of a counter-gift, or a return, that is of absolute necessity for those societies practicing sacrifice. To not be able to give in return is dire; a gift that cannot be equaled or returned establishes a debt that cannot be annulled. Baudrillard writes of Bataille’s observations of the massive human sacrifices carried out by the Aztecs. Where Bataille considered the outpouring of energy from the sun to be an excess whose abundance is unreciprocated, Baudrillard makes a different argument. There is no natural excess, and for the Aztecs there was not a conception of the sun’s beneficence arriving on their lands ‘free of charge’. Their sacrifices were dedicated to make the sun function, because the very energy from the sun was the product of a dual relation involving a sacrificial exchange. He poses the question the Aztecs would have asked: ‘what would humans be if the sun afforded them its light with nothing in return?’ He considers that the reply is that in a society of ‘symbolic’ exchange, they would be nothing; ‘they would not even exist’ (2005a: 188). And the converse applies: if the gods did not respond to the humans’ sacrifice with the beneficence of the sun’s energy, they in turn would not exist. ‘Nothing has existence in itself. Nothing exists except in dual, antagonistic exchange’ (p.188). This is no longer the case in societies of economic exchange, as Baudrillard writes: ‘We have put an end to this dual relation with the sun [ . . . ] Reversibility is still there, but it takes the form of vengeance’ (p.189). Baudrillard (1998a) gives what he considers to be a contemporary example of ritualized, sacrificial consumption in the way many people might purchase medications, many of them non-prescription. They do so, he suggests, not as rational consumers believing the medication will contribute to curing their condition, but because health must cost something, it must be exchanged. Another example that he considers to represent the sacrificial response par excellence is an instance where someone wrote a demand in a classified advertisement in an American newspaper, which read ‘Send me a dollar!’ and apparently received tens of thousands of dollars (Baudrillard, 1990a). The point being that he (in Baudrillard’s rendition it was a ‘he’) did not say ‘I need a dollar’, in which case Baudrillard is convinced no-one would have sent a single dollar. But instead it was offered as a challenge; a gesture that opened the possibility of a miraculous exchange that could not

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be valued according to any calculus of equivalence; something more than that was at stake. The sacrificial response was to send a dollar. The counter-gift or sacrifice within the dual relation of ‘symbolic’ exchange is not assessed by virtue of a value that can be measured for its equivalence, but rather through the challenge it presents. Whether this challenge is made individually or collectively, the status of that which is given is singular and irreducible. Baudrillard writes about this challenge as one that summons the gods to appear through response, or, if they cannot respond, to disappear. The inverse applies also. Where Lacan considers sacrifice as a lure that entices the gods to appear as desiring, which in turn reassures that objet a is desiring like the subject, Baudrillard’s notion of challenge proposes a wager, circling around the very existence of the gods and the continuation of the dual relation. Baudrillard’s rendition situates sacrifice within the framework of the ritual, as does Girard, but Baudrillard focuses rather more on the entire system of reciprocal obligations that such ritualized exchanges establish. The act of challenge is central to the notion of ‘symbolic’ exchange and the duality it presupposes. Because the exchange is ‘symbolic’, it is not mediated by any external, generalized reference point, in a way similar to that of a duel as an unmediated challenge to the death between two parties. Challenge, along with seduction, game, rule, destiny and fatality, form a constellation of concepts within Baudrillard’s system of ideas that is differentiated in absolute terms from those of generalized exchange, namely law, value, economy, identity and difference. These two sets of concepts reflect the differential realities of ‘symbolic’ exchange and generalized exchange. Seduction and challenge are particularly potent as they provoke a diversion from one universe to the other. For example, a person insists on functioning in accordance with the law by refusing access for another person to a guarded facility and allows his/her conduct to be governed entirely by this generalized edict. S/he may be seduced or challenged by this other person wishing entry into acting in accordance with a rule of a game. This seduction involves setting up a game that redefi nes the universe of possibilities for action. One can break a law yet the system of the law remains, but one cannot break a rule, or cheat, and retain the existence of the game. Cheating is not a transgression but a refusal to play the game; it destroys both the game and its stakes. To be seduced into allowing access to the facility is to shift from the realm of the generalized law to the realm of the singular seduction and challenge encountered, with its stakes being recursive to that encounter. Similarly, games of chance are not actually games of chance at all, according to Baudrillard, but instead occasion a radical challenge to this very construct of chance with its presupposition of a neutral order. As such, games of chance recreate a ritual order of obligations, undermining the free world of equivalences on which chance is predicated. If we really ‘believed’ in chance, casinos would be very different places, and gambling would probably not be ‘addictive’. In a similar vein, destiny is the singular

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history of one’s personal encounters in the world from the point of view of its unavoidable duality and is countered by any generalized notion of happiness for humanity. Fatality has the sense of a strategy that works against any attempt to manipulate and cause an outcome. Baudrillard provides an explanation of his often-misunderstood concept of ‘fatal strategy’ to be ‘an undertaking in which an involuntary reversibility is in play, for better or for worse’ (2007: 127). The fatality of the strategy is that it works against one’s own will, ‘inventing its own destiny’. You try and manipulate an outcome and the more you try the more the opposite eventuates, or alternatively, nothing is attempted or actively sought and yet it (a desirable end) appears without any willing. When Baudrillard wrote ‘we have put an end to this dual relation’, as cited above, he is referring to the way economic exchange, with its necessarily generalized and coded basis for establishing equivalence through the law of value, has taken the place of ‘symbolic’ exchange. The political economy that has emerged and evolved over centuries means that the domain of the ‘symbolic’, including the reciprocity of gift and counter-gift, reversion, expenditure in the potlatch, and the sacrificial process, is structurally of no consequence; ‘it no longer counts for anything’ (1993b: 35). When the surplus is no longer reversed in rituals of sacrificial expenditure, the effects of the surplus irrupt in ways that tend to be violent, ‘evil’ and mystifying. Baudrillard tracks the stages through which this political economy has evolved, from early systems of economic exchange in the market place to feudal systems where, in each case, ‘symbolic’ processes remained significant. It was the development of capitalism that saw the beginning of an increasingly intensified exclusion of any vestige of the ‘symbolic’ within the formal operations of the economic system. Late capitalism is marked by the loss of all points of reference in what Baudrillard calls hyperreality; ‘integral reality’ is now an even more extreme form of this implosive, metastatic system that has structurally excluded negativity. In other words, the positivity of growth, signification and value cannot be reversed: they only accumulate more and more—‘accelerating into the void’ as expressed by Baudrillard (and cited earlier). We no longer have a ‘political economy’; it is also the case, he notes, that ‘nature’ as the point of reference for utility no longer counts for anything. Political economy, insofar as it was grounded in some materiality, ‘only survives in a brain dead state’ (1993b: 35). There is no question that Baudrillard valorizes ‘symbolic’ exchange and the critique of ontology this conceptualization represents. Indeed, the ‘symbolic’ and its allied concepts provide the point of departure for Baudrillard’s critique of political economy, the code, and all systems structured by generalized exchange. The ‘symbolic’ world was earlier, when the world was inhabited by humans for whom the ‘symbolic’ organized all aspects of their existence and sociality; this occurred in other times, represented now through the anthropological record regarding the lives lived by those in ‘other cultures’, in other places, only vestiges of which continue to take place.

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This valorization is explicit. For example, in the discussion with Noailles (2007), Baudrillard points to the way that organization of exchange and social life through inclusion of sacrificial destruction of the accursed share within the confines of the ‘symbolic’ universe, has ‘fallen apart’ only to be replaced by production and consumption in economic terms. He said: ‘[t] his is our response, but it isn’t really successful, for the sacrificial world was, admittedly, cruel, but acceptable, whereas ours is much gentler but unacceptable. And the more consumable it is, the more unacceptable, for nothing any longer deserves to be sacrificed in it’ (2007: 32). It is clear that Baudrillard’s attribution of these ‘symbolic’ practices to ‘primitive cultures’ is intended in the historical and contemporary anthropological sense. On many occasions his commentary makes such a claim unambiguously: for example, ‘Other cultures know how to manage this fundamental ambiguity symbolically, through the use of sacrifice, of rituals, of the ceremonial. But we don’t want to take it into account’ (2005b: 151); and elsewhere he refers to ‘anthropological cultures’, ‘primitive societies’ and so on. The ‘anthropological dream’ of the existence of the object of exchange in its ‘symbolic’ form (1988b) is a dream precisely because such a social reality is no longer present. Baudrillard presents the transition from societies ordered and organized through practices of ‘symbolic’ exchange to those of economic exchange, not in the sense of a historically identifiable break. This transition occurred either as a process whereby the latter gradually came into the ascendancy and through whatever means fi nally eclipsed any possibility of ‘symbolic’ exchange, or where a culture practicing sacrifice was exterminated by those invading and for whom such sacrificial practices were intolerable (for example, the Spanish colonizing Mexico). As this process of change evolved or was imposed, it was not that structurally excluded reversibility disappeared, but rather that it no longer calibrated the order of culture and therefore made its appearance alternatively through the transparency of evil, irrupting within the social through effecting the chaotic breakdown of any smooth and functional operation based on coded equivalence. These ‘other’ societies are praised for their diacritical acumen: for example, ‘Other societies made the distinction clearly [between equivalence and its impossibility], recognizing duality, which, for us, has become the absolute heresy, whereas in those societies, there was no heresy, but a ritual, sacrificial putting-in-play of that duality’ (2007: 93). This valorization is not based on some sort of romantic and nostalgic reminiscence of Arcadia but on an analysis that concludes that the hegemony of generalized exchange presents a very real threat. Baudrillard writes: ‘Anything that purges the accursed share in itself signs its own death warrant. This is the theorem of the accursed share’ (1993a: 106). An equilibrium that cannot be sustained through reversibility, which in Baudrillard’s analysis means the reversion of accumulation in festivals and expenditure, and of power in exchange and death (1975: 146), consigns human life (and possibly life on Earth) to an inevitable end. Baudrillard’s

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view that reversion can be considered to be the inevitable and fatal strategy of the world is one he recanted in one of his last works, written in 2004. In the light of the current convergence of economic and fi nancial, energy and ecological collapse on a global scale, Baudrillard was moved to acknowledge that reversion might not have the ultimate status he assumed: To contemplate the idea that a global power, which is after all, a form of self-abasement and universal abasement, may nevertheless constitute a power of defiance, a power of response to the challenge from the other world—that is to say, ultimately, a symbolic world—means for me a drastic revision, a casting into the balance of what I have always thought [ .  .  . ]. But perhaps we have to resign ourselves to the idea that even reversibility, as a weapon of mass seduction, is not the absolute weapon; and that it is confronted with something irreversible—in what we may just discern today as a worse kind of ultimate prospect. (2010: 28) Baudrillard’s account of the sacrificial event, influenced as it is by Bataille, has some points of similarity and departure from that of Nietzsche. Nietzsche also viewed sacrifice as a repayment of debt, yet cast this demand for repayment within an entirely different frame, associating the jouissance of the sacrifice with an incandescent revenge at the heart of ressentiment. If the cruelty of sacrifice, with its display and de-subjectification of a sacrificial victim, is an act of annulment purely in the form Baudrillard suggests, how does he explain the frenzy, the blood lust, the desire, the fascination at the process of putting to death of a victim that accompanies it? Even in its ritualized reiterations, sacrificial gestures rouse some vestigial jouissance that cannot be side-stepped in any theorization proposed. Sacrifice is generally not an agonistic scene like the duel. Where it might appear to be the case, for example in the gladiatorial arena of ancient Rome, the antagonists are both sacrificial victims. The question of who is sacrificing whom, or what, is central to understanding the social relations of this enactment. The social relations of sacrifice are not characterized by challenge and seduction. Nietzsche’s account is more convincing with respect to jouissance; a jouissance that in Baudrillard’s analysis of contemporary ‘victim society’ is now subdued and diverted through the transformation of evil into an economy of misfortune, where repayment of debt is formalized, integrated and dispatched through the functionality of welfare, authorized by a legislature of rights. In his critical evocations of the contemporary ‘victim society’, Baudrillard is not depicting victims as sacrificial. They are not dedicated to any sacrificial event, but are rather dislocated from any such logic. It is a kind of proliferating simulation of victimhood with no sacrificing agent. He is scathing of the ‘terroristic happiness conspiracy’ that fuels the ‘victim culture’, where the imperative of ‘integral happiness’ leads to an insistence on a right to due compensation for misfortune. If this ‘victim culture’ is

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one of ‘recrimination, repentance, denunciation and miserabilist compassion’ (2004: 104), if victims are ‘no longer victims of anything’ (p.60) but simply settling accounts within an economy of grievance, confessing their wretchedness, then sacrifice is effectively annulled. The crime lacks a criminal rather than a victim. Baudrillard associates this state of affairs with a permeating indifference that seeps its way into every crevice of our lives and institutions to pacify and enforce a certain ‘autism’ at the level of culture. This ‘cool’, ‘integral’ victimhood that infects everyone is radically different from the ‘heated’, impassioned scene of sacrifice. Our society of protection, insurance and security refuses to ‘risk life’: ‘Worse than the desire to destroy life is this refusal to risk it—nothing being worth the trouble of being sacrificed’ (1996b: 141). And of course, in Baudrillard’s terms, this pervasive victimary status is an artifact of the integral reality that precipitates such a grievance mentality. In its indifference, this society of victims precisely excludes the passion of the sacrifice. Baudrillard does not propose an alternative to either a sacrificial world or our cool, indifferent victim society. Clearly the fi rst is valorized and the latter condemned by Baudrillard. However, are these the only two possibilities? To reverse the latter must we embrace the former? Or do the very terms of the sacrifice Baudrillard invokes need to be more carefully delineated?

RISKING LIFE Is it necessary to have to ‘accept’ the extraordinary violence and abjection of sacrificial practices as an integral part of a social process of exchange not ordered in accordance with a generalized exchange? These entirely human practices of sacrifice, whether understood in terms of their origins in controlling contagion of frenzied violence through sacrificial victimage or in their consequential ritualized incarnations and bargaining displacements, cannot possibly be a part of any form of social life that would be supportable from the standpoint of any critical cultural theory or from the standpoint of our contemporary Westernized and globalized society, no matter which way one looks at it. There is something specifically about the role of the sacrifice that is missing from Baudrillard’s account, and also, by association and lineage, from that of Bataille. Neither Baudrillard nor Bataille offer in any sustained and systematic way a theorization of the ‘subject’. Baudrillard argues against the importance many contemporary theorists place on the ‘subject’ and ‘subjectivity’, and yet if such a critique is to have any meaningful purchase on human psychosocial enactments, what or who is s/he who speaks and acts, who challenges and seduces? What are we to make of the jouissance of the sacrificial act? What might it mean to go ‘beyond’ our investments in both the totalizing hegemony of generalized exchange as well as the jouissance of sacrificial practices, now sidelined into state-legitimated sporting arenas, or de-legitimized when

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appearing in ubiquitous activities such as bullying, or outlawed but rife in criminal acts such as gang rape, torture, dog fights and such. For all that Baudrillard is convinced that the victim of a ritual sacrifice in societies of ‘symbolic’ exchange is deemed worthy of such a fate and complicit in his/her destiny, is this not a rather poor excuse for avoiding the diacritical task of distinguishing between those elements of sacrifice that might well be commensurate with ‘symbolic’ exchange, seduction, reversion and annulment of the accursed share, and those elements that are not? An analysis of the kind that Baudrillard presents at the level of the social and cultural dynamics of exchange serves to foreground and detail the former—those elements that are commensurable. An understanding of those that are not commensurable requires a critical examination of the jouissance of sacrifice, which in turn requires a theory of the subject: the sexed, speaking subject. Baudrillard wrote a few notorious lines in America (1988a) delivering an injunction, or responding to an imagined injunction, that the desert requires a sacrifice, and he suggests for this: a ‘woman’. I argue that this provocation is neither acceptable nor unacceptable, neither right nor wrong, neither supportable nor unsupportable. The point is that it has elements of both in each case. How it might fi nd acceptance through its commensurability with reversion and ‘symbolic’ exchange is, however, far outweighed by the denial it invites of the very negativity of which Baudrillard mourns the disappearance. A theorization of the subject is needed before this denial can appear. Here is the quotation: Death Valley is as big and mysterious as ever. Fire, heat, light: all the elements of sacrifice are here. You always have to bring something into the desert to sacrifice, and offer it to the desert as a victim. A woman. If something has to disappear, something matching the desert for beauty, why not a woman? (Baudrillard, 1988a: 66) Why not a woman, indeed? This provocation is not innocent. On the one hand, to be worthy of being sacrificed is to match the beauty of the desert in all its stark and glorious evocation of emptiness and void; a hard image to match. And yet on the other hand, in accordance with Baudrillard’s argument discussed above, to respond to the gift given by the gods or the desert through making a sacrifice that challenges into existence the gods or the desert is to seek and affi rm ‘existence’ in this symbolic dual/duel relation. If you do not respond and reciprocate, you do not exist. The point appears to be lost that there are two roles here: the sacrificer and the victim; it is not the victim’s existence that is conjured and reversed in a relation of challenge and seduction, but rather that of the sacrificing agent(s); the ‘you’ in the sentence is he, (she?) or they whose ‘existence’ is at stake in the challenge. The sacrificial victim’s fate is to disappear; to become in a sense

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instrumental in the sustenance of the dual relation itself and thus die to the possibility of challenge and reversion, in other words, die to ‘life’. Baudrillard’s provocation cannot be taken solely at the surface, and rather stereotypical, level of the association of the feminine with the appearance of beauty. Rather, we have to pay attention to the fact that to replace the last words with ‘why not a man?’ does not work. It fails, most obviously, because the sacrificer, the person represented by ‘you’ in the quotation, the ‘he’ for whom ‘a woman’, as other, matches the beauty of the desert, has all the hallmarks of being of the same set as ‘man’, so it would have to be a particular kind of ‘man’, a man qualified in some way and not just ‘a man’. The relation of the sacrificial victim to the sacrificing agent cannot be ignored; the victim is importantly and categorically differentiated from the sacrificing agent. Furthermore, what is obscured in this quote from Baudrillard points to an assumption regarding the universal ‘woman’. Even if we read Baudrillard’s comment as a challenge, it is still the case that ‘a woman’ is predicated on the prior assumption of a universal, abstracted concept ‘woman’; otherwise the suggestion of ‘why not a woman’ is meaningless. The only way to not imply such a universal would be to name the particular woman. In pointing to this assumption, I am not making the anodyne observation that Baudrillard, like any other speaker/writer, is inevitably caught in a significatory process that will, unavoidably, assume universals or conceptual sets. I am asking specifically: what does it mean to postulate that there is such a ‘thing’ as ‘a woman’ conceptualized as an abstracted instance of ‘the woman’? And why is ‘a woman’ the obvious sacrificial victim to ‘match’ the beauty of the desert? In Lacan’s analysis ‘the woman’, in the sense of the universal construct of ‘woman’, does not exist because of the structural position of the feminine within language. Not dissimilarly, for Baudrillard, the feminine is the domain of seduction and the principle of uncertainty. Why, then, is the feminine to be the (perfect) victim of this sacrifice? If the surplus positivity Baudrillard wishes to see annulled through symbolic reversion in the ‘counter-gift’ of sacrifice is represented in the masculine, as representative of ‘the phallic exchange standard’, to sustain a logic of symbolic exchange surely it would make more sense for ‘a man’ to be sacrificed. What does it mean to ‘risk’ or sacrifice the ‘life’ of another human being for whom that sacrifice is not open to any challenge or seduction? Interrogating Baudrillard’s stance on sacrifice reveals a possible impossibility at the heart of this aspect of his philosophy; an impossibility because the attempt to sustain the human subject, the actions of human subjects, as somehow enacted by a transcendent duality ‘that is the working of the world’, is to negate the very meaning of subjectivity. In other words, the sacrifice cannot only be glossed as a rendition of ‘symbolic exchange’; it speaks of something else at the heart of human subjectivity. But what is ‘subjectivity’ for Baudrillard? For Lacan, as a theorist of subjectivity, the subject is formed through language, is an effect of language, although not

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reducible to it. As such, the subject inevitably constitutes a break from the ‘Real’, or possibly one could say from the dual relation that Baudrillard describes as the ‘working of the world’. And yet a Lacanian theorization of language insists that the inevitability of this break cannot be avoided. Is it possible to imagine or propose a formulation of language that disavows this break? This is the question. A unique contribution of Baudrillard is to propose that language is fundamentally not about this break; in fact the break, for him, is an artifact of a generalized exchange, fundamentally economic, that institutes the bar of identity/difference, and that introduces the law of value with its generalized scale designating equivalence and degrees of difference. He writes of language as ‘dual’, of an ‘otherness’ of language that is abolished when the duel between language and meaning is reduced to a logic of difference: One might even say that difference is what destroys otherness. When language is broken down into a set of differences, when meaning is reduced to nothing more than differentiation, the radical otherness of language is abolished [ . . . ] And everything that is irreducible to mediation, articulation or meaning is eliminated—everything, that is, which causes language at its most radical level to be other than the subject (and also Other to the subject?). The existence of this level accounts for the play in language, for its appeal in its materiality, for its susceptibility to chance; and it is what makes language not just a set of trivial differences, as it is in the eyes of structural analysis, but, symbolically speaking, truly a matter of life and death. (Baudrillard, 1993a: 127) What is tantalizing about this passage is that it could actually be written from the point of view of Lacanian psychoanalysis. Baudrillard condemns psychoanalysis systematically and repeatedly throughout the years of his writing, and yet he uses many psychoanalytic concepts over and over. Sometimes his employment of terms such as the ‘reality principle’ is intended ironically, yet at the same time, the utility of these concepts to his project cannot be denied. In a footnote written in 1972 in For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign (1981: 161–162, FN21), Baudrillard counters the bar between the signifier and the signified with the ‘symbolic’. It is the structural bar that he critiques, the bar that he claims separates in absolute terms the materiality of the signifier from the meaning to which it is deemed, albeit arbitrarily, to be equivalent. At this point it seems to be the positivity of an assumed representation and the mythical establishing of a relation of equivalence that he rejects as ideological. He refers then to Lacan’s bar as the ‘bar of repression’ and suggests that such a formulation opens the possibility, not seen by Lacan, of the ‘symbolic’ as that which has no place, neither equivalent nor different but ambivalent and unable to be inscribed in any place. ‘It [the ‘symbolic’] is not what comes to be registered

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beneath the repression barrier (line), the Lacanian Sd. It is rather what tears all signifiers and signifieds to pieces, since it is what dismantles their pairing off and their simultaneous carving out’ (1981: 161–162, FN21). It must be pointed out that this is not a reading of Lacan that is recognizable now: for Lacan the signified is in the domain of the Imaginary; he does not use a notion of the ‘sign’ for psychoanalysis; he insists that any notion of meaning being established via equivalence is illusory, and so on. The closest Baudrillard comes to acknowledging the possibility that Lacan’s theorization of language actually bears at least some resemblance to his own critique is in Cool Memories 1980–1985, where he writes: Lacan is right: language does not convey meaning. It stands in place of meaning. But the results produced are not the effects of structure, but seduction effects. Not a law which regulates the play of signifiers, but a rule which ordains the play of appearances. But perhaps this means the same thing. (Baudrillard, 1990b: 6) Considering the paradox at the heart of Lacan’s theorization of the divided subject, one would have to agree that perhaps it does mean, if not the same thing, certainly something not entirely different: as the subject emerges in his/her subjection to the signifier, there is a simultaneous aphanisis, fading, or disappearance of being. The psychoanalysis of Lacan confronts Baudrillard’s notion of language as ‘symbolic’, as dual in his sense of utter ambivalence with no bar or cut and its presumed possibility of relations of equivalence, with the question: what kind of human subject does such a rendition of language propose? Does such a proposal negate the very possibility of human subjectivity? Is Baudrillard’s vision in fact the ultimate death drive whereby the imagined jouissance of life before the cut of language and subjectivity is so yearned for that the death of the subject is the payment surrendered? Does it represent a denial, refusal or foreclosure of castration; a psychotic collapse of the symbolic into the Real? Is it rather an imaginary fantasia of a human universe in which there is speech endlessly fi nessing and seducing with no cut or bar? Or, does it foreshadow the possibility of a radical undoing? Beyond the castration of the cut is the Real. In Lacanian analysis, the sounds of the talking and singing of those most familiar to the baby, particularly the m(O)ther, create an affect in/on the body. Marc Strauss8 describes this affect to be like ‘rivulets’ that flow in an unconstrained way creating unpredictable, contingent and unique paths that traverse the body of the baby. This is the phenomenon for which Lacan created the neologism of ‘lalangue’ to describe—language as sounds the baby hears before they are formulated as signifiers, before they become the discourse of the Other, before the cut. If the unconscious, as internal limit of the Symbolic, is described by Lacan as the discourse of the Other, the ‘Real Unconscious’

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is that of the effect of lalangue on the body—the ‘affected body’; this Real Unconscious is completely inaccessible to the subject. The point is that for the infant to become a speaking being (parlêtre), to submit to the meanings of signifiers that precede him/her, the cut of the signifier must take place. The ‘hit’ of language, where the signifier is accepted by the infant to stand in for something s/he does not designate, inscribes cuts on the body, dividing it with borders that create holes (orifices). The rivulets of lalangue are inscribed, but they have no organization, no relief or borders; they encounter no hindrances and therefore they flow; they are not visible. There has to be the cut of the signifier, of the letter, for the body to receive an organization, and for this organization to be visible. The letter, written on the body, makes possible the position of enunciation whereby the meanings of the Other, although never fully known by the subject or the Other, are taken up by the subject as s/he enters into the Symbolic Order. The interdiction of incest common to all human cultures reflects in mythical form the construction of impossibility to remain before the cut if one is to enter language and become a speaking being and therefore to exist within the social. ‘Castration or worse . . . ’ is the import of the title, ‘ou Pire . . . ’ (‘or Worse . . . ’), of one of Lacan’s Seminars, in other words, to refuse castration is to be psychotic, autistic, or worse; it is to be flooded by the Real and unable to create any organization of the body and the world that enables the human subject to participate within the social domain of others. Such a theory of the conditions of possibility of the subject does not negate the continuing effect of lalangue on the body. It does not negate the insight that the clarity of a ‘reality’ organized in this way is illusory: ‘lending false clarity and a deceptive glitter to everything’, as Lacan (1991: 238–239) said, ‘[b]ecause, the greatest light is also, is it not, the source of all obscurity’ and ‘[t]he emergence of the symbol creates, literally, a new order of being in the relations between men [sic]’. Nor does this theory negate the notion that the self who perceives is a construct of this very significatory process and its sacrifices: on the contrary. The non-sense of meaning and the illusory, constructed nature of the subject feature prominently in Lacan’s formulation of the process of signification. At the very moment when meaning appears to emerge there is an uncanny sense that it is annihilated. The precariousness of the hold we have both on meaning and sexed subjectivity is never far from Lacan’s discourse. Baudrillard’s claim that the ‘symbolic’ ‘tears all signifiers and signifieds to pieces’, disrupting and rendering impossible their pairing off, appears to place the ‘symbolic’ within the domain of the Lacanian Real. And as such we have to ask, if the subject does not succumb to the signifier, how does Baudrillard imagine that such a ‘subject’ (it is unclear what term Baudrillard would use at this point) exists to be the agent of play with language as a manifestation of the dual relation? Furthermore, even within semiology the ambivalence that is central to any notion of a ‘pairing off ’ of signifiers and signifieds does not issue a positivity of meaning. As Parker (2005: 167) notes, according

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to Saussure, language must be understood as ‘a system of differences without positive terms’ (citing Saussure, emphasis in original) and as such, the practice of psychoanalysis brings the subject to a recognition that the language that ‘bears them is made up only of differences without any positive terms’ (p.168). The inevitable cut of language, the ‘alienating or’ Lacan refers to in Seminar XI (1998a), is not optional in his view. Arbitrary, yes, but it is a part of the very nature of language itself. In addition to the bar that precisely refuses any possible equivalence between signifier and signified, the subject emerges as divided between the primary signifier and the other signifiers; it is this division that accomplishes the alienation productive of desire, whereby the subject disappears under the signifier that s/he has become. Baudrillard’s view that differences obliterate otherness speaks of a radical ‘otherness’ that, unlike difference, cannot be mapped on any scale of value, an otherness that, in its singularity, demolishes any structuring afforded by signification. While this is a challenging suggestion, for it to really lead to a workable, critical theory it is necessary to propose how language, as a significatory system (but not only a significatory system), might ‘be’ truly ‘symbolic’ in Baudrillard’s sense, and furthermore, how might we conceptualize the speaker(s) of such a language? Baudrillard, however, does not claim to contribute to debates within ‘critical theory’; his intervention through writing is, in his own words, more of the order of a ‘poetic resolution’. Rather than pretending to enhance the intelligibility of the world, his engagement is directed to enhancing its enigma, in fact rendering the world less intelligible than it was before. As Gerry Coulter writes (Smith, 2010: 157), Baudrillard’s intent is to challenge the propensity of philosophy to turn the enigmatic into philosophical questions. While Lacan’s critique holds a question to Baudrillard, Baudrillard’s critique challenges the limits of a Lacanian universe circumscribed within the bounds of the signifier. But does it do so successfully? Possibly Baudrillard does not go far enough with his challenge, unless he views the attempt to do so as a task beyond the limits of language (which in turn surely undermines its prospects). The jouissance of sacrifice remains obscure from a Baudrillardian perspective, and it is this jouissance, as a path to death, that is fundamentally produced and inhibited, made to appear and disappear, because of the human being’s destiny as a subject of language. It is not possible to assert that ‘the cut did not take place’. This does not mean that any single subject cannot traverse his/her past, but it does mean that one cannot deny that past through a gesture of imaginary nostalgia for a ‘before’ the cut, or indeed an imaginary dream of an ‘outside’ or transcendental ‘beyond’ the cut. Baudrillard insists that the ‘living, antagonistic form remains the dual form’, which he claims to be integral to some languages, but that has ‘almost disappeared from ours’ (1998b: 95). Where is there any evidence of any human language past or present functioning entirely in the absence of any fantasmatic representational injunction? This is the point—the representation is fantasmatic, or illusory. Where Baudrillard condemns Lacan

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for what he (Baudrillard) refers to as his (Lacan’s) referential assumptions regarding the sign, Lacan would probably entirely agree with Baudrillard that ‘reality is the effect of the sign’ (Baudrillard, 1993c: 141), although for Lacan it is the chain of signifiers rather than the sign, precisely because the relation of equivalence is indeed equivocal. Baudrillard’s rejection of the representational logic of signification, with its generalized exchange, leads him to embrace a notion of language as poetic, whereby humans engage in a play of appearance and disappearance within an infi nite morphology of forms. Yet this characterization of language provides very little leverage to pursue the question of the subject; it somehow bypasses the question of human subjectivity. On the other hand, Lacan’s recognition that the representational logic of signification is an illusory and imaginary capture leads him to formulate a notion of subjectivity whereby, through becoming speaking beings, humans are alienated, because of language, from the very world that Baudrillard seeks to engender. Through the work of Bataille in particular, it is clear that there are elements of the sacrifice that appear indeed to be commensurable with ‘symbolic exchange’ in Baudrillard’s sense: the reversion of positivity and accumulation. Those elements that are not, however, speak to what remains irresolvable at the heart of human subjectivity. The agency of the sacrificer transforms the person who becomes his/her victim into an instrumental pawn in his/her drama of challenge and seduction that is precisely centered elsewhere (with the gods, for example, or the desert). This instrumental move transforms what would otherwise presumably be a dual relation between two persons, into one of agent and victim. Thus, in the very cause of apparently sustaining the vitality of the dual relation (through a sacrificial act), it is in fact radically denied. Baudrillard’s attempt to make sacrifice emblematic of reversion works only partially. His viewpoint loses sight of the obscene jouissance of sacrifice, its sexed investments, and the horror of its inevitable victimization—features that make sacrifice both defi nitional of human experience and at the same time not only open to its own reversion, but in turn to be sacrificed. ************************ Baudrillard’s critique of generalized exchange provides at least some of the ingredients needed to account, sociologically, for the way the current configuration of ‘victim’ in our society of ‘integral reality’ appears dislocated from any agonistic exchange or sacrificial process. Victims float and circulate in a virtual realm whose coordinates are only those of a ‘right’ to this status, and a demand for compensation or therapy. With no anchoring in any sacrificial act, the victim is a signifier that can migrate and attach itself anywhere. We are all victims; the victimizer no less than anyone else in a seemingly endless regression. In fact the polarization of perpetrator and victim implodes into itself—it appears that no person is deemed to act with evil intent unless also a victim of prior abuse or neglect. Baudrillard’s

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argument that the disturbance of evil is transformed into a calculable and manageable misfortune is reliant on his critique of the dominance of a generalized exchange that smothers and suffocates (excludes and banishes) any incursion of ‘symbolic exchange’. The history of the emergence of this status of the victim over the course of the last century in Western Europe can be tracked to the way the notion of ‘trauma’ entered into a medicalizing vocabulary and moved from there out into a more popularized and widespread use of this term. Trauma, as a kind of moral category, authenticates the suffering of victims, and the possible sources of trauma can range across the almost infi nite expanse of socio-cultural experience (see Fassin and Rechtman, 2009). As Baudrillard’s critique of generalized exchange takes its point of departure from that which it annihilates, the dual relation of ‘symbolic exchange’, so this contemporary construct of victim is addressed from the specter of the sacrificial act. The move to incorporate the sacrificial into his ‘cruel but acceptable’ world of impossible exchange, reversion and illusion circles around a question that remains unaddressed—what about the ‘subject’? Baudrillard summarily dispatches the concept of the ‘subject’ to a similar fate to that of the ‘victim’, yet to do so does not mean that the question goes away. What is the nature of the ‘being’ who acts? Who is the actor within the sacrifice? How does s/he come to speak? What does it mean to be a speaking being? How does one become sexed? How is the victim chosen? What is targeted in the violence? Where does the jouissance come from? Whose is it? Who is responsible for my enjoyment? To address these questions is to refuse a historicist framing of any individual action, that is, to refuse an interpretation whereby the individual’s act and speech is viewed purely as an epiphenomenon of the social and historical conditions of the individual’s existence. In fact, to ask these questions would appear to accord with Baudrillard’s critique of a generalized exchange that erases the singularity of the person’s act.

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A cultural history of the victim relation, as it appears in the selected theoretical treatments traversed here, provides strong support for its imbrication in sacrificial processes. As mentioned in the Introduction, the etymology of ‘victim’ is highly suggestive of this originary connection with sacrifice— the victim is he, she or that which is offered, killed, devoured, given over in what is fundamentally a teleological gesture. The aim of the sacrificial act, albeit unconscious, may be argued to have social implications. As we have seen, for Girard the sacrificial violence unleashed upon a victim by the social group in early human societies created a calm; it pacified the destructive violence resulting from mimetic desire between members of the social group that, he claims, will inevitably run riot through a wild and unstoppable contagion if not confronted with some mechanism of release and catharsis. This use of the violence of sacrifice to control violence marks the beginning of the sacred in Girard’s analysis, as the sacrificial victim is sacralized for its pacifying powers and the act of sacrifice subsequently ritualized. Not incompatible with this interpretation, post-Durkheimian theorists point to the social bond that they claim is created and reiterated through carnivalesque festivals in which sacrificial rituals feature for their ability to intensify the social experience of commonality in a state of heightened emotion and libidinal release. Sacrifice is integral to religion and integral to the formation of the social (which, from the Durkheimian perspective, are one and the same). Alternatively, sacrificial rituals are analyzed by Bataille, and later Baudrillard, for their role in a reversion of the social accumulation of any surplus in pre-economic societies. This surplus, this ‘accursed share’, will be ruinous if it is not expended and if the power it accrues is not annulled. Displays of sacrifice through the potlatch in particular evidence the requirement (within Baudrillard’s notion of societies of ‘symbolic’ exchange) for that which is received by the social group to be responded to with a sacrificial gesture. Such a response provides an ontological assurance of existence—to not respond, to not act within the challenge of the dual relation, is to not exist. Baudrillard contrasts this reversion of any remainder or surplus in societies of ‘symbolic’ exchange to our contemporary late capitalist

Victims, Gender and Jouissance 145 and consumer society in which the dual relation is obliterated. Such a society of ‘integral reality’ defies any such logic of ‘symbolic’ reversion with a totalizing extreme of positivity and a kind of metastatic accumulation. This vision of an essentially bulimic society that can only contemplate ‘more’, ‘growth’, is one in which its individual members collectively claim their right to be victims because to be a victim has been structurally transformed into a strategy for further accumulation, for compensation, for recognition. The victims of sacrificial, ritualistic violence are silent and unseen throughout these analyses, with the possible exception of Girard for whom the proclamation of the innocence of the victim was both the Christian message and the founding moment of the law, and only become heard in their clamorous insistence of their status in this contemporary era of trauma with its condition of victimhood. For Nietzsche this fundamentally undignified and misguided social agitation of the victim has a long history, which, he claims, represents a ‘morality of the slaves’. This ressentiment that Nietzsche disdains derives from a certain hatred by those oppressed for those deemed to oppress, those who reduce victims of their oppression to a status of utility; ressentiment is in turn the derivation of the moral law that he so ardently rails against. On the one hand, the victim appears in these accounts to be almost, one could say, the invisible part, the offering precipitated from a violent social process, sectioned off from any social embeddedness, destined to a collectively witnessed and bloody slaughter that is somehow necessary for a broader social teleology of integration, or equilibrium. On another hand, the victim is pitied for his/her innocence and becomes the object of concern, care, indignation or righteous objection. A moral discourse appears with its appeal to the inherent wrongness of victimization. And yet again, the victim rallies this political opportunity to assume this indignation and seek vengeance or, more latterly, compensation and insurance against ‘risk’. At different points in the history of these theoretical reflections, the victim is variously ignored, sacralized, pitied, protected, rejected, disdained or given what is considered due political recognition with all the ambiguities this entails. What these accounts, important and useful as they are in their own terms, are lacking is a means to fully theorize the relentless and inevitable repetition of the victim relation. While the argument that ‘we are all victims’ in the sense that Baudrillard claims might be sustainable in terms of the compensatory machinery of the current era, it is also the case that the victims of a myriad of physical, psychological, economic and cultural forms of violence are being damaged, hurt, tortured and are enduring unbearable sufferings for which the notion of ‘compensation’ is a cynical misrecognition. The question remains, whether victims are approached from any of the standpoints outlined above, what is so compelling about sacrifice that appears to make it so integral to the very condition of being human, as well as to the condition of forming human societies? The responses that

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only deal with the latter—that sacrifice controls violent contagion resulting from mimetic desire, or that sacrifice annuls the accursed share through reversion, or indeed that sacrifice creates and re-creates the sociality of human collective life—fail to account for the human being as ‘subject’ of the victim relation. They fail to take that further step to ask why the enjoyment, why the jouissance, why the fascination, what to make of the compelling urgency that appears to attend the imperative to construct, enliven and repeat this relation? How does it get under our skin and into our bodies? Why will the appeal, such as that of Judith Butler discussed in Chapter One, to our mutual recognition of human vulnerabilities be unlikely to transform this relation at the level of its structural condition? For all that Butler analyzes theories of subjection, arguing that a relation of subjection is integral to subjectivity, we need to go further to refine an understanding of the ambiguities of the stakes of this relation and the jouissance that underwrites it. Why will hatred for that vulnerability continue to be sustained? To address these questions requires a theory of the subject. It also opens the way for considering how to orient our response to the apparent inevitability of sacrifice, the victim relation, and its framing by gender. As introduced in Chapter Six, Baudrillard’s enduring commitment to the ‘symbolic’ universe of reversion, to a universe in which all forms and gestures are reversed in a ‘symbolic’ resolution, effectively historicizes the subject. The subject can therefore only be theorized by Baudrillard as a manifestation of a historically and culturally specific constellation of social, economic and significatory instances. A fake, an artifact, an invention, yet one that has no inventor, one that can only be seduced if the historical conditions allow. As soon as this commitment is made, the only radical act becomes one that is engendered through a seduction, a reversion, a ‘symbolic’ exchange; an act that defies the hegemonic, solely positive logic of a society of economic exchange and accumulation. But who defies? Who seduces? If the radical act is purely precipitated by a counter-logic, it can only be observed (what ‘is’)—it cannot be induced (the ‘ought’ and the ‘act’). Who might act to change the conditions? Not the subject, who, as a precipitate of these conditions is thoroughly impotent to such a task. Baudrillard claims that the subject as desiring, the desire of the subject, is precisely an accompaniment to the appearance of the subject: ‘only the subject desires’. He writes: In our philosophy of desire, the subject retains an absolute privilege, since it is the subject that desires. But everything is inverted if one passes on to the thought of seduction. There, it’s no longer the subject which desires, it’s the object which seduces. Everything comes from the object and everything returns to it, just as everything started with seduction, not with desire. The immemorial privilege of the subject is overthrown. (1990c: 111)

Victims, Gender and Jouissance 147 The subject cannot withstand the inevitable reversion of the object, of the world, of the illusion of form, and in fact, according to Baudrillard, the subject is in the process of disappearing. Its arrogance and ‘will to power’ (Baudrillard’s allusion to Nietzsche), its assumption as creator of history— all this is fading, as Baudrillard observed in the early 1980s. We have fi nished with ‘all that’, with the subject in the ‘dramaturgy of its alienation’; the subject ‘is now only a miserable carcass in conflict with its own desire or its own image, incapable of managing a coherent representation of the world, pointlessly sacrificed on the corpse of history in an attempted resurrection’—the subject is merely ‘trapped in the melodrama of its own disappearance’ (1990c: 112). We have to be convinced, however, that this historical appearance and disappearance of the human ‘subject’ is a sustainable postulate. Baudrillard’s apparent historicism is eminently grounded in critique; his work is a monumental contribution to what can only be described as a rigorous scholarly process of disabling all, including the most intransigent, assumptions of contemporary thought. To question his historicism of the subject is to question his critique that ‘the subject’ is not integral to the human condition. In other words, Baudrillard must provide a convincing case that the human organism can function in a universe of ‘symbolic’ reversion with no recourse to anything that can be called subjectivity. This is surely a questionable point in Baudrillard’s oeuvre. Its corollary is his proposition that human language can also be wholly recapitulated within these ‘symbolic’ terms of reversion and sacrifice. What leads me to query Baudrillard on both of these points are my questions regarding the lengthy and widespread history of the victim relation and human sacrificial violence. The inquiry leads, furthermore, into Baudrillard’s assumptions, assertions and theorizations regarding the subject, language, reversion, signification, the dual relation, illusion and ultimately his provocation ‘why is there nothing rather than something?’ (1996b: 2) Possibly the gulf between Baudrillard’s situated critique and Lacan’s psychoanalytic theorizing of the subject actually represents a small conceptual step, a shift in focus perhaps, and yet the fact that it is presented by Baudrillard as a non-negotiable chasm probably does represent fairly the implications of the points of divergence. For Lacan, the ‘subject’ cannot be reduced to being solely the agent capable of self-conscious reflection— such a notion of ‘self’ is precisely a mis-recognition produced through the very precipitation of subjecthood, something Baudrillard also depicts. Yet Baudrillard’s subject that is disappearing is stated explicitly in one of his most recent works (posthumously published in both French and English) to be the ‘subject that is an agency of will, freedom and representation, the Subject of power, knowledge and history . . . ’ (2010: 45). This is not the psychoanalytic subject. The subject in psychoanalysis cannot be thought without language, but given the presence of language—when human beings are speaking

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beings—there cannot not be a subject. The subject emerges with the signifier; is an effect of the signifier. The subject is that effect of language emergent upon the very fact that any acceptance of the signifier, any taking up of the signifier and the possibility of the chain of signifiers it anticipates, will be accompanied by a rupture. This rupture is doubled. The subject must be sectioned or divided from that which the signifier presumes to take its place (creating not only an interior and exterior but also a remainder in the form of that remnant of ‘being’, objet a), and the subject must be divided as a construct (an internal division that is mis-recognized as a unifi ed whole). The divided subject cannot ‘know’ the conditions of its subjecthood, as the disavowal that constitutes its very possibility is unconscious. The unconscious according to Lacan, is structured like language1—in other words, for a signifier to mark a presence there will in the same movement be a bar that delimits that presence by virtue of barring that from which it is distinguished. The illusion of the contours of form appears in this gesture of the signifier. This is the ‘reality’ the subject constructs as an effect of language. In Saussurean (and Aristotelian) terms, that which ‘is’ takes on its identification through its distinction from that which it is not. The signifier therefore acts as a mark, a cut, a letter, an insignia that for any subject can only represent that subject for other signifiers if s/he has taken up the contract of language. To take up the contract of language is to enter into a world of discourse where the subject is literally subjected to the (ultimately unknowable and Imaginary) meanings of ‘others’ that precede him/her. If this possibility is refused or foreclosed, there will be no subject. Taking up this contract of language, ‘being’ a subject that can be represented within the Symbolic Order involves a sacrifice. To become a subject, s/he must give up the (fantasy of) undifferentiated immersion in the world and the fantasized sense of utter jouissance, omnipotence or completion, s/he might imagine accompanies this state. This ‘world’ that must be sacrificed to become a subject is in itself a precipitate of the Symbolic, an ‘effect’ of language, one that Lacan calls the Real. As Lacan clarifies, there is no lack in the Real, nor is there any excess or surplus. Baudrillard’s evocation of the ‘symbolic universe of reversion’—a world that does not require a cut to precipitate the subject as divided, a non-essentialist world of appearance as illusion in which language does not figure as in any sense representational but is rather an act of poetic challenge and seduction—radically rejects the universal nature of the signifier and the necessity of human subjectivity.2 Yet is it not an impossible vision? There is no language of the human species that does not inaugurate in some way this cut of the signifier and unleash a cascade of ‘reality’ constructed through the chain of signifiers. There are no cultural forms, including tribal, in which some incarnation of subjectivity is not present. This is not to say that all individuals are speaking beings, but any human baby not nurtured in the presence of other human speaking beings will not only never ‘become’ human but will in all likelihood die (and not through lack of food, warmth,

Victims, Gender and Jouissance 149 shelter): ‘it’ will not become a subject (see Pommier, 2004). Nor is it dismissing the existence of forms of speech and language that function purely in poetic form; Baudrillard’s example of language reversing its terms in poetry (with no remainder, no meaning, effecting a cancelling of any positivity) is not unlike Lacan’s evocation of lalangue. Where Baudrillard views the subject as an historical and cultural artifact or even anomaly, albeit hell-bent on the totalizing spiral of a generalized exchange currently accelerating to a vanishing point, the notions that the subject is a construct and that reality is constructed, are not at all different from those of psychoanalytic theorizing. The difference lies in the distance between Baudrillard’s conviction that there is another ‘symbolic’ world of reversion which human social and psychic life could inhabit, compared to the psychoanalytic contention that any resolution of the human condition must pass through the rigors of language, the cut of the signifier and the imaginary construction of the subject—in other words, for psychoanalysis there is an inevitability of the subject. Take an example of a statement from Baudrillard: The absence of things from themselves, the fact that they do not take place though they appear to do so, the fact that everything withdraws behind its own appearance and is, therefore, never identical with itself, is the material illusion of the world. And, deep down, this remains the great riddle, the enigma which fi lls us with dread and from which we protect ourselves with the formal illusion of truth. (1996b: 2) There is nothing in this statement that is averse to a Lacanian reading: the void, the hole, the nothing, bounded as such and rendered enigmatic by the emergence of the signifier; that which is of the order of the Real remains forever unknowable and unrepresentable; the net of signifiers is woven together by virtue of the Imaginary, the construction of appearances; the ‘truth’ of perception and the ‘master’s discourse’ veils the psychoanalytic truth that is specific to the subject and ultimately unknowable; the dread of the Thing, precisely as that which cannot be represented is both abject and sublime. The difference is that, for Baudrillard, there is the suggestion that the ‘symbolic’ universe of reversion, of the dual relation, pre-exists the subject, that reversibility is ‘the working of the world itself’ (2007:69), beyond or outside the subject, is the world from which the very appearance of ‘the subject’ represents a departure, and in which he imagines its dissolution; to which he imagines its return. On the other hand, for Lacan, the very registers of the Real, the Symbolic and the Imaginary are orders of the subject; he has nothing to say about the ‘world’. The subject is by structure and definition divided by language, produced by language as desiring, effected by the unconscious, and confronts the inevitable vicissitudes of its drives. As such, the desire for a return to an

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imagined state where there is no subject would be a state of no language, no grappling with the (illusory) Other, no social (as Other); a fantasy of a primordial, infi nite jouissance—in short, the death drive. ‘Why is there nothing rather than something?’ From a Lacanian perspective, there is no issue to be taken with Baudrillard’s proposal that this is the ‘real question’ today. The response to the ‘great philosophical question’ that Baudrillard reverses—that is, ‘why is there something rather than nothing?’—is that all versions of ‘something’ are artifacts of human language and subjectivity. The psychoanalytic subject is s/he (sexed) who is continually mis-recognizing his/her self or ego as whole and unified, a subject whose desire is unconsciously set in interminable and repetitious motion by that ineffable remainder or trace of the Real, a kind of surplus, Lacan’s objet a (introduced in Chapter Three and discussed further in Chapter Four). This psychoanalytic subject is the subject of the victim relation. Sacrifice can be understood to reassure the subject of a continuity with the Real: anything but the cut, the alienation, the castration, the severance; anything but the division of the subject and the hopelessness of its fantasy, the impossibility of an infi nite jouissance; anything but the psychoanalytic symptom. In the writings of de Sade, the sadist seeks the impossible object—objet a, the cause of its desire; in the sacrificial offering to a god that deity is produced as desiring, like the subject. The cruel and punishing law of sacrifice, with its associated victimage in its grandiose staging of mass killings or in the guise of its ‘little daily mutilations’ to which Lacan refers (see Chapter Four), appears to be integral to the desire of the subject, to its jouissance, to its relation with the Other and the hallucinated insistence of its demand. ‘There are no victims’ in the very sense that ‘we are all victims’—or to put it another way, the subject is inscribed within the torsion of the victim relation. When Bataille and Baudrillard claim the significance of the reversion of the accursed share, it raises the question of the notion of ‘surplus’ or ‘excess’. If such practices of potlatch or the ‘symbolic’ exchange of the gift were characteristic of pre-economic ‘societies’ or cultural groups (Baudrillard objects to the notion of the ‘social’ in this context) whose entire ontology was not predicated on economic value, how did a calculus of ‘surplus’ appear? How was it possible for an excess to be identified? How was it measured and relative to what? In Baudrillard’s analysis, ‘symbolic circulation is primordial’, and within this process of reciprocity nothing remains: ‘this exchange excludes any surplus’ (1975: 79).3 Goods are exchanged precisely as a means to perpetuate a mechanism of reciprocity and non-accumulation or proliferation. He writes, ‘exchange itself is based on non-production, eventual destruction, and a process of continuous unlimited reciprocity between persons, and inversely on a strict limitation of exchanged goods’ (pp.79–80, emphasis in original). And yet the sacrificial, ritual destruction of the accursed share is reliant on there being some recognition of that which is in excess of the reciprocal dynamics of exchange; that which has not

Victims, Gender and Jouissance 151 been reversed is identifiable and marked for sacrifice. Can such an excess of ‘goods’—goods that presumably have some value to the group, otherwise their sacrifice would be meaningless within this logic of the accursed share (they would not have the potency that ‘accursed’ suggests)—be as neatly and absolutely distinguished from the Marxist notion of ‘surplus value’ as Baudrillard insists?4 Surplus value is the value extracted from the labor of the worker over and above that which is returned to him/her by way of payment. This surplus value is extracted by, and thus accrues to, the capitalist. It must go somewhere. What is this ‘value’ that must be expended? It is extracted in the form of objects or ‘goods’ that can be exchanged for another form of ‘value’ (money, which effectively is debt). This value is strictly for the enjoyment of the capitalist. S/he can exchange that money for more ‘goods’ and ‘services’ for his/her enjoyment, or s/he can invest it to generate more and more value. But it must be expended. And indeed for Lacan, surplus value is not unlike surplus jouissance (propelled by the inherent loss or lack in jouissance along the ‘path towards death’). Like the accursed share, it becomes the capitalist’s curse in the sense that it is worthless if s/he cannot expend it in enjoyment, a jouissance that must be sacrificed. Lacan recalls that Marx wrote that within the capitalist system the surplus work has to be paid for—and that ‘it pays in jouissance’ (Lacan, 2007: 20).5 The surplus of goods that represents an accursed share and is destroyed in a sacrificial ritual can also be thought of as a surplus jouissance—an enjoyment that must be expended precisely through the sacrificial process itself. If the subject, as an effect of the signifier, can be approached as a topological structure articulated within a flux of loss, desire, the demand of the Other, fantasy and a surplus jouissance, as a subject destined to sacrificial gestures, it follows to resume pursuing the question asked in Chapter Three, how is this structure inflected by gender? Reineke’s interpretation of Kristeva’s critique of the gendered ‘sacrificial economy’ suggested that a gendered nature of the structure of victimization, of sacrifice, is evident through the violence infl icted specifically on the bodies of women. This violence, she claims, places the feminine victim as its object because, fundamentally, the bodies of women mark that maternal origin as the site of that which must be rejected for the subject’s very separation, emergence and existence. Reineke argues that it is precisely when the status of the subject-as-whole and complete is threatened or undermined that there can be a retracing, a reiteration, of the rejection of that flesh, the mother-body, against which the subject attained its being. If the mother-body can be made to signify, can be marked and cut, ‘it’ will shore up the subject’s fantasy of its ‘being’. This emphasis on the mother-body as the site of sacrificial violence prompts a forced alignment of women with victim and men with violation. This in turn leads to the suggestion that the inherently sacrificial nature

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of men’s ‘death-work’ should be the focus of an ethical response. Alternatively, retaining the analysis at the structural level of the subject’s (whether masculine or feminine) inevitable imbrication within the victim relation dislodges the necessity for this alignment and allows for the victimizing, sacrificial gesture to be enacted by any subject, and for any ‘body’ (or body part) to be sacrificed. It is useful to be reminded that the ‘subject’ does not imply an object of possible experience, as Copjec (1994) insists; the subject has no substance as such, and equally, reference to the ‘sexed subject’ does not mean that sex positively describes the subject. Sex as masculine or feminine, understood in Lacanian terms, marks the subject’s relation to the master signifier. As Lacan stated, there is only one sex—that which is marked by, or as, the phallic signifier. The only other position is to not be marked. There is no signifier of sexual difference as such, and this is why Lacan refers instead to sexuation. This is also why there are only two ‘sexes’; the proliferation of sexes, as the current valorization of ‘diversity’ would advocate, functions solely at the level of ‘sexual identity’, a matter of discourse and imaginary construction. In fact, in Copjec’s analysis (1994) the subject can be understood rather more as the failure or limit of language, and the subject is sexed because there are two ways in which language can fail or approach its limit.6 The structural relation of the subject to the phallic signifier is precariously achieved. The masculine subject, as much as the feminine subject, is constituted within the torsion of the (non)-relation between the phallic all (or whole) and the non-phallic not-all (or not-whole) and is not fully subsumed by gender. Whether masculine or feminine, the subject’s fundamental fantasy—the relation to objet a—will not only be structured by gender. What matters is the subject’s relation to objet a, to the ‘most intimate and living bit of our/the Other’s being’ (Faye, 2009: 6, also cited in Chapter Four), and not the relation to other people as such, or to the Other (see also Copjec, 2002). Possibly one could argue that the sacrificial dramaturgy and the victim relation fi nds its core in this unconscious, singular and unknowable fundamental fantasy of the subject; the relation of the subject to objet a being the ‘fundamental fantasy’ in Lacan’s terms. The sexed nature of the subject will inflect this relation to objet a, to this partial object of the drive, but not fully constitute it. Joan Copjec writes, ‘It is woman who is the guardian of the not-all of being’; in this sense she (the feminine structure of the subject) ‘remains closer to the truth of being, while man obfuscates this truth through a nostalgic, secondary operation that allows him to maintain a belief in the plenitude of being to come’ (2002: 7). In other words, in the same way that there is no whole of being, ‘she’ is not One, whereas ‘he’ has a pretention to being One (thus there are two means of failure). Lacan’s statement, ‘The woman does not exist’ (with ‘The’ crossed through as a positive negation), means there is no universal of ‘woman’. ‘Man’ (inclusive of the set ‘men’) can ‘exist’ as a collective because the masculine subject has a singular and

Victims, Gender and Jouissance 153 common means of making up for the failure of the sexual relationship (objet a takes the place of the sexual partner), whereas for women it is radically different—‘something other than objet a is at stake’, according to Lacan (1998b: 63), and this something other is contingent and therefore unique for each woman (thus women must be approached ‘one by one’). Baudrillard considers ‘woman’ as guardian of seduction, and hence of the ‘nothing’, the void, the dual form and an impossible exchange—possibly there is some resonance with Lacan’s construct of woman as ‘not-all’. Lacan insists there is no sexual relation, a claim that has some resonance with Baudrillard’s dual form and the impossible exchange. Baudrillard embraces the sacrificial as a form of seduction, pertaining to the world of reversion, whereas Lacan charts a conceptual terrain that opens on to the sacrificial as integral to the human drama of subjectivity. Without a theory of the subject, indeed, without subjects, Baudrillard’s analysis appears to leave us, on the other side of the mirror, stranded in a fantasmatic and agonistic world of challenge, seduction, reversion, radical otherness, cruelty and sacrifice; a woman is the sublime object of sacrifice to reverse and respond to the challenge of the void, the desert. Whereas, for Lacan, a desire to sacrifice over and over, more and more, to what he calls a ‘dark God’ is immanent to the structure of the subject as speaking being; the feminine, precisely as that which signifies nothing, is the hinge to the possibility of an ethical act. A point of difference indicating the possibility of two very different versions of the ‘sacrificial’ act has begun to appear in the course of the discussion thus far; a divergence that must be distinguished and can now start to be delineated. There is something about the sacrifice that Bataille and Baudrillard write about that appears to be working in accordance with a logic of reversion that is wholly ‘other’ from a sacrificial act that serves a cathartic role, as an object with which to bargain for an advantage or as a defense against a perceived threat to phallic identity. While all forms might presage a certain means of doing ‘death-work’, to use Reineke’s term, or of keeping the death drive at bay in Walter’s discourse, the reversion of an excess constitutes a means to invent a social formation that is at paradigmatic variance from the use of violence to control violence, the use of violence to terminate a cycle of vengeance, only to be renewed. Where the latter works like a kind of electric shock treatment, abruptly diverting the escalation of a chaotic charge threatening collective carnage and ultimate dissolution, the former negates and dissolves through a transformative ‘symbolic’ process that is a repeated undoing of the One and the Other. It is confusing to use the term ‘sacrifice’ for these very different enactments. Various forms of the potlatch or other ritualized instances of symbolic exchange, for example the hau of the forest in Māori7 tradition, are not sacrificial in the sense of using sacrifice to keep the death drive at bay. They are not of the order of that kind of ‘sacred’ and have no religious

154 Victims, Gender and Jouissance connotation nor instigate any system of belief. As soon as there is the question of human or animal sacrifice, of cutting off limbs or making offerings of various substitutes, we are in the realm of a cathartic or bargaining type of sacrifice. To understand this latter sacrifice and its jouissance it is necessary to bring a theory of subjectivity to bear on this very human conundrum. Baudrillard does not have such a theory, so his work does not open onto an understanding of how and why humans act as they do when the subject is precipitated by the cut of the signifier. Such a subject, it must be noted, is arguably the precursor to the existence of processes of ‘symbolic exchange’, which act as a means to undo the effects of this inevitable alienation. Otherwise there is no way of configuring how humans come to perceive or construct an excess to be reversed, a presence to be undone. Societies of ‘symbolic exchange’ cannot be imagined as some pristine originary order of a natural and prior universe, to be devastated by systems of generalized exchange. Rather, they represent a means of undoing the ‘something at the heart of the essent’, which is precisely there to be undone because of the cut of the signifier. Lacan’s approach to sacrifice as a lure or wager that conjures the Other as desiring refi nes our understanding of the sacrifice with its bargaining telos, yet it also points in a way toward the challenge and seduction of ‘symbolic exchange’. We have to ask of Lacan, however, what is his critical point of departure for his theorizing of subjectivity? A discourse of ‘what is’ (Lacan’s seminars and writing are structured through a discourse of ‘is’ and ‘are’) can only be a critical discourse (which is so obviously Lacan’s intent) if his observations (such as ‘the Imaginary is’, ‘the subject is’) are made from a point of view that takes a critical distance from that which is observed. This cannot be a view from nowhere (otherwise his refusal to say ‘what is’ is pure fiction). So what is the critical point of departure for Lacanian psychoanalysis? It would have to be the standpoint resulting from the analytic ‘cure’ as the transformative process of psychoanalysis. From the analysis of sacrifice, the victim and gender presented here, it is possible to wager that Lacan’s critical point of departure misses something. While aiming to recognise and traverse the fundamental fantasy, its purview remains within a boundary of the One and the Other; it does not see or envision any other way of confronting the inevitability of the One and the Other constructed via the signifier and the chain of signifiers. With Baudrillard’s insights, which, I am convinced, are in some ways compatible with Lacan’s, it is possible to envision a way of constituting exchange, a formation of the social, that undoes the dualism inaugurated by the unary trait, the master signifier; that is of an entirely ‘other’ order from that of the subject and its Other. Like the Zen parable of the mountains and the rivers, the mistake is to view Baudrillard’s (or Nietzsche’s or Bataille’s) ‘way’ as somehow prior, as a ‘working of the world’ that can somehow be reinstated in the absence of the cut of the signifier. Rather, ‘symbolic’ reversion, exchange, the dual (non-dual) relation, results from a process of annulment that is not only

Victims, Gender and Jouissance 155 one of personal transformation but also diff uses throughout the social formation constituting the terms of its exchange. When subjectivities are dissolved and renewed in the encounter, in Bataille’s terms, one can encounter another, each in recognition of the other’s contingent existence. ************************** The theorists discussed in this book are not persuaded by the naïve application of any form of moral law to sacrificial violence with its active creation of victims. Understanding the sacrificial violence of victimization as some kind of aberration to be outlawed and detoured through ‘policy’ and ‘programs’, while probably ‘necessary’, is recognized to be ultimately theoretically blind and impotent in terms of praxis and poesis. On the contrary, they variously problematize both the law and morality, study how they are implicated in the very terms of sacrificial acts, in an attempt to delve more deeply into the social and psychic conditions of the sacrificial. As we have seen, the victim relation is one in which the line between victim and perpetrator, sacrificed and sacrificing is disturbingly difficult to prevent from becoming blurred. The focus shifts from accounting for transgression to the theoretical task of interrogating the way these sacrificial processes enact ambiguous social and psychic realities. For some, sacrifice is in fact valorized for its role in social life or its role at a more fundamental level of a critical ontology. For others, sacrifice is a horror to be fi rstly recognized and then eradicated through a complex process of social and psychic transformations involving death-work, or religious or mystical practice, or disdained for its motivation in grievances inspiring vengeance. For others, sacrifice is neither to be valorized nor condemned per se—rather it exists, has a long and cross-cultural history, and as such its study provides insight into the human condition. For a project exploring the relation between victims and gender, and the jouissance that appears to circulate around and knot this nexus, the latter is more persuasive. The question then becomes one of envisaging a non-sacrificial formulation of the subject. Rather than envisaging a pristine ‘before’ the subject (or any alternative to the subject), it is a matter of ‘after’ the subject—after in the sense of a process that confronts the subject with its divided construction. In psychoanalysis, this is a practice that only the subject can traverse— there is no collective solution to the conundrum of the subject’s disavowed division, of his/her fundamental fantasy, of the impasse of jouissance, all of which derive from the subject’s relation to, and situation between, language and the Real. Whether the practice involves years of psychoanalysis, sublimation through art, or Zen meditation, there is ultimately a recognition of the inevitability of the subject’s division and a refusal of its disavowal, recognition of the fabricated nature of unity and division, recognition of the non-whole of being, the non-existence of the Other (let alone the demand of the Other, or even more seriously the Other of the Other), the fatality of belief, the enigma of the impossibility of desire, an assumption of the death

156 Victims, Gender and Jouissance drive . . . ‘Recognition’ here does not imply a learning, or a teaching that can be transferred; it is not directly, consciously assimilable. Rather it is produced through a ‘shift’ in unconscious process.8 A question arises at this point that has not been foregrounded thus far: which subject? If we accept that the subject emerges with the signifier, then a qualified universal application of the concept presumably follows. Yet it remains to be asked, are the specific coordinates of ‘the subject’ as such to be thought as universal and trans-historical, trans-cultural? Can the Aztec brandishing his lethal weapon of human sacrifice, the Spanish women hurling a live goat from a balcony in a ritual sacrifice, the Nazi death camp commandant or the sadistic abuser of children in 20th century Western Europe be usefully considered the same ‘subject’? Clearly not; as was acknowledged in Chapter Two in connection with the need to situate Lacanian psychoanalysis within its socio-historical, capitalist, European context, the instance of subjectivity is appropriately indexed to its socio-cultural milieu. This important question and its implications can be approached through relinking with an earlier discussion of the nature of ‘evil’. How helpful are references to the ‘evil’ of human acts of unspeakable violence? As discussed in Chapter Five, good and evil are strictly human constructs and as such can be considered as products of humanity’s attempts to deal with its suffering. There it was suggested that the crux of a critical formulation of ‘evil’ lies in the fantasized and as yet unrealized, totalizing ‘truth’ about the world. While Badiou claims this totalizing truth to be the hallmark of evil, Baudrillard rather deploys the term ‘evil’ for that irruption of a terrorizing force that would disrupt and disable any possibility of such a totalizing truth. Either way, to invoke a world-to-come whereby human existence is benignly pacifist, whether this delusional vision is presaged to come about through a transformation of collective sensibility, religious conversion, or because somehow a moral revolution would create law-abiding citizens, is precisely the kind of totalizing vision from which Badiou and Baudrillard recoil. With reference to the subject of the act, however, it becomes necessary to address the question of evil to this subject. Copjec (1996) discusses Kant’s claim that ‘radical evil’ is concomitant with the emergence of ‘freedom’ in post-Enlightenment Europe. The point here is that the possibility of doing evil was at this time detached from the conditions of human fi nitude (‘conceived simply as the limitations imposed on our mortal nature’, p.xi) and instead attached to ‘our immortal aspirations’ (to human freedom). This relocation was unavoidably associated with the emergence of a particular ‘autonomous’ subject. This subject became burdened with responsibility for his/her acts and could not experience or explain his/her actions as epiphenomena of external conditions. Thus, what Kant refers to as ‘radical evil’ became possible, not with a liberal form of voluntarism, but when the divided will of the subject prohibits an unproblematic identification with its own autonomy. Copjec stresses Kant’s position that the only way we can know the specifically moral law is through

Victims, Gender and Jouissance 157 guilt of transgression: ‘The only way we can act freely—that is, that we are free—is through the voice of conscience, which tells us that we ought to free ourselves from our slavery to external motives’. She goes on to explain how, for Lacan, it is from the work of Kant that ‘the status of the subject becomes ethical rather than ontological; the subject can only be supposed on the basis of moral conscience’ (1996: xv). ‘Radical evil’ is therefore the action that could have been otherwise. It requires a certain kind of subject. Our question of the ethical act contemporarily is of necessity one to be asked of the modern subject. The edict of ethics as acting in conformity with the moral law, purportedly prescribing that which must not take place in the service of a generalized ‘good’ that frees us universally to pursue our enjoyment, is one that Lacan turns on its head. He formulates the ethical act through a reversal of this injunction. The act that is precisely not ethical is when the moral law anticipates a unified subject acting in accordance with a moral ‘good’, thus detouring the subject away from recognition of its division and commanding it to ‘enjoy!’ The moral law as moral conscience in this sense functions as a cruel and sadistic internal judge, inciting the pursuit of jouissance with an aggressive and unstoppable insistence. The ethic of psychoanalysis, on the other hand, takes as its point of departure our recoil from this injunction. To repeat the point quoted at the end of Chapter Three, Lacan states that the only thing of which one can be guilty is having given ground relative to one’s desire. To refuse a disavowal of one’s division is a premise of Lacanian psychoanalysis. When the relentless pursuit of jouissance is inscribed in moral law through an invocatory drive, the voice of conscience, the subject is compelled to its pursuit of enjoyment and disavows any recognition of the death drive. It follows that an ethic of psychoanalysis equally is one of refusing to disavow the death drive. While feminist and social theory aim towards critique that will demystify systems of knowledge and belief for their role in defending and consolidating violent and oppressive social relations, it is imperative to reject any idealist tendency to dismiss analyses because they do not indicate a means of social change. In accordance with Penney’s (2006) claim, mentioned earlier, regarding the indeterminate and undeterminable nature of the ‘ought’, the discussion of the victim relation and its sacrificial history presented here cannot begin to claim to identify a problem and therefore prescribe how to engineer a solution, nor can it claim to identify an oppressive Other against whom a revolutionary objection can be mounted. It claims, on the contrary, that the victim relation appears to be enmeshed, contingently and violently, within the unfathomably complex web of gendered human subjectivity. While clinical psychoanalysis, and the Lacanian field, is a means for the kind of ‘revolutions in subjectivity’, to cite Ian Parker’s term (2011), suggested here, its limited prospect for a vision of social transformation is obvious. If Baudrillard’s valorization of sacrifice can be re-signified away from those far-more-virulent forms of sacrifice involving a scapegoat or an object

158 Victims, Gender and Jouissance for bargaining and re-articulated with ‘symbolic’ processes of exchange; if we understand his rendition of the dual relation and the process of reversion to obtain to an on-going undoing of the illusion of the ‘subject’ as an ontic effect of the signifier, not in Walter’s (1977) sense of a death drive that undoes the differentiation between the ego and the world, but in Baudrillard’s sense of a relentless reversal of the positing of what ‘is’ in its positive, cumulative yet illusory imperative; if it is conceded that reversion functions through social formation as much as at the level of the singularity of the individual, then such a contribution would present a creative counterpoint to a Lacanian psychoanalysis that does not envision any form of human social existence outside the vicissitudes of the illusory One, the illusory Other, and the trauma of the Real. Although the core of Lacan’s theory appears to be incompatible with this provocation of reversion, in the sense of remaining caught in this circumscribed space, it nonetheless ceaselessly insists on the non-sense, the void, the objet a. The tension generated by this confrontation, in recognizing the inevitability of the sexed subject yet articulating its seduction and reversion, will be one that leads to sacrificing sacrifice, detouring jouissance from its fantasy of the Other, and opening a way beyond the victim.

Notes

NOTES TO THE INTRODUCTION 1. As Wendy Brown has analyzed, the effort to use the law to somehow terminate social injury ‘powerfully legitimizes law and the state as appropriate protectors against injury and cases injured individuals as needing such protection by such protectors’ (1995: 27). 2. Slavoj Žižek (2005) is one author who explores a few of these assumptions in relation to human rights more generally, claiming there are three of them: fi rstly, that appeals to human rights oppose essentializing claims characteristic of fundamentalist positions; secondly, by reference to the importance of the most basic rights of freedom of choice, and of dedicating one’s life to the pursuit of pleasure; thirdly, by forming the basis for a ‘defence against the “excess of power”’ (p.115). He proceeds to deconstruct these assumptions. 3. ‘Being’ is in quotation marks because it is never a static being in the ontological sense; there is no ‘thingness’ to being, nor is being assumed to be whole or unified.

NOTES TO CHAPTER 1 1. Carine Mardorossian (2002), for example, notes how feminists in the early years of the second wave of feminist activism actively campaigned in the US against the fact that the criminal justice system would allow courts to use the prior sexual history and the reputation of the complainant against her (see p.751, FN10). 2. See, for example, Ellen Faulkner and Gayle MacDonald’s 2009 edited collection Victims No More, which they claim explores the moments beyond victimization by arguing that ‘women do not stay crushed and broken, but move on, build and grow’ (publicity material). This notion of survivorship is an attempt to ameliorate the damaging psychosocial consequences of a victim discourse. 3. See Baudrillard (1987) and Grace (2000) for a discussion of Baudrillard’s critique of Foucault’s concept of ‘power’ and its implications for feminist theory. See also extended discussions critical of Butler’s attempt to bring Foucault’s power and discourse together with Lacanian psychoanalysis in Copjec (1994) and Penney (2006). See Dean (2000, especially Chapter Five) for a Lacanian critique of Butler’s engagement with Lacanian concepts. 4. Ann Murphy (2009) refers also to Debra Bergoffen, Rosalyn Diprose and Kelly Oliver who variously ‘critique the individualism and autonomy of

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Notes

the late modern subject through an appeal to figures such as vulnerability, generosity, witnessing and dispossession’ (p.55). 5. See the discussion by Juliet Mitchell (1982) in her introduction to Lacan’s Encore, where she provides a detailed account of the historical controversy surrounding the question of the assumed but, she argues, erroneous biological reference for both the phallus and the notion of the castration complex particularly in relation to Freud’s work. 6. See Copjec (1994) for a Lacanian critique of Butler’s rendition of ‘gender’, for an analysis of what she misses regarding sexual difference in Lacanian terms, and for her use of Foucault’s historicism.

NOTES TO CHAPTER 2 1. See Keenan (2005) for a comprehensive review of the genealogy of theories of sacrifice. 2. Prior to this book, Girard published two others that examined the triangular relationships supporting his concept of mimetic desire. These books comprise studies of novelists, the fi rst being Deceit, Desire and the Novel (1965) on Cervantes, Stendhal, Flaubert, Proust and Dostoevsky fi rst published in 1961, and the second being Resurrection from the Underground: Feodor Dostoevsky (1997) on the works of Dostoevsky fi rst published in 1963. 3. Girard’s critique of the way Christianity moved to promote, endorse and ritualize a stance that represented the inverse of the message of Christ echoes the analysis of Nietzsche. In The Will to Power (1968), Nietzsche expounds his critique of religion and ‘Christian ideals’, and in this context writes ‘The entire Christian teaching as to what shall be believed, the entire Christian “truth”, is idle falsehood and deception: and precisely the opposite of what inspired the Christian movement in the beginning’ (p.98). 4. For example, ‘Freud and other theoreticians of psychoanalysis refuse to understand its [the double bind’s] terrible simplicity; they always direct our attention away from the truth towards some ludicrous fable’ (1988: 62). 5. Lacan’s discours de l’Autre has variously been interpreted to mean the unconscious is the Other’s discourse, or the discourse about the Other. 6. Girard (1987) distances his notion of desire from those of writers such as Hegel and Freud, for whom human desire is given too much specificity, in his view, and is therefore too radically distinct from non-human animals. According to Girard, although human desire is not the same as non-human ‘desire’ there is a continuity between the mimetic behaviors of non-human animals and that of humankind. He makes this observation with reference to ethological studies, and it provides him with one of many rationales for taking issue with psychoanalysis. It should be noted, however, that Lacan’s construct of the imaginary is precisely one he developed with an eye to a human–non-human continuum where in each case mimesis is active and productive. He discussed this in his 1953–54 seminar: ‘Let us note in this connection that the function of the imaginary is at work in the behavior of every animal couple’ (Lacan, 1991: 281). It is thus not convincing for Girard to discard the psychoanalytic concept of desire with this claim as a reason. Clearly, psychoanalytic theorizing does not reject mimesis and the observation that humans share mimetic features with other animals is evident in Lacan’s imaginary, yet the psychoanalytic notion of desire remains entirely different from that of Girard. 7. Girard (1977) provides numerous examples from ethnological and anthropological literature of this ritualized preparation of the sacrifi cial victim,

Notes

8.

9.

10.

11. 12.

161

including, for example, practices surrounding the person of the king. In specified African monarchies, in preparation for taking up the role, the king-to-be is, he reports, forced to commit acts of incest and many other transgressive acts (eating certain foods that are taboo, committing acts of violence) that are considered to be of utmost evil and subsequently punishable. ‘In some societies the whole enthronement ceremony takes place in an atmosphere of blood-stained confusion’ (1977: 105), the king-to-be also suffering ritualistic abuse and insults from those gathered as his future constituents. Girard claims that these forced transgressions take place because the king must, in these cases, play the role of the original victim. It is not that the king is sacrificed because he is somehow weak or lesser in his potency but because such a sacrifice will bring benefi cence to the community. The potency of the king precisely derives from this incarnation in potentia. Citing one ethnologist in the early twentieth century who wrote of the symbolic remnants of such a practice in Rwanda, Girard quotes, ‘The royal pair appeared in public, bound like captives condemned to death. A bull and a cow, their substitutes, were clubbed to the ground and some of the bull’s blood was poured over him so as to carry the symbolic resemblance between the two as far as possible’ (Girard, 1977: 106, emphasis in original). By contrast, Bataille (1991) documents the preparation of a victim through the opposite process whereby s/he is feted, given food, wine and precious gifts, etc., effecting a closeness between the victim to be killed and the social group. Arguably this is different means of registering a form of ‘consent’. Girard (1977) notes how the figure of the pharmakos in classical Greece—a victim who is sacrificed to cure the social group of sickness—is the origin of the pharmakon from which we have the term ‘pharmacy’ with its meaning of medication. The pharmakon in ancient Greek means both poison and the antidote for poison (see Girard, 1977: 95). Ressentiment is a term used by Friedrich Nietzsche to refer to the hostility through to seething hatred the oppressed feel for their oppressors, because of their powerlessness to refuse or overturn their subjection, and also because of their inability to give expression to their rage. In the context of talking about Freudian psychoanalysis and the advent of modern science, Lacan made the point in Seminar XI that ‘the Freudian field was possible only a certain time after the emergence of the Cartesian subject’, and later ‘the subject who is called—the subject of Cartesian origin’ (1998a: 47). For all of his repeated references to the classical Greek scholars and the relevance of mythic figures from antiquity to his analyses, Lacan is clear on this point regarding the ‘subject’ of whom he speaks. The German word Freud used in his work translated in English as ‘uncanny’. To differentiate, from this point I will use a capital letter to designate the Lacanian nouns Symbolic, Imaginary and Real, and inverted commas when referring to the Baudrillardian concept of ‘symbolic’ exchange.

NOTES TO CHAPTER 3 1. Note that this quote prefaces Martha Reineke’s (1997) book on Kristeva, women and violence. 2. This view originated with Freud, who was clear that the unconscious, which contains repressed wishes or drives, does not contain thoughts or affects as such but rather ‘representatives of the (re)presentation or idea’. Lacan understands these representatives of the drives as signifiers, words that stand in

162

3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9.

10. 11. 12.

Notes for the drives (see Fink, 1995: 73). In Ellie Ragland’s reading of Lacan, that which is repressed is precisely unsymbolized meanings, ‘meanings that have not yet been translated into language’ (1995: 98–99). Against the notion of the semiotic as the reading of signs as in medicine or linguistics, Kristeva employs the term to refer to the irrepressible eruption of the non-representable being-in-the-real. Kristeva’s rendition of the semiotic here is not dissimilar to Lacan’s use of Freud’s notion of the ‘Thing’. Soma meaning of the body, bodily. Jean-Thierry Maertens (1978) analyzes the marks made on the body through scarification and tattoo for their gendered differentiation, drawing a similar conclusion. Also see Jean-Thierry Maertens (1978) for an in-depth elaboration of what are arguably these very processes in numerous cultural contexts. See especially p.243ff.: ‘The Splendor of Antigone’. The Lacanian notion of ‘cause’ here is not intended as a determination apparent in sets of relations observable in ‘reality.’ Evans (1996) outlines how Lacan’s engagement with ‘causality’ evolved throughout his work. The specific use of ‘cause’ in the expression of objet a as ‘cause of desire’ is elaborated in Seminar X, where ‘Lacan argues that the true meaning of causality should be looked for in the phenomenon of anxiety, for anxiety is the cause of doubt’ (Evans, 1996: 24). Existence in the etymological meaning: outside of a state of being, ex (outside of), stence (state). The deity does not exist. This gendered differential regarding jouissance and desire has its precedents in early Islam and with the ancient Greeks (Apollodorus Lib. 3.6.7, cited in Johnson and Ryan, 2005). Verhaeghe notes that in his view a ‘postlacanian hype’ surrounding ‘feminine jouissance’ can only be understood as an ‘hysterical attempt to recuperate something that, due to its very nature, cannot be recuperated’ (2001: 104). This reflection signals the importance of precisely not treading a non-Lacanian path with Lacanian concepts.

NOTES TO CHAPTER 4 1. Sacrifice has long been inherent in the practices of Catholic Christianity (and other forms of Christianity); a matter of giving up specific things such as food, alcohol, wealth, without mentioning the ascetic practices that predated the Christian era as a means to link to the gods through auditory and visual hallucinations. 2. Hollywood (2002) remarks on this disturbing feature of Bataille’s description. As Bataille takes more and more extreme images of horrifying torture, Hollywood asks numerous critical questions about the nature of the apparently self-serving role these photographs perform in Bataille’s ‘self-shattering’ exploits. She wonders about the photographer, the orientalizing gaze in which Bataille participates, the exploitative appropriation of what might be considered ‘snuff ’ photographs. In one context she also indicates that a parallel with Giles de Rais is suggested. 3. For a discussion of the life and works of de Sade, including interview excerpts from his biographers as well as commentators such as Andrea Dworkin and Camille Paglia, see http://supervert.com/elibrary/marquis_de_sade/ (accessed November 7, 2010).

Notes

163

4. Lacan’s essay in Ecrits with the title “Kant with Sade” was in fact written as a preface to an edition of Sade’s Philosophy in the Bedroom, but did not appear as such. The essay thus pertains mostly to this work of Sade. 5. The ‘I’ in this sense is known in linguistics as a ‘shifter’. 6. This connection between masculinity and obsessional neurosis is noted by Parker (2011), although he is cautious to emphasize that the association of hysteria with the feminine and obsessional neurosis with the masculine cannot be mapped in a stereotypic manner. He also makes the point that these forms of neuroses do not only concern gender. 7. See Josefi na Ayerza ‘So She Unfolds’ http://www.lacan.com/perfume/so. . . . htm (accessed November 10, 2010), for a brief few paragraphs on the Lacanian use of the Boromean knot in relation to the mystic’s jouissance as that of ‘beyond the phallus’ with reference to Lacan’s Seminar XX (Lacan, 1998b).

NOTES TO CHAPTER 5 1. I use the German word Übermensch instead of its usual translation into English of ‘overman’ or ‘superman’, each of which detour the meaning away from the character of this ideal in Nietzsche’s terms (to be explored later in this chapter). 2. In fact, as Nietzsche would have it, the ‘herd-instinct’ is reductive of human lives to the value of zero: ‘Our entire sociology simply does not know any other instinct than that of the herd, i.e., that of the sum of zeroes—where every zero has “equal rights”, where it is virtuous to be a zero’ (1968: 33). 3. In The Will to Power, translated by Walter Kaufmann and R.J. Hollingdale, the word ‘pain’ appears throughout this discussion. In Daybreak, translated by R.J. Hollingdale, the word ‘suffering’ appears in what appears possibly to be the parallel phrasing. 4. Aristocracy from the Greek, meaning literally the rule of the best. 5. This appears in a passage written between 1883 and 1888. In another section written in 1888, he describes the Dionysian to mean ‘an urge to unity’, which in this context refers to ‘an ecstatic affi rmation of the total character of life as that which remains the same’ (1968: 539), in other words, the eternal return. ‘Unity’ in this latter use is possibly not the most helpful word, if it means a sense of immersion in the inevitability of contingency and flux against a dualistic tendency to separate creativity and destruction. This use of the term ‘unity’ here suggests that Nietzsche’s ‘Dionysian’ hovers between a raw exposure within the eternal return and the death drive. 6. See Jill Marsden’s book (2002) for a discussion of what she analyzes to be the ecstatic, non-foundational philosophy represented in Nietzsche’s ‘eternal return’. In this sense, thought of the eternal return is not of the order of any illusory knowledge and truth, but beyond meaningful comprehension in its urge to escape boundedness. 7. Badiou refers to the positivism of nineteenth century science and the way the positivists imagined that the truth of science would ‘replace opinions and beliefs about all things’ (2001: 84). His point is that this totalizing vision has points of commonality with the truths articulated by both Nietzsche and the Red Guards of the Chinese Cultural Revolution (as two examples). My point is that it is fallacious to oppose absolutism with a situational relativism that the concept of ‘opinion’ would suggest. Not all science is, or was, positivist, and science (some would say the only form of what can be known as ‘science’) that progresses not only foremost but solely as critique, has nothing to do with opinions.

164 Notes NOTES TO CHAPTER 6 1. Remember that quotation marks around the term ‘symbolic’ differentiate it from Lacan’s entirely different use of the word Symbolic, with a capital S. 2. One of Baudrillard’s early books, based on his doctoral thesis, had the title The System of Objects (1996a). 3. Its difficulty is precisely because of our immersion in the concept of the one, unity and wholeness (see Baudrillard 2003: 81–82 for a discussion on duality). 4. Nihilism in the strong sense Baudrillard claims is a ‘nothing based thinking’; he writes that if nihilism could be imagined to start from the maxim ‘why is there nothing rather than something?’ then he would have no problem with being labeled a nihilist (see 1998b: 34). 5. The term ‘obscene’ is one Baudrillard uses from his earliest writing to refer to that which is so fully realized in its positivity, it is obscene. The absence of negativity produces complete multidimensional exposure with no shadow, nothing unseen or unseeable, as if lit from all angles (see Baudrillard, 1994, for a discussion of this point). ‘Obscene’ in Baudrillard’s sense is outside the scene with the loss of spectacle, stage, theater, as spaces of illusion. We become integrated into reality, losing our distance subject-object from it. His most frequent examples of the way he intends this analogous concept are the body and sex in pornography and the event in the media (see Baudrillard, 2003: 25ff. for discussion on his use of the word ‘obscene’). 6. In this context Baudrillard cites a case in which a child born with a mental retardation condition was granted compensation for the rest of its life, eff ectively for being born (2005a). 7. This interpretation, couched as it is within the theoretical framing of the accursed share, differs from that offered by Girard (mentioned briefly in Chapter Two, Note 7, in the context of the preparation of the sacrificial victim); it is either a very different interpretation, or refers to a different form of king sacrifice. 8. These observations are indebted to a seminar, ‘The Affected Body’, presented by Paris-based Lacanian psychoanalyst and psychiatrist Marc Strauss, in Auckland February 16–17, 2011, hosted by the Centre for Lacanian Analysis, New Zealand. The interpretation is mine and I am not quoting verbatim.

NOTES TO CHAPTER 7 1. As mentioned in Chapter Six, currently some commentators on Lacan’s teachings are studying the later Lacan (after Seminar XX) and refer to this Seminar as the point of introduction of a second rendition of the unconscious: in other words, Lacan shifts his emphasis from the Symbolic unconscious (structured like a language) to the Real unconscious (completely outside of the Symbolic). The second does not replace the fi rst; it rather represents an extension of Lacan’s thought. 2. The reversibility of human history referred to in the later part of Chapter Four whereby the signifying act can always be undone, reversed, according to Copjec, is a different point related to the conditions for repetition and the death drive. 3. Baudrillard rejects any suggestion of reciprocity implying a dialectical relation. ‘Symbolic exchange’ is predicated on what he calls the ‘dual relation’ in which radical otherness precludes any dialectical relation. Baudrillard’s concept of reversion is entirely ‘other’ from that of dialectics.

Notes

165

4. Baudrillard sharply distinguishes ‘symbolic exchange’ from ‘economic exchange’. The latter involves a generalized system of measurement. 5. As noted by Evans (1996), Lacan’s notion of surplus jouissance is a concept inspired from Marx’s surplus value. Objet a ‘is the excess of jouissance that has no “use value”, but persists for the mere sake of enjoyment’ (p.125). 6. Here Copjec (1994) takes her direction from Kant’s antinomic impasse, the mathematical and the dynamical, as well as Lacan’s statement ‘there is no sexual relation’. 7. Māori are the indigenous people of Aotearoa (New Zealand). 8. And according to neuroscience research, this recognition has neuronal correlates, reflected in a ‘re-wiring’ of the synaptic connections in the brain (Austin, 2000).

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Index

A abject, 61, 83, 149; abjection, 2, 65, 98, 135 accursed share, 50, 51, 129, 133, 136, 144, 146, 150–151 action, 2 agency, 12, 13, 14, 17, 18, 19, 51, 86, 142 aggression/ivity, 12, 18, 56, 71, 113, 123 alienation, 60, 71–72, 73, 99, 141, 150, 154 alterity, 75, 127 Althusser, Louis, 17, 18, 19 André, Serge, 35, 97, 116 animal(s), 40, 48, 116, 119, 154; animality, 117 anxiety, 93, 94, 97 Aristotle, 64, 148 asceticism, 82, 83, 104, 107 Auschwitz, 128 Aztec(s), 130, 156

B Badiou, Alain, 75, 102, 117–120, 123, 156 Bataille, Georges, 47, 49–51, 55, 85–86, 88, 103, 122, 129, 130, 134, 135, 144, 150, 153, 154–155 Baudrillard, Jean, 20, 49–50, 55, 101, 114, 118–121, 122–139, 140–143, 144–151, 153, 154, 156, 157–158 belief(s), 46, 113, 154, 155, 157, 163n7 binary, 13, 15, 23–24, 27–28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 51, 86, 100, 107, 110, 114, 115, 120, 126; logic, 4; binaries, 3, 14, 16; essentialism of, 19 blame, 10, 14, 45, 103, 107, 110, 114

body/ies, 5, 19, 62, 64, 68, 71, 73, 86, 87, 95, 96, 116, 140, 146, 151, 152, 162n7; bodily, 3, 27, 63, 65, 93, 95, 100; ecstatic, 80; of mystics, 82–83 border(s), 64, 69, 82, 140 boundary/ies, 62, 63, 66, 71, 118; failure, 62, 63, 83; work, 61 Butler, Judith 1, 2, 16–21, 24–25, 27–32, 64, 146

C capitalism/ist 20, 51, 66, 121, 132, 144, 151, 156 carnival, 4, 120 castration, 26, 27, 28, 55, 65, 68, 70, 139, 140 catharsis, 36, 43, 44, 45, 53, 64, 75, 144; cathartic, 39–40, 62, 123, 153, 154 Charenton, 90 Chateau de Saumane, 89 Christ, 38, 46, 83, 85, 88, 95 code/d, 125, 132, 133 commodities, 50 compensation, 123, 127, 128, 134, 142, 145 consumer(s)/ism/ist, 49, 66, 121, 123, 130, 145 consumption, 39, 50–51, 130, 133 contagion, 37, 38, 40, 135, 144; contagious, 43, 64 Copjec, Joan, 30, 42, 70, 75–78, 93, 117, 152, 156–157 crime, 135 criminal/ize, 3, 127, 135, 136 crucifi xion, 83, 95 cruel/ty, 6, 53, 93, 101, 109, 110, 115, 134, 150, 157

174

Index

D death drive, 33, 54, 58, 64, 65, 66–70, 75–77, 78, 99, 118, 139, 150, 153, 155–156, 157, 158; as gendered, 68; death work, 62, 63, 64, 65, 68, 83, 121, 151, 153, 155 debt, 96, 98–99, 105, 108, 121, 130, 134, 151 deity, 44, 62, 64, 150 democracy 2, 106; democratizing, 102 desert, 136–137, 153 desire(s), 4, 7, 18, 21, 22, 36, 37, 40, 41, 42, 55, 58, 68, 71, 92, 95, 96, 114, 116, 117, 134, 141, 146, 149, 150, 151, 155; as unconscious, 42; of the Other, 25, 42, 53–54, 57, 71–72, 97–98, 109, 123; of the mother, 26; repressed, 76; surrender of, 77–78; See mimetic desire. dialectic(s), 98, 122, 126, 164n3; master-slave 3; of presence and absence, 23–24, 59; dialectical, 2, 32, 110; logic, 18; understanding, 15; dialectically, 3, 18; relations, 20 difference(s), 16, 51, 124, 125, 127, 131, 138, 141 Dionysian, 4, 47, 89, 111, 112, 120, 121, 163n5 discrimination, 2 divine/ity, 39, 44, 81; female, 67, 68 dominate, 2; domination, 19, 22 drive(s), 75, 76, 103, 111, 112, 149, 152, 157 dual relation, 50, 126–127, 129–131, 136–137, 142–143, 144–145, 147, 149, 154, 158; dual form, 153 dualism(s)/ist/ity, 112, 113, 119, 121, 127, 128, 132, 137, 154 (See binary; see dual relation) duel, 127, 134 Durkheim, Emile, 34, 47–49; Durkheimian, 53, 102, 144

ego, 66, 67, 68, 77, 123, 150, 158 envy, 104 epistemic, 4 equality, 3, 102, 104–105, 120 enjoyment, 7, 43, 104, 113, 129, 143, 146, 151, 157 eternal return, 111, 112, 115, 126, 128 ethic(s), 18, 19, 20, 31, 58, 113, 117–120, 157; as prescriptive, 82; of psychoanalysis, 21, 75, 77–78, 120, 157; ethical, 2, 22, 153 evil, 44, 53, 58, 64, 71, 96, 101,102, 110, 112, 113, 118–121, 127, 128, 129, 132–134, 142–143, 156 ex-sistence, 84, 116

F fantasy/ies, 72, 74, 76, 87, 100, 102, 120, 121, 148, 150, 151, 152, 154, 155, 158 fatal/ity (Baudrillard), 101, 126, 131; strategy, 132, 134 Faye, Esther, 80, 97, 116 female(s), 5, 16, 29, 51, 52, 73, 89, 114 feminine, 2, 3, 4, 16, 23, 24, 25, 27, 30, 61, 63, 65, 68, 71, 73, 80, 100, 137, 152, 153; femininity, 5 feminism 1–5, 12, 13, 32 feminist, 31, 101, 102, 114; poststructural, 16; theorists, 79; theorizing, 3–5, 12–15, 22; theory, 157 festival(s), 4, 47, 49, 50, 52, 133, 144 feudal, 132 Fink, Bruce, 60, 72, 73, 74 Foucault, Michel, 17, 20; Foucauldian, 18, 22, 28; freedom, 2, 4, 78, 92, 106, 110, 156 French revolution, 90 Freud, Sigmund, 17, 23, 25, 26, 29, 35, 36, 40, 41, 46, 53, 56, 64, 67, 68, 73, 76, 77, 90, 95, 97, 101, 103, 104; Freudian, 45, 66

E

G

economic(s), 125, 138; discourse, 96; exchange, 49, 98–99, 125, 130, 132–133, 146, 165n4; relation, 50, 105; value, 124, 126, 150 economy, 51, 69, 118, 131; of signification, 62; ecstatic, 4, 19, 88, 117, 120; ecstasy, 39, 84

gambling, 131 gender, 5, 7, 12, 16–17, 30, 31, 50, 51, 52, 57, 58, 62, 69, 75, 102, 114, 146, 151–152. See performativity. generalized exchange, 118, 122, 123–125, 127–128, 131–133, 135, 138, 142–143, 149, 154

Index gift, 96, 124, 129–130, 136, 150 Girard, René, 7, 35–41, 42, 43, 45, 46, 47, 48, 50, 52, 53, 56, 57, 58, 62, 63, 82, 103, 108, 123, 131, 144, 145 god/ess, 67, 68, 82, 84, 85, 95, 96, 97–98, 106, 107, 108, 109, 116, 130, 131, 136, 150 gold standard, 125 guilt, 15, 34, 38, 44, 103, 107; guilty, 43, 45, 102, 105, 106

H harm, 6, 15, 106, 108, 110; harms, 12 hate, 97; hatred, 106, 111, 116, 145, 146 Hegel, Georg WF, 3, 17, 53 Hollywood, Amy, 81, 85–88 Holocaust, 80, 97–98, 116 homo sacer, 98, 117 homophagia, 35 hyperreality, 132

I id, 66, 67, 68, 77 identity, 2, 16, 19, 104, 118, 124, 125, 127, 131, 138, 153; feminist, 1; gender, 16–17, 20, 23; sexual, 24, 27, 73, 80, 152 ideology/ical, 12, 118, 138 imaginary (Lacanian), 40, 56, 59–60, 69, 71, 78, 87, 100, 139, 148, 149 incest, 70, 71, 74, 140 industrial revolution, 2 inequality, 2 innocence, 12, 15, 112, 115, 119, 121, 128; as impotence, 13; victim’s, 6, 14, 31, 32, 34, 37, 38, 45, 103, 113, 145; women’s, 13 integral reality, 126, 132, 135, 142, 145

J jouissance, 21, 33, 42, 43, 50, 51, 53, 54, 55, 57, 58, 62, 63, 65, 68, 70, 77, 82, 83, 88, 92, 96, 100, 105, 108, 114, 116, 117, 120, 121, 129, 134–136, 139, 141– 143, 146, 148, 150, 154, 155, 157, 158; and sexual difference, 71–73, 78; and sadism, 90–93; and symbolic, 56; as God, 95, 97; meaning of, 7, 42; of the Other, 93, 95, 97; phallic, 74, 75; Other, 74, 84, 88, 95; sexual, 94

175

K Kant/ian, 3, 90, 91–93, 95, 156–157 Klein, Melanie, 66, 67, 71 Kristeva, Julia, 2, 4, 23, 30, 32, 35, 58–59, 60–63, 64–65, 66, 68, 69, 70–71, 74, 78, 81, 82, 100, 123, 151

L Lacan, Jacques, 7, 21, 23–27, 36, 40, 41–43, 46, 52, 53, 55, 57, 59, 64, 68, 69, 71–74, 75, 78, 86, 99, 104, 114, 117, 122, 123, 128, 131, 137, 139–142, 147–150, 152–153, 157; and mysticism, 84; and sacrifice, 55–56, 97, 109, 154; Lacanian psychoanalysis, 29, 50, 77, 87, 100, 116, 138, 154, 156, 157, 158; on Sade, 90–96, 100 lalangue, 139, 140, 149 language, 5, 7, 18, 20, 23, 28, 30, 36, 52, 59, 65, 86, 95, 140, 141, 147–150, 152, 155; and sexual difference, 60, 73, 87–88, 137– 138; as dual, 138, 139; as poetic, 142, 149; as the Other, 25, 71, 96; as third term, 72; binary structuring of, 16, 24; phallogocentrism of, 25; subjects of, 17 law, 3, 4, 18, 28, 38, 46, 51, 70, 71, 77, 91–92, 103, 105, 118, 131, 145, 155; violence of, 3; Levinas, Emmanuel, 19, 20, 118 libertine, 89 libido, 67; libidinal, 4, 49, 144 loss, 7, 19, 55–56, 61, 73, 78, 86, 99, 122, 151 love, 115–117

M male(s), 5, 16, 29, 51, 68, 73, 87, 114 manic-depression, 39 Marcus, Sharon, 13 market, 124, 125, 132 Marx, Karl, 36, 151 masculine, 16, 23, 24, 25, 63, 65, 73, 81, 87–89, 137, 152; structure, 52; masculinity, 5 masochist, 89 maternal, 4, 61, 63, 65, 68, 78, 80, 82, 83, 94, 99, 100, 151 melancholy/ia, 64, 65, 99 men/man, 5, 12, 51, 52, 65, 73, 74, 80, 83, 88, 99, 137, 151–152

176 Index Mill, John Stuart, 105 mimesis, 63 mimetic desire, 36–41, 42, 43, 46, 50, 56, 63, 144, 146 mimicry, 40 mirror stage (Lacan), 59, 71 misfortune, 10, 102, 127, 134, 143 money, 151 Montaigne, 128 moral(s), 2, 114; actions, 101; agency, 77; discourse, 3; goodness, 102; injunctions, 113; law, 78, 91, 93, 101, 107, 117, 118, 120, 145, 155, 156–157; order, 77; theology, 46 morality, 102, 104–108, 110–113, 118, 155 mother-body, 63, 66, 68, 69, 71, 74, 78, 151; Mother, 70; m(O)ther, 96 mourning, 19, 64 murder, 36, 38, 130; foundational, 46, 57; murdered victim, 37 muselmann, 98 mystic(s), 4, 81, 95, 100; medieval, 52, 80–86; mysticism, 78, 88, 90 myth(s), 36, 37, 40, 45, 46, 47, 52, 66–67

N name-of-the-father, 29, 70, 72 Nazi/ism, 80, 97–98, 111, 156; National Socialism, 116 need, 41, 126 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 3, 7, 17, 19, 20, 36, 49, 53, 86, 95, 97, 101–121, 123, 126, 127, 128, 134, 145, 154 nihilism, 127

O objet a, 70, 72–73, 74, 87, 96, 97, 99, 100, 109, 116–117, 131, 148, 150, 152–153, 158 ontology, 17, 19, 20, 110, 113–114, 125–126, 132, 150; ontological/ ly, 30, 144 Other, 17, 18, 22, 25, 26, 30, 41, 47, 60, 72, 77, 80, 87, 92, 94–97, 99, 107, 110, 114, 116–117, 151, 154, 155, 158; as symbolic order, 31, 139–140, 150 otherness, 3, 141, 153

P pain, 7, 86–87, 92–95, 100, 105, 107, 108, 121 Parker, Ian, 11, 52, 56, 140, 157, 163n6 paternal metaphor, 72 Penney, James, 20, 22, 24, 43, 53–54, 157 performativity, 16–17, 32; gender as, 20, 24, 27, 28, 30 perpetrator(s), 13, 14, 15, 51, 109; victim binary, 80, 100, 110, 113, 142, 155 perverse, 22; perversion(s), 53, 80, 89, 100 pervert, 93 phallus/ic, 25, 27–29, 51, 63, 65, 70, 72, 73, 87, 99, 137, 152 pharmakos, 37, 161n8 pleasure, 7, 54, 86–87, 91, 94, 108, 117; principle, 67, 78 plenitude, 62, 71, 87 politics, 4, 20, 101, 113 postmodern, 14 poststructural, 15; poststructuralist, 17 potlatch, 50, 132, 144, 150, 153 power, 18, 19, 20, 31, 36, 50, 51, 65, 87, 101, 103, 105, 106, 108– 109, 111, 117, 120, 121, 133, 144; Foucauldian theory of, 17, 18, 20, 24; of the Other, 93; relations, 3 praxis, 2 profane/d, 50, 85 prohibition(s), 2, 24, 27, 51, 56, 71, 74, 102, 103, 114 psychoanalysis, 17, 20, 21, 23–24, 26, 29, 35, 40, 41, 63, 72, 99, 138, 147, 155; psychoanalytic practice, 72, 141, 157 psychological, 15, 20, 102 psychosis/tic, 26, 27, 68, 139, 140 psychosocial, 3, 20, 22, 56, 135 puritanical, 95

R (de) Rais, Giles, 53–54 rape, 13–14 real (Lacanian), 40, 59, 60, 70, 72, 76, 99, 100, 139, 140, 148–150, 155, 158 reality principle, 67 Reineke, Martha, 58, 60–65, 68, 69, 78, 81, 82, 83, 99, 151, 153

Index religion 36, 85, 103, 118, 144; as the social, 48, 49; founding of 37 religious, 118, 153, 155, 156; belief, 47; life / function, 35, 47, 55; religious meaning, 107 repetition, 76 representation/al/able, 1, 14, 59, 64, 70, 138, 142 ressentiment, 51, 81, 101, 104, 105, 107, 109, 111, 112, 114–121, 123, 134, 145 revenge, 101, 103, 106–110, 134 reversibility, 133 reversion, 50, 101, 122, 123–124, 126, 127, 129, 134, 136–137, 142– 143, 144–150, 153, 154, 158 revolt, 4, 61 right(s), 2, 3, 92, 102, 104–105, 107, 114, 117, 119, 120, 134; women’s, 4, 16 ritual(s), 7, 35–37, 38, 45, 47, 48, 51, 52, 56, 62, 66–67, 103, 131, 132, 136, 150–151; of mystics, 82; ritualized, 44, 45, 118, 129–130, 134, 135, 144, 153

S sacred, 4, 36, 38, 44, 45, 50, 51, 55, 80, 81, 83, 85, 144, 153; sacralisation, 37 sacrifice, 5, 6, 34, 38, 39, 43, 44–47, 50, 55–56, 68, 83, 107, 122– 123, 129, 133–135, 142, 144, 146–147, 153, 155, 157; and debt (see debt); and gender, 35, 50, 52, 63, 65; and mystic, 80–81; and repetition, 55; and signification, 68; and social, 46, 145–146; as salvific, 82; as vengeance, 111; human, 38, 50, 67, 101, 109, 129, 130, 137, 154; celebration of, 4; link to victim, 3, 5, 32, 33, 34–36, 43, 44, 45, 53, 62, 64, 114; of king, 130; of sacrifice, 98–99, 100 sacrificer(s), 83, 136–137, 142 sacrificial, 3, 4, 5, 7, 37, 39, 43, 64, 128–130, 134, 150–151, 153, 155; contract, 58; economy, 37, 71, 78, 83, 151 (de) Sade, Marquis, 80, 89–96, 100, 150 sadism/ist/istic, 53, 80, 88–90, 93–96, 100, 156, 157

177

Saint Teresa of Avila, 84 (de) Saussure, Ferdinand, 23, 59, 125, 141, 148 scapegoat, 36, 37, 44, 83, 103, 157; scapegoating, 46 science(s), 70, 161n10, 163n7; scientific thought, 48 security, 101, 106, 117, 135 seduced, 20, 146 seduction, 50, 126, 129, 131, 134, 136, 142, 148, 154, 158; and feminine, 137, 153; semiology, 125, 140 semiotic, 61, 62, 68, 69, 73, 78, 100 separation, 71–72, 73 sex, 5, 152; and gender, 3, 5, 12; sexgender, 5, 113, 114, 115, 121, 123; sexual abuse or violence, 12, 13; sexual difference, 4, 5, 22–26, 28–31, 51, 52, 57, 58, 60, 62, 63, 64, 71–74, 78, 86–87, 152; sexual harassment, 127; sexual relation, 126 sexuality, 24, 78, sexual expression, 95 sexuation, 24, 27, 28, 30, 33, 43, 71, 74, 84, 86, 152 sign(s), 64, 125–126, 139, 142 signifier(s), 5, 20, 23–26, 29, 40, 43, 54, 59, 60, 69, 70, 87, 95, 100, 138, 140–141, 147–149, 154, 156, 158; and history, 76; phallic, 24–29, 56, 60, 74, 152; signifying order, 73, 76 simulation, 126, 134 social, 4, 26, 31, 47, 65, 140, 144; bond(s), 19, 53; change, 157; collectivity, 44, 47–48; construction of, 3; contract, 3; domesticity, 4; formation, 153; group, 36, 49, 129, 144; injunctions, 101; life, 3, 4, 103, 120, 135, 155; power, 13; relation(s), 20, 29, 31, 102, 113, 134, 157; world(s), 4, 6; socio-cultural, 62, 88, 156 sodomy/ite, 53, 90 soma, 63, 94 sorcery, 6 speech, 77, 92, 110, 143, 149 sports, 43; sporting, 135 subject, 17, 20, 22, 23, 28, 42, 135, 136, 140, 143, 146–150, 153, 155, 156–158; and power, 18;

178 Index as barred/split, 59–60, 66, 78, 86, 92, 96, 100, 116, 139, 141, 148, 150, 155; death of, 68, 118; of language, 40, 43, 54, 55, 76; sexed subjects, 15, 23, 26, 60, 73–74, 86, 114, 121, 123, 150, 152, 158; interpellated, 18, 59 subjectivity, 3, 4, 5, 18, 19, 20, 22, 25–27, 30, 31, 32, 52, 63, 65, 75, 85, 99, 117, 123, 135, 137, 142, 147–148, 153, 154, 157; and absence, 83; and lack, 42; political 15 subordination, 17, 18, 19, 20, 22, 33 suffering, 6, 13, 94, 95, 100, 101, 103–110, 116, 118–119, 127, 145, 156 super-ego, 67, 77, 96, 118; superegoic, 91 surplus, 50, 55, 85, 121, 128, 132, 137, 144, 148, 150–151; jouissance, 151 survivorship, 15 symbolic exchange (Baudrillard), 49–50, 51, 52, 55, 124–126, 129–133, 136, 137, 142–143, 144, 146, 150, 153, 154, 158 symptom, 150

T television, 38 theory, 2, 29 thetic, 63, 82 Thing, 70, 83, 93, 96, 99, 116, 149, 162n4 totalitarian/ism, 111, 120, 127, 128 totem, 48; totemic, 47, 48 tragedy, 22 trance, 48, 52; trance-like, 64 transgression(s)/ive, 3, 4, 47, 51, 54, 114, 131, 155, 157 trauma, 143, 145 truth(s), 46, 99, 118–120, 149, 156

U unconscious, 25, 27, 28, 36, 40, 41, 54, 58, 67, 70, 101, 103, 139, 144, 148, 149, 152, 156 utilitarian/ism, 70, 77, 117 utility, 50, 51, 54, 85, 125–126, 132, 145

V value, 118, 124–127, 131, 132, 141, 151; law of, 138 vengeance, 37, 38, 44, 103, 104, 106, 107, 111, 153, 155. See revenge. vengeful, 121, 123 victim(s), 7, 12, 13, 15, 19, 20, 32, 34–35, 44, 51, 57, 88, 110, 114, 127, 134, 144, 145, 152, 158; and feminism, 13, 14; and gender, 15, 31, 74, 90, 94, 100, 102, 151; and mystics, 83–84; and women, 13–15, 52, 136; as medicalized, 15; culture, 134; construct of 3, 4, 5, 15, 101, 102, 103, 113, 120, 121; contemporary, 121, 123, 142–143, 145; meaning of, 6, 45, 117–118; power of, 44; surrogate(s), 37, 38, 43, 52, 56, 74, 75, 85; victimization, 3, 12–15, 21, 31, 51, 58, 93, 145, 151, 155; victimize/izing, 2, 13, 117–118, 122; victimized position, 4; victimary predicament, 121; status, 117, 123, 135 violence, 3, 4, 6, 12, 13, 15, 19–21, 31, 32, 35–39, 43, 45, 46, 50, 58, 66, 78, 84, 96, 99, 103, 104, 107, 111, 119, 129, 135, 145, 151, 153, 155; domestic, 64; mimetic, 65, 123; sexual, 88 virtual, 126, 142 vulnerability/ies, 3, 17–21, 31, 103, 107, 146

W Walter, Jean-Jacques, 35, 37, 38, 45, 52, 66–69, 108, 153, 158 will, 91–92, 101, 103, 107, 109, 129, 132, 156; to power, 111–112, 115, 117 witch, 83 women/woman, 1, 5, 12, 15, 27, 31, 52, 63, 65, 73, 74, 86, 94, 99, 114, 115, 136–137, 151–153; and mysticism, 80–84, 86, 88; women’s movement, 12

Z Žižek, Slavoj, 23, 25, 30, 31, 41, 77, 104