Undoing Gender (28 page)

He writes, “we have to understand this sacrifice not only as a radical change in the way of life but as a consequence of a formula like this: you will become the manifestation of truth when and only when you disappear or you destroy yourself as a real body and a real existence”

(179). This version of confession involves a full repudiation of the subject of will, one that is, nevertheless, performed through verbalization and, hence, understood as a form of verbalization that suspends the will itself.

In this version of confession, then, it would appear that Foucault’s earlier claim that pastoral power is defined by the aims of domination and control proves to be off the mark in certain ways. We could read self-sacrifice as compelled by power, as a strategy of containment, but that would be to misread its desire and its achievement. The point is not to ferret out desires and expose their truth in public, but rather to constitute a truth of oneself through the act of verbalization itself. The first relies on a repressive hypothesis; the second emphasizes instead the performative force of spoken utterance. The role of the confessor is also slightly different in this later account: “the role of the interpreter is assumed by the work of a continuous verbalization of the most imperceptible movements of thought,” since the interpreter will attend to those “imperceptible movements” not to discern a preexisting truth but to facilitate a detachment of the self from itself. In this sense, the aim of sacrifice or, indeed, of reconstituting the self in a divine light, implies “the opening of the self as a field of indefinite interpretation” (180).

If Foucault’s early account of pastoral power turns out to be partial or mistaken, and if psychoanalysis continues to be identified as an inheritor of pastoral power, how are we to understand the way in which pastoral power survives in psychoanalysis? The role of the confessor within pastoral power is no longer understood primarily as governed by the desire to enhance his own power but to facilitate a transition or conversion through the process of verbalization, one that opens the self to interpretation and, in effect, to a different kind of self-making in the wake of sacrifice.

But if Foucault is wrong that psychoanalysis, as the inheritor of pastoral power, seeks to use the confession to augment its own control and power, then what would be the reason for someone listening so hard to desires that are so difficult for the other person to bring forth? If it is not a simple sadism that motivates those who bear witness to other people’s confessions, how do we account for the purpose of that kind of listening? And if the point is not to find out the “truth of what happened” and to treat the language of the analysand as corresponding to a set of internal or external events, then what is language doing in this exchange?

Of course, it is not only desire to which psychoanalysis listens. And it seems fair to say that most therapists and analysts do not pronounce upon the truth of what is said in the context of their offices. Indeed, it may be that finding meanings is very different from finding truths, and that one way to get to meanings is to suspend the kinds of judgments that might block communication. The confession strikes me as an important moment to consider because not only does it constitute, within the psychoanalytic setting, a communication of what one’s desire or deed has been, but the very speaking constitutes another act, one that within the field of the analytic setting confers a certain reality on the deed, if it is a deed in question, and that also implicates the analyst as listener in the scene of desire.
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If it is one desire that the analysand seeks to speak to the analyst, it is another desire that takes hold in the speaking. For by the time the speech is made, the analysand desires for the analyst to know and expects or fears some kind of reaction to what is said. In this way, the confession does not simply bring an already existing desire or an already accomplished deed before the analyst, but alters the desire and the deed so that neither was what they become once they are stated for the analyst.

Let us make the confession perhaps more dramatic. Foucault imagined in his earlier work that what happens in the analytic scene is that everyone gets to speak about their surreptitious desires, that license is given to talk about sex. He also makes a psychoanalytic point, perhaps in spite of himself, by claiming that what is enjoyed most is this very speaking about sex: verbalization becomes the scene for sexuality. My question follows from here: is the enjoyment in speaking about sex an enjoyment about the sex or the speaking? And if these are two different forms of enjoyment, are they perchance related to one another? What is the content of confession? Is it a deed, a desire, an anxiety, and abiding guilt for which the confessional form serves as a balm? As the confession begins, it usually centers on a deed, but it may be that the deed conceals the source of the desire for confession.

But let us begin with the initial presumption of the confessor that there is a deed that awaits revelation in speech. By imagining the content of the confession as a deed, a deed of desire, a sexual act, the analysand speaks, but that speaking becomes the new vehicle; for the act becomes, indeed, a new act or a new life for the old act. Now not only has one done the deed, but one has spoken of it as well, and something in the speaking, a speaking that is
before
another and, obliquely,
to
another, a speaking that presumes and solicits recognition and constitutes the first act as public, as known, as having truly happened. Thus the speaking of the confession in the psychoanalytic setting becomes a different bodily act than the one that is being confessed, but what remains continuous between the two acts? The body that is on the couch is the same body that did the deed, but on the couch, the deed is relayed verbally; the body acts again, but this time through the bodily act of speaking itself. Does the speaking of the deed bring the deed into play between the analyst and the analysand? And what about the body? It is the referent of the deed; it is that whose activities are reported, relayed, communicated. But in the confession, the body acts again, displaying its capacity for doing a deed, and announces, apart from what is actually said, that it is, actively, sexually there. Its speech becomes the present life of the body, and though the deed is made more real by virtue of its being spoken, it also, at the moment it is uttered, becomes strangely past, completed, over. This is why perhaps confessions almost always come after the fact, and why they are postponed until the time in which the speaker is ready for the sacrifice of the object that speaking the words sometimes implies.

Of course, to have a confession to make is also to have speech that has been withheld for some time. To have a confession to make means that it is not yet made, that it is there, almost in words, but that the speaking remains in check, and that the speaker has withdrawn from the relationship in some way. But it also means that these words have not yet been performed for the analyst, the words have not yet been offered up as material. The words, the deeds they convey, have not yet been made vulnerable to another perspective, one that might subject the words and the deeds to a reinterpretation, so that the originally highly cathected meaning invested in the deeds is not yet made into an event whose meaning is intersubjectively constituted. The secret erodes the intersubjective presumption of the analytic scene, but it also can become a new event, an event that becomes material for analysis only on the condition that the confession forces the secret into view. And it may be that by the time the confession is made, the delay in making it becomes a new cause for guilt and remorse.

Let me offer another view by making use of the moment in Sophocles’ play,
Antigone
, in which Antigone confesses before Creon that she has broken his law and buried her brother, Polyneices.
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Her crime is not exactly a sexual one, although her relation to Polyneices is intense, if not overdetermined by incestuous meaning. She is guilty for disobeying the edict that Creon has delivered, the one that sentences anyone to death who buries her brother, Polyneices. But is she guilty for other reasons as well, reasons that are covered over by her large and public crime? And when she makes her confessions, does she add to her guilt, becoming guilty for more than what she possibly did? Does her confession, in fact, exacerbate her guilt?

Antigone is introduced to us, you will remember, by the act by which she defies Creon’s sovereignty, contesting the power of his edict, which is delivered as an imperative, explicitly forbidding anyone to bury that body.
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Antigone thus mocks Creon’s authority; she contests him verbally, refusing to deny that she was the one who performed the crime: “I say that I did it and I do not deny it” (43), “Yes, I confess it,” or “I say I did it”—thus she answers a question that is posed to her from another authority, and thus she concedes the authority that this other has over her. “I will not deny my deed”—“I do not deny,”

I will not be forced into a denial, I will refuse to be forced into a denial by the other’s language, and what I will not deny is my deed—a deed that becomes her possession, one that makes sense only within the context of the scene in which a forced confession is refused by her. In other words, to claim, “I will not deny my deed” is to refuse to perform a denial, but it is not precisely to claim the act. To say, “Yes,
I say
I did it,” is to claim the act, but it is also to commit another deed in the very claiming, the act of publishing one’s deed, a new criminal venture that redoubles and takes the place of the old.

Antigone’s deed is, in fact, ambiguous from the start, not only the defiant act in which she buries her brother, but the verbal act in which she answers Creon’s question; thus, hers is an act in language. To publish one’s act in language is in some sense the completion of the act; it is the moment that implicates her in the masculine excess called hubris.

Interestingly, at this moment in which she is understood to oppose Creon fiercely, there are at least two troubling problems. One, she begins to resemble him. They both seek to display their deeds in public, and to gain public recognition for their acts. Two, she speaks to him and in front of him, so he becomes the intended audience of her confession, the one to whom it is intended, the one who must receive it. Thus, she requires his presence even as she opposes him bitterly. Is she like him? Is she, through her confession, binding herself to him more tightly?

The first deed was bad enough. She broke the law and buried her brother. She did it in the name of a higher law, a different ground of justification, but she is not able to make clear what precisely that law is. But as she begins to confess and, so, to act in language, her motivations appear to shift. Her speech is supposed to underscore her own sovereignty, but something else is revealed. Although she uses language to claim her deed, to assert a “manly” and defiant autonomy, she can perform that act only through embodying the norms of the power she opposes. Indeed, what gives these verbal acts their power is the normative operation of power that they embody without quite becoming.

Antigone comes, then, to act in ways that are called manly not only because she acts in defiance of the law, but she also assumes the voice of the law in committing the act against the law. She not only does the deed, refusing to obey the edict, but she also does it again by refusing to deny that she has done it, thus appropriating the rhetoric of agency from Creon himself. Her agency emerges precisely through her refusal to honor his command, and yet the language of this refusal assimilates the very terms of sovereignty—he is, after all, the model of sovereignty—that she refuses. He expects that his word will govern her deeds, and she speaks back to him, countering his sovereign speech act with an assertion of her own sovereignty. The claiming becomes an act that reiterates the act it affirms, extending the act of insubordination by performing its avowal in language. But this avowal, paradoxically, requires a sacrifice of autonomy at the very moment in which it is performed: she asserts herself through appropriating the voice of the other, the one to whom she is opposed; thus, her autonomy is gained through the appropriation of the authoritative voice of the one she resists, an appropriation that has within it traces of a simultaneous refusal and assimilation of that very authority.

In her open defiance of the state, we see something else about her motivations. At the moment in which she defies Creon, she becomes like the brother that she buried. She repeats the defiant act of her brother, thus offering a repetition of defiance that in affirming her loyalty to her brother, situates her as the one who may substitute for him and, hence, replaces and perhaps territorializes him, taking over his place in a violent substitution of herself for him, vanquishing him, perhaps, in the name of fidelity to him. She assumes manhood through vanquishing manhood, but she vanquishes it only by idealizing it. At one point her act appears to establish her rivalry and superiority to Polyneices. She asks, “And yet how could I have gained greater glory [
kleos
] than by placing my brother in his grave?”

So if we thought that it was her abiding love for her brother that drove her to act as she did, her own words put into question the manifest purpose of her deed. The deed might be said to begin with the burial, but to escalate with the confession. And it is with the confession, an apparently guiltless one, that Antigone both assumes her power and secures her death. She seems to defy the law, but she is also giving herself over to its death sentence. Why would she pursue this course of action that is certain to lead to death? Why does she solicit this most fatal of punishments through her deed and her word?

In Freud’s essay, “Criminals From a Sense of Guilt,” he reports on patients who commit misdeeds because they were forbidden, and “their execution was accompanied by mental relief for their doer.”
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