Undoing Gender (27 page)

So I keep adding this qualification: “when incest is a violation,” suggesting that I think that there may be occasions in which it is not.

Why would I talk that way? Well, I do think that there are probably forms of incest that are not necessarily traumatic or which gain their traumatic character by virtue of the consciousness of social shame that they produce. But what concerns me most is that the term “incest” is overinclusive; that the departure from sexual normalcy it signifies blurs too easily with other kinds of departures. Incest is considered shameful, which is one reason it is so difficult to articulate, but to what extent does it become stigmatized as a sexual irregularity that is terrifying, repulsive, unthinkable in the ways that other departures from normative exogamic heterosexuality are? The prohibitions that work to prohibit nonnormative sexual exchange also work to institute and patrol the norms of presumptively heterosexual kinship. Interestingly, although incest is considered a departure from the norm, some theorists, Linda Alcoff among them, argue that it is a practice that generally supports the patriarchalism of the family. But within psychoanalysis, and structuralist psychoanalysis in particular, positions such as mother and father are differential effects of the incest taboo. Although the very existence of a taboo against incest presumes that a family structure is already there, for how else would one understand the prohibition on sexual relations with members of one’s own family without a prior conception of family? Within structuralism, however, the symbolic positions of Mother and Father are only secured through the prohibition, so that the prohibition produces both the positions of Mother and Father in terms of a set of proscribed endogamic sexual relations. Some Lacanian analysts treat these positions as if they were timeless and necessary, psychic placeholders that every child has or acquires through the entry into language.

Although this is a complicated question that I pursue elsewhere, it is important to note that the symbolic status of this position is not considered to be equivalent to its social position, and that the social variability of parenting and family structure is not reflected in the enduring binarism of Mother/Father installed at the symbolic level. To insist that kinship is inaugurated through linguistic and symbolic means which are emphatically not social is, I believe, to miss the point that kinship is a contingent social practice. In my view, there is no symbolic position of Mother and Father that is not precisely the idealization and ossification of contingent cultural norms. To treat these variable norms as presuppositions of culture and of psychic health is thus to divorce the psychoanalysis of sexual difference fully from its sociological context. It is also to restrict available notions of normativity to those which are always already encoded in a universal law of culture.

Thus, the law that would secure the incest taboo as the foundation of symbolic family structure states the universality of the incest taboo as well as its necessary symbolic consequences. One of the symbolic consequences of the law so formulated is precisely the derealization of lesbian and gay forms of parenting, single-mother households, blended family arrangements in which there may be more than one mother or father, where the symbolic position is itself dispersed and rearticulated in new social formations.

If one holds to the enduring symbolic efficacy of this law, then it seems to me that it becomes difficult, if not impossible, to conceive of incestuous practice as taking place. It also becomes difficult, if not impossible, to conceive of the psychic place of the parent or parents in ways that challenge heterosexual normativity. Whether it is a challenge to the universality of exogamic heterosexuality from within (through incest) or from rival social organizations of sexuality (lesbian, gay, bisexual, as well as nonmonogamous), each of these departures from the norm becomes difficult to acknowledge within the scheme that claims that the efficacious incest taboo determines the field of sexual intelligibility. In a sense, incest is disavowed by the law on incest, and the forms of sexuality that emerge at a distance from the norm become unintelligible (sometimes, for instance, even psychosis-inducing, as when analysts argue in the structuralist vein that same-sex parenting risks psychosis in the children who are raised under such conditions).

One argument that psychoanalysts sometimes make is that although the incest taboo is supposed to facilitate heterosexual exogamy, it never quite works, and that the array of perversion and fetishism that populates regular human sexuality testifies to the failure of the symbolic law fully to order our sexual lives. By this argument we are supposed to be persuaded that no one really occupies that norm, and that psychoanalysis makes perverts and fetishists of us all. The problem with this response is that the form of the norm, however uninhabitable, remains unchanged, and though this formulation would have us all be equally deviant, it does not break through the conceptual structure that posits a singular and unchanging norm and its deviant departures. In other words, there is no way that gay parenting or bisexuality might be acknowledged as a perfectly intelligible cultural formation and, thus, to escape its place as deviance. Similarly, there is no way to distinguish, as there must be, between deviations from the norm such as lesbian sexuality and incestuous practice.

To the extent that there are forms of love that are prohibited or, at least, derealized by the norms established by the incest taboo, both homosexuality and incest qualify as such forms. In the former case, this derealization leads to a lack of recognition for a legitimate love; in the latter case, it leads to a lack of recognition for what might have been a traumatic set of encounters, although it is important to note that not all forms of incest are necessarily traumatic (brother/sister incest in eighteenth-century literature, for instance, sometimes appears as idyllic). But whether the point is to legitimate or delegitimate a nonnormative form of sexuality, it seems crucial that we have a theoretical framework that does not foreclose vital descriptions in advance. For if we say that, by definition, certain forms of sexuality are not intelligible or that they could not have existed, we risk duplicating in the very theoretical language we use the kinds of disavowals that it is the task of psychoanalysis to bring to light.

For those within structuralist psychoanalysis who take Lévi-Strauss’s analysis as foundational, the incest taboo produces heterosexually normative kinship and forecloses from the realm of love and desire forms of love that cross and confound that set of kinship relations. In the case of incest, the child whose love is exploited may no longer be able to recover or avow that love as love. These are forms of suffering that are at once disturbances of avowal. And not to be able to avow one’s love, however painful it may be, produces its own melancholia, the suppressed and ambivalent alternative to mourning.

What, then, of the other ways in which kinship, which forms the conditions of cultural intelligibility for the structuralist position, is abrogated by a love that breaks the boundaries of what will and should be livable social relations, and yet continues to live? There another sort of catachresis or improper speech comes into operation. For if the incest taboo is also what is supposed to install the subject in heterosexual normativity, and if, as some argue, this installation is the condition of possibility for a symbolically or culturally intelligible life, then homosexual love emerges as the unintelligible within the intelligible: a love that has no place in the name of love, a position within kinship that is no position.

When the incest taboo works in this sense to foreclose a love that is not incestuous, what is produced is a shadowy realm of love, a love that persists in spite of its foreclosure in an ontologically suspended mode. What emerges is a melancholia that attends living and loving outside the livable and outside the field of love.

It might, then, be necessary to rethink the prohibition on incest as that which sometimes protects against a violation, and sometimes becomes the very instrument of a violation. What counters the incest taboo offends not only because it often involves the exploitation of those whose capacity for consent is questionable, but because it exposes the aberration in normative kinship, an aberration that might also, importantly, be worked against the strictures of kinship to force a revision and expansion of those very terms. If psychoanalysis, in its theory and practice, retains heterosexual norms of kinship as the basis of its theorization, if it accepts these norms as coextensive with cultural intelligibility, then it, too, becomes the instrument by which this melancholia is produced at a cultural level. Or if it insists that incest is under taboo and, therefore, could not exist, what forfeiture of analytic responsibility toward psychic suffering is thereby performed? These are both surely discontents with which we do not need to live.

8. Bodily Confessions

I propose to consider the relation between language, the body, and psychoanalysis in this essay by focusing on a particular act, the act of confession.
¹
This act is not a simple one, as you probably know, but it does have a central relationship to the clinical setting, as I understand it. In popular culture, the therapist’s office is very often figured as the place one goes in order to make a confession. In the first volume of Michel Foucault’s
History of Sexuality
, psychoanalysis is described as the historical descendant of the confessional, a view that constitutes something of an accepted version of psychoanalysis among his followers.
²

The organization of modern political power maintains and recirculates some elements from Christian institutions, and so something Foucault names “pastoral power” survives into late modern institutions. By this, he means to suggest that a certain class of people emerges who care for and minister to the souls of others and whose task is to cultivate them ethically and to know and direct the conscience of others. Implicit within the Christian notion of the pastor, according to Foucault, is that such a person has sure knowledge of the person to whom he ministers, and that application of this knowledge to the person is the means by which that person is administered and controlled. Pastoral power is thus that form of power by which the administration of the soul takes place. The claim to really know the soul of the other, and to be in the position to direct that soul toward good conscience and salvation is a powerful one, and only certain well-trained individuals are in a position to make it. By accepting the knowledge about themselves that is offered, those whose souls are administered in this way come to accept that the pastor has an authoritative discourse of truth about who they are, and come to speak about themselves through the same discourse of truth.

For the Foucault of
The History of Sexuality: Volume I
, the way in which we come to be controlled by such authoritative discourses is by confession. We say what it is we have thought or done, and that information then becomes the material by which we are interpreted. It lays us open, as it were, to the authoritative discourse of the one who wields pastoral power. In confession we show that we are not truly repressed, since we bring the hidden content out into the open. The postulate that “sex is repressed” is actually in the service of a plan that would have you disclose sex. The imposed compulsion to disclose relies upon and exploits the conjectured thesis that sex is repressed. In Foucault’s view the only reason we say that sex is repressed is so that we might force it out into the open. The idea that sex is repressed thus prepares the way for our confession, and it is our confession that we apparently savor most.
³

Why? Why would it be that we arrange everything so that we might, with difficulty and courage, speak our desire before another human being, and await the words they will speak in return? Foucault imagines the analyst as a dispassionate judge and an “expert” who will pass judgment and seek to exercise control, who will solicit confession in order to subject the analysand to a normalizing judgment. It turns out that Foucault recanted his account of pastoral power, and that in his later work he returned to the history of the confessional in late antiquity only to find that it was not administered exclusively in the service of regulation and control. In “About the Beginning of the Hermeneutics of the Self” (1980),
⁴
he offers an “autocritique” (161) of his earlier position in which he reconsiders the role of confession in Seneca’s writings. Foucault claims to have found there an account of confession that is not about the revelation of “profound desires”

(167), but an effort, through speech, to “transform pure knowledge and simple consciousness in a real way of living” (167). In this instance, according to Foucault, “truth… is not defined by a correspondence to reality but as a force inherent to principles and which has to be developed in a discourse” (167). Confession here works without the repressive hypothesis, elaborated by Foucault in the first volume of
The
History of Sexuality
. There are no desires that are muted by repressive rules, but, rather, only an operation by which the self constitutes itself in discourse with the assistance of another’s presence and speech.

He writes, “the self is not something that has to be discovered or deciphered as a very obscure part of our selves. The self has, on the contrary, not to be discovered but to be constituted through the force of truth. The force lies in the rhetorical quality of the master’s discourse, and this rhetorical quality depends for a part on the exposé of the disciple, who has to explain how far he is in his way of living from the true principles that he knows” (168).

In his consideration of John Cassian, one of the church fathers, Foucault considers how confession is constructed as a “permanent verbalization” (178). The aim of this verbalization is to convert the attachment that the human being has to himself to an attachment to something beyond the human, to God. In this sense, Foucault writes, “verbalization is self-sacrific” (179). For Cassian, according to Foucault, the sacrifice involved in confession is a giving up of desire and the body.