Undoing Gender (23 page)

Moreover, these various forms are implicitly structured by a struggle for recognition in which the Other does and does not become dissociable from the object by which it is psychically represented. This struggle is one that is characterized by a desire to enter into a communicative practice with the Other in which recognition takes place neither as an event nor a set of events, but as an ongoing process, one that also poses the psychic risk of destruction. Whereas Hegel refers to “negation” as the risk that recognition always runs, Benjamin retains this term to describe the differentiated aspect of relationality: the Other is not me, and from this distinction, certain psychic consequences follow. There are problematic ways of handling the fact of negation, and these are, of course, explained in part through Freud’s conception of aggression and Kleinian conceptions of destruction. For Benjamin, humans form psychic relations with Others on the basis of a necessary negation, but not all of those relations must be destructive. Whereas the psychic response that seeks to master and dispel that negation is destructive, that destruction is precisely what needs to be worked through in the process of recognition. Because human psychic life is characterized by desires both for omnipotence and for contact, it vacillates between “relating to the object and recognizing the outside [O]ther.”
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In a sense, Benjamin tells us that this vacillation or tension is what constitutes human psychic life fundamentally or inevitably. And yet, it seems that we are also to operate under a norm that postulates the transformation of object-relations into modes of recognition, whereby our relations to objects are subsumed, as it were, under our relation to the Other. To the extent that we are successful in effecting this transformation, we seem to put this tension into play in the context of a more fluid notion of communicative practice mentioned above. Benjamin is insistent upon the “inherently problematic and conflictual make-up in the psyche,”
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and she does not go back on her word. But what becomes difficult to understand is what meaning recognition can and must assume, given the conflictual character of the psyche. Recognition is at once the norm toward which we invariably strive, the norm that ought to govern therapeutic practice, and the ideal form that communication takes when it becomes a transformative process. Recognition is, however, also the name given to the process that constantly risks destruction and which, I would submit, could not be recognition without a defining or constitutive risk of destruction. Although Benjamin clearly makes the point that recognition risks falling into destruction, it seems to me that she still holds out for an ideal of recognition in which destruction is an occasional and lamentable occurrence, one that is reversed and overcome in the therapeutic situation, and which does not turn out to constitute recognition essentially.

My understanding of her project is that whereas the tension between omnipotence and contact, as she puts it, is necessary in psychic life, there are ways of living and handling that tension that do not involve “splitting,” but which keep the tension both alive and productive. In her view, we must be prepared to overcome modes of splitting that entail disavowal where we either disparage the object to shore ourselves up, or project our own aggression onto the object to avoid the psychically unlivable consequences that follow when that aggression is recognized as our own. Aggression forms a break in the process of recognition, and we should expect such “break-downs,” to use her words, but the task will be to work against them and to strive for the triumph of recognition over aggression. Even in this hopeful formulation, however, we get the sense that recognition is something other than aggression or that, minimally, recognition can do without aggression.

What this means is that there will be times when the relation to the Other relapses into the relation to the object, but that the relation to the Other can and must be restored. It also means that misrecognition is occasional, but not a constitutive or insurpassable feature of psychic reality, as Lacan has argued, and that recognition, conceived as free of misrecognition, not only ought to triumph, but can.

In what follows, I hope to lay out what I take to be some of the consequences of this view and its component parts. For if it is the case that destructiveness can turn into recognition, then it follows that recognition can leave destructiveness behind. Is this true? Further, is the relationship assumed by recognition dyadic, given the qualification that the process of recognition now constitutes “the third” itself based upon a disavowal of others forms of triangulation? And is there a way to think triangulation apart from oedipalization? Does the dyadic model for recognition, moreover, help us to understand the particular convergences of straight, bisexual, and gay desire that invariably refer desire outside the dyad in which it only apparently occurs? Do we want to remain within the complementarity of gender as we seek to understand, for instance, the particular interplay of gender and desire in transgender? Finally, I’ll return to Hegel to see the way in which he offers us another version of the self than the one emphasized by Benjamin in order to understand whether a certain division in the subject can become the occasion and impetus for another version of recognition.

From Complementarity to Postoedipal Triangularity Over time, Benjamin’s work has moved from an emphasis on complementarity, which assumes a dyadic relation, to one that accommodates a triadic relation. What is the third term in relation to which the dyad is constituted? As one might expect from her earlier contributions, the triad will not be reducible to oedipalization. It will not be the case that the dyad is tacitly and finally structured in relation to a third, the tabooed parental object of love. The third emerges, however, in a different way for Benjamin, indeed, in a way that focuses not on prohibition and its consequences but on “both partners [in a] pattern of excitement.” This pattern is the third, and it is “cocreated”: “outside the mental control of either partner we find a site of mediation, the music of the third to which both attune.”
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Indeed, the third constitutes an ideal of transcendence for Benjamin, a reference point for reciprocal desire that exceeds representation. The third is not the concrete Other who solicits desire, but the Other of the Other who (or which) engages, motivates, and exceeds a relation of desire at the same time that it constitutes it essentially.

Benjamin is careful in
The Shadow of the Other
to distinguish her position from that of Drucilla Cornell or any position inspired by the Levinasian notion that the Other is transcendent or ineffable (93). But in her most recent writing, she admits this Other as external to the psychic object, nearing the Levinasian position and so perhaps enacting for us the expansive possibilities of the critic who makes an identification with formerly repudiated possibilities.

This way of approaching the triadic relation is a very happy one, and I’ll confess that I am not sure it is finally credible or, indeed, desirable. It is indisputably impressive, though, as an act of faith in relationships and, specifically, in the therapeutic relationship itself. But as an act of faith, it is difficult to “argue” with. So what I hope to do in what follows is less to counter this exemplar of happiness than to offer a few rejoinders from the ranks of ambivalence where some of us continue to dwell. Further, I think that some less jubilant reflections on triangulation and the triadic relation (to be distinguished from one another) may be possible and will not return us to the prison house of Oedipus with its heterosexist implications for gender. Finally, I’d like to suggest that a triadic structure for thinking about desire has implications for thinking gender beyond complementarity and reducing the risk of heterosexist bias implied by the doctrine of complementarity.

I’m no great fan of the phallus, and have made my own views known on this subject before,
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so I do not propose a return to a notion of the phallus as the third term in any and all relations of desire.

Nor do I accept the view that would posit the phallus as the primary or originary moment of desire, such that all desire either extends through identification or mimetic reflection of the paternal signifier. I understand that progressive Lacanians are quick to distinguish between the phallus and the penis and claim that the “paternal” is a metaphor only. What they do not explain is the way the very distinction that is said to make “phallus” and “paternal” safe for use continues to rely upon and reinstitute the correspondences, penis/phallus and paternal/maternal that the distinctions are said to overcome. I believe in the power of subversive resignification to an extent and applaud efforts to disseminate the phallus and to cultivate, for instance, dyke dads and the like. But it would be a mistake, I believe, to privilege either the penis or paternity as the terms to be most widely and radically resignified. Why those terms rather than some others? The “other” to these terms is, of course, the question interrogated here, and Benjamin has helped us to imagine, theoretically, a psychic landscape in which the phallus does not control the circuit of psychic effects. But are we equipped to rethink the problem of triangulation now that we understand the risks of phallic reduction?

The turn to the preoedipal has been, of course, to rethink desire in relation to the maternal, but such a turn engages us, unwittingly, in the resurrection of the dyad: not the phallus, but the maternal, for the two options available are “dad” and “mom.” But are there other kinds of descriptions that might complicate what happens at the level of desire and, indeed, at the level of gender and kinship? Benjamin clearly asks these questions, and her critique of the Lacanian feminist insistence on the primacy of the phallus is, in large part, a critique of both its presumptive heterosexuality and the mutually exclusive logic through which gender is thought. Benjamin’s use of the notion of “overinclusiveness” implies that there can be, and ought to be, a postoedipal recuperation of overinclusive identifications characteristic of the preoedipal phase, where identifications with one gender do not entail repudiations of another.
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Benjamin is careful in this context to allow for several coexisting identifications and even to promote as an ideal for therapeutic practice the notion that we might live such apparently inconsistent identifications in a state of creative tension. She shows as well how the oedipal framework cannot account for the apparent paradox of a feminine man loving a woman, a masculine man loving a man. To the extent that gender identification is always considered to be at the expense of desire, coherent genders might be said to correspond without fail to heterosexual orientations.

I am in great sympathy with these moves, especially as they are argued in Chapter 2, “Constructions of Uncertain Content,” in
Shadow
of the Other.
Although I continue to have some questions about the doctrine of “overinclusiveness,” in spite of liking its consequences, I believe that Benjamin is working toward a nonheterosexist psychoanalysis in this book (45–49). I do think, however, that (a) triangulation might be profitably rethought beyond oedipalization or, indeed, as part of the very postoedipal displacement of the oedipal; (b) certain assumptions about the primacy of gender dimorphism limit the radicalism of Benjamin’s critique; and (c) that the model of overinclusiveness cannot quite become the condition for recognizing difference that Benjamin maintains because it resists the notion of a self that is ek-statically
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involved in the Other, decentered through its identifications which neither excludes nor includes the Other in question.

Let us first consider the possibilities of postoedipal triangulation. I suggest we take as a point of departure the Lacanian formulation that suggests that desire is never merely dyadic in its structure. I would like to see not only whether this formulation can be read apart from any reference to the phallus, but whether it might also lead in directions that would exceed the Lacanian purview. When Jean Hyppolite introduces the notion of “the desire of desire” in his commentary on Hegel’s
Phenomenology of Spirit
, he means to suggest not only that desire seeks its own renewal (a Spinozistic claim), but that it also seeks to be the object of desire for the Other.
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When Lacan rephrases this formulation of Hyppolite, he enters the genitive in order to produce an equivocation: “desire is the desire
of
the Other” (my emphasis).
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What does desire desire? It clearly still continues to desire itself; indeed, it is not clear that the desire which desires is different from the desire that is desired. They are homonymically linked, at a minimum, but what this means is that desire redoubles itself; it seeks its own renewal, but in order to achieve its own renewal, it must reduplicate itself and so become something other to what it has been. It does not stay in place as a single desire, but becomes other to itself, taking a form that is outside of itself. Moreover, what desire wants is the Other, where the Other is understood as its generalized object. What desire also wants is the Other’s desire, where the Other is conceived as a subject of desire. This last formulation involves the grammar of the genitive, and it suggests that the Other’s desire becomes the model for the subject’s desire.
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It is not that I want the Other to want me, but I want to the extent that I have taken on the desire of the Other and modeled my desire after the Other’s desire. This is, of course, only one perspective within what is arguably a kaleidoscope of perspectives. Indeed, there are other readings of this formulation, including the oedipal one: I desire what the Other desires (a third object), but that object belongs to the Other, and not to me; this lack, instituted through prohibition, is the foundation of my desire. Another oedipal reading is the following: I want the Other to want me rather than the sanctioned object of its desire; I want no longer to be the prohibited object of desire. The inverse of the latter formulation is: I want to be free to desire the one who is prohibited to me and, so, to take the Other away from the Other and, in this sense,
have
the Other’s desire.