This week we discussed Jemima Repo’s
excellent (truly excellent!) forthcoming essay “Herculine Barbin and the Omission of Biopolitics from Judith Butler’s
Gender Genealogy” (to be published in the journal of Feminist Theory).
The discussion began, as per usual, with
questions:
1) The discussion on pages 5 & 6
of the nature/culture distinction was interesting, but there is a question
about the scope of the claims. Is it the
case that “the biopolitical… control over sex” holds always? Or just sometimes?
2) On page 13 there is a claim that,
“For Foucault, pleasure is a capacity.” What
might this mean? Is this accurate? What’s at stake here?
3) On page 14 (also again around 18)
there is a claim that there is an “organic yet non-discursive body”? What’s at stake here? Why claim this? A little before there is an accusation that
Butler confuses “the non-discursive with pre-discursive” (13). Why does Repo need to claim this? What does that idea do that Butler can’t do? What’s at stake in Repo such that she has to
argue this?
4) On page 18, there is a contrast
between “the organization of desires” and “their [desires] unhappy, compulsory
self-destruction” (18). This is very
helpful. It registers a connection
between what some in our group like about the connection between Foucault and
Deleuze—order is a positive productive effusive activity (not necessarily ‘good’)—in
contrast to French Hegelian arguments about order as resting on contradiction.
5) Is the paper operating with a
dichotomy between two kinds of explanations?
What is the difference between “genealogy of gender ontology” and “genealogy
of gender”?
6) A few background questions on
Butler for the group:
What is the equivalent
in Butler of Foucault’s dispositif? (For if we don’t have one, then performance
seems over-individualized, rather than an acting-out of a set of social
conditions.)
What is the status
of Repo’s claims (throughout) that Butler seems to assume an invariant subject,
in the form of a Hegelian subject of desire that is bound to recognition? Is there a politics for Butler beyond the
politics of recognition?
Discussion proper proceeded.
Concerning (1), we discussed whether
or not Foucault collapsed (or avoided, or did not even acknowledge) the
distinction between nature and culture. If
Foucault avoided the nature/culture distinction did he avoid it in such a way
that he has to hold that nature and culture are always imbricated? Or just sometimes?
The
key thing, presumably, is the distinction between being “an effect of a
cultural system, but an apparatus of biopower”.
So there is a claim that “control over sex is… biopoltical” (6, 20). Is this always
the case? Or just sometimes? Presumably it is
always the case for us (we who live within a biopolitical dispositif) but it need not always be the case for all places and
all times. So even practices of gender
reperformance and gender resistance (e.g., drag) are instances of a utilization
and deployment of biopolitics.
Resistance is always internal to the form of power that takes.
We then shifted to question (5) and
the erst of the discussion remained there.
To recapitulate the question: What is at stake in the distinction
between a genealogy of X’s ontology and a genealogy of X itself? (In this case X=gender (though presumably it
matters what the content of the X is).)
What is at stake in the distinction
between sex as “mechanisms of intelligibility and performativity” (20)
attributed to Butler and an “apparatus of biopower in the administration of
life” (20) attributed to Foucault? What
would the scene of politics in each look like?
What forms of resistance are possible?
In the former politics is parody (of identity, discourse, etc.). In the latter (i.e., Repo’s Foucault) resistance
would have to look quite different. It
would have to be a (biopolitical? right?) resistance against biopolitics? But is this how Repo in the piece envisions
and figures resistance? Is this how the
discussion of Barbin functions? It seems like it is meant to function that
way insofar as this section of this essay is titled “Rereading Herculine Barbin Biopolitically”. We turned to that section in fine…
Barbin’s “body” and “pleasure”
became “ordered by power”. So
biopolitics is a type or mode of ordering?
That sounds right. Then there are
two moves that get made here, and we worried that they are being run together. The first
move is that a biopolitical ordering is beyond (or need not lie on) the
nature|culture distinction. The second move is that a biopolitical
ordering is beyond (or displaces) Butler’s analytic category of identity. Let’s take each in turn.
First,
Biopolitics is a type of ordering (a “biopolitical territorialisation”; Deleuze
(for better or worse!)) that doesn’t analytically draw on, or require, the
nature|culture distinction. Barbin was
inscribed by (drawn up by?) biopolitics and we can analyze that without
reference to the nature|culture binary. The
best way to put this point: sex is an effect of a process involving the workings
of biopower. And we can make this point
without getting embroiled in debates about whether sex is “cultural” or “natural”,
which are debates that Repo seems to want to avoid. In other words, this is what is involved in
avoiding the “genealogy of gender ontology”.
Is the point of this paper, then, a deflationism about the nature versus
culture wars?
Second,
does this first move warrant a displacement of identity as a category of
analysis? The paper opens with a
critique of Butler’s identity-analysis.
But is it sufficient to move beyond an analytics of identity to
methodologically dispense with the nature|culture binary? Is there something at stake in that binary
that supports or furthers identity-analysis?
The move from the first to the second seems to be wrapped up already in phrases like “the cultural
construction of identity”. But is
getting beyond “cultural constructionism” to already move beyond “identity”? Why?
(CK, NM, ER, HL, KL)