#bobby benedicto

[antirelation]

As Joan Copjec writes: “The famous formulation of a feminine ‘not-all’, that is, the proposal that there is no whole, no ‘all’ of woman, or that she is not One, is fundamentally an answer not just to the question of feminine being but to being as such. It is not only feminine being but being in general that resists being assembled into a whole”. What is at stake in feminine being, as Lacan describes it, is the “bit of nonbeing at the subject’s core”, the resistance to assemblage that gets lost when sexuality is stripped of its negativity and regarded instead as a feature of selfhood to be claimed, a means to assert the subject’s “positionality” within a given symbolic field. Lacan’s formulation makes clear, however, that this negativity that gets renounced is not a luxury that “deprivileged” subjects cannot “afford,” but the basis for indetermination, the grounds for unknowability that deprivileged subjects cannot afford to lose. Registered in the form of a supplementary jouissance that “marks the point at which the Other does not know”, negativity is that which prevents the subject from coinciding with itself, and which thereby ensures that she will remain “radically incalculable,” “a cause for which no signifier can account”. For those who find themselves anticipated by meaning at every turn, whose place is always designated in advance, (feminine) jouissance offers no alternate means to ground one’s symbolic existence, no materials with which to “reclaim and remake selfhood” or “assert and affirm subjecthood”. In offering nothing, however, jouissance affords the subject that which nothing else can: an “opening onto nonbeing (‘dèsêtre’) that … subtracts it from sense”. Hence, in Lacan’s formulation, the principal bearer of feminine jouissance—“Woman”—“does not exist” but rather “ex-ists,” meaning only that we have no way to determine her place, no means to know who “woman” is, no grounds to say “all women.” “We can’t talk about Woman (La femme),” writes Lacan, not because she stands outside the symbolic, but because the lack in the symbolic is inscribed in her without being veiled.

Bobby Benedicto, from Queer Beyond Repair: Psychoanalysis and the Case for Negativity in Queer of Color Critique

[antirelation]

The warnings sounded by [Leo] Bersani and [Lee] Edelman draw our attention to the underlying psychic structure from which violence stems, the defensive posture adopted against the negativity that operates from within and that must be repressed in order to secure “the fixity and coherence of the ego’s form”. It is difficult to formulate a politics with this structure in mind, for it implies that the search for ontological ground, even when undertaken as part of a righteous struggle, is implicated in the reproduction of the world as it already is. Bersani’s injunction to not stop “losing sight of the self,” even when the opposite may seem imperative, might be reframed here as a call to bear the weight of this complicity, to retain our faculties of suspicion even with regard to the sense of self we cannot not claim, and to the worlds we must build to sustain it. Holding open space for negativity entails a refusal to defend the defenses that one needs; it means allowing for the incoherences that render the subject different from itself, unknown to itself, rather than bearing down on a “right to distinction” or on the sacrosanct value of the “dreams of difference” with which the subject must identify in order to give itself a form.

Bobby Benedicto, from Queer Beyond Repair: Psychoanalysis and the Case for Negativity in Queer of Color Critique

[antirelation]

[…] while [Leo] Bersani does draw attention to the phenomenal effects of the ecstatic experience, it is important to note that the very compulsion to repeat that experience, and even the “pleasurable-nonpleasurable tension” that comes from its pursuit, already registers the operation in the subject of something that suggests the subject’s being not-whole, of an illogic that runs against “the sovereignty of the pleasure principle,” that pays no heed to either biological or social imperatives (including the imperative of survival), and that thereby suggests that there is something awry in “the nature of the sexual function itself”. If the subject is undone by sexuality, in other words, it is because sexuality is, for Bersani, already contaminated by this something, the “daemonic,” pulsive force of the (death) drive that moves with no purpose, no aim, and that brings the subject only to the limit that is immanent to it, the site of unknowability or the “nonhermeneutic psychic field” at which point meaningless enjoyment emerges. Jouissance here does not need to be conceived in orgasmic terms, nor tied to a specific sexuality, for what is at stake is the queerness of sexuality tout court. As Bersani writes: “Sexuality manifests itself in a variety of sexual acts and in a variety of presumably nonsexual acts, but its constitutive excitement is the same in the loving copulation between two adults, the thrashing of a boundlessly submissive slave by his pitiless master, and the masturbation of the fetishist carried away by an ardently fondled silver slipper”. Indeed, part of the reason sexuality remains disturbing, why it might be said to represent “knowledge of pressures which resist any theorizing whatsoever,” is that it takes no specific form or object and yet remains recognizable even when manifested in or as “presumably nonsexual acts.” A “functional aberration of the species,” sexuality poses a problem for thought, not only for those who wish to grasp its true nature, as Freud did, but for the subject herself, for whom sexuality also marks a gap in (self-)knowledge, an otherness to oneself. Sexuality, in this way, names the difference within that renders the subject unknowable. It is, as Bersani writes, “that which profoundly disorients any effort whatsoever to constitute a human subject”; it is “the operator of the inhuman,” “the operator of dehumanization”.

Bobby Benedicto, from Queer Beyond Repair: Psychoanalysis and the Case for Negativity in Queer of Color Critique