The Real and 'I': On the Limit and the Self

Katerina Kolozova

THE REAL AND “I”: ON THE LIMIT AND THE SELF

To my father

     The Iliad (24. 785-789)

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Many thanks for the words of encouragement and advice to Ray Brassier, Jasna Koteska, Žarko Trajanoski, Jelisaveta Blagojevi}, Miglena Nikolchina and Drucilla Cornell. I am grateful to François Laruelle for his friendship and the possibilities he has given me to share my ideas with him (even when it meant only to disagree). My thanks go also to Dušica Dimitrovska-Gajdoska, Jason Brown, to my sister and to Svetozar Antovi}.

Series of books in theories of identity

Katerina Kolozova, In Skopje on the 20th of March, 2006

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

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Chapter 1: The One and the Multiple

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Chapter 2: The Real and the Fiction

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Chapter 3: The Limit and the Limitless

Chapter 4: 69 The Real Transcending Itself (Through Love): Radical Solitude in the Heart of Love 91

Chapter 5: The Grain of the Real inside the Identity

110 Bibliography

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CHAPTER 1

THE ONE AND THE MULTIPLE Part 1: Philosophical Dualism: The Unitary and the Non-Unitary Subject, a Question of “Either-Or” 1.0. An Introduction: About the Proscribed Names in Contemporary Theories of Subjectivity and (Gender) Identity Adherence to a determinate theoretical horizon, to its language and to the truths generated through it, provides one with the comfort and safety of philosophical certainty and of a securely established reality from which one is reluctant to detach oneself. Even when the proclaimed reality is one of mobility and instability, the stabilized truth of the latter is that stability which one risks losing through the decision to “radicalize” one’s critical position from within the “domicile”-discourse; and by “radicalization” I mean getting to the roots of the discourse that has become one’s theoretical inertia. Therefore, the use of the word “radical” is merely etymological. “Getting to the roots,” the “radical” theoretical position, at least the one argued for by this particular text, would consist in questioning the content and mechanisms of auto-constitution and auto-legitimization inherent in the founding conceptual constructs of one’s own theoretical discourse. Specifically, it would mean enquiring about some of the fundamental ideological-theoretical presuppositions that constitute the theoretical lineage to which one subscribes, those that virtually situate themselves as givens within and according to the discourse. It would be a matter of calling into question the putative truths that are removed from the ambit of interrogation, those which suppress questioning through mechanisms of discursive auto-legitimization and in fact function as axioms within that discourse. With regard to the traditional (canonic) genre-classifications of the realms of truth-production – those which discipline them as “science,” “philosophy,” “theology” etc. – I would like to remind the reader that science as a “genre” allows axioms to be questioned. The “genre” of philosophy, however, discourages the adherents of competing doctrines from tackling the questions that could undermine whatever doctrinal construction they may profess. Thus, the effect of undermining seems to be always and as a rule understood as destructive, rather than as a gesture that brings forth a problematic aspect (no matter how fundamental) or of the functional flaws inherent in a conceptual construction without dismissing it altogether. In these practices of truth production – traditionally defining the field of textuality called philosophy – one can detect a repetitive and auto-generated instance of thought’s self-censorship in the name of preserving the fidelity to a certain discursive legacy. Nevertheless, I believe that this sort of questioning from within of a particular discourse contributes to its conceptual vitality and to the re-invigoration of the doctrine it underlies. My aim here is to open up from within their own discursive horizon certain questions pertaining to the axiomatic structures 4

THE REAL AND “I”: ON THE LIMIT AND THE SELF

that underlie the contemporary – predominantly poststructuralist/ deconstructive – gender theory. The aspiration that inspires this undertaking is not a pretension to get a hold of the truth out there – and, thus, to rectify the claims deployed on the basis of those problematic axioms. It is rather a desire to break through the inherent inhibitions of the doctrine, to liberate oneself from scholastic obligations and thus to defy whatever hinders the free and uncensored movement of thought. From the outset, I am aware that the act of interrogating will itself be – to a certain consciously established extent – irresponsible, insofar as it abandons the stance of scholastic “responsibility” by striving to re-create a naïve state of wonder. The goal is not to attain definitive and irrefutable solutions, but merely to propose a few stimulating examples of questioning. Accordingly, the ambition is reduced to the mere exercise of an awakening of thought from the rigidity of doctrine and to the emancipatory move of stepping out – albeit for an instant – from the scholastic enclosure which constraints the discourse of contemporary gender theory. This attempt to use theory to scratch at the surface of some deeply ensconced ideational fundament may result at least in hinting at a critically new positioning of thought, in moving toward something more radically different. I would like to initiate this line of investigation by examining the status of an apparently fundamental presupposition within the poststructuralist-postmodernist (post-Foucauldian, post-Lacanian and deconstructive) feminist theoretical horizon: that of the essentially non-unitary nature of the Subject. The status, the conceptual content and the immanent rules of discursive connections between some other fundamental distinctions – such as those of stability and fixity versus mobility, of the One versus the Multiple, the Real versus Language, to mention just a few – are inherently related to the status of this claim within poststructuralist feminist discourse. My initial question is: Doesn’t this proposition’s very stability render it exclusive? Doesn’t the stabilization of this particular truth – which transforms it into one of the axioms of poststructuralist feminist discourse – introduce binary, oppositional, and dualistic thinking into the constitutive layers, the very tissue of the discourse? My investigation will seek to focus on this and some other closely related questions, among which – imposing itself as perhaps the central one – is that of the position of the instance and/or concept of the Real vis-à-vis that of Discourse/Language. The initial motivation for this theoretical endeavour originates, perhaps, more in the personal and experiential realm than in any intellectual or scholastic ambition to exercise and demonstrate one’s competence in the domain of truth-production. My position at the outset of the investigation I am proposing is that of one who has begun to feel uneasy about her existence as constituted according the dominant “postmodernist ideologies of being.” The deconstructive promise of a never ending textual and discursive (inter-) play, the optimism of an unrestrained transformability of identity and freedom implied by the Foucauldian legacy, are always already undercut by the impossibilities upon which these utopias reside. Namely, the playfully transformable existences of multiple identities are supposedly made possible by the impossibility of the 5

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One and the Static; an impossibility professed by these ideologies (which in the years of my intellectual and personal formation had already begun to establish themselves as academic and intellectual orthodoxy); and it is precisely the fundament of an impossibility – both discursive and purportedly experiential – that gives rise to the aforementioned malaise. The impossibility of producing discourse about certain instances – such as the One, the Real, the Stable, etc. – creates irrevocable hindrances for thought. By being rendered “unthinkable,” these notions introduce insurmountable aporias into the heart of the Language at our disposal today. This is another source of intellectual and existential discomfort. Moreover, to resort to celebrating paradoxes – based on the insight that they (the paradoxes) propagate yet another unending flux of the much praised unrestrained textuality – as the propagators of the postmodern era have done, does not seem to me to have the intended effect. On the contrary, it gives me the impression of being a hysteric denial in the face of the Obstacle (of the Real), one which merely re-iterates the constantly re-produced reality by retreating to the infantile safety of the known in the neurotic over-saturation with discursiveness/textuality. Thus, I would like to consider ways of overcoming such inhibitions and interdictions within the poststructuralist feminist discourse without diminishing the theoretical accomplishments and political advantages the latter has brought about. Let us tackle first the claim concerning the non-unitary Subject, which seems to impose itself as an axiom about the essentially non-unitary nature of the Subject, one whereby the instance of non-unity seems to have achieved the paradoxical status of a certain defining “substance.” The deconstructive-poststructuralist propagation of the idea – and installation of the reality – of the non-unitary Subject is inherently related to the insistence (of the same theoretical provenance) on the Subject’s radical instability, on its mobility and transformability – and hence, multiplicity. The presupposition of the Subject’s essential instability is, in fact, the founding assumption which enables the auto-imposition – in this particular discursive horizon – of the axiom of the Subject’s non-unitary nature. Let us consider the putative truth of the Subject’s constitutive – or, should we say, substantial? – instability, and examine the initial contention of this discussion – that this idea has always already been stabilized as a theoretical position by the discourse which professes it. It seems that the claim concerning the Subject’s unarguably non-unitary constitution and “principle of being” is something that cannot be critically questioned within this theoretical horizon, except for the purposes of re-asserting the same claim – at least not authentically, or without self-imposed constraints of ideological correctness. Could it be that the stabilizing factor is already inherent in the founding assumptions of those poststructuralist, constructivist or/and deconstructive discourses which assert the non-unitary and unfixed nature of the post-metaphysical (or non-metaphysical) Subject? Our guiding question can be differently formulated: Might there not be some underlying conceptual structures, occluded by the very regulations of the discourse in and through which they

exist, that remain beyond the reach of the theoretical approach upon which the concept of the non-unitary Subject is based, namely the deconstruction? The motivation for asking this question, for granting its relevance and legitimacy, becomes more apparent when we begin to notice to what extent this “postmodern” insistence on a non-unitary conception of the Subject, far from diminishing binary oppositions, actively perpetuates a more insidious variety of dualistic thinking. Thus, the relentlessly self-avowed “post-metaphysical” position with regard to possible conceptualizations of the Subject, insisting as it does on the latter’s exclusively non-unitary status, allows as its only possible alternative – precisely one which it constitutes as its own opposition – that of the metaphysically unitary and stable Subject. Despite the poststructuralist insistence on non-monolithic thinking, in all significant feminist writing which advocates the idea of the non-unitary Subject, any other position which would allow the possibility of a Subject residing upon (any sort) of unifying principle is automatically, and almost by definition, dismissed as metaphysical and/or oppressively stabilizing and totalizing. The problem lies precisely in the logic of this dismissal, which functions “automatically and by definition”. (We will examine the evidence for this claim in the discussion below.) Nevertheless, my intention here is not to argue against the poststructuralist and deconstructive critique of the ideal of the unitary Subject, an ideal upheld by an entire philosophical (or “metaphysical”) tradition from Cartesianism to positivism. First and foremost, it is important to reiterate that I find the core of this critique convincing. Indeed, it is simply one of my own axiomatic starting points. (I state my position here without an intention to enter into a scholastic discussion and defense of this conviction, which is of an axiomatic character for me. Such an exposition would lead to an entirely different investigation.) My thinking has been formed – or, rather, I have been “intellectually raised,” like so many of my generation – by the postmodern academic and political thinking of the authorities of the era. Therefore, what I would like to problematize at this juncture is solely and precisely the question of dualism: the binary and oppositional self-positing of poststructuralist theorizing – in particular, the theories of gender identity – which argues for the non-unitary nature of the Subject. I will propose instead that the dichotomy between either an exclusively metaphysical or an exclusively non-metaphysical thinking of the Subject – as either exclusively unitary or exclusively non-unitary – creates a vicious circle whereby each of the two mutually exclusive positions reciprocally generates its Other. It is precisely insofar as it posits itself in our “World” (of ideas, concepts and linguistic availabilities) solely and exclusively according to this binary logic that the Thought of the non-unitary Subject situates itself as agonistic, oppositional, and exclusive with respect to other discursive possibilities. A meticulous survey of the seminal texts of feminist theory which proclaim their poststructuralist (or “postmodern”) provenance will reveal the inflexible rigidity whereby, in accordance with the rules governing the discursivity in question, any contention in favour of (any sort of) unity for the Subject, must be summarily dismissed as metaphysical and/or reactionary. In fact, it will show 7

the complete absence of any claim about the Subject’s unity in any instance, context, or sense whatsoever. In addition to this it will reveal this discourse’s constitutive inability to think the question of unity – together with some other congenial terms, such as the One and the Real – in a way that would not be metaphysical, in a way that would be post-metaphysical, in its own way. It suffers from an immanent, fundamental (founding) and insurmountable inhibition in the use of language when attempting to make reference to the self-evident fact of a certain force of cohesion within the Subject. It remains reluctant to explore possible instances and/or configurations of unity, and emphatically – not a unity of differences, but of oneness and singularity. Poststructuralist (feminist) discourse is vitiated by a debilitating lack of linguistic resources for tackling these questions. Moreover, its inability to address such issues without dismantling their relevance altogether and consigning them to the conceptual junkyard of metaphysical remnants, produces the chief points of aporia in this form of discursity. The utter lack of conceptual tools to conceive of the Subject’s unity in a way that might be a post- or nonmetaphysical underlies such celebrated paradoxes of postmodern discursivity as: “One, yet - Multiple: The One is Multiplicity and the Multiple is Oneness!” But such paradoxical formulations continue to assume that the Multiple is the truth of the One while refusing to acknowledge the converse. Multiplicity and non-unity are that which truly exists, while oneness and unity are fallacious – a mirage of a kind. Yet the question remains: Could there be a poststructuralist, constructivist and deconstructive critique of the (Cartesian) unitary Subject, which could also and simultaneously allow us to conceive of the Subject as residing upon some form or mode of immanent oneness and stability that would not be a constrictive and exclusive metaphysical formation? Is it possible to conceptualize a Subject according to some paradigm of unity that would not be totalitarian; a Subject of auto-transformative oneness, of identitarian mobility; in short, multiple in one sense yet an instance of oneness in another? And could we conceive of both instances as immanent? Could there be more than one immanent “nature” or constituent – can there be more than a single immanence? Within the horizon of discursive possibility proper to poststructuralism, this is a conceptual stance that should be both permitted and granted its minimal pertinence, from a perspective that is methodological as well as political – in the sense of a certain politics/distribution of power and knowledge. But the grave linguistic hindrance identified above still remains: namely, the critical lack of the conceptual tools required for such debate. The challenge is thus to undertake the task of creating a discursive basis for thinking unity (of the Subject) in terms that are neither metaphysical nor totalizing, but without abandoning the poststructuralist discovery of the multiple and transformative Subject. It is an even greater challenge to demonstrate how such a discussion might be neither contradictory nor deficient in theoretical rigor.

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1.1. Conceptualizing Unity “After” Its Deconstruction The concept of “unity of the Subject” as we meet it in the poststructuralist, deconstructive-constructivist legacy of the critique of the unitary Subject, namely as one which always already integrates its already traditional attributions of “totality,” “fixity” and “exclusiveness,” represents a peculiar synecdochical construct. These are pars pro toto identifications – therefore, misidentifications – which regularly appear in the form of a conceptual totality, a complex of concepts. Just like any other conceptual con-plexity, the latter is but a minimal ideological foundation. The ideological minimum of the “Project of the non-unitary Subject” is indebted in its greatest and methodologically most significant part to the Derridean deconstruction. However, this deconstructive critical compound seems silently to refuse subjecting itself to any deconstruction. In its domicile ideology (poststructuralist/postmodern theory), the conceptual structure of the fragmented, unstable, multiple, inclusive and non-totalitarian Subject has never been subject to a more radical, deconstructive critique inasmuch as a structure itself. This possibility is always already impeded by the axiomatic presupposition that the only standpoint of radical critique of the notion of the non-unitary Subject would be the one of the essential opposition of the perennial Other – the metaphysical position. However, let us assume the possibility for a deconstructive look upon this conceptual conglomerate, which will reside upon immanently deconstructive epistemic presuppositions. This assumption made, what remains as next is to engage into a heuristic reading of the language economy of the discourse. Let us endeavour to reconstruct the traces – and the logic of their interlacing – of power distribution through the acts of naming as crucial element in the discursive creation and institution of the non-unitary Subject. The principal question in this sense would be: Is there a term that holds a hegemonic position among the other key words within this conceptual complex? I will argue that there is such, hegemonic term. In fact it is the empty place of a term, the absence of name – the Name of the One. The dismantled One presides over the subsidiary concepts of the (again) – after being deconstructed – dismantled and dismissed totality, stability, autonomy, exclusiveness, etc. In effect, they are the automatic deduction of the One; they are also its automatic reduction. Oneness is a priori deduced to these sinister effects of its eventual “reign” (or of its mere presence) and, in addition to this gesture of aprioristic deduction, it is also reduced to its results. Hence: the auto-generation of the acclaimed postmodern Synecdoche of the Non-Unitary Subject. The One is normally conflated with its own “bad produce,” first and foremost with the instance of totalizing, thus universalizing (in the totalitarian sense). The Subject as a possible One, or the possibility of some unity – or, more exactly, instance of oneness – for the Subject, is unavoidably identified with the (Kantian) modern (-ist) autonomous, self-sufficient Subject of exclusion (with respect to the Other). Oneness, which could as well be plain singularity, is identified and

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conflated with seclusion and exclusion, implicating the sovereign Subject of soliloquy. Venturing an ontological discussion over the One and the Multiple and the dichotomy they form is not my intention here. Instead, I would like to address the question of the discursive exclusion and censorship over the-Nameof-the-One (evidently, a consequence of these automatic reductions of the notion to its potentially negative aspects). It seems that in the entire post- and anti-metaphysical philosophical-ideological legacy, there is a tacit aprioristic expulsion and moral condemnation of any position from the perspective-of-theOne and, thus, of-the-Unity-as-Singularity (not of Differences). The latter are inescapably related – in such a way that these discourses imply this relation as an intractably inherent one – and degraded to the notions of Totality (and totalitarian repressiveness) and Universality (understood only and exclusively as a thinking act of hegemonic universalizing). Within this entire context of the anti-metaphysical and anti-Cartesian critique of the Unitary Subject, the feminist constructivist/deconstructive theories of identity and subjectivity seem to suffer from self-censorship regarding the very use of Name-of -the-One in the affirmative sense (or in even the sense that risks to be interpreted as affirmative). There is a tacit – or, in some examples, almost overt – auto-prohibition with respect to the possible operating with (or application of) any sort of Logic-of-the-One, or Thinking-in-terms-of-the-One. Precisely because of the axiom of the postmodern anti-metaphysics, according to which any theorizing which claims the reality of a certain One/oneness is a priori universalistic, totalitarian, exclusive, etc. Thus, the place of the “One” – as a Name, a Signifier (or simply, the Word) – in the Signifying Chain, in the politico-theoretical Language of the postmodern World (Discourse) is an empty place. I would like to call upon a retrieval of the position of the “One” within Language, the position which it rightfully owns, together with its legitimacy – inasmuch as linguistic reality. Moreover, this retrieval should be accompanied, or even enabled by the simultaneous reclaiming of the “right” to the Name (of the One) not to be – in the aforementioned reductivist manner – identified almost by definition with the “universalistic” and the “totalitarian.” My contention is, thus, that in the feminist (and not only feminist) discourses of deconstructive critique of the unitary Subject, the use of the term “unitary” – insofar as insufficiently examined in terms of its oppositional relation to the favoured “non-unitary” – is in some way simply formulaic. Or differently put, it sometimes seems to be functioning as an almost magic utterance of condemnation (sort of anathema of the non-absolutistic era). Since, in the discourses professing the non-unitary Subject, the “Unitary” automatically, that is to say, with no critical stance, with no intellectual pausing, entails also the notions of stability, totality, fixity, etc. Feminist critique of the unitary Subject, traditionally (representing indeed a tradition today) defined (also, by itself) as marginal in the landscape of the intellectual power-network, is already rigidified within its own position, and in such a way that it can only produce the pure opposition of its own constructed

Other. The position of its theoretical Other is fixed and its conceptual content unchangeable. It is as a rule considered, always already diagnosed by a certain instance of an internal auto-regulation of the discourse as pertaining to the “mainstream autonomy theories”; Marilyn Friedman writes: “Feminist philosophers have criticized mainstream conceptions of autonomy […] those conceptions ignore the social nature of the self […] Mainstream autonomy theories assume that we should each be as independent and self-sufficient as possible.”1

This is one among the myriad of examples of generalization of the kind which produces this eternal theoretical Other to the contemporary feminist (poststructuralist) theories of identity and subjectivity. To Friedman, “Autonomy theories” appears to be synonymous with “Unitary Subject theories” and the latter seems to be synonymous with the “Stable Identity theories.” In the next quotation in which she is proposing the opposite position – the opposition – to “the mainstream autonomy theories,” drawing on Judith Butler’s conception of subjectivity, it reads as follows: “[…] feminist criticism of mainstream theories of autonomy is that they presume a coherent, unified subject with a stable identity who endures over time and who can ‘own’ its choices. This presumption is challenged by postmodern notions of the subject as an unstable, fragmented, incoherent assortment of positions in discourse.”2

Here one sees an example of that reductionist inter-identification of several predicates. It is detectable also in the quotation I am about to present, in which one can also notice the inhibiting effect of this package of attributes that must all go together as one. The lines, taken from Rosi Braidotti’s Metamorphoses, that I am about to quote display that aporetic and inhibiting situation in which the argument in favour of the non-unitary Subject is installed on the grounds of excluding the possibility for – perhaps, some other, new and nonmetaphysical form of – any unity and coherence for the Subject. “Sexuality is crucial to this way of thinking about the subject, but unless it is coupled with some practice of the unconscious […] it cannot produce a workable vision of a non-unitary subject which, however complex, still hangs somehow together […] I would like to point out, however, that whereas in the psychoanalytic tradition these internal crevices are often the stuff that nightmares and neuroses are made of, they need not to be so. I would like to take the risk of arguing that the internal or other contradictions and idiosyncrasies are indeed a constituent element of the subject, but they are not such a tragedy after all”3

It is precisely the exclusion and the suppression of the thinkable or linguistically expressed One which creates this situation. Braidotti embarks upon a courageous project to transcend – or bypass – this aporia, to establish some insight into the substance and the ways of that “glue” which holds together that Subject-which-is-not-One, without abandoning her poststructuralist position. She is attempting to accomplish this by resorting to psychoanalytic instruments of critique and to the notion of the unconscious. Further on, just one paragraph below the one quoted just now, Braidotti is taking all precautions not to betray the vision of the non-unitary Subject, 11

while she actually continues with her search for that which holds together that “bundle” called Subject. “I take the unconscious as the guarantee of the non-closure in the practice of subjectivity. It undoes the stability of the unitary subject by constantly changing and redefining his or her foundations.”4

However:

“Non-unitary identity implies a large degree of internal dissonance, that is to say, contradictions and paradoxes. Unconscious identifications play the role of magnets, building blocks or glue.”5

The latter statement leads Braidotti to the following one: “Following Irigaray, the most adequate strategy consists in working through the stock of cumulated images, concepts, and representations of women. […] If ‘essence’ means the historical sedimentation of many-layered discursive products, this stock of culturally coded definitions, requirements and expectations about women or female identity – this repertoire of regulatory fictions that are tattooed on our skins – then it would be false to deny that such an essence not only exists, but is also powerfully operational.”6

If we decide to follow the argumentative line linking these several quotations together, we can see that Braidotti is not only in pursuit of that “thing” which glues together the “bundle called Subject,” i.e. of some “unity” – or, more accurately, of its unifying “forces,” “principle/s” – but she also seems to grant certain legitimacy to the notion of “essence.” Thus, by re-inventing the notion of “essence,” she takes the argument even further in the direction of some idiosyncratic reclaiming of the instance of unity. This is a re-inventive and idiosyncratic arguing for unity, since it is embedded in a position that is one of an advocate of the notion of the “non-unitary” Subject. Some might find Braidotti’s position contradictory. However, it is not; her line of argumentation and inference is impeccably logical and highly convincing. She is arguing for the existence of some unifying processes in a certain instance of the Subject, whereby the latter itself is ultimately non-unitary. Moreover, her claim might even not be paradoxical, since it seems to be perfectly compliant with the norms of the formal logic. Namely, Braidotti’s argument, sublimated in the way I just proposed, consists in the claim that the coexistence of unity and non-unity is made possible by the simple fact that the existence of each of the two rests on a different ontological level, and represents a different, distinct epistemological moment. What is that, in Braidotti’s text, which produces those rhetorical swings of overly alert vigilance regarding the possibility of being “misread” as someone who propounds an idea of subjectivity different from that of the poststructuralist notion of the Non-Unitary Subject? In other words, we can trace an overt intention for identification with a particular theoretical ”school,” of self-identification as an advocate of a certain “truth” as propagated and defended by a determinate discursive community. The open self-declaration of belonging to a determinate line of thinking (about a specific issue) within the same discursive/textual act (on virtually the same page) that contains a claim which can be interpreted as being in opposi12

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tion with this declared belonging is a statement of disavowal of any connection with a different theoretical linage. It is an act of ideological self-identification and a statement of renunciation of any association with a different theoretical school. The repetition of the statement of self-identification is a performative act of self-subjection to a certain ideology – in this particular case, with the poststructuralist one. The defensive language of Braidotti’s argument for (some) unity of the Subject, reflected in those repetitive self-declarations, speaks of the importance bestowed upon the question of theoretical-ideological belonging. This cautious language is voiced most “loudly” in the little words such as conjunctions, adverbs, etc. For example, in “however” and “still” from “it cannot produce a workable vision of a non-unitary subject which, however complex, still hangs somehow together.”7 But it also speaks of the discourse’s powers of inhibition with respect to the potentially free course of argumentation, movement of thought. On the occasion of a seminar devoted to her work and aimed at younger feminist scholars from Eastern and Central Europe, Judith Butler was asked by one of the students if the non-unitary Subject, through its constant inconstancy, is not always already facing the question of “survival,” the possibility of its death. At one point of this dialogue, Butler says: “And I do think that certain forms of social transformation do involve passing through the fear of death. And I don’t think it’s a bad thing. And what’s of course interesting about the fear of death is about who I am. I could say at a certain point in time, that this is who I am and I cannot imagine myself any other way. I will dissolve if I do x, y and z. I will become undone fundamentally if I do x, y and z. And then it turns out you do x, y and z, hopefully within a community in which others are doing the same, and indeed something in you is undone, or even dies. But there is some new possibility that also emerges in its place […].”8

In this quotation, the same tone of cautious rhetoric can be detected that is preventing the speaker (in this case, Butler) from falling into the (metaphysical) “trap” of allowing any possibility whatsoever for a unity of the Subject. In a word, the transformative Subject is but a social one, and this Subject is called an “I” only when spoken about its possibility to “die,” or to be “undone,” which in this (Butlerian) context means – when it undergoes a social change and, thus, expresses political engagement. When the existential lacuna appears out of the absence of any (new) socio-political position (assumed), what re-emerges in the place of the old “I” is not, in the discourse of Butler, some new “I,” or different state or “nature” of the “I,” but “some new possibility.” Thus, in the lacuna of crisis, it seems that there is no “I.” As if there is no “I”-of-Crisis, no “I”-of-the-“Space”-Between (different socio-political and cultural subjections), no “I” without the awareness of its social (political) position. Since, if there were any, it would be that “thing” which, in Braidotti’s words, “glues” the Subject together. If there were any, there should be some unifying principle presupposed. The a priori exclusion of any possibility of allowing any mode of unity within a concept of a Subject that is in its ultimate instance non-unitary, is, through its dichotomous 13

restrictiveness, inhibiting of thought and pushes the discourse into the clench of aporia. This is how even Judith Butler could find herself claiming something like this: “[…] think of the many years of Turkish migrate workers in Germany, for instance. A population that is not a citizen, that are not citizens, that are also not effaced from the view. Not absolutely absent, there, but spectrally human. They do not form part of the figure of what is human.”9

It seems to me that in the postmodern, poststructuralist discourse there is some tacit, yet highly sturdy prohibition against thinking – let alone granting legitimacy to a certain instance of – Unity or mere exploitation of the Name-ofthe-One in affirmative connotation. The background of this prohibition is constituted by the unquestioned – or, rendered as unquestionable – synecdoche of the Unity with its unavoidable attributions of “totality,” “fixity,” “domination,” “repression,” etc. Highly illustrative of this theoretical practice is the following quotation from Jane Flax: “The postmodernists regard all such wishes for unity with suspicion. Unity appears as an effect of domination, repression, and the temporary success of rhetorical strategies.”10

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1.2. Beyond the Dichotomy?

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In order to enable the release of thought from the grasp of (the unitary/ non-unitary Subject) dichotomy, it seems necessary to grant oneself the right of disloyalty to the school of thinking one adheres to. Since, as we have seen, it is the self-declarations of belonging to an “ideology” – or to a Discourse, to a School (and Scholastics) – which produce the positioning of thought which is exclusive (with respect to other School/s and scholastics) and hence – dichotomous. As for the poststructuralist theories, the belief (and the axiom) that one is enclosed within one’s own discursive horizon to the extent of being (self-) produced as a (theoretical) Subject by and through the Discourse itself only is that which makes that constitutive exclusiveness insurmountable. One of the possible approaches to such re-positioning of the thinker is the critical situating of thought provided by François Laruelle’s non-philosophy which consists in a theoretical gesture of radical stepping out of any sort of discursive (i.e., discourse’s) autoreferentiality. This means performing a doctrine-unattached (without a pre-emptive theoretical argument of corroboration and discursive legitimization) leap of abandonment of the enclosure of thought within the tradition of a certain discourse and the (epistemological, ideological) obligations of adherence. The leap itself, made on the basis of a mere “non-,” without the knowledge of any pre-existing discursive grounding, is a leap of and into uncertainty. However, that act of stepping out, while producing itself, co-produces a discursive possibility of unrestrained flow of thought. Such a gesture (of radical abandonment of the scholastic belonging) is, however, not possible without a radical stepping out of the stance of self-suf-

ficiency, self-circumscription of the disciplinary field or discourse. The non-philosophy of François Laruelle professes such a gesture of a radical stepping out with respect to philosophy and its narcissistic self-perception as self-sufficient, or, as Laruelle puts it – of the Principle of the Sufficient Philosophy (Principe de philosophie suffisante: PPS). This is an attempt to undermine the auto-positioning of philosophy based on “its being animated and entangled by a certain faith or belief in itself as the absolute reality, intentionality or reference to the real that it pretends to describe or even constitute, or to itself as the real itself.”11 Therefore, Laruelle concludes: “This is its fundamental auto-positioning; that which one could also call its autofactualization or its auto-fetishization – all that we assemble under the Principle of the Sufficient Philosophy (PPS).”12

We should note at this point that in Laruelle’s discourse, the notion of “philosophy” and the notion of “World” (understood as “Discursiveness” in general, as the “Transcendental” or the “Conceptual World” of a society and time) are inter-changeable, synonymous. Without going any further into a technical explication of the non-philosophical method of suspension of the Principle of the Sufficient Philosophy (PPS), let us only draw the analogy that the thinking Subject’s stance of loyalty-in-the-last-instance to a discourse (or ideology) implies the self-sufficiency of the latter. Such self-enclosure of thought, circular auto-completion resulting from the pretension to have accomplished some sort of discursive self-achievement – to have consensually marked the horizon line of the Thinkable – is inhibiting for the authentically investigative thought. In this vein, let us attempt to suspend the principle of discourse’s self-sufficiency, let us endeavour to assume a stance of a radical stepping out of the discourse we are subscribing to, which, in this specific case, is the feminist vision of the non-unitary Subject. Let us, thus, allow the possibility that there might be a “good One,” “good Unity.” Namely, that it does not necessarily have to exclude the multiplicity. In total, let us assume the possibility that the both instances (of unity and of non-unity) can be part of the Subject’s constitution and simultaneously operative without being mutually exclusive. Let us assume that this “coexistence” is made possible by the very potentiality of the two instances to be operative at different levels or layers (of the Subject-constitution), within different structural sub-constructs (or the subjective construct) or aspects (of the performative Subject). Before entering any further reflection on this assumed “peaceful coexistence,” let us briefly consider the question of our theoretical/discursive positioning of that “certain outside” of the dichotomy. Where is this position to be “located”? Or what is that which constitutes it? If one assumes that the two do not create any division, that their simultaneous workings do not imply any exclusion of one another, the thought is, then, situated beyond duality. Duality always already implicates dualism, if it resides upon the founding assumption that there is no possibility of thinking the two beyond their relation of two. Thinking, however, beyond relation and relationism – of which the minimal form is established precisely by the two – is thinking in terms of singularity. The situation of non-relatedness is a situation of radical solitude. It can be but 15

the Instance of Oneness. This is a situation of thought in which even relations are being thought beyond relationism or non-relatively – that is to say, solely and radically from the aspect of the particular reality which is subject to our thinking, seen in its utmost solitude (from the viewpoint of its singularity). Hence, the position of non-dichotomous thinking is located in and constituted by – the One. The One I am attempting to (re-) claim here (following in that respect the claim of François Laruelle) is exempt from any debts to the philosophical and/or metaphysical legacy. Any relation to the latter, any referring to (such) a tradition of thought and its implication in this particular concept of the One, would inevitably render it totalizing and universalizing (totalitarian), or, conversely, particularizing. Thus, let us venture conceiving of this One as an instance of the Singular – and within that very instance of singularity, uniqueness and “phenomenological” (or “epistemic”) solitude – relieved from any historical (= discursive) responsibility. Furthermore, let us conceive of this singular position as absolved from any responsibility to be relative (to). That is, void of the stipulation to be relational, to establish any relation whatsoever – since, any sort of relationally constituted viewpoint is, in its minimal instance, always already a gesture of constituting a couple (with another notion, concept, instance, etc.). Coupling is binarism, binarism entails dichotomy. Therefore, let us attempt to conceive of an instance that will pre-emptively undermine the process of coupling (and the production of dichotomy), described by Laruelle in the following way: “The One is a non-thetic (non-thetique) Identity in general; that is to say, at the same time non-decisional (of) itself and non-positional (of) itself: without will for essence (sans volonté pour essence), without topology for existence; without the contest for movement forth (sans combat pour moteur), without space or figure for manifestation […] The One is the transcendental minimum, the minimal petition of reality – that is to say, the reality presupposed by any petition in general.”13

Resorting to such an approach (of thinking in terms of non-thetic oneness), let us suppose a unity within the Subject that would be neither in an exclusive nor in an oppositional relation (nor in any sort of binary relatedness) to the Subject’s instance/s of multiplicity – of non-unity. Let us conceive of an instance of unity that would not be establishing any relation whatsoever – in the domains of thought, of course, suppressing any pretension to make a claim in the name of the Real of relating – with that of the non-unity. Let us permit ourselves to ponder on the instance of unity – or rather, of oneness – within the Subject without the obligation to place it in any particular relation with that of non-unity, a relation which would condition it, shape it and act as an element of its constitution. The “unitary Subject” that we can invoke drawing on the theoretical resources of François Laruelle’s non-philosophy is not unitary in the sense of cohesive unity of organized differences – a gesture, which, according to this theory, is essentially, dualistic14 – but in the sense of the persistence of a certain One of a stubborn Sameness, underlying the identitary and subjectivity complexities. 16

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In brief, let us permit an instance that would allow us to thematize the unity without imposing on ourselves the compelling responsibility of simultaneously thinking its relation to the instance/s of non-unity. Let us consider the possibility of thinking (this) oneness in its irrevocable singularity, i.e., in its cruel nudity without the soothing effects of the standpoint of relativity – in a word, in its radicalness. Finally, let us venture entering such considerations with the minimum ambition of mere overcoming of thought’s self-inhibition coming from the loyalty to a discourse/ideology/school, and with the simple desire for bypassing and dismissing the logic of dichotomy; and to go only one step further – to open the question of permeability of the contemporary feminist discourses professing the non-unitary Subject and identitary multiplicity. The affirmed (and given a theoretical/methodological operativeness) dimension of “permeability” is that which might allow an opening for the curious glance at “that” which “glues” together the incoherent “bundle” called Subject.

Part 2: The Question of (Subject’s/Self’s) Continuity: Possible Location of Oneness for the Subject or for the “I” 2.1. The Subject and the “I” It seems that the theory of gender identity of predominantly poststructuralist or postmodern scholastic provenance – or more specifically, the one affirming and re-enforcing the notion of the non-unitary Subject – has inaugurated a furtive substitution of the name of “I” with that of the “Subject”.15 By resorting to the name of the “I,” I am not referring to any philosophical or theoretical concept behind it. I am referring to a name, a signifier within the Symbolic or, simply, within Language, a word containing the pretension to signify the reality of the Self inasmuch as a totality encompassing all of its experiences. When I say “pretension […] of […] encompassing all […] experiences,” I mean a tendency of conceptually appropriating all experience, including that which is beyond the Language (namely, the effects of the body and the effects of the Real), and placing it under one signifier – the “I” (Ich, Moi/Je, Ego/õ, Ja/s, etc.). In different words, I am referring to this word in its sense (as) devoid (as possible) of scholastics and erudition, to its principally infantile and/or most common, colloquial use. The notions of commonness and those of the Symbolic and of Language are, surely, subject to historic contextualization. It would be irresponsible not to bear this in mind. However, let us simply take recourse to a name which is there, in the Language – in different historico-cultural renditions (Western, European, of Greek-Judean civilizational provenance, Eastern, Subaltern, etc.), nevertheless corresponding to the signifying contents as just described. Or, let us regard the name of the “I” inasmuch as a name (a possibility of naming), with its own rightful position within Language regardless of how “stretchable” and shifting in signification, and its substitution (with another name – the Subject) inasmuch as a suppression of a name. Consequently, let us consider what limitations to – or, perhaps, also opportunities for – thought are 17

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being imposed by such suppression, as well as to the rough, ultimately elusive to any reflection sheer experiences of selfhood. I have permitted myself to attach the attribute of “furtiveness” (of the mentioned acts of substitution), since the closer re-reading of Foucault and Lacan – the two, perhaps, chief authorities of the philosophical/theoretical tradition in question – has shown that neither of the two thinkers has ever put forward the proposition of replacing one (of the two) notion/s with the other. In the case of Lacanian psychoanalysis, it would be particularly fallacious – or simply wrong – to assume such claim of substitution. If one thinks only of that tuché (of the Real) which strikes the automaton (of the signifying chain) every now and then as if only to remind it of its sovereign rule and unattainable position, it becomes clear that it is simply impossible to conceive of such substitution. The Subject is the effect of the Signifier, while the Real is revealing itself only through its lack within/for the Subject. Still the psyche undergoes the (traumatic) workings of the Real. How can “I” refer to these experiences as mine if the name of “I” is not at my disposal (but instead – an obsolete version of the name of the Subject)? Moreover, even in the repertoire of Lacan’s technical terminology the names of the Moi and Je subsist side by side with that of the Subject (Sujet), and as distinct from it.16 Still, while the notion of “Moi” – besides appearing merely as a case in the (grammatical) declination of “Je” – has a rather clear technical designation in Lacan’s terminology, it seems that the use of “Je” remains more vague, elusive and shifting from the technical to the colloquial. This possibility of sliding of the term is what makes it close to the common and non-scholastic use. However, its elusiveness is not a reason to strip it of the possibility of being at play in these or any theoretical considerations. The same kind of elusive workings of the name of “I” are to be found in Foucault’s theme of “the care of the self” (souci de soi: de moi, de toi, etc.) or that of a topos of resistance which seems to evade its placing into the structure of the Subject in the strict sense of the word. It is always at work in his (or, for that matter, in Lacan’s just as well) writing whenever it turns impossible for the term Subject (Sujet) to cover the undiscovered, unexplored – not subjected to reflection – territories of the theoretically imagined Self. Nonetheless, it remains a common place that both Lacan and Foucault, just as the later theories drawing on their work, have performed an act of philosophical take-over of the position once held in the philosophy by the Ego (the “I”) in the name/favour of the Subject. To conclude, my argument here is simply that this act of “dethronement” has its own lacunae and that the latter are symptomatic. Namely that there are remnants of the (philosophically imagined) Self that are “untranslatable” into the notion of the Subject as advocated by this rather heterogeneous yet relatively unisonous theoretical legacy; and moreover that it is precisely in the texts of the forefathers of this school of theorizing that we find at play the elusive name of the “I” as supplementing or complementing that of the Subject. I would like to propose at this point to go back to the question of the unitary/non-unitary Subject dichotomy, with an approach of integrating the

aforementioned lacunae around or inside the poststructuralist concept of the Subject into our further considerations. The lacunae are the cracks of absence of the “voice” of “I,” of the incapacitated and silenced uttering (regardless of whether textually or through phonemic physicality) of an “I” which is too awkward and too inarticulate – unarticulated as a concept operative in scholarly language – to fit into the structure of the Subject. Before we proceed, it should be pointed out that there is no clear-cut distinction between the notions of identity, subject and subjectivity and the name of “I” in the considerations present in this initial chapter of the book. In fact, every now and then, they will appear as interchangeable or act as synonymous. Their overlapping of meaning seems to be of a “metonymic” character, rather than “metaphoric.” The latter would imply inter-identification consummating in a single identity or signifier that appropriates all the other, whereas what I have in mind is a meaning shifting across the terms, along the lines of their closeness. Namely, a “sliding” in the naming which takes “place” along the borders of intersection of the notions (or simply, the names) in question; and this approach is a mere result of the situation in the discourses/texts that are subject to this discussion. It is something that we inevitably inherit by re-reading the fundamental texts of the theoretical legacy that we are attempting to re-discover through our search for the mentioned lacunae as a discourse of creative permeability. Such shifting of meaning across the words “identity,” “subject,” and occasionally “I” is something that happens in the text/s of the theory advocating the non-unitary Subject. (And it is something that I will attempt to shed some light on in the following pages.) One more note before we go any further, which is more of a reminder than anything else. Our preoccupation here is thematic, not scholastic. Therefore, the insistence on certain themes and the interpretations proposed here are in no relation of belonging (ideological subscription) to any “School,” any legacy of a “great Thinker” or a circumscribed, historically identifiable discourse, at least not in the last instance.

2.2. Subject’s Survival or the Continuity of an “I”: Questions of “Location/s” of Perseverance 2.2.1. Even when conceived of as a continuous process of transformation, an instance of constant transformability and multilayeredness, the Subject is – nevertheless and still – subject to/of continuity. It is subject to a process of perseverance of an instance (or instances) that provides the basis for certain – even though relative – unitedness of the transformable Subject or of an “I” which recognizes – imagines – itself as inescapably identical to itself. The importance of the question of “persistence and survival” is one of the central claims by Judith Butler in one of her most recent books, Undoing Gender (where we meet a plethora of examples of resorting to the words “I” and “Self,” even though identical in meaning with the notion of “Subject”).

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Continuity is perseverance of a certain the “Same”; this “Same” is indispensable in providing the possibility for numeric unity – or oneness, One – which bears the chain of continuous subjective and identitary transformation. Mathematically, it is this one (even though multiple) Subject or Self (or “phenomenon of humanity,” or “Person”) that undergoes the processes of its (or: her/his) own transformability. Of course, this is no news to anyone, including the proponents of the theoretical project of the non-unitary Subject. If so, then, what is that which precludes the (feminist) poststructuralist language to utter a word of this simple, self-evident fact, let alone theorize its role in the construction of subjectivity? There are two possible answers to this question that I am about to propose which are seemingly contradictory. Namely, the relevance of the “self-evident,” “simple fact” – of the insisting instance of continuity of the Self – is perceived in the poststructuralist discourse as an implication of its irrelevance (precisely because of its self-evidence). This seemingly absurd claim and the situation it creates – of such dim, unsaid and peculiar inter-changeability of the two contradictory implications – seen in the context of their own conceptual world, are in a full compliance with the logic of the discourse they pertain to. I will argue that the answer is already implicated in the preclusion itself. The poststructuralist feminist – and, to be more precise, not only feminist – discourse seems to have assigned the status of the ineffable and unthinkable to that “self-evident” instance of certain oneness or unity (of the Self or of the “I”) underlying the Subject’s transformability. The very constitutive presuppositions of the school of thought in question create the implication that this is an instance outside the realms of Language, or outside the language at disposal to this particular discursiveness. Therefore, what seems to be implied is that this relevant instance is not so relevant after all. The position of “the One” – or of the instance of unity – is in strikingly obvious coincidence with that of the Real in the same discourse, issuing from the Lacanian psychoanalytic legacy which the latter incorporates. Before tackling this coincidence, let us just consider this brief note on the concept of the Real as provided by poststructuralism, drawing on Lacanian psychoanalysis. Within the fringes of this theoretical horizon, the Real is not a substance. It is an instance. In one possible – and clearly only approximate – rendition of the point by resorting to ontological language, let us say the Real is not an entity. It is a function. It is not a “quid.” It is a “quale.” It is a position that can be assumed by any-body or any-thing. It is a “form” in which any-one and any-thing can render itself (for the Other or for the Subject). Still, it seems that there is one “substance” which is always already assigned to assume the position of the Real as its only possible positioning or rendition. Having the priority of residing only in and through the Real, it is a substance that seems to have an unquestionable exclusivity to this topos; and this substance is the substance par excellence – the body or the “materiality.” The body, physicality or what is understood by “materiality,” in poststructuralist and (post)Lacanian context, is defined by its very impossibility of being 20

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“here and now” inasmuch as such – as the Bodily, without its translation into the Imaginary and Language. It must be mediated through Imaginary/Language in order to be there. It is “impossibility” in the sense of its impossible immediacy. Inasmuch as “the bodily” it is the ineffable. It is beyond Language and Thought, and as such it is defined by its absence. This is precisely how the Real is conceptualized by (post-) Lacanian poststructuralism. It seems that the notions of the Real and the Body inasmuch as “materiality” (or “Materiality”) are virtually synonymous. However, this is an oversimplification – and, to some degree, inaccuracy – when the original writing and teaching of Lacan himself is concerned; and we will return to this question further in this book. Still, it appears that in the poststructuralist theory of gender identity (drawing heavily on Lacan in this respect) the inter-changeability of the two concepts is in fact taking place. Moreover, it is taking the place of an axiom. Anything produced by the Language – which is, in fact, anything not belonging to the domain of the “Material” inasmuch as “material” – is deemed to be radically and inexorably beyond the Real. Or, it is the Real, that “World of the “Impossible” or “Impossible World,” which remains to be conceived of as inaccessibly beyond the World of Language, to which, according to this theoretical legacy, belongs every-thing except the Bodily. For example, it is inconceivable, in the context of the poststructuralist theory of gender identity, to thematize “the Real of an Identity.” The very predication would be but a contradictio in adiecto, the utterance itself but nonsense – since it is the radical detachment from the Real that has created the Imaginary, the Language and through that – the Identity. It is becoming evermore evident that the “outlandishness” of the Real is generated by an underlying dichotomy of metaphysic origin nesting in the very foundations of the poststructuralist “production of worlds” (conceptual framework/s of explanatory practices). Clearly, the binary structure of opposition between “Materiality” and the “Idea” (= sign, culture), inherited through Marxism from the so-called tradition of metaphysics, has subsisted as such even in the debates devoted to its deconstruction. This is something that the status of the notion of the One has in common with that of the Real – it is also captured in the binary structure of a classical metaphysical opposition and (mutual) exclusion of two terms – the One and the Multiple. As we have seen above, besides the shared feature of being grasped in such a constitutive way by a dichotomy – the latter itself being a direct inheritance from the metaphysics – of a metaphysical character, these two notions (the One and the Real) have a few more traits in common which are of fundamental significance. These are the status of the ineffable, the status of the inaccessible and, as I hope to demonstrate further in the text, a constitutive intertwining with the concept of the Body. (In Bodies That Matter, Judith Butler endeavours to overcome the mutually exclusivist inter-relating between the Body and the Language, and this something I will be tackling more closely in the next chapter.)

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2.2.2. In Psychic Life of Power17 by Judith Butler, the author to whom so many authorities have assigned the status of the founder of what is today known as the gender studies (and also of the queer studies), one of the most convincing and authoritative proponents of the theory of the “Impossible Unity for the Subject,” I found one of the rare explicit references to a possible site of continuity for the Subject; and in a later work by the same author, in Undoing Gender from 2004,18 we meet a re-iterated unequivocal claim about the “tasks of persistence and survival” for the “I,” nonetheless, without the insistence on the question of the “Site” (of the “survival and persistence”). In PLP, following Foucault’s line of theorizing the notions of the Subject, Power and Discourse, and more specifically his conceptualizations of the “body” and the “soul” and their respective roles in the Subject formation, Butler refers to the Body as “the site” of the Subject’s transformativity. Inasmuch as a (or, as it is originally stated, “the”) “site” (for subjective transformations), the Body is referred to in its “materiality” or physicality – in its aspect of the Real. In that sense, this “site of transformations” is inescapably the same and one (mathematically: it is one and the same unit or set). Thus, what is clearly said is that the Subject is never really identical to itself – always already a process; and what is implicated is that the “site” of transformability subsists as the same and one. Surely the imagined body as a territory of signification undergoes change. Nonetheless inasmuch as “the site” that Butler refers to, it is the body proper conceived in its opposition to the “soul” (both terms provided by Foucault himself). Therefore, the body in this context is physicality and it is the Real, detached from the workings of the Imaginary and the Language – a passive Site. After stating clearly that “(F)or Foucault, this process of subjectivation takes place centrally through the body,”19 Butler engages in a critical reading of Foucault’s main idea, aiming at amending his theoretical position by way of introducing a psychoanalytic perspective to it. Or the other way around: “(…) that criticism will entail re-emergence of a Foucauldian perspective within psychoanalysis.”20 The main goal of such a theoretical move is the introduction of greater emphasis on the Subject’s inherent dimension of ambiguity. And what is meant by that is that “Subject” (or “Identity”) – “insofar as totalizing”21 – inasmuch as the imprisoning effect of the “soul,” apart from being constraining, is also an instance which has “formative or generative effects.”22 These formative, generative effects are results of precisely “the prohibition and restriction” imposed by the constraints of soul producing the “frame” of “imprisonment.” The latter is but the form of subjectivity generated through those processes of restriction and discipline. The Subject is the only possible active instance. It is an agency, and yet again that passive imprint of constraint and imprisonment. Hence, the claim about the Subject’s constitutive ambiguity. This theoretical move of Butler is enabled by her critical rethinking of the clear-cut dichotomy between body and soul in Foucault, which she aims to undermine, bypass or surpass.

“The transposition of the soul into an exterior and imprisoning frame for the body vacates, as it were, the interiority of the body, leaving that interiority as a malleable surface for the unilateral effects of disciplinary power.”23

This quote which speaks of the body-soul (interiority-exteriority) opposition is inherently related to her critical observation that Foucault, and in particular in Discipline and Punish (hereafter referred to as DP), reduces “soul” to the Subject taken as a “position” within the Symbolic order, to use Lacanian parlance.24 Bearing this in mind, if not supplemented with psychoanalytic theory, Foucault’s discourse on subjectivity, according to Butler, leaves little space, if any, for the “location” of resistance of the Subject. “Where does resistance to or in disciplinary subject formation take place? Does the reduction of the psychoanalytically rich notion of psyche to that of the imprisoning soul eliminate the possibility of resistance to normalization and to subject formation, a resistance that emerges precisely from the incommensurability between psyche and subject?”25

Butler rejects recourse to the “romanticized” notion of the unconscious as a possible answer (proposed by psychoanalysis) to the question of the location of resistance (for the Subject). “What makes us think that the unconscious is any less structured by the power relations that pervade cultural signifiers than is the language of the subject?”26

She attempts to transport the ambiguity that marks the Foucauldian Subject – its two-faceted, passive-active character ensuing from the Subject’s “complicity” with the Power in the disciplinary formation – into the unconscious. The result of such a gesture is, however, not fruitful. Namely, it becomes even more difficult to establish the location and trace the mechanisms of resistance within the psyche. It is at this point of virtual dead-end in the discussion that Butler reintroduces the question of the “body.” “Before continuing this interrogation of psychoanalysis, however, let us return to the problem of the bodies in Foucault.”27

By searching for that which is outside the Foucauldian “soul,” outside the Subject articulated by the mechanisms of power – that mere “position” within the Lacanian symbolic – as the possible locus of resistance (for the “I”), Butler is attempting to locate that thing which “glues the bundle (called Subject) together.” How do I come to such a conclusion? To answer this question let us consider the following hypothesis. If while one is searching for that topos of critique (regarding one’s own subject-position) one finds oneself drawn into, taken by that transformative instance, which is a process, one remains inside the confines of a construct which is substitutable (by other identity/subject constructs). The locus of resistance is, however, a potentiality of situating oneself with a stance of critical detachment from the continuous auto-generated processes of subjection (of “being a Subject”). Thus, it is a situating beyond the instance of transformability (which, by definition, belongs to the domain of the Subject). It is an instance which continues to be there as a possibility of critical distance (or stance) with 23

regard to the ceaseless processuality. In other words, this is a “location” of an always already possible critical positioning. It is the topos of emergence of any resistance to the oppressions effectuated through any subjectivity – thus, not taken by the power structures pertaining to the Subject. This topos can be but that “thing” called by Braidotti the “glue” for the non-unitary Subject. It is an instance of continuity and persistence (of the critical stance) beneath, behind or beyond, or merely parallel to and detached from – the processes of subjection and identification. The implicated link between resistance and continuity (of the “I”) that I see in Psychic Life of Power (PLP), is confirmed or affirmed by Butler herself in Undoing Gender (UG), when she says “ […] the possibility of my persistence as an ‘I’ depends upon my being able to do something with what is done with me.”28 UG is a book which insists on the task of survival of the Self. Still it neither “undoes” the concept of subjectivity as conceived in PLP nor the argument concerning the topology of the resistance and continuity as proposed by the same book. (The latter is explained further on.)

2.2.3. Can the Body be the Site of Revolt? Exploring the possibility to identify the locus of resistance in Foucault (in particular, in DP), whereby the “soul” or the “Subject” have been dismissed as clearly named and claimed to be “an instrument of power” (PLP, 90), Butler inevitably invests the core of her investigation in the direction of the issue of the “body” as that possible location (of resistance). In this particular work of Michel Foucault, according to Butler’s meticulous reading, the “Subject” is nowhere to be read in the vein of its (Subject’s, which is also: Power’s) notorious ambivalence. This means that any possibility for the Subject to be interpreted also as the bearer, location or agency of resistance is already in advance dismissed; it is for this reason that she invites us to “return to the problem of bodies in Foucault.”29 This invitation is immediately followed by the question: “How and why is resistance denied to bodies produced through disciplinary regimes?”30

This is an introduction to the subsequent brief investigation of the possibility for the “body,” as conceptualized in Foucauldian discourse, to be that sui generis topos of resistance. We read: “[…] it appears there is an ‘inside’ to the body which exists before power’s invasion. But given the radical exteriority of the soul, how are we to understand ‘interiority’ in Foucault? That interiority will not be a soul, and it will not be a psyche, but what will it be? Is this a space of pure malleability, one which is, as it were, ready to conform to the demands of socialization? Or is this interiority to be called, simply, the body? Has it come to the paradoxical point where Foucault wants to claim that the soul is the exterior form, and the body interior space?”31

If the answer to these questions were to be affirmative, we would be facing a rather conservative position by Foucault. And it would indeed be so, not 24

THE REAL AND “I”: ON THE LIMIT AND THE SELF

only because such a statement would bear the anachronistic overtones of the traditional metaphysical contempt for the body, but also, because it would leave no space for a potentiality of resistance/critique. (Following Butler, I would also dismiss, already in advance, such a hypothetical reading, since it is in utter disagreement with the most fundamental presuppositions and concerns of the Foucauldian discourse: his statement about the soul’s imprisoning effects on the body is a sufficient reason for such dismissal. In addition to this, let us mention that also the concept of the “soul” in the context of the entire Foucauldian discourse is, of course, neither reduced nor reducible to imprisonment and constraint – it is also the instance of liberation and pleasure, and subject to the advocated practices of self-cultivation (souci de soi) in The History of Sexuality, Vol. III: The Care of the Self.32 My insisting – following Butler’s insisting of the same kind in PLP – on such textual renditions that might resonate with overtones of conservatism, is merely for the purposes of demonstrating the complexity, multidimensionality and the instances of impasse in Foucault’s writing.) Butler continues with her investigation of the possibility for the body to be that Site of Revolt par excellence: “This ‘subjection’ or assujetissement is not only subordination but a securing and maintaining, a putting into place of a subject, a subjectivation. The ‘soul brings (the prisoner) to existence’; not unlike in Aristotle, the soul, as an instrument of power, forms and frames the body, stamps it, and in stamping it, brings it into being. In this formulation, there is no body outside of power, for the materiality of the body – indeed, materiality itself – is produced by and in direct relation to the investment of power.”33

These lines show clearly that, according to this particular discourse, Power and the Subject are merely synonymous, whereas the Subject is also to be understood as the constraining soul-effect, imprisoning imprint on and grasp of the body. The search for any grounds of any pertinent assumption that the body (in its immanence) might represent that locus of insubordination and revolt turns out to be futile. Futile because the body is not outside the reach of Power, and should be understood as the “material” resonance of the Power Structure pertaining to the disciplining soul. The logic of Butler’s argument is obvious: resistance should be located outside the Subject and the Power (inhabiting the Subject); since it is proven that even the body is invaded by the Power and discursiveness (structuring the subject), resistance is not to be found there (in the body) either. Further on in the same chapter of PLP,34 Butler engages in a critical reading of the sparse account on resistance that Foucault offers in his History of Sexuality, Volume 1: The Will to Knowledge,35 where he clearly states that there can be “no single locus of great Refusal, no soul of Revolt.” Instead, one can talk of “multiple possibilities of resistance enabled by power itself.”36 This ambivalence of Power to be at the same time that disciplinary and constraining force of Law and the very potentiality of Resistance, instils both these facets in the Subject, producing it as that same ambivalence. The process is “reconstructed” by Butler as follows: 25

“[…] for power in Foucault not only consists in the reiterated elaboration of norms or interpellating demands, but is formative or productive, malleable, multiple, proliferative, and conflictual. Moreover, in its resignifications, the law itself is transmuted into that which opposes and exceeds its original purposes. In this sense, disciplinary discourse does not unilaterally constitute a subject in Foucault, or rather, if it does, it simultaneously constitutes the condition for the subject’s de-constitution.”37

This reading of Law’s possibility to “transgress” itself by means of its ceaseless reiterations is Butler’s own re-appropriation or re-invention of Foucault’s theory and is the product of her methodological innovation consisting in interconnecting of Foucault’s thought and Lacanian psychoanalysis. The “conflictual” nature is brought to the Butlerian Subject by way of the relentless re-significations of the – although “always different” – always the same Law. The parallel to the disciplining force of Power is found in Lacan’s Law.38 Let us carefully read the passage from the first volume of Foucault’s HS-I, which is the departure point of Butler’s thesis about the “Law’s auto-transgression.”

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“[…] there is no single locus of great Refusal, no soul of revolt, source of all rebellions, or pure law of the revolutionary. Instead there is a plurality of resistances, each of them a special case: resistances that are possible, necessary, improbable; others that are spontaneous, savage, solitary, concerted, rampant, or violent; still others that are quick to compromise, interested or sacrificial; by definition, they can only exist in the strategic field of power relations. But this does not mean that they are only a reaction or rebound, forming with respect to the basic domination an underside that is in the end always passive, doomed to perpetual defeat.”39

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It seems to me that this explication of Foucault about the multiple workings of the resistance(s) is valid on the level of the Social, that wider network of power relations. Further, in this sense, it has no real bearing on the question of the construction of the Subject, and the inner organization (within the Subject) of that double potentiality of Power. When referring to “individual resistances,” Foucault is rather vague regarding the question of “location” of that “odd term in relations of power”40 which is the resistance. He speaks of “focuses of resistance […] inflaming certain points of the body, certain moments in life, certain types of behaviour.”41 The fact that the Subject is constituted of Power does not explain anything as to how the Law and Resistance organize themselves within that construction called Subject. If we are to understand the Subject as the instance of a sort of self-articulation of the Power (or its articulation within the Self), regularization of what might be anarchic flux of those quasi-libidinal forces of Power, we can presume the existence of that double nature of Power on the level of the Subject. This, however, is not the Subject we meet in DP, at least not according to Butler’s reading. Nevertheless, if we consider the ambivalent nature of Power, and the ambivalence of the Subject as being both an agency (of Power) and a product of subjection, let us assume that, in any of Foucault’s works, the Subject’s disciplinary nature is to be understood, to the least, to be always already permeable.

Consequently, should we presume that the lacunae in the Subject’s disciplinary “nature” are the loci and/or the substance of resistance and revolt? At this point, we are facing the immediacy of the question as to how this other facet of the Power’s double nature is articulated on the level of the Subject. This is a question of location, structure but also, even more so, of conceptual contents. That is to say, what does the concept of resistance of Judith Butler’s Subject consist of? What is the Subject’s capacity of resistance “made of”? What concept constitutes it? Or, what is its name? Power is the “substance” of both Subject’s discipline and resistance; and what we are searching for is that instance which can transform the Power from oppressiveness of discipline into a force of revolt. That instance is also the critical stance, and we are in a search for the “location” and/or the conceptual contents it is made of. Having rejected the psychoanalytic concept of the unconscious as the location and content of resistance “romantic” (PLP, 88), Butler’s reading of both discourses (Foucauldian and psychoanalytic) on the questions of subjectivity – resulting in her own idiosyncratic discursive construct incorporating psychoanalysis into Foucauldian discourse – offers no counter-proposal. Namely, having declared the Power to be the carrier and origin of resistance, in the light of the open question about the Subject’s capacity for resistance, one would expect the author’s conception of how it (the Power) is transformed from disciplinary effect to revolutionary force. Also in UG, which struggles with the questions of Subject’s (Self’s) “survival” and “persistence,” we do not find an answer to the question of mechanisms, contents and topology of this transformation. The only thing we meet regarding this issue is a re-iteration of the statement about the ambiguous nature of Power or Norm.42 In effect, Butler’s (and Foucault’s) discourse fails to provide a clear response to this question. Subjectivity remains to be explicitly formulated as a disciplinary instance, and only implicitly understood as the agency of resistance. (It is both by Foucault and Butler proclaimed as such – agency of resistance and critique – on the basis of the implications provided by the presence of Power as its constituent.) Therefore, one concludes: the “location” of revolt has to be looked for elsewhere and outside of what is strictly known as the “Subject.” Furthermore, this “location” has to be the site of resistance for or within a certain Self or an “I.” Since the revolt or resistance is that which enables Subject’s self-critique and self-transformation (from one subjectivity to another), one is obliged to assume that there is certain continuity of an “I” behind these transformations. After all, if a Subject can “die” in order for a new one to be “born,” one has to imagine a “territory” of an empty space or a “period” of absence, a fissure in that period of change; certainly, if one assumes that the dissolution of the Subject is lived, experienced, appropriated as one’s own subject-dissolution, or death. If the extinguishing, the disappearance of the Subject is an experience of a self-dissolution, there is an instance that undergoes this experience and claims it as its own – it is I who am dying as the “I” I knew. It is the instance of continuity behind the changes, claiming possession of these changes as its own. 27

Moreover, in the context of Butler’s (Foucauldian) theory, this instance of continuity is to be presumed to be the location of resistance, because it is from the standpoint of that instance only that one can introduce, undergo and endure subjectivity transformations.

2.2.4. Connecting Continuity with Unity (in the Sense of Perseverance of Oneness) How can we situate the idea of the Self’s (or the Subject’s) continuity within the poststructuralist theory of gender professing the multiple and transformative Subject? What is the position it can assume, without establishing a conflict with and undermining the fundamental presuppositions of the discourse? At first glance, the notion of continuity – or even, the very name of it, the signifier within Language – seems to introduce an unavoidable conflict with the main concerns of the discourse in question. This is a discourse of consistent and relentless critique of the metaphysical, and the idea of continuity echoes with overtones of the eternal, stable and fixed. These echoes are the product of the problematic implication about a relatively stable instance behind the processes of vicissitude and change. The stable instance bears resemblance of unchangeable substance. Thus, it seems to imply an essence, a human essence universally shared by that multitude of (post-human) subjectivity. But if we are to understand that instance of continuity not as a substance, but as a stance, I cannot see the reason for any “conflict of discourses.” In the context of the poststructuralist discourse/s, there are a number of (in-) stances that are perpetually there – the Subject, the Real, the Power, etc., displaying that mere faculty of continuity within the discourse itself and the (imagined) reality that discourse creates (a non-eternal one, not representing an essence, but mutational and staggering – and yet, an instance of continuity). The instance of continuity in its immanence functions as a unifying force for the Self or the subjective processuality. In other words, continuity is the perseverance of a certain numeric One. Moreover, this enduring One underlies or undergoes the processes of indentificational multiplicity and subjective transformability. In Foucauldian context, this instance (of continuity, perseverance) seems to have been assumed by a “substance,” that continuous numeric unity of the Body, participating in the processes of subjection, in the construction of subjectivity (as that which is exterior to Language). It is significant that Butler raises the question of the body as a possible site of the resistance, concluding that such a possibility is precluded or hindered by Foucault’s discourse. Nonetheless, she embarks on an investigation into the reasons for these hindrances, and by that she seems to demonstrate her initial presumption that the body should be the right place to look for the possible location of resistance. In PLP (89), Butler opens this line of investigation with the following question: “[…] let us return to the problem of bodies in Foucault. How and why is resistance denied to bodies produced through disciplinary regimes?”

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What is that which inspires Butler to this particular question? Is it the fact that what is being disciplined is the body and thus it is the body which is called upon its own resistance to that whatever subjugates it, that is to say, to the regime of (a particular) subjectivity. Foucault remarks that the “dissociated Self” – the one “adopting the illusion of a substantial unity” – is possible precisely through the destruction of the body, that “volume in perpetual disintegration” (inflicted by Language and Ideas).43 So, it seems that Butler expects the body to resist this “force of destruction,” to strive necessarily for its self-preservation, for its survival – for its continuity. This is also an implication that the body is the instance which has the inherent capacity for and immanent tendency towards continuity; it is precisely this characteristic which provides the basis for the expectation that the site par excellence of the resistance should be – the Body. Thus, we can deduce, following this line of reasoning, that there is an instance of continuity for the “I,” provided by the incessant effort of the Body to preserve itself against the disintegration brought about and upon it by the Subject. From the discussion thus far, we can see that, through the presumed corporeal continuity, Butler, perhaps the most influential authority among the proponents of the (feminist) theory of “The Non-Unitary Subject,” provides a potentiality to conceive of a certain continuity for the “I” (marked by transformative subjectivity). Also, let us add the following observation: namely, in spite of the fragmentations brought about by the many subject deaths that an “I” undergoes, some continuity for the latter is assumed also in the sense of the continuity of the memory line of experiences (unless we are speaking of psychotic subjects). This continuity of the memory unifies the many subject-situations under a single name. In Butler’s and in Foucault’s writings – as in so many by other authors of the same discursive belonging – it is apparently an “epistemological given” that this interrupted sequence of subjectivities is located within a circumscribed psychic “space” as a single unit/set. Evidently, in the discourses purporting the “death of the unitary subject,” the workings of self-sustainability of the “One” next to the “Multiple” are always already tacitly admitted, but never clearly referred to. The silence imposed over the “Name of the One” is in inherent, inextricable relation with the “prohibition” of the use of language regarding the questions of continuity. One can assume operations of a self-imposed, ideological control over the “good” and “bad” words in the context of these particular discourses: words to be subject to repetition and words to be avoided. The silently admitted instance of continuity in the discourses of non-unitary subject, transformed into a stance of speech/text could allow opening of spaces for discussion, linguistic possibilities for thematizing questions of forms and instances of unity for the Subject-in-Process.

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2.2.5. The Radical Solitude in Continuity

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“Many people think that grief is privatizing, that it returns us to a solitary situation, but I think it exposes the constitutive sociality of the self, a basis of thinking a political community of a complex order,” writes Judith Butler in one of her later works (Undoing Gender from 2004).44 And Butler is right about the grief as a state of being exposed in one’s constitutive dependence on the others, since “the ties we have to the others”45 indeed “compose who we are.”46 Still those “many people” who “think that grief is privatizing” are probably also right. Since the grieving, or rather – the mourning, entails the hard labour of self-preservation performed by the “I” in the face of the dread of its possible annihilation. The relentless, auto-generated process of corporeal and psychic self-preservation against the threat of disintegration by “the dissociated Self” is a state of irrevocable solitude. This is a process of repetition of the single labour of auto-propagation, of ceaseless repetition of an act of unilateral auto-affirmation. I am resorting to term “unilateral” in its Deleuzian sense of the “unilateral difference,”47 which is a singular, unrelated act of affirmation, of a sheer “Yes.” The “sheer yes” of the survival is always already an auto-referential affirmation doomed to endless repetition. The auto-referential stance is always already translating itself into an autoreflexive one.48 We are speaking of an auto-affirmative process of self-preservation striving towards – and inevitably resulting into – precisely the continuity of that particular “auto-.” This ceaseless duration of self-preserving labour takes the figure of curving of the Self into itself, similar to the Nietzschean idea of the Self’s will that turns upon and against itself as the origin and perpetual act of auto-reflexivity and, hence, subjectivity.49 And this is a state of insurmountable, radical solitude. The question whether it is prior to the “entrance on the scene” of the Other, posterior or contemporaneous to it is, in fact, irrelevant. Relative or viewed as denuded of any relation, there is an instance of radical solitude in the Self, involved in the auto-generating and auto-reflexive processes of subject production. In other words, behind, beneath, next to … the mobility of the multiple and transformable Subject, the hard labour of self-preserving continuity is taking place, creating a state which is irrevocably solitary one. This is a self-enclosed reality of mere labour at a point where the organic and the sense of Selfhood merge into one another, a denuded effort of selfpreservation which is ultimately elusive to the authority of Language – the instance of the unsurpassable “imprisonment” in one’s own Self. This instance is the Real of the “I” that is unmediated through the Other and through Language. This irrevocably solitary instance is the Limit itself to mediation through and relatedness to the Other, the limit to the reach of Language.

NOTES 1. Marilyn Friedman, “Autonomy and Social Relationships: Rethinking the Feminist Critique.” In Feminists Rethink the Self, edited by Diana Tietjens Meyers, (New York: Westview Press, 1997), 41. 2. Ibid., 42. 3. Rosi Braidotti, Metamorphoses: Towards a Materialist Theory of Becoming (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2002), 39. 4. Ibid., 39-40. 5. Ibid., 40. 6. Ibid., 41. 7. Ibid., 39. 8. Katerina Kolozova and @arko Trajanoski, eds., Conversations With Judith Butler (Skopje: Euro-Balkan Press, 2001), 29. 9. Ibid., 27-28. 10. Jane Flax, “The End of Innocence,” in Feminists Theorize the Political, eds. Judith Butler and Joan W. Scott (London & New York: Routledge, 1992), 454. 11. François Laruelle, Philosophie et non-philosophie (Liege and Burxelles: Pierre Mardaga, 1989), 17 (hereafter cited both in text and notes as PNP). 12. Ibid., also consider the French original of the quotation: « C’est son autoposition fondamentale; ce que l’on peut appeler aussi son auto-factualisation ou son auto-fétichisation – tout ce que nous rassemblons sous le Principe de philosophie suffisante (PPS). » 13. Ibid., 42: « L’Un est une Identité non-thétique en général, c’est-à-dire à la fois non-décisionnelle (de) soi et non-positionnelle (de) soi: sans volonté pour essence, sans topologie pour existence ; sans le combat pour moteur, sans l’espace ou la figure pour manifestation […] l’Un est le minimum transcendantal, la pétition minimale de réalité – c’est-à-dire la réalité que suppose toute pétition en général. » 14. In this sense, the notion of the “unitaire” inasmuch as essentially “dualitaire” is repeatedly criticized by Laruelle throughout his entire work, and in particular in Philosophie et non-philosophie. 15. In Undoing Gender (published at the same time as when these lines were being written), Judith Butler invokes, or rather, reclaims the notion of “I,” which, nonetheless, seems to function in the text as synonymous with the concept of “Subject.” She writes of the “constitutive sociality of the self” (p. 19) and of the “fundamental sociality of the embodied life” (p. 22). See: Judith Butler, Undoing Gender (New York and London: Routledge, 2004). 16. In the following quotation from “Le stade du miroir comme formateur de la fonction du Je,” one can see the distinction between the terms of je et le sujet, and their operational statuses in the theory: “[…] la matrice symbolique où le je se précipite en une forme primordiale, avant qu’il ne s’objective dans la dialectique de l’identification à l’autre et que le language ne lui restitue dans l’universel sa fonction de sujet.” (Lacan (Ecrits I), 1999, 93) The term moi appears as a grammatical flexion of je, but also as a term with a more specific denotation of representing the function of the imaginary in the subject formation, or simply the location of the Imaginary in the psychic “space.” 31

17. Judith Butler, Psychic Life of Power, Stanford University Press, 1997 (hereafter cited and referred to in text and notes as PLP). 18. Judith Butler, Undoing Gender (London and New York: Routledge, 2004) (hereafter cited and referred to in text and notes as UG). 19. Butler, PLP, 87. 20. Ibid. 21. Ibid., 86. 22. Ibid. 23. Ibid., 86-87. 24. Ibid., 86. 25. Ibid., 87. 26. Ibid., 88. 27. Ibid., 89. 28. Butler, UG, 3. 29. Butler, PLP, 89. 30. Ibid. 31. Ibid. 32. Michel Foucault, History of Sexuality, Vol. III: The Care of the Self, trans. Robert Hurley (London: Penguin Books, 1990). 33. Butler, PLP, 90-91. 34. The chapter entitled as “Subjection, Resistance, Resignification: Between Freud and Foucault.” 35. Michel Foucault, History of Sexuality, Vol. I: The Will to Knowledge, trans. Robert Hurley (London: Penguin Books, 1998). (Hereafter cited and referred to in text and notes as HS-1.) 36. Foucault, HS-I, 95-96. 37. Butler, PLP, 99. 38. See: Butler, PLP, 86, 88-89, 98, etc. 39. Foucault, HS-I, 95-96. 40. Ibid., 96. 41. Ibid. 42. “If I have any agency, it is opened up by the fact that I am constituted by a social world I never chose. That my agency is riven with paradox does not mean it is impossible. It means only that paradox is the condition of its possibility.” (Butler, UG, 3) 43. See: Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History” in Language, CounterMemory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, edited by D. F. Bouchard (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977), 147-48. 44. Butler, UG, 19. 45. Ibid., 18. 46. Ibid. 47. See: Gilles Deleuze, Différence and répétition (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1993). 48. I have written more extensively on Nietzsche’s conceptualization of autoreflexivity and the formation of subject in terms of “the Will’s turning against itself,” see: Katerina Kolozova, “Ni~e i poststrukturalisti~ke teorije subjektiviteta: ^itanje kroz Judith Butler (Nietzsche and the Poststrucutralist Theories of Subjectivity: A Reading through Judith Butler),” Tre}a br.2/vol.2 (Zagreb, 2000): 131-138. 49. See: Butler, PLP, 63 ff. 32

THE REAL AND “I”: ON THE LIMIT AND THE SELF

CHAPTER 2

THE REAL AND THE FICTION 1. The Dichotomy of Sex and Gender and Some of its “Metaphysical” Implications The dichotomy of “sex” and “gender,” and the still prevailing ways in which it works within the contemporary theories of gender, are the reflection, or rather, the expression of another dichotomy which belongs to the “family” of several grand couples of opposing concepts inherited from the metaphysical tradition. It appears that in the poststructuralist theories of gender from the last decades of the 20th and the very beginning of the 21st century there can be traced an irreducible remnant of the metaphysical mode of thinking. The dichotomy between sex and gender reflects and reproduces the classical metaphysical oppositional division between the “materiality” (of the body/ sex) and the “idea” (“conceptuality” or “the linguistic character” of gender as “culturally constructed”). It seems that this opposition generates – or is simply and immanently connected with – a series of other inherently related binaries based upon the mutual exclusion and/or opposition of the constituting terms. Namely, the biology/culture, or “materiality”/“idea, opposition always already implicates – and is susceptible to a reduction to – the opposition between reality (the Real) and fiction. This opposition then again reproduces the most fundamental – or perhaps, the founding – opposition of the entire tradition of Western metaphysics (and philosophy as we still know it) and is the principal source of its greatest inhibitions. It is the opposition constituted by the binary of tò ón (the Being) and tò mè ón (the Non-Being, Nothingness). We will come back to this question a little later in this chapter, after we will have referred once again to the sex/gender (body/identity) opposition and to its deconstruction as put forward by Judith Butler. The radical critique of the body/discursiveness dichotomy has been performed by Judith Butler in many of her works. However, she has done this in the most meticulously elaborated and seductively convincing way in her Bodies That Matter (BM), a seminal work devoted precisely to this particular question. Here, Butler exposes the naïve – or the naïvely unquestioned – belief in the existence of a “pure” body. She exposes it as naïve, non-reflected, nonsubjected to deconstructive critique and as belief. This belief in the “pure” body detached in a constitutive, defining way from Language is but a belief in the (absolutely) passive body. Or rather, this is a belief in the absolute passivity of matter and matter as absolute passivity, on the one hand, and the untouched integrity of Subject’s intentionality, on the other. Within the discourses created by this traditional dichotomy, Subject’s intentionality obtains a position from which it can – and is expected to – operate (within or as the construction of “I”) as ontologically independent from

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the body. Thus, it can operate on the body as a Form on Matter, as intentionality upon a material, as subject on object. In other words, what we are dealing with here is the classical dichotomy between determinism (the materiality of sex) and (Subject’s) free will (“constructing” the gender), to use Butler’s words (although from a different context).1 Such trenchant and stable opposition between sex and gender, thus between the body and the construction of subjectivity/identity (materiality and “the world of ideas”), is made possible and persisting precisely by the presence of the reality (Real)/fiction (the imagined) dichotomy enabling this very chain of inferences. As mentioned previously, it is the one between. This particular dichotomy inevitably creates a significant implication which seems to (auto-) undermine some of the basic assertions of poststructuralist theory itself; this implication is that the “Matter” is the “Certainty” which will always remain outside the limits of Language, and that Language inasmuch as constitutively arbitrary will remain from this (the only accessible) side of the unyielding and non-penetrable frontier of the inconceivable “Real.” I will argue that this “mode of reasoning” based on the mutual exclusion and opposition of the two terms unavoidably implies that the “Real” is “more real” than the fiction (the Imagined). It is always the “real reality” as opposed to the imagined. Or simply, it acquires the status of a “higher reality” as a necessary product of the immanence of the opposition itself. It is precisely the axiomatic position of the assumption about the reality/fiction opposition – and the need for ontological certainty that it satisfies – which makes both possible: the “non-poststructuralist” resistance to discourses of constructivism as well as constructivism’s own reluctance regarding deconstruction of materiality and sex. From constructivist – just as from a non-constructivist point of view – sex, inasmuch as materiality is nondeconstructable, being precisely the opposite of construction. It is exactly this situation in “radical constructivism” that has served Judith Butler as a point of departure for her critique of the incongruity in the constructivist discourses which sustain and reinforce the dichotomous and oppositional inter-positioning of “sex” and “gender.” “If such a theory (of ‘the radical constructivist position’) cannot take account of sex as the site or surface on which it acts, then it ends up presuming sex as the unconstructed, and so concedes the limits of linguistic constructivism, inadvertently circumscribing that which remains unaccountable within the terms of construction.”2

Let us engage in a closer reading of Butler’s deconstruction of the concepts of “materiality” of the body and of “culturality” or “constructedness” of gender and the opposition they create, carried out in BM. This will be a reading which will attempt to establish the symptoms of the presence and status (of relevance in terms of constitution of Butler’s theoretical construct) of the Real/Fiction dichotomy, and explore the ways in which it operates and the implications it generates. I will argue that the aporetic situation with respect to reality (the Real), in which the construction of sex finds itself at a particular point in the text

of BM, is symptomatic of the Real/Fiction dichotomy as inherent to Butler’s discourse, as well as to those subject to her critique. There, at that very point of Butler’s argumentation, we meet the (productively) paradoxical position of the category of reality/the Real which screens the crisis of the perennial dichotomy between the Real and the Fiction. She brings the discussion to its wall of aporia, by exposing the dead-end of this conflict of duality of concepts in such a denuding way that she inevitably subverts the binary. However, in spite of the subversion, in spite of the deconstruction which unveils the ambivalent, paradoxical ways in which both terms operate and interchange, still the binary itself continues to be there, always already presupposed. Butler’s critical reading of the theoretical propagation of the sex/gender opposition as one between materiality and construction, relying on its belief in the cultural “virginity” of the body, sets out with the aphoristic remark “is sex to gender as feminine is to masculine?”3 Butler encapsulates many important aspects of her critique in this allusion to the structuralist opposition of the female and male gender as a reflection of that between nature and culture.4 Nonetheless, I will resort to this remark only in order to rephrase it in the following way: “Is sex to gender as nature is to culture?” and thereof: “Is sex to gender, as reality is to fiction?” The latter is the question I would like to concentrate on in this chapter of the book. The reality/fiction binary is among the several grand and grounding dichotomies of all metaphysics.5 In other words, it represents the theme that has always already been at the base (or at the pinnacle) of any and all metaphysical endeavour: the problem of the Real and the illusion, which always already “translates,” transposes itself into the problem of truth and delusion. In summary, the question of the Real/Fiction dichotomy has always already been or inevitably imposed or transposed itself as the one of “what is” and “what is not” – the question of tò ón and tò mè ón, of Being and Non-Being (Nothingness).

2. The Impasses of the Real/Fiction Duality: The “Aporetique(s)” Already at the very beginning of the critical endeavour undertaken in BM – namely, to deconstruct of the sex/gender dual structure – one senses an anticipation of a fruitful theoretical outcome: radical rethinking of the both concepts and their inter-relatedness. The deconstructive work preformed by Butler in this work brings about the liberation of the both terms from the hold of the (binary) structure, and from their oppositional and mutually exclusive relation. The joy from such anticipation may, however, be a little disquieted by the inhibiting situation in which, at a certain point in the argumentation, the notion of sex as construction finds itself in relation to the term of reality. We read:

“If gender is the social construction of sex, and if there is no access to this ‘sex’ except by means of its construction, then it appears not only that sex is absorbed

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by gender, but that ‘sex’ becomes something like a fiction, perhaps a fantasy, retroactively installed at a prelinguistic site to which there is no direct access. But is it right to claim that ‘sex’ vanishes altogether, that it is a fiction over and against what is true, that it is a fantasy over and against what is reality? [My italics] Or do these very oppositions need to be rethought such that if ‘sex’ is a fiction, it is one within whose necessities we live, without which life itself would be unthinkable? And if ‘sex’ is a fantasy, is it perhaps a phantasmatic field that constitutes the very terrain of cultural intelligibility? [My italics] Would such a rethinking of such conventional oppositions entail a rethinking of ‘constructivism’ in its usual sense?”6

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To sum up, Butler claims that “sex” does not disappear entirely by virtue of being that “fiction” within whose “necessities we live,” and without which “life itself would be unthinkable.” This seems to be Butler’s answer to her own implicated presupposition that the fiction or fantasy is something, by its definition, to be expected to inevitably establish a relation of opposition to “what is true” and “reality.” (Implied in the question of whether it is right to claim that the “sex”, conceived as radically constructed, “vanishes altogether,” that it is a “fiction over and against what is true “and “reality.”) We are immediately led to the question of how this (“necessary”) fiction relates to that which she refers to as “true” and “reality.” Furthermore, what is “true” and “reality” within or according to this discourse (the one created in BM)? Clearly, Butler distinguishes these two categories (“true” and “reality”) from that of fiction (of the body) and inter-relates them as something distinct from one another. Given that the “phantasmatic field” of the body constitutes a certain reality, which is that of a “cultural intelligibility,” it appears that there is a “more real” reality than it, to which this fiction establishes a certain relation that Butler attempts to re-think. Consequently and inevitably, we are also led to the questions of what and where should we assume this (“real”) reality is? (Is it perhaps that “prelinguistic site to which there is no direct access”? If the answer to this question turns out to be affirmative, it would generate a series of rather interesting implications about the main concerns and claims of Butler’s theory that she shares with the rest poststructuralist theories on gender and identity.) It seems that Butler is suggesting that its very status of necessity (Zwang, ananke) renders the fiction of “sex” (and its “materiality”) as an aspect, a component or situation and part of the topology of one (or, at a given moment, the only) possible reality we can encounter, deal with, be in, or think. The fiction of “sex” performs (as) the reality of “sex.” It possesses the authority of the undisputable criterion of ultimate formative power and authority in the production of the gendered and sexualized identities and possibilities of practice; and the identities and practices which defy this defining criterion and foundation (the sex of our bodies: their maleness or their femaleness) are determined by their very positioning of defiance vis-à-vis the ultimate condition of human sexuality. Thus, following precisely the logic of Butler’s argumentation, I am led to conclude that it (the “fiction” of sex) is the reality of sex (reality to which gender is bound to relate to). Fiction is Reality, the only reality to be found there.

Could this be the solution of, the liberation from, the way out of the aporia created by the encounter of the deconstructive concept of “sex” (as fiction) with the notion of reality? It is possible. However, I would argue, only if this were a statement situated outside of a discourse based on a binary mode of thinking and constituted around (or by) a dualistic structure. In fact, it would be a possible way out of the aporia solely if this statement were not produced within a discourse created by a duality (albeit deconstructed) and the interconditioning inter-relatedness (albeit deconstructed) of the two terms. The ambivalence of terms enclosed in a binary relation can hardly be “a productive paradox” in the sense of “productivity” that we are in search for here. Instead, the only thing that this paradox can produce is a circular entrapment between the two poles of the binary. This is even more so, if the two terms are opposed and mutually exclusive. The latter however – I will argue – is always already produced by a binary structure, by any dual construct. Let us take – what I will call – “the map of symptoms” of the quoted paragraph by Butler as an auspicious invitation to a modest deconstructive attempt regarding the Tradition of Thought of the Real (and Reality) founded upon the opposition it establishes with the Fiction. According to François Laruelle, this opposition has always persisted within what he calls the entire “gréco-judaïque” tradition of thought (pensée).7 And it is still present in the texts belonging to the philosophical project of deconstruction of the Heideggerian (/Derridean) line of thinking, claims Laruelle.8 The entire tradition of the (proclaimed) Western metaphysical and (self-proclaimed) postmetaphysical philosophical thought is a tradition of thinking the reality/the Real and the Fiction in terms of duality, inevitably implying dualism of mutually exclusive contraries. Moreover, this is a defining trait of all Western (“grécojudaïque”) philosophy, rendering it – in its entirety, including deconstruction and Lacanian psychoanalysis – as metaphysical,9 claims Laruelle.

3. Two Ways of Dealing with the Aporetic Dead End: Deleuze and Laruelle I would like to consider two concepts – one philosophical and the other non-philosophical – that both strive to create an opening of thought which escapes the binary clench. A way out of the confinement of thought within a stable structure – and from the binary of opposites which is the most elemental compulsory constituent of any structure – has been proposed by Deleuze, both in his early and later works (the latter co-written with Guattari). A way out of dualism and of philosophy (which is, according to Laruelle, always already metaphysical) has been invented also by Laruelle. The exit from the dual autoenclosure of Thought is enabled by the non-philosophical method or axiom of “thinking of in terms of the Real.” These two possible ways out of the tiresome vicious circle of interpretational aporias are the ones I would like to consider here.

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Let us start with the first proposition, that of Deleuze (and, in the later phase of his work, co-developed with Guattari). The dissolution of structure into a rhizomatic flux produces certain liberating effects with respect to stability and exclusiveness as the necessary and defining aspects of Structure. However, it is depriving the possibility of thinking the “pure” concepts, i.e., concepts seen in their aspect of – what would young Deleuze himself call – a “unilateral difference.”10 Dissolution not only of structure, but also of concepts as such, is at the core of Deleuze’s “cosmology,” especially in his early works. His “ontology” and “epistemology” of dissolution (the “World/s” he re-creates, his Vision-of“Being”) are already implied in the conceptualization of “unilateral difference” in Différence et repetition. The “unilateral difference” is an unequivocal “Yes” (of “Being”): unrelated and absolute (act of) affirmation. It produces a flux of “will” – to resort to Nietzschean parlance, whose formative influence on his own work is claimed by Deleuze himself – or of “being” (to use a more traditional terms) or of “energy” (a term of the later Deleuze), instead of a definitive and defining structure. Dissolution of structure is what he continues to pursue, together with Guattari, in L’Anti-Oedipe (Anti-Oedipus)11 and Mille Plateaux (Thousand Plateaus).12 In these two works, Structure is deconstructed and dissolved into rhizomes of traces and fluctuation and into bodies without organs. However, the dissolution of concepts into either rhizomes (in L’AntiOedipe) or endless affirmations of absolute (“unilateral”) differences (in Différence et répétition) – or their very impossibility to be isolated from the rhizomatic influxes created with other dissolving concept-structures – is that which precludes the possibility of thinking “pure concepts.” If such a vision/ thought (of “pure concepts”) is always already impossible within the context of this discourse, we are facing a barrier set up by, as Laruelle would say, “a philosophical decision.” This impossibility is but a result, a creation of a philosophical decision – an axiom that precludes certain possibilities of thought within a particular scholastic horizon. The decision that disables any theoretical effort to think “pure concepts” consists in the conviction that the latter are metaphysical stabilized truths the radical critique of which can be but the dissolution into fluxes and rhizomes. Moreover, Deleuze puts forward a rather clear claim regarding the possibility of exiting the aporetic inhibition of thought, a claim which is yet another decision with the status of an axiom. It is encapsulated in the great metaphors of the “labyrinth” and the “eternal return,” and the equation he establishes between the two terms. According to Deleuze in Nietzsche et la philosophie there is no way out of the labyrinth of aporias.13 The only “way out” is the embracing of the “truth” about the unending circle – cyclicality – of paradoxy of thought. Namely, the image of the “Labyrinth” represents the Great Circle of the eternal return (le retour éternel).14 The labyrinth is the figure of the Deleuzian (following Nietzsche in that respect) “truth” about temporality as the non-temporality of the eternal return. (Deleuze’s considerations about time and temporality, present also in some of his other works,15 follow the views of Bergson, according to whom,

Time inasmuch as pure Duration is but Future always already collapsing into the returning Past, which, again, conforms with the vision of the eternal return.) The affirmation of the labyrinth, according to Deleuze, the decision not to leave from there but to remain inside of it, is the salvation from the frustrations created by the situation of aporia. However, I will claim, it is not a way out of the aporia itself. Instead, it is its “unilateral affirmation” in ceaseless repetition. My central argument here is that the aporetic situation is possible but within a discourse of duality (dualism) which implies opposition between the two components of the binary structure, and that constitutive contrariety issues into mutual exclusiveness. Consequently, a situation of thought outside of an aporia should be the unavoidable sign, the symptom of the real, experienced liberation from – and dissolution of – the binary constraint. François Laruelle’s choice in PNP (quite differently from Deleuze) is to attempt to invent a mode of thinking which is outside the aporetic labyrinth, to confer a possibility of thinking in a non-aporetic situation. According to Laruelle’s non-philosophical theory, thinking beyond an aporia is made possible by or comes down to precisely the thinking in terms of the Real (la pensée du réel). In fact, the very project of “non-philosophy,” the idea about the necessity for a radical stepping out of philosophy and assuming a non-philosophical posture of thought relies on precisely the concept of a Thought-in-terms-of-theReal. Namely, the suspension of the philosophical principle of self-sufficiency (Principe de philosophie suffisante: PPS, a term fostered by Laruelle16) is a gesture of thought correlating with the Real, while simultaneously affirming its ultimate elusion to Language and Thought. It is a kind of thinking which recognizes the uncompromising and uncontrollable rule of an ungraspable Real behind the reality it aspires to explain as the ultimate authority which dictates the “generating of truths,” and not the scholastic axioms, including those of the non-philosophy. In that sense, the non-philosophical posture of thought is an empty position – a non-position – within philosophy which disposes with the latter as a sort of conceptual material (chôra),17 ultimately heretic towards it and faithful only to the specificity and singularity of the theorized (questioned, subject to “truth generation”) reality. Departing from such a presupposition, one should be able to think “Real” and “Fiction,” each of the two, in its singularity, “in terms of their specificity,” liberated from the inter-conditioning dependence on the other term (of the binary). Laruelle writes: “The problem of philosophy in general originates from the fact that it never thinks of the terms in their specificity, but as contrary to each other, within their relations, and, in the best case, on their borders and in their proximity. As a result of this, the concept of the real, like any other (concept), designates an amphibologic reality, a limitrophy of the real, regardless of fact whether it is placed beyond the latter, or before it, or as a border between the two. From classical rationalism to contemporary deconstructions, fiction has remained captured within that relation of the mixed, i.e., of the unitary. Excluded by the real, internalized by it, while internalizing it herself and pretending to co-determine it, (fiction, le fictionnel) has never escaped 39

these games of inter-inhibition, which are those that philosophy plays with herself, where it is but a pawn of a history which has pretended to surpass it.”18

The notion of “unitary” Laruelle refers to in this passage is the gesture of unifying differences in a construct of inter-relatedness – sort of a system or a totalizing unity (of binaries and multiplicities into an all-encompassing One). It is not arguing against the One or Oneness and it is precisely why, in the previous chapter, I have insisted on the Instance-of-Oneness which implies a certain unity for the Subject, without being unifying in the sense of organizing differences and inter-relations into a Unitary Structure, Composition or Cosmos. Quite to the contrary, Laruelle sees “Oneness” as the sole “principle” of thought which enables surpassing of the dualistic clench and its inhibiting effects. Inter-inhibition of the terms is a relation that any binary ultimately produces, the inevitable result of the inter-conditioning relatedness of opposing (conflictual) kind. Thinking in terms of the Real as counter-possibility for the Thought is also thinking in terms of the One, claims Laruelle.

4. Where Does the Reality Lie?: Fantasies of the Locus and Location of the Real François Laruelle proposes the method – a posture of thought rather than a method in the strict sense of the word, i.e., as a specified procedure prescribed by a doctrine – of the Vision-in-One (la Vision-en-Un), as a way of thinking in terms of the Singular, the Absolute* and the Real.19 This vision – this theoriaen-heni – emerges as radically free from any dually and structurally conditioned mode of thinking. The Vision-in-One, in Laruelle’s view, is the only axiomatic positioning of thought which enables an ultimately radical critique and a way out (the Ausgang Heidegger dreamt of) of not only metaphysics, but the entire “gréco-judaïque” matrix of thought,20 i.e., (the occidental) Philosophy. This is so because only the thinking in terms of the One, claims Laruelle, can escape the trap of the “gréco-judaïque” obsession with Unitary Thought (in terms of organizing differences in a Unifying Whole) as the central constituent of metaphysics.21 At first glance, this may appear contradictory and odd. However, the explanation lies in the use of the term “unitary” in Laruelle’s vocabulary. Namely, unitary thought is not the thought of the One and the Radical in Laruellian sense, which is a “state of non-relatedness” of the theoretically examined reality. Further, it is neither the process of thinking in terms of uniqueness and singularity, which is that of the Real, or of the Vision-in-One. Quite the opposite, unitary thought, inside the horizon of non-philosophy, is the thought of duality. It is dualitaire, or the thought of the relation between (at least) two. Relational thought is always already a thought expanding towards unification. Relational, thus, unitary thought is expansive, since it strives to encompass and organize differences in a circumscribed totality. It is not a move towards reduction, towards the minimal common denominator, which would be characteristic of the thought in terms-of-the-One (of the Real). In the sense of the non-philosophical, Laruellian use of the term “radical”: non-related, non-conditioned by a philosophical decision.

*

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THE REAL AND “I”: ON THE LIMIT AND THE SELF

Oneness and Radicality – in the sense of non-relatedness inasmuch as immanence – is the defining constituent of the non-philosophical and/or the non-dichotomous thinking. Unitary Thought (unitaire, in the sense criticized by Laruelle) is relational. It is a posture of thought which establishes relations between different concepts by way of organizing them into a certain construct, “organic” whole which is a unity of a multiplicity of concepts. The exclusion of the possibility to think outside of (the unity formed by) a relation of at least two, according to Laruelle, is informed by the intentions characteristic of the grand projects of Unitary Thought (in the sense given to it in the nonphilosophical vocabulary) immanent to all Metaphysics and Philosophy. Unitary (unitaire) thought is always already dualistic (dualitaire). On the other hand: “The One is an Identity, which is non-thetic (non-thétique) in general, i.e., nondecisional (of) itself and non-positional (of) itself: without will for essence, without topology for existence.”22 The Vision-in-One is also an experience which is “non-reflected (irreflechie), non-decisional and non-positional (of itself), the One is an entirely singular immanence.”23 In summary, according to Laruelle, the Reality examined by a Thought that situates itself as correlating with the Real emerges within a Vision liberated from the unitary (dualistic) ambitions of Thought, that is to say, outside the theoretical horizon of relationism. Hence, the Thought in terms of the Real is “absolute” in a very distinct sense: it is solitary in its singularity, an effort of Thought exposed in its ultimate incapacity to grasp and control the Rule-of-theReal, yet attempting to correlate but with it, without the support of a doctrinal web made of philosophical decisions. The reality subject to thought in terms of the Real is experiential, initially and ultimately non-reflected (irreflechie) yet constantly subjected to the theoretical vision (in-One). It is singular; and such is the method of thinking in terms of the Real or the Vision-in-One. Namely, it is a process of theorizing which recognizes itself as ultimately (in “its last instance” or in its “identity in the last instance,”24 put into Laruellian parlance) non-reflected (as containing – and moreover being based on – the remainder of the elusive Real), singular and severed from the network of philosophical decision(s). Let us now go back to the quoted paragraph from Butler’s BM. It concludes with the suggestion that “sex” represents such “fiction” within whose “necessities we live” and without which “life itself would be unthinkable.” This is the answer she offers to the question of whether it is right “to claim that ‘sex’ vanishes altogether, that it is a fiction over and against what is true [my italics], that it is a fantasy over and against what is reality [my italics]?,” which would be the ultimate implication of “radical constructivism.” (Further, she suggests that – as an implication of the above – there is a need of “rethinking ‘constructivism’ in its usual sense.”) I would like to raise the question of the source of this dilemma. It is based on an implication – which acts as the grounding presupposition of the entire argument – about the opposition between reality (in question) and fiction (in question). Butler does not attempt to deconstruct the opposition itself. Subject to her radical (deconstructive) critique is each of the terms, exposing them in their constructedness. 41

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However, the binary construct and its logic of opposition, in particular, escape the process of deconstruction. Butler solves the dilemma “fiction against reality” (and “what is true”) by redistributing new significations (and power) within the binary, not by deconstructing the binary itself. Thus, this is a necessary fiction, the one without which “life itself would be unthinkable.” Even if it is “over and against what is true,” even if “it is a fantasy over and against what is reality,” its stipulating workings demand discursive recognition and legitimization precisely because the “weight” of its significance (its Power within the Discourse) is that of an inescapable precondition of our existences. The recognition and legitimacy fiction receives in Judith Butler’s discourse is, in fact, an act of “empowerment” of the term (of fiction) with respect to the other term of the binary. Yet they continue to constitute a binary of opposed terms. If this “necessity without which life is unthinkable” – which is the fiction of “sex” – remains opposed or radically different to the “reality,” then, we are compelled to ask, where and what is “the reality” and where and what is “the true”? If we are to suppose that the Reality is somewhere outside this realm of our immediate experience (which is, nonetheless, that of mediation, i.e., of fiction as life-constituting necessity), outside the borders of the reality, which is the only thinkable/possible to us, where should we assume this topos is? Where and what could this topos of the “Reality” and of the “True,” as opposed to the Fiction, possibly be? The notion of fiction in this context is synonymous to the notion of the (Lacanian) Imaginary – and consequently, implies the production of the Symbolic – and is, therefore, as professed by precisely the poststructuralist legacy, the only reality available to us. Yet, Butler speaks of the possibility for “this reality” (fiction or fantasy) to be over and against “reality” (and “what is true”). If the reality is outside the only “reality” we can think (of), dispose with, be in, constitute and be constituted by which is that of the “necessary fiction,” then, where and when (and as what) are we expecting it to be located? By posing and presupposing such questions, it would seem, one assumes the existence of a reality parallel to the only reality we can experience as such, i.e., a counter-reality. Are we, by this, supposing the existence of a reality, which is “more real” than the one we are experiencing immediately? In such a case the latter would be more of our misconception of the “real” reality, which is itself a more perfect one, or the perfect one. It is beyond and it is perfect, therefore – it is a transcendental reality. It is an abstraction, a pure concept, which has been granted “ontological independence” on the basis of a philosophical decision. Thus, to which reality could the construction of “sex” (or of “gender,” or any other of the constructions according to which “we are living as according to the very necessities of our lives”) possibly be contrary? If by reality the “impossible Real” (of psychoanalysis) is not meant (or, even if it is meant), then it is yet another construction that we are dealing with. But this time, it is a more perfect one and of greater correspondence with – yet another abstraction (thus, conceptual construction) – the Real itself (psychoanalytic or not). The Butlerian notion of the Real is a Lacanian one. She adopts Lacan’s

concept of the Real as the Unthinkable and the Impossible (site of existence). It is beyond the liveable life created by the Imaginary and articulated (into Language, Discourse, and “the World”) through the Symbolic. It has its absurd effect on Life that is, however, unintelligible as such, unless it is re-invented by the Imaginary and/or instituted into the “World” through the Symbolic. Unless it is translated into a “meaning,” (re-) created in Language, it virtually does not exist for the Subject, since the latter is a purely linguistic category. Yet, it appears that in this particular context (in the cited paragraph by Butler and, for that matter, in the entire BM) it is the proximity to the Real of a certain (imaginarily) constructed reality that renders it “more real” than the one closer to the fantasy. How do I come to this conclusion? This implication is the necessary result of the operation of the binary within Butler’s thought. It is a direct consequence of the repetitive reaffirmation of the opposition between fiction (fantasy) and reality (she refers to all of the three terms: “reality,” “real,” “what is true”). The opposition implies conflictual situatedness of the two terms vis-àvis one another representing two irreconcilable domains. (If the relation of opposition has such a defining, constitutive status, the conclusion that domains are irreconcilable is unavoidable.) And Butler clearly relates the domain of “reality” to the Real in psychoanalytic terms, namely to the “sex” inasmuch as the reality of the body and materiality. This is, however, immediately superseded by an “imaginarization” of body and materiality which is imposed precisely by the need to “transcend” their status of unthinkable and impossible (site of existence). The state of aporia created by the Real/Fiction binary is solved by Butler through a “philosophical decision” which would be qualified by Laruelle as Nietzschean.25 The act of “imaginarization-in-advance” (with the ascribed value of an “always already”) of the Real implies the following: fiction=reality, reality=fiction, equations situated in a vicious circle.26 The Grand Circle (of the eternal return) is indeed one of the great metaphors of Nietzsche’s philosophical project of “discovering” the door which leads outside of the aporetic entrapment of thought within metaphysics (and of Deleuze’s, re-appropriated through his metaphor of the Labyrinth). I am subscribing here to Laruelle’s comment regarding this type of solution for the aporetic coupling of Real and Fiction, who writes: “[...] the form of the equation has been changed, but the equation as a form of thought still persists.”27 According to Laruelle, this “romantic” solution is, in fact, an “escape in advance into the fiction (une ‘fuite en avant’ dans la fiction).”28 Furthermore, what is even more important concerning this type of solution is that the binary structure of opposites persists, and the play between its two components remains within the unshakeable constraint of oppositional duality (dualism). Through this reading of a passage by Judith Butler as an exposure of the aporetic situation between “construction” and “reality” within “constructivism,” I am proposing a deconstruction of the reality/fiction couple (as a couple) and of its nature of opposition. This is an invitation to abandon the dualistic picture of the Real and its Shadow, or, in different words – to claim the reality of what 43

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in the quoted paragraph by Butler is being called “fiction.”29 And this claim is made within a Vision-in-One, where the Fiction and the Real are not opposed. They are not even placed into a (mutual) relation that would condition their respective meanings. Liberated from the constraints of “philosophical decisions” – according to which we are inevitably urged to think fiction as contrary to reality or in a binary mutual hold with it – the reality that is unconditioned by the fiction of the processes of the Imagined, of Signification or of Thought becomes possible. The reality of the mental, intellectual, psychic and bodily productions, the reality of the human/non-human constructions/creations becomes real in its singularity, as non-opposed, radically unrelated to any other (more) accomplished reality. Reality which is not conditioned by fiction “performs” as the Real; it affirms its internal laws of constitution which are not negotiable within the “micro-cosmos” it creates and within the “Cosmos” (“World”) it participates in. By non-negotiable I mean impossible to be subjected to dismissal through discursive intervention (a radical deconstruction) without having as a consequence the demise of the entire “World” (at least for the Self). The only thing which is ultimately non-subjectable to deconstruction is that which, in its last instance, escapes Language – the non-reflected experiential, the excess of the lived (Laruelle: vécu) through the utter singularity of one’s being in the “World.” I am therefore referring to the ultimate limitations to arbitrariness of thought, which are dictated by the “lived.” The “Lived” escapes articulation through Language and yet it is ultimately relevant for the “liveability” – and therefore “legitimacy” – of all linguistic constructions our “World” is made of. Therefore, the reality of these “fictional” constructions that have the role of constituting, producing our lives inasmuch as their necessities performs as Dilthey’s Real. That is to say, by virtue of being (life-constituting) necessity, these fictions, in the last instance, will enact resistance to the individual will or to the intentionality of the Subject. The Subject is always already and inescapably assujeti, subjected (sub-iectus < sub-iacio) to these fictions. It is subjected to the Rule of these necessities inasmuch as “life enabling” (Butler says “without them life would be unthinkable”). And, then again, the Subject and its survival are possible precisely as a result of the liveability delivered by these very limitations to its “free will.” Therefore, these discursive constructs that life is based upon and carried out through contain an aspect which renders them a necessity, an instance that is ultimately compulsory and not negotiable – a Limit. Limit to arbitrariness. Thus, there are aspects of discursiveness which produce the effect of the Real in its role of the impenetrable frontier (Limit) to Language. Also, according to Heidegger, the “experience of resistance,” “the unveiling of the Resistant” is what characterizes the “in-the-World-Existent” (or “Being”), or to use the exact term (in its German original, used by Heidegger) – Innerweltliche Seiende.30 And this very experience of resistance (from the “outside world”) ensues into an experience and consciousness of reality, which is itself, in a way, a mode of Being-in-the-World (in-der-Welt-sein), says Heidegger.31

These Butlerian “fictional” constructions in their role of life-conditioning and non-negotiable necessities echo the psychoanalytic Real as the Nonpenetrable (by Meaning), as the impact of tuché* on the automaton (the signifying chain). In this sense, they also conform (to) the Laruellian Real, in its sense of “finitude radicale,”32 and also to the Laruellian Other (l’Autre) that has been liberated from the authority of the Same (le Même) – the Real in its Reality of Singularity and Absoluteness.33

5. Real Reaffirmed (Not at the Expense of Fiction) 5.1. Resistance Re-visited The fact that the constructions made of fantasy act in a certain – that is to say, the last – instance as an impenetrable, insurmountable, non-negotiable Limit which is the Real, implies another fact – that the Subject’s capacity for and “authority” over its auto-reinventions is intrinsically limited. The Subject is subjected to the rule of the “constructed World” which – in the last instance – installs itself an acting Real vis-à-vis the intentionality of the Self to reinvent it (and itself). The Self is ultimately limited in its workings of autotransformation also by the rule of the Real, which is most directly enacted by the pure labour of self-preservation of the (human) individual as the continuity of the self-identical “I.” (This is something I have attempted to demonstrate in the previous chapter of this book.) It seems that at this point it is safe to reaffirm that my invoking of the possibility for a certain instance of unity for the non-unitary Subject excludes the possibility to be interpreted as a re-instalment and re-legitimization of the classical idea/l about the autonomous Subject. On the contrary, the insisting on the presence and the relevance of the instance of oneness – which implies continuity and specific mode of unity of the Self – for the Subject only reaffirms Self’s ultimate vulnerability and constitutive (in the subjectivization) dependence on the “World.” Finally, it is significant that the Limit (Real), which “lives” both in that which is exterior to the Subject as well as in its utmost interiority, is necessarily characterized as Resistance. (In fact, the two words are virtually synonymous.) The Limit is, thus, a site of Resistance. Depending on whether it is situated in the exteriority or the interiority of the Self, it is either resistance of the “outside world” to the individual Subject’s intervention, or vice versa – Subject’s resistance to the intervention of the World. This is a Lacanian term which aims to explain the effect of the Real on the signifying chain as a mere event of “intervention” of an exteriority which ultimately evades subjection to Language. As a thrust of an unconceivable, characterized only by its “being there” or installing itself merely as real, announcing that which is untranslatable in the Imaginary or/and Language. This explication of the term surely bears marks of my own interpretation. For an insight into the original words of elaboration of the term, see: Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (New York and London: W. W. Norton and Company, 1998), 53-54. *

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5.2. “P.S.”: The Anxiety of the Unreal

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About a decade after the first publication of Bodies That Matter, Judith Butler, in Undoing Gender from 2004 (hereafter UG), argues for affirmation of the status of a “real” for an individual or a group. For conquering of the domain of realness by those who are “unreal,” that is to say, denied the most fundamental recognition by society not only in terms of their rights but in terms of their existence inasmuch as participation in the reality. Butler has relentlessly argued in all of her writings for recognition of the marginalized and repudiated by the Normalizing Society. The recognition she has always claimed upon does not concern only the (human) rights of the “invisible.” It has also always already been a claim for affirmation of the identitary difference as one which calls upon re-thinking and transforming the Norms. Still, this is the first time she resorts to the concept of the “real” (and the “unreal”) as a central term of the argumentation. Together with the term of the real, the concepts of the “limit” and the “survival” are elemental for the rhetoric of this book. This is a shift in naming. Naming is situating within Language. Therefore, the shift implies that the problems have received different status and different contents in this recent discursive, that is to say, textual construct of Butler. In summary, the change in naming entails a change in the way of thinking. This change consists of the insisting on not merely the discursive, but also on the non-reflected experiential, which is a particular “state of being” made of the experience of being perceived (by the others and in the “World”) as real. The sensation of one’s own and other’s “realness” for and in the “World” is now a key element in the operation of recognition and for the status of a recognized subjectivity (not only identity). “So it is not just that a discourse exists in which there is no frame and no story and no name for such a life, or that violence might be said to realize or apply this discourse. Violence against those who are already not quite lives, who are living in a state of suspension between life and death, leaves a mark that is no mark. If there is a discourse, it is a silent and melancholic writing in which there have been no lives, and no losses, there has been no common physical condition, no vulnerability that serves as the basis for an apprehension of our commonality, and there has been no sundering of that commonality. None of this takes place on the order of the event. None of this takes place [My italics].”34

And such lives (e.g., “those who live outside the conjugal frame or maintain modes of social organization for sexuality that are neither monogamous nor quasi-marital”), which are no lives leaving a “mark that is no mark” (in the discursive and on the order of the event), are, according to Butler, “considered unreal.”35 UG is a book which relies heavily on the underlying conviction that to be considered unreal, to be placed in the position of an unreal is the harshest form of oppression; it is not presented only as an annihilation of the very fundament for claiming any (human) rights (namely, in order to claim rights one has to “be there,” to exist – to participate in the “reality”), but also as the

most debasing, cruel act of an attempted effacement “in-to-the-Real” of the Real-of-One’s-Existence – it is the ultimate, inexorable form of oppression in itself. In this way, one performs a gesture of annihilation of the Real inasmuch as the Lived (in Laruellian parlance) of the “unreal people”: the enjoyed and the suffered (in Laruelle, both of them encompassed by the term le Joui),36 and as Butler says: “[...] their loves and losses (are considered) less than ‘true’ loves and ‘true’ losses. The derealization of this domain of human intimacy and sociality works by denying reality and truth to the relations at issue.”37

The claim for social recognition and change is at the same time a claim to realness, an endeavour to attain – or perhaps conquer – the domain of reality. Realness is not but an imaginary category that can appear as a mere “device” of the Symbolic, whose aim would be to enable social recognition. The right to realness (at least in UG) becomes a right in itself. Conquering of the domain of “knowable reality” means something more than “a simple assimilation into prevailing norms,” it is a change which entails discrete and unpredictable (precisely as the effect of the intervention of the “unruly Real” into the “intelligible reality”) transformations in the ruling normativity itself. Butler writes: “To intervene in the name of transformation means precisely to disrupt what has become settled knowledge and knowable reality, and to use, as it were, one’s unreality to make an otherwise impossible or illegible claim. I think that when the unreal lays claim to reality, or enters into its domain, something other than a simple assimilation into prevailing norms can and does take place.”38

It seems that in UG a difference (of critical significance) appears between the recognition through discourse or inasmuch as a “discursive reality” and the one which she calls “entering the domain of reality.” According to Butler’s entire opus so far, reality is what is always already rendered and made possible precisely through discourse. Nonetheless, this claim is evidently appended and reinforced in this particular work of hers (UG) with the insisting on the status of realness as ultimately legitimating (of one’s identity and rights). And realness is that which belongs to the domain of the “liveable” and to “embodiment.” “Liveability” is an instance upon which Butler strongly insists in this book, and it is inherently related to the status of “realness” and “humaneness.” “[...] it is one thing to assert the reality of lesbian and gay lives as a reality, and to insist that these lives are worthy of protection in their specificity and commonality; but it is quite another to insist that the very public assertion of gayness calls into question what counts as reality and what counts as a human life.”39

Hence, “[...] to be called unreal, is one way in which one can be oppressed [...].”40 Realness is, therefore, a question of “liveability,” or a question related in an intrinsic way to “the tasks of persistence and survival.”41 In this text, we can notice Butler constantly interconnecting the questions of survival,42 realness, and also of the “I” (instead of “Subject”) to those of (political and social) recognition. This theoretical “procedure” to the issue of recognition accords the relevance of the “embodied,” and moves the entire discussion towards the 47

realm of the “lived,” “experienced” (social) recognition or (social) invisibility, the one which, in its last instance, exceeds or evades reflection. This line of reasoning is bringing Butler once again to the question of the fantasy/reality opposition. This time, the opposition is resolved through a theoretical move consisting of an unequivocal declaration about – and an entirely new (vis-à-vis the one present in BM) conceptualization of – the interrelatedness of the two notions as fundamentally non-oppositional. “Fantasy is not the opposite of reality; it is what reality forecloses, and, as a result, it defines the limits of reality, constituting it as its constitutive outside. The critical promise of fantasy, when and where it exists, is to challenge the contingent limits of what will and will not be called reality. Fantasy is what allows us to imagine ourselves and others otherwise; it establishes the possible in excess of the real; it points elsewhere, and when it is embodied, it brings elsewhere home.”43

Here, one can notice a significant shift in the way of thinking the two notions. They are clearly no longer in an oppositional inter-relatedness. Fantasy defines “the limits of reality,” “constituting it as its constitutive outside,” but in a sense that calls into play the reality in order to become the “possible in excess of the real.” This is a discourse on how the two instances relate, but one allowing a possibility to think each of the notions in their singularity. Fantasy has a “life of its own,” it is an ultimately autonomous instance “generating life” which will one day “conquer” the territory of what is considered real. Their relation is no longer mutually exclusive: when the fantasized “elsewhere” is embodied – “it brings elsewhere home.” Fantasy is “brought back home” – into the Real. Fantasy is translatable into the Real, and can yet live an independent life – since it is not defined in its ultimate instance by this translatability. Therefore, the relation between the two notions is being considered in this particular Butlerian text, but the consideration itself does not seem to be relationist. There seems to be no aporetic entrapment of thought here since there is no circularity of thought at work. I am referring to a circularity of the kind where the translation of the one term into the other means its disappearance into it, an engulfment of the first by the latter. I am referring to those ceaseless workings of the Speculative Thought that necessarily bring in the establishing of a cycle of mutual effacement of the two concepts. This “mutual effacement” is executed either by the exclusion of the other term or by its total “inclusion,” which comes down to its utter appropriation (by the other term), to the “colonization” of one term by the other. In UG, Butler’s thinking seems to be relieved of this unnecessary burden. Her discourse here is discharged from that hard labour of thought which does not bring to life anything but the endless inter-mirroring of the both notions. Her thought is free from the tiresome cyclicality created by the two terms and consisting in their respective “narcissistic” (instituting sameness through otherness) invasions of one another. One can sense the presence of a lightness of thought which can think in terms of singularity, in terms of the exhilaratingly liberating acts of “unilateral affirmations.”

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NOTES 1. I am having in mind a paragraph in Gender Trouble, where Judith Butler refers to “social determinism” while making the following observation: “The controversy of the meaning of construction appears to founder on the conventional philosophical polarity between the free will and determinism” (Butler, 1999, 12). 2. Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter (New York/London: Routledge, 1993), 6 (hereafter cited in text or in notes as BM). 3. Ibid., 4. 4. Cf. Sherry B. Ortner, “Is Female to Male as Nature to Culture?” in Women in Culture: A Women’s Studies Anthology, ed. Lucinda Joy Peach (Malden, MA and Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1998 [1974]), 23-44. 5. Here I draw upon Heidegger’s considerations in the section on “Dasein, Erschlossenheit und Wahrheit” from Sein und Zeit about the long tradition of identification between Truth (Wahrheit) and Being (Sein) within western philosophy. 6. Butler, BM, 6. 7. Laruelle, PNP, 179-212; 230-238. 8. Ibid., 186-212. 9. This claim is in a consonance with the following insight of Jane Flax from her book Thinking Fragments: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and Postmodernism in the Contemporary West (Berkeley/Los Angeles/London: University of California Press), p. 12: “To view oneself as a heroic lawgiver, ‘foundation builder,’ neutral judge, or deconstructor who has the right to evaluate the truth claims and adequacy of all forms of knowledge places the philosopher outside of a time in which such un-self-reflexive certainty seems more like a will to power than a claim to truth.” 10. Gilles Deleuze, Différence et répétition. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1993 [first published in 1968]), 42 (hereafter cited both in the text and in notes as DR). 11. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, L’Anti-Oedipe (Paris: Les éditions de Minuit, 1972). 12. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Capitalisme et Schizophrénie: Mille Plateaux (Paris: Les éditions de Minuit, 1980). 13. More specifically, it is referred to the aporias of the thought of time. 14. For more on the question of the Deleuzian retour éternel, see: Deleuze, Nietzsche et la philosophie (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1962), 215 et passim (hereafter cited as NP), and also: Deleuze, DR, 118ff et passim. 15. Cf. Gilles Deleuze, Le bergsonisme (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1991 [first published in 1966]); His Bergsonian views are clearly stated (as Bergsonian) and exhaustively elaborated also in DR and in NP, and easily detectable in his entire work. 16. Elaborated on many occasions throughout his opus, however, for a concise introduction see: Laruelle, PNP, 17-20, et passim. 17. Laruelle, PNP, 18. « [...] défactualisation, défétichisation ou déposition de la décision philosophique, à sa réduction à l’état de matériau d’origine philosophique sans doute, mais philosophiquement inerte ou stérile. On

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appellera chaos ou chôra – concepts évidemment à refondre – cet état de la philosophie comme matériau stérile. » 18. Laruelle, PNP, 232. « Le problème de la philosophie en général vient de ce qu’elle ne pense jamais les termes dans leur spécificité, mais comme contraires, dans leurs relations, au mieux dans leurs frontières et leurs voisinages. Le concept de fiction désigne alors, comme tout autre, une réalité amphibologique, une limitrophie du réel, qu’elle soit au-delà de celui-ci, en deçà, ou la frontière des deux. Du rationalisme classique aux déconstructions contemporaines, la fiction est restée prise dans ce rapport de mixte, c’est-à-dire unitaire. Exclue par le réel, intériorisée en lui, l’intériorisant à son tour et de toute façon prétendant le co-déterminer, jamais elle n’a échappé à ces jeux d’entre-inhibition qui sont ceux de la philosophie avec elle même, et où elle ne fut qu’un pion parmi d’autres pour une histoire qui prétendait la dépasser. » 19. Laruelle, PNP, 37 ff. 20. Or, “la cloture gréco-unitaire de la pensée” (PNP, 8); see also: Laruelle, PNP, 215-221. 21. Ibid., 7-10; 20-22. 22. Ibid., 42. 23. Ibid., 46. 24. According to the non-philosophical terminology, the Identity is always already an Identity-in-the-last-instance and, in fact, the instance of the radical, immanent, that is to say, the Real; see: François Laruelle, Théorie des identités (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1992), 93 ff. 25. A Nietzschean solution is that of “an escape in advance into the fiction,” says Laruelle, of solving the problem by rendering the real “engulfed” by the fiction. The first is effaced by the latter – everything is but fiction. See: Laruelle, PNP, 231. 26. Laruelle, PNP, 231. 27. Ibid. 28. Ibid. 29. Cf. Ibid, 230-238. 30. Martin Heidegger, Bitak i vrijeme [Croatian translation of Sein und Zeit] (Zagreb: Naprijed, 1988), str. 240. 31. Ibid. 32. Ibid., 185 33. Ibid., 207. 34. Judith Butler, Undoing Gender (New York and London: Routledge, 2004), 25 (hereafter cited as UG). 35. Butler, UG, 26. 36. François Laruelle, Théorie des Etrangers: Science des hommes, démocratie et non-psychanalyse (Paris: Éditions Kimé, 1995), 183 ff. 37. Butler, UG 27. 38. Ibid. 39. Ibid., 30 40. Ibid. 41. Ibid., 4 42. See in particular pp. 30-31. 43. Ibid., 29.

CHAPTER 3

THE LIMIT AND THE LIMITLESS 1. The Ban of the Limit In our postmodern era, it seems that the few “bad” terms blemished by their professedly inherent adherence to the Cartesian-metaphysical language and tradition, such as “the One” and “the Real” – also the “Fixedness,” “Stability,” “Continuity” (of the Self), and so on – are all relegated to the realm of the Unthinkable and the Impossible. These notions of a rather vague, somewhat metaphorical meaning, reduced almost entirely to the contents given to them by the Lacanian parlance, for the thought that has declared them “outlandish,” are always already positively determined as that which is outside the language and (the accessible, i.e., possible) reality. Thus, these are names and realities, “phantasmatic” or “real,” – the distinction, however, seems to be superfluous if not fallacious – that have been reduced to the status of non-existent and unspoken of. These are names, concepts that are banned from the discourse that purports to have done away – or to have to a large extent progressed along that way – with the metaphysical constraints of thought. It is the exclusion of these several names (signifiers) upon which the allinclusiveness of poststructuralist discourses is based. I refer to the postmodern fascination with the construction of open fields of free-play of thought (discourse, text), of transience of meanings and situations of being, of the rhizome-like bundle of traces behind the deconstructed arbitrariness (a notion, a discourse, a social/cultural/psychological structure, etc.). Surely this is a generalization and a clearly reductionist view, since, e.g., behind Derrida’s “playful textuality” there also exists a very rigorous structure of his ethical thought – backbone of his philosophy1. Also, behind the “rhizomaticity” of Deuleze’s thought in L’Anti-Oedipe (Anti-Oedipus) and Mille Plateaux (Thousand Plateaus) there lies the meticulously constructed ontology of the unilateral difference and the pure affirmation, elaborated in an earlier work, namely Différence et répétition (Difference and Repetition). The ambivalent position of Derrida regarding such fundamentally metaphysical concerns as constructing ontology or advancing a belief in an (ontological) essence is illustrated through the correlation established by the following two quotations taken from Jane Flax’s Thinking Fragments (1991): “Derrida’s deconstruction of the misrepresentation of the Real presupposes and depends upon his own, often covert ontological premises. For him the Real does have a (mystical) essence. It is heterogeneous, infinitely open, and governed by chance. The philosopher’s task is to invoke rather than present the Real.”2

This is a comment on Derrida’s invocation of the Real into his discourse – as something in a seeming contradiction with the main enterprises of postmodernism – which Flax gives immediately after having proposed her general claim about postmodern thought (in general): 51

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“Postmodernism is a valuable form of discipline philosophers impose on themselves. Postmodernists generate intra-discourse warnings and limitations: No, you can’t do that. That way lies grandiosity, illusion, the seductive tyranny of metaphysics, truth, the real.”3

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I agree with Flax’s assertion about postmodernism generating “intra-discourse warnings and limitations” (as I myself have argued at more length in the first chapter of this book) which are directed precisely against the “real,” among other notions. Certainly, not each and every kind of an “intra-discourse warning” is equally attributable to each and every textual corpus that comes under the rubrics of “postmodernism” and “poststructuralism,” as we can see from the above stated example which shows that one of the emblematic figures of postmodernism believes in (“invokes”) the discursive pertinence of the Real. The qualifications produced by Flax concerning “postmodernism” – and that I subscribe to – refer more often to something that one might call postmodernist intellectual habitus (and the textual legacy it creates, in particular, through its reception in the States), and not always to the ensemble of the most significant textual corpora that are normally put under the label of postmodernism. Still, I will argue that in spite of some critical differences – reflecting both the fact that there is no monolithic poststructuralism as well as that behind the purporting of all-reigning arbitrariness there still persists an ambition to determine some Arché-of-All-Being – “playful vicissitudes” (a provisory term that will evolve into more specific ones later in the text of this chapter) are something that has been inaugurated into the ideology of the postmodern era. The acceptance of this ideology bestows correctness in thought and acting, accommodated to the (implicit) ruling ontology of our time/s: materialist, pragmatist, poststructuralist and also neo-liberal Truth of the non-existence of stable truths and meanings, implying (essential) uncertainty as the fundament of all existence. It is not too much of a generalization to say that the proclamation of this particular position is shared by all poststructuralist authorship (recognized as relevant and representative by the “Centres of Intellectual and Academic Power”), regardless of the above-mentioned significant differences. The “installation” of this Truth has produced an entire habitus, not only an intellectual and academic one, but also entire lifestyle/s. Or, to quote Jane Flax (who embraces much of the philosophy and methodology of what is usually called postmodernism/ poststructuralism while still preserving the position of an un-self-censored critic of the intellectual trend it creates): “[…] postmodernists construct their own meta-narratives of the ‘death’ of the Enlightenment or the ‘metaphysics of presence,’ thus violating their own principles of ‘defferal’ and indeterminacy. Reason (this time disguised as ‘language’) reappears, persistently pursuing its cunning plan, despite the apparent dominance of entropic forces in the world.”4

In a sense, by way of inaugurating vicissitudes and uncertainty as the sole possible certainty, Crisis is radically affirmed and legitimated. But at the same time, by way of inaugurating it as the sole reality, it has been domesticated, stabilized and perverted into its paradoxical (acting) opposite. For some of us,

“the children of postmodern culture and academism,” in spite of its recognized benefaction, this position – as the solely acceptable inasmuch as the only “right” one – has also been able to produce a rather uncomfortable existential settling. This discomfort is mainly generated by the fact that the “discovery” about the essential uncertainty has in effect been – or has practically acted as – a positively determined ontological Truth about the “Essence of Being.” The impermeability of this Truth can cause the naïve and spontaneous reaction of the Imaginary creating a phantasm about “the World of vertiginous instability” as the only possible world.5 The emotional response to (or transfiguration of) this sort of ideological (or symbolic) positioning can be but a form of anxiety6 issuing from the totality of a single possibility – that of the absolute, irreversible Truth of the irrevocable and essential Uncertainty. The advantageous side of this unique ontological possibility would be its aspect of continuous change, ceaseless mobility – the open horizon of overwhelming, omnipresent possibility. Here one can notice the overlapping of the poststructuralist/postmodern optimisms with those of neo-liberalism regarding the inexhaustible, never-ending existence of possibilities, a sort of “fundamentalist futurism.” Judith Butler is right when she claims that the placing of so many different theoretical trends and authors creating utterly different or even opposing visions (Lacan, Foucault, Derrida, Kristeva, Irigaray, Cixous…) under the same rubric of poststructuralism/postmodernism – many of them even rejecting the term “postmodernism” – is an inaccurate generalization.7 However, I will argue that the theoretical productions gravitating around this particular ensemble of authors when put under the same rubric – as most often, if not virtually always, is the case – do have something in common. Notably, it is precisely this belief in the Ceaseless Possibility of a purely Linguistic Universe (and Reality), based on the exclusion of the Real (the Negative, the Absence, or the Death) from the Play of Discursiveness. The quality of Immortality (the “ceaselessness of possibility”) accorded to the – always already Discursive – Reality results in a particular and peculiar pathology of that same reality (the only reality we can exist in, according to the proponents of poststructuralism or/and postmodernism). Namely, the saturation of possibility is equal to the entropy of positivity of our times, as diagnosed by Baudrillard, resulting into a suffocating omnipresence of simulacra as the only possible (and legitimate) reality of our postmodern times. In Symbolic Exchange and Death (SED),8 Baudrillard invokes the affirmation of negativity or death as the cure to this “disease” (of entropy) of (the) Reality. Avoiding the paths of argumentation that might make Baudrillard’s claim, and my subscription to it, resonate as some new mystical ontology, let me just say that the overwhelming presence of evidence about the ruling interdiction of the Negative that the book (SED) gives is symptomatic. One recognizes the suppression, the denial, the evident censorship over the “No,” over Death and Loss – over the Limit to the endless expansion of the Positive. The authoritative philosophical discourses of the post-industrial/postmodern age are all characterized by an inherent, constitutive, insurmountable incapacity to incorporate this Limit into themselves, simply because – according to the 53

discourses in question – it is outside of the Language. This Limit is quite simply – the Non-Language. Or rather, what is being denied through the denial of Limit is the reality of the debilitating finitude, of that which introduces absence (of possibility or naming) and the concomitant experience of utter and radical frustration of thought. Surely, considering the (Marxist) materialist background of this thinking, finitude and the a priori impossibility to envelop the “Real” – thus Limit – by Thought are recognized and granted legitimacy. Nonetheless, and paradoxically, precisely as a result of this recognition, they are instantaneously expelled from discursiveness all together. Paradoxically, because it seems that this radical deficiency of Thought automatically translates itself into a certain positively determined constitutive Essence which is total/izing. It seems that the recognition of the non-absoluteness (or imperfection) of Thought translates itself into an absolute Verdict according to which Thought itself is essentially constituted by this particular impossibility. In other words, the statement “Thought can only mediate a certain ‘Real’ but never encompass and grasp it in its entirety” automatically (by means of certain intrinsic rule of the system?) translates itself into the absolute statement of “Thought in itself is always already incapable to communicate the Real.” Thus, “a certain real” that can be also read as “any real” – implying its multiplicity – is transformed into the unique, monolithic, absolute and immutable Real. Just as plurality of Thought, mobility of thinking has been suspended, precisely through the fixing of Thought to the Thought (-inItself), even though constituted as total (=absolute) arbitrariness. Therefore, postmodern/poststructuralist free flow of discursiveness is produced through this process of coagulation of thinking into the aporetic construct of Thoughtas-Absolute-Arbitrariness. Through this virtually inconspicuous reversal of Thought, the absolute recognition of the Limit/Real (to Thought) has been turned into its contradicting counter-position of utter suspension of the Limit/Real, while the impotency of thinking is transformed into Thought’s (i.e., discursive and textual) omnipotence. The Real, being banned from the clean territory of Thought/Discourse – while the latter is recognized as the only possible/thinkable reality – I will agree with Baudrillard’s insight that what the postmodern age suffers from is: the critical degree of an ever expanding positivity. So, indeed, we can say that we are living in a World (and Age) of the grand interdiction over the “negative,” the “no” – over the Limit, and/or the Real. Let us, for the time being, concentrate on the suspension of the Limit proper, that is to say, on the interdiction over the (ultimate) frontier as such, or rather: on the ban of the affirmed boundary (instead of its ceaseless and “immanently” unstoppable postmodern crossing). (In this way, we will be able to evade the trap of “frontal confrontation” with the multi-layered difficulty to deconstructively approach the fortified inviolability of the notion of the Real as the Unthinkable, the Unutterable and the Impossible. The latter are qualifications – which are, originally, Lacanian naming and conceptualization 54

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of the “Real” – that have been widely accepted by the poststructuralist discourse/s as an unquestionable truth – an axiomatic presupposition. Nevertheless, I believe that the status of the Real in Lacan has a significantly different position with respect to Language than the simplified one most widely ascribed to it. We will tackle this question again and in more length a bit further on in the text.) The Limit inasmuch as the “No,” that is to say, the unbridgeable Lack lingering in every Difference, the Real of Absence “filling” the gap between two realities is always already superseded by an act of transcendence. The latter consists in the compulsory and simultaneous gesture of interpretation in terms of the affirming difference (a gesture conditioned by the internal structural regulations of the discourse itself). In the framework of the dominant ideologies of the postmodern era, the affirmation of difference is always already its transcendence, and never affirmation the abyss upon which any difference resides. There is a “consensus” in poststructuralist discourses, including poststructuralist feminism, that the reality of this gap, the frustration created by the hindering abyss (of the negative) cannot be subject to thought, cannot be encompassed by or introduced into discursiveness. Its ontological status places it in the realm of the au-delà, of a certain Beyond that is an ontological actuality per se. Being – that gnoseological impossibility for the shaping ideologies of the postmodern era – is also rendered an ontological impossibility (for the Subject-of-Knowledge). The latter implies the status of the Limit (of /or the Real) within the discourses in question (poststructuralism and other discourses advocating the postmodern World). Namely, the gap of absence (-oflanguage) can be – and always is – declared to be (“virtually…”) non-existent or, if you prefer, not-there. Since one cannot translate it into Language: It is, therefore, not. This is the path of inference (or, at least, as I have traced it) implied in the ruling ideologies of the postmodern age. Naturally, it is the utter limitation, the irrevocable and absolute “No”, which is discursively untranslatable, that has been relegated into the Realm of the Impossible, not the one interpreted as the (affirmed) “différance” (the “always already crossed” border, the margin, and so forth). In poststructuralist and poststructuralist feminist discourses, it is, of course, the name of the Real that holds this position, not the name of the Limit. Nevertheless, the latter is the aspect of the poststructuralist, banished Real that I am interested in, since I would like to call upon a legitimization of the reality of the ultimate “No” (of a certain real, or of the Real). Arguing for this, I envisage legitimacy granted within discourse, discursive legitimacy – more accurately, discourse that incorporates within itself its own realities of limitation without having them always already transposed into the (transcendental) Real, recognizing them as inherent constituent of its overall experience and conceptualization of reality. I would like to reclaim the neglected truth that the unstoppable flux of auto-proliferating textuality has always already found itself into and founded itself upon the relentless, never-ceding grasp of creative opposition with the (disclaimed) Real, or rather, with its ultimate Limit/s.

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This continuous, founding defiance of Discourse vis-à-vis its ultimate – in some sense, absolute: utterly unchangeable, unbendable, impossible subjects to negotiations – limitations, vis-à-vis Limit’s constitutive castration, creativeness and productivity of the frustration imposed by the Real, all of this is never really transposed into a “free flow” of discursiveness/textuality. In different words, all of these effects of the Real upon Language are events occurring in the World of Discursiveness (the only available World to us, according to the poststructuralist/postmodern construction of the “World”) that remain without names. The only names they have been given are the ones fixing them as unnameable. These events are instances and operations within Discourse that do not enter the register of naming. And beyond the Text they remain. The ban of the Real from Discursiveness debilitates and/or prohibits any discussion of its immediate or mediated effects: limitation, trauma, unmediated crisis, frustration, negation and death, operative within Language and Discourse. Also, in the line of the proposed discussion, it is of utmost importance to point out to the suppression of the multiplicity of the Real. There is but one Real, the one and only ungraspable and transcendental – the absolute Real. Namely, if (in the poststructuralist context) the Real is a name for an ontological status not substantiated into some (mystical) entity, then why is the (possibility of) multiplicity of its manifestations neglected or even excluded as a subject of thematization? Surely, one can speak of discursive events (put in a rather free appropriation of Badiou’s parlance), since the event of auto-imposition of a certain episteme as the foundation for a certain discursive Cosmos is an act, a gesture. Surely a discursive one, but the gesture itself, the event of imposition or of the act of installation of a certain axiom as grounding for the discursive World which resides upon it contains the effect, the Real. It is a Thrust into the Reality as we have known it up until that moment, a traumatic intervention which will transform the Image of the (“always already” discursive) “World.” The multiplicity of these events bears the status of the sombre aspect of the Real, always in singular. This reality of the multiple eventality of the Real is never approached as such, but has always already been obliterated through its reduction to the generalizing notion of the “Ur-” Real. Or, resorting to Alain Badiou’s concept of the “evental site”, we can also put it in the following way: The “evental site” is a position held by social groups or categories of subjectivity that are virtually non-existent for the situation (“World,” the “Available Discursiveness”) whose inhabitants they are; they are on the edge of the Void (the Real) upon which the situation resides; and for the language the situation disposes with, they remain unrepresentable; in fact, these groups do hold the position of the Void, they are the Void for the situation they inhabit, but when they act and thereby create an entirely new truth, they do it from the position of the “evental site” which is still within the situation although on its edge, bordering with the Void. Badiou speaks of the proletariat as inhabitant(s) of the Void in the time of Marx, and of the “hysterical feminists” and the Middle-East “terrorists” as inhabitants of the Void of our time (situation).9 Therefore, the Real – or the Void – in terms of

Badiou’s philosophy of the event, has many faces, many “representatives.” In conclusion, it is multiple. To illustrate the point, let us consider the following example symptomatic of the suppression I am problematizing here, present in the contemporary social theory. The entire quest for a fair society, with “equality” and “freedom” as the main principles of societal “organization,” led by the proponents of what is “recognized”* as the legitimate political thought of today, is founded upon a consensus about a particular “arbitrariness” – the one stating that the society must be “democratic.” (Arbitrariness, since it is but a discursive construct, a “philosophical decision” of the linguistic Subject.) Furthermore, it seems that according to some internal laws of the existing political discourses of “recognized legitimacy,” the choice of this particular arbitrariness (over some possible other) to appear as founding for our basic conception of society and its possible discourses is a question not to be tackled. (This attitude is in tune with the postmodern concern of avoiding the “metaphysical traps” of the “big” questions that might open some of the infamous “grand narratives.” Nonetheless, it remains a fact that we are dealing with a discursive construct which evades any deconstruction.) Surely, the concept/s of “the democratic” and “democracy” are amply problematized, thematized and contested. Still, its undisputed position of axiomatic necessity for any social and political organization, its status of a horizon, of the ultimate point of political thinkability, its aspect of a conditioning necessity is beyond discourse. It is the utter Limit of the Discourse(s) which revolve(s) around it. It “acts” as the Real for the discourses in question and their Subjects. To dismiss the questioning of this particular axiomatic assumption by way of proffering instead the claim about its “contractual” (cultural, discursive) and historic provenance is discursively castrating. Namely, the question of the “choice” – or of the reasons and of the power and authority enabling the (auto-) imposition – of this particular arbitrariness (over some other) remains unanswered: Is democracy the necessary and ideal “contract” for the particular historical context? What is the origin of its inauguration as the political ideal par excellence of our times? Is it a sheer discursive construction, a product of historically embedded discursiveness or is it, perhaps, an answer to some “state of being,” a reflection of a certain “condition of Real”? The position of an axiom that the requirement of democracy holds rejects these questions, relegating them into a certain territory of “Beyond-Any-Discussion.” In summary, it does assume the status of the Real for the discursive Subject of the contemporary political thought (with the status of a “legitimate” one). The conditioning powers of the chief presupposition of an entire discourse are, as a rule, unquestioned, the origins of the discourse of a more-or-less defined physiognomy are not discussed; and they do “act” as the Real representing the ultimate limitation to discursiveness. Yet this Limit is made of discursiveness: that which plays the role (or assumes the status) of the Real in a certain linguistic construct. This situation speaks both of the particularistic, thus multiple “nature” of the Real – which has been neglected as such by the *That is to say, by the instances of power/authority to accord that recognition.

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discourses in question – as well as of its overlooked constitutive powers in its aspect of the Limit. It reveals the fact about a Constitutive Fissure within Discursiveness, fundamental Crisis around which a Discourse arises. Therefore, it is not only the grand Silence over the grand, ineffable Real that we detect here, but also silence over the origin and the generating powers and ways of a particular original presupposition, and its relegation to the realm of the Real. I would like to point out to the presence of these cracks of Constitutive Lack within Discourse, to the scarred face of Discourse by negativity, impossibility, by the “Unthinkable” which has been relegated to the notorious au-delà of the Real, to the realms outside Language. Even if this banishment is not produced by the language of the old metaphysics, it suffices that it operates as an absolute exclusion and transposition to the level of the abstract, which is unattainable in its virtually ontologically independent transcendental life, to consider it metaphysical. Thus, one of the constitutive discursive moves of the poststructuralist (feminist) thinking is the unreserved affirmation of the presence (absurdly manifesting itself but as absence) and of the engulfing potency of the Real, together with the utter impotence of Thought with respect to it, only to paradoxically claim the opposite. Namely, it is there only to announce the endless festival of discursive omnipotence and the virtual impotence of the virtually non-existent Real. Manifestly, the compulsive insisting on the Real’s untameable potency serves only as an apotropaic strategy of averting its “evil” powers and introducing instead the merry vision of a World in which everything is Discourse and the Real lives no more.

2. Lacanian excursion So, decades and decades later, we find ourselves in an ambiance described by Lacan in his paper from 1936 “Au-délà du ‘Principe de réalité’” – where he sets off to overturn that very same kind of ambiance – as search for a “guarantee of truth” in “contemporary psychology and philosophy,” that is to say, a guarantee that can only be transcendental “even when the philosopher has just denied its existence.”10 Paradoxically, it is precisely within the framework of Lacanian psychoanalytical legacy, i.e., through the postmodernist philosophico-theoretical reception of Lacan’s theory, that we have come to the point where the purported emancipation from the claim for certitude is turning itself into its own opposite. As it has already been argued, this is a situation we arrive at as a result of the repetitive operation of rigid mutual exclusion of Discourse and the Real. But is this something that is part of the repertoire of Lacan’s original claims? True, the Lacanian Real is categorized as the Impossible, and the Unthinkable, but this does not mean that it does not exist for the Discourse, that it does not “communicate” with Language and Discursiveness. The insisting on this mutuality of rapport is present already in his earliest works, such as the already mentioned “Au-délà du ‘Principe de réalitié,”11 just as it is present in

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his later discussions, notably the one published under the title of “Tuché and Automaton.”12 “First, the tuché, which we have borrowed, as I told you last time, from Aristotle, who uses it in his search for cause. We have translated it as the encounter with the real. The real is beyond the automaton, the return, the coming-back, the insistence of the signs, by which we see ourselves governed by the pleasure principle. The real is that which always lies behind the automaton, and it is quite obvious, throughout Freud’s research, that it is this that is the object of his concern.”13

So, it is the figure (instance) of the Real lying behind the Automaton that Lacan perceives as the object of Freud’s chief concern “throughout […] (his) research.” “Freud’s true preoccupation,” according to Lacan, is “[…] the question – what is the first encounter, the real, that lies behind the phantasy?”14 One can see from the position ascribed to the Real vis-à-vis the signifying chain the relevance of the question of the Real for the psychoanalytic theorizing. Notably, for Lacan’s theoretical discourse, since it is he who re-discovers the question of the Real and its relation to the “automaton” inaugurating it into Freud’s “true preoccupation.” Nevertheless, Lacan’s self-declared devotedness to “the true Freud,” his unique “heretic orthodoxy,” is that which gives status to this question as one of critical relevance for psychoanalysis tout court, and not exclusively for his own contribution/s. Furthermore, in “Tuché end Automaton,” he engages into a proposition of a theory on the mutual hold between “tuché” and “automaton,” that is to say, he creates a discourse on the Real’s insertion into Discursiveness. It is worthwhile producing the following, perhaps lengthy quotation, being itself a sufficient corroboration to this claim: “The relation to the real that is to be found in the transference was expressed by Freud when he declared that nothing can be apprehended in effigie, in absentia – and yet is not the transference given to us as effigy and as relation to absence? We can succeed in unravelling this ambiguity of the reality involved in the transference only on the basis of the function of the real in repetition. What is repeated, in fact, is always something that occurs – the expression tells us quite a lot about its relation to the tuché – as if by chance […] Is it not remarkable that, at the origin of the analytic experience, the real should have presented itself in the form of that which is unassimilable in it – in the form of the trauma, determining all that follows, and imposing on it an apparently accidental origin?”15

Therefore, the Real makes itself present in the form of its “significant/signifying” absence from the signifying chain/the pleasure principle, through Trauma, Incidence, through that ungraspable Hiatus of the experience of some “Happening” (Badiou’s “event”). The “event” (of the Real) intervenes upon discursiveness, it can reverse the order and logic of the Discourse, it can produce an entirely different situation on the level of pleasure principle – it is something that happens to Language. Discursiveness builds around the event attempting to domesticate it through Language. Thus, it seems that, according to Lacan, if Real-in-itself is unthinkable, its workings upon the World of Signs are not beyond Discourse.

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Today, one of the most influential representatives of the Lacanian line of thought, Slavoj Žižek, calls for theoretical considerations of these workings of the Real, of the possibility of its impact on the hegemonic (in Gramscian sense of the word) discourses of today.16 And he is not alone in this call: The Ethics of the Real (2000) by Alenka Zupancic represents a brilliant example of the rich discursive possibilities originating from such a theoretical stance. “The heart of all ethics is something which is not in itself ‘ethical’ (nor is it ‘non-ethical’) – that is to say, it has nothing to do with the register of ethics. This ‘something’ goes by several different names – although we will limit ourselves to two: for Lacan, it is ‘the Real’; for Badiou, ‘the event’. These terms concern something which appears only in the guise of the encounter, as something that ‘happens to us’, surprises us, throws us ‘out of joint’, because it always inscribes itself in a given continuity as a rupture, a break or an interruption. According to Lacan, the Real is impossible, and the fact ‘it happens (to us)’ does not refute its basic ‘impossibility’: the Real happens to us (we encounter it) as impossible, as ‘the impossible thing’ that turns our symbolic universe upside down and leads to the reconfiguration of this universe.”17

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3. Laruellian Recursion

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François Laruelle not only makes the Thought of the Real possible, but also claims that thinking should always already take place with respect to the Real or the One. The both terms – Real and the One – in the language of non-philosophy can function as synonymous. There are numerous arguments in Laruelle’s writings that can be invoked to explain and corroborate this clam of synonymity, and some of them have already been presented in the previous chapters. Let us just briefly recall that the equation Real = One stems out from the status of absolute non-relatedness of the Real, being itself an experience that precedes any decision (meaning: philosophical decision, or any postulate of the thetic thought). Or also: being “an immanence that takes pleasure only (from) itself and solely (from) itself without outdoing itself, embarking upon or transcending itself.”18 The Real is “an identity that is nothing-but-singular,” and not “singular and universal” (which would say “mixed,” i.e. in relation with an imagined, philosophically produced “World”). Thus, the Real inasmuch as “the One” can be thought (of) as that to which Language and Thought correlate but do not reflect. In its non-philosophical posture, Thought defects the trap of entering the play of mutually constituting each other with the Real. Namely, “language can describe the One, which has not at all the same structure as it, without reflecting it exactly or reproducing it.”19 Furthermore: “One would say it is a non-thetic Reflection (of the) real, a non-specular reflection or without mirror, or a ‘description in the last instance only’ of the One.”20

From the viewpoint of the thinking that sets in suspense all philosophical decision and, more importantly, dualistic thinking as intrinsic to any philosophy, the claim of the mutual exclusion of the Thought and the Real is fallacious. Thinking in terms of opposition, in binary constructs as the minimal possible

structure of thought, is what – from the perspective of a non-philosophical critique – constitutes any philosophy pertaining to the “gréco-judaïque” (fore-) closure of the horizon of thought; this applies to contemporary philosophy as well, such as the deconstruction, since “there one of the opposites in the Dyad has merely been replaced by the Other-which-is-not.”21 Further, it is precisely the founding presupposition about the mutual conceptual constitution of the two opposites (Real/Language), or rather their dual conceptual precondition of discursive (co-) existence, that makes the exclusion of the one from the territory of the other possible and necessary. This mode of thinking is enabled by the very constitutive relatedness of each of the terms, and, even more so, by the insurmountable, necessarily binaristic and oppositional way of being of the both constituents (of the twofold structure); it originates from the aporetic situation in which the so-called post-metaphysical thinking has found itself striving to liberate the Real from the pretension of the Thought to constitute it. Namely, this impasse (aporia) occurs as a result of the inherent impossibility of such an attempt since the thought is always already constitutively grasped by the binary hold of the twofold and mutually opposing existence of the terms – thinking them independently from one another is ab initio impossible. Thus, to liberate the Real from the ambitions of Thought means necessarily, reciprocally and reflectively also the opposite – i.e., liberation of Thought from any authority of the Real over it, and thus, from any possibility of correlating to it in any way. This is a presumption that automatically follows from the ontognoseological state of affairs as it has been presented thus far. Laruelle gives the following “warning”: “One will warn against saying that language always betrays the One, because language would always, as it is the case, manipulate with couples of opposites and would always be the nourishing element of unitary dualities. This sort of thinking postulates that Language is a specular reflection of the One, that it even has the same structure as it (cf. the argument of the Tractatus) or that it is isomorphic to it. This is a postulate of the negative ontology and theology, and moreover it is a supplementary and useless presupposition: language can describe the One, without having the same structure as it, without reflecting it exactly or reproducing it.”22

In this view of the inherent non-relatedness of Thought and Real, the both happenings, occurrences – i.e., events (Thought and Real) have unique, independent and non-thetic modes of “coming to being” and of operation. Each event of thought takes place in some mode of correspondence with the instance of the Real that is unique, non-cosmogonic and non-cosmologic, that is to say singular. (In this sense, one can also say that the event of thought, thought as experience is, in its own, unique and one-off way – real, as well. Nevertheless, to avoid entering into the classical aporetic state of philosophical circularity one should note that the emphasis here is on the experience of thought inasmuch as event, and not as the conceptual contents.) Unlike the postmodern idea of “fragment” that essentially implies fragmentation of the whole of a certain pre-existing philosophical universe (cosmos), the non-philosophical concept of singularity lays the ground for “debt-free” (in 61

relation to any previous doctrine), truly non-systemic instance of Thought. As it has previously been said, the Real and the One are synonyms variously naming the same instance, the same “thing” – the singularity (of the theorized reality as well as of the stance of theorizing). The pretension to thematize a reality in terms of its singularity, in correlation with “its Real” is not a pretension to grasp (with Thought) the Real, to claim the Truth of the Real inasmuch “as real,” as its accomplished reflection. Acknowledging its singularity and correlating with the Real is an act of theoretical recognition of the “radical immanence” (which is always already singular and the very instance of the Real) of the Identity which is being postulated as the “real object” of the non-philosophical research. The “real object” of research is, of course, a postulate and not the reflection of the Real of the investigated “Identity” (“Identity” = the “What” which is being thematized inasmuch as a “non-thetic Identity”). This distinction between “the Real” (as “the finitude of Identity” and “the radical immanence”) and “the real object of research” does not imply the distinction between “experience and concept, the concrete and the abstract, the experimentation and the theoretical – nor any of their ‘dialectizations’ or ‘couplings,’” insists Laruelle in Théorie des identitiés (1992).23 Unavoidably, the “real object” (of non-philosophical thought), inasmuch as a sample of the “World” (which is linguistically, “transcendentally” constructed), contains “theorico-technico-experimental ingredients.”24 In fact, the two objects (“the Real” and “the real object” of non-philosophical thinking) contain the “the same representations, but of an entirely different status.”25 Namely, the distinction between them “is not epistemological […], but only of-the-lastinstance, that is to say, either transcendental or immanent […],” clearly states Laruelle.26 It is important that the first correlates with the latter, acknowledging it as the identity-in-the-last instance of that which has been subjected to theoretical investigation, as that to which the cognition subordinates itself as to the ultimate authority.27

4. The Real as Limit and the Thought It seems that the purported and desired unbound arbitrariness of the discursive web is a phantasmatic situatedness that has offered much jouissance to authorship and to writing but has never seized being in a passionate grip with the presence/absence of the Real. The Real is, thus, a certain “beyondthe-Language” category which is nonetheless inherently relevant to Language and Discursiveness. Moreover it is an element of Language, or rather a situation of/within Discourse that imposes itself as a constitutive instance and/or effect of the Real – inasmuch as its (Discourse’s) conditioning Limit. This is an implicit premise of the poststructuralist beliefs concerning the categories of Language and the Real “reconstructed” by our discussion thus far. Or rather, it is an implication produced by the structure itself and the internal “mechanisms” (i.e., the “economy” of significations) of the conceptualization of the two notions

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and their inter-relatedness. In fact, I will argue, following in this respect the central argument of Drucilla Cornell’s The Philosophy of the Limit,28 that this is a potentiality which lives in the very discursive “configurations” brought about by poststructuralism and postmodernism, and more specifically – in the method of deconstruction. The concept of the “philosophy of the limit” is a product of Cornell’s reinventive reading of Jacques Derrida’s notion of deconstruction. More accurately, it is a work of conceptual innovation issuing from her original reading of the possibilities of thought (philosophical and ethical, or ethico-philosophical) that lay in the method of deconstruction and the grand ideological project of the “postmodern” era consisting of the dismantling of metaphysics. If we collapse both notions (deconstruction and the postmodern) into a single one – that of radical critique of the Thought’s (metaphysical) pretension about its capacity to re-present the Real – we could say that what is at stake in “postmodernism” is the Thought’s repetitive affirmation of its own inherent and constitutive limitations. Given this, Cornell’s “philosophy of the limit” is the fruit of her symptomatic reading and the main heuristic device of her re-reading of a wider intellectual trend, a vastly ranging theoretical undertaking and not only of a single discursive project – that of Derrida’s deconstruction. In her own words, she detects and explores the possibilities of a certain theoretical “configuration” created by the intersection of the work of several thinkers a part from Jacques Derrida – Theodor Adorno, Jacques Lacan and Emmanuel Levinas. According to Cornell, the exposure of thought’s limitations vis-à-vis “the beyond” (to it), that is to say, vis-à-vis the “Real,” is not a nihilistic reversal of thought towards its auto-foreclosure into an aporetic paralysis. It is precisely the opposite. In the “dialogue” between the following two quotations from The Philosophy of the Limit (PL) we will see why. “[…] deconstruction, reconceived as the philosophy of the limit, does not reduce the philosophical tradition to an ‘unreconstructable’ litter, thus undermining the possibility of determining precepts for moral action; rather it exposes the quasitranscendental conditions that establish any system […]. This exposure, which in Derrida proceeds through what he calls the ‘logic of parergonality’, demonstrates how the very establishment of the system as a system implies a beyond to it, precisely by virtue of what it excludes. The second aspect of deconstruction more accurately described by the notion of limit is related to what Charles Peirce in his own critique of Hegelian idealism called secondness. By secondness Peirce indicates the materiality that persists beyond any attempt to conceptualize it. Secondness, in other words, is what resists. Very simply, reality is not interpretation all the way down.”29

However, this inherent impotence of thought to encompass and re-present the Real in its totality is not the end of the Thought, the Truth of its meaninglessness. The Beyond is not the closure of all thinking, but its utter, gaping opening. Thus the Limit has the ambivalent meaning of a threshold – it is both the end and the beginning of the reality of Thought/Language. “The reaching of aporia for Derrida is precisely what provides us with the golden opportunity. The difference between the two thinkers (Derrida and Levinas) has to do with their approach to the beyond, the excess, the remain(s). As we will see, Derrida 63

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does recognize the excess to established reality but only as absence that brings us to mourning […] Derrida still questions more radically than does Levinas the ability of traditional philosophical discourse to evoke the aporia of the beyond through the saying of what cannot ever be said. The recovery of the excess, the remain(s), then, is both ‘impossible’ and necessary; impossible, and yet necessary – for to fail to pay tribute to the remains would be another violation of heteros.”30

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The re(-dis-)covery of these and such capacities of the philosophical gesture of deconstruction is Cornell’s own work, fruit of her own philosophical labour. Namely, the textual legacy that Drucilla Cornell reads in order to reveal in it the potency of the instance of the limit has never itself (by its own authors/creators and before Cornell) pointed out so unequivocally and in such a revealing way to its endless re-creative capacities. The exciting original move towards something radically new of PL lies in the directing and resting of the philosophical glance upon the instance beyond deconstruction, in the discovery of the “time” after the “completed deconstruction.” And in this sense Cornell’s philosophical preoccupations touch with those of François Laruelle (and of Alain Badiou), although each of these three authors has his/her own original theoretical project with its own specific aims and means. The Limit exposed through the deconstructive gesture is a certainty of an instance which is both speechless and nameless. In spite of giving it the name of “Limit,” what defines this instance (of the Limit) is precisely the radical limitation it imposes to pretensions of naming (i.e., of Language). Nonetheless the acceptance of its status of ultimately, i.e., in the last instance, evading to the acts of Naming does not necessarily imply that one should quit attempting to grasp it, which, on the other hand, can be done but through naming. These grasps, these incomplete insights into the workings of the “Limit” will generate different and many names, among them: “the real” and “the One.” Drucilla Cornell claims: “To run into an aporia, to reach the limit of philosophy, is not necessarily to be paralyzed. We are only paralyzed if we think that to reach the limit of philosophy is to be silenced […] The dead end of the aporia, the impasse to which it takes us, promises through its prohibition the way out it seems to deny.”31

She defends this claim as much as she defends her claim that this is a possibility for Thought proffered by the “philosophy of the limit” of Jacques Derrida. It is precisely this potentiality (for an opening of/for thought created by the “deadend of the aporia”) nesting in the method of deconstruction which is the reason for her renaming it as “philosophy of the limit.” It is on the brink of this Limit that the dimensions of Language and Real interact and one can detect the Thought’s desire – and its undertaking – to encompass the Real. Namely, each discourse is generated by a limited number of presuppositions that can be referred but to the discursive construct (and, more generally, to Language). The latter, on the other hand, ceaselessly originates from that same limited number of presuppositions. The figure of this referentiality is, evidently, circular, and the path of argumentation is that of circularity. This is the philosophical vicious Circle, the Labyrinth (those haunting figures of Deleuze and Nietzsche) we have been talking about in more length in the

previous chapter. A premise can be referred to and corroborated by but its own produce: the network of concepts generated by itself. In other words, any discourse is purported by itself solely, and/or by discursiveness more generally. No instance other than itself supports it. Nevertheless, it is that of the Real in reference to which it emerges. Discounting recourse to evolutionism and progressivism as a way of interpretation (=construction of a history of an idea), thus resorting to Foucault’s concept of episteme, let us go back to our example about democracy as the only available ideal for today’s political thinking. It is an inescapable presupposition – thus, an axiom – of the political reality of our time that the democracy is the only possible and thinkable principle of social organization today. This status (of an axiom) is implied by the state of affairs according to which it is the only acceptable grounding principle of the political thinking of today that has self-installed itself as the only legitimate one. Thus the principle of democracy is the sole “availability” for the political discourses and realities with the right to exist. Everything other than this is sure to be extinct as a reality and is deprived of any pertinence whatsoever as a discourse – it is practically non-existent. Democracy is the only existing political reality with an always already given possibility to survive. And it is a foundational assumption shared by both “evolutionists” (basing their claims on the argument of progress) and poststructuralists (departing from the Foucauldian premise of the interrupted sequences of epistemes. Clearly, this hypothesis is constitutive of the entire poststructuralist and Post-Marxist political discourse of today. Overruling this presumption would mean a leap into an entirely different and new “episteme” and, thus, a start of a completely new and different discursive universe. Since there can be no discursive and historic continuity, this would be a leap of Thought “in correlation with the Real.” In different words, we can but assume and imagine a certain auto-postulation of a new premise and an epistemic web, a “World” emerging “ex nihilo”; and it is around this “abyss” of absolute limitation of thought and language that an emerging discursiveness begins to endlessly revolve. That is to say, around and in correlation with the Real. Resulting from it (discourse’s intrinsic limitation) and constructed with respect to it – i.e., a presupposition related to no discursive legacy, turned in its solitude but to the Real and to its “will” to translate this singular experience into language and discourse. This leap is necessary when all – or rather any – discursive track of pursuit has been exhausted. To go back to our example: when the aporetic closure of thought occurs at the occasion of pursuit after a new conceptual foundation that would enable the most adequate translation of the experience of the need for a new principle of political organization. Despite the eventual “discourserelatedness” of this need, its experiential origin in the form of trauma imposed caused by the by the advent of Discourse’s dead-end, renders it as Real-correlated one. The twist of thought towards the new grounding premise is not going to take the discursive route, since it is not available. In effect, this leap of the Thought, in its attempt of bridging the Real, will be one of relative “arbitrari65

ness.” “Relative,” since one cannot claim arbitrariness when what is at stake is Real-conditioned pursuit for discursive adequacy (to the real, to the experienced need for more suitable discursive departure-point, that would more adequately correspond with the experience of desire for a more “adequate” discursive situating). When one finds her/himself in the circular movement within the only/all possible discourse/s revolving around the same grounding presupposition, there is no exceeding of the horizon. Thus, for the purposes of establishing a new horizon of thought, cruel interruption of discursiveness is necessary, cutting off with all available discourse, introducing of absolute fissure in Language and unimaginable new, grounding postulation of a discourse about to be born. The source and the rise of the new horizon’s wording will be again veiled by the grasp of the Real. And I see this new event as open to the weaving of new narratives that will strive to approximate its reality.

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NOTES 1. This is something that can be traced throughout the entire body of work of Jacques Derrida. One of the most saliently evident examples in this sense is his “Donner la mort” published in L’ethique du don (1992). 2. Jane Flax, Thinking Fragments: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and Postmodernism in the Contemporary West (New York and London: Routledge, 1991), 196. 3. Ibid., 189. 4. Ibid., 12. 5. Jane Flax in her Thinking Fragments (New York and London: Routledge, 1991) speaks of the same kind of anxiety caused by the sense of absolute uncertainty, of having put into question each and every truth, every destabilization of any position on anything, and in the description of this ruling sense of discomfort she also uses the image of the vertigo. On p. 6, Flax writes: “Western intellectuals cannot be immune from the profound shifts now taking place in contemporary social life. These transformations have deeply disrupted many philosophers’ self-understanding and sense of certainty. One of the paradoxical consequences of this break-down is that he more the fault lines in previously unproblematic ground become apparent, the more frightening it appears to be without ground, the more we want to have some ways of understanding what is happening, and the less satisfactory the existing ways of thinking about experience become. All this results in a most uncomfortable form of intellectual vertigo to which appropriate responses are not clear.” 6. See: Katerina Kolozova and Zarko Trajanoski, eds., Conversations with Judith Butler (Skopje: “Euro-Balkan” Press, 2001), 25-30. 7. Judith Butler, “Contingent Foundations” in Feminist Contentions, ed. Seyla Benhabib et al. (New York/London: Routledge, 1995), 36-37. 8. Jean Baudrillard, Simbolicka razmena i smrt (Serbo-Croatian translation of the Symbolic Exchange and Death) (Gornji Milanovac: Decje Novine, 1991). 9. Peter Hallward, Badiou: A Subject to Truth (Minneapolis/London: University of Minnesota Press), 120 (hereafter cited as Badiou). 10. Jacques Lacan, Écrits 1 (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1999 (1966)), 74 : “Il faut alors reconnaîtreque ces cadres, loin d’avoir été forgés pour une conception objective de la réalité psychique ne sont que les produits d’une sorte d’erosion conceptuelle où se retracent les vicissitudes d’un effort spécifique qui pousse l’homme à rechercher une garantie de vérité: garantie qui, on le voit, est transcendante par sa position, et le reste donc dans sa forme, même quand le philosophe vient à nier son existence.” 11. Lacan, Écrits 1, 85: “Travail d’illusioniste (about psychoanalysis), nous dirait-on, s’il n’avait justement pour fruit de résoudre une illusion. Son action thérapeutique, au contraire, doit être définie essentiellement comme un double mouvement par où l’image, d’abord diffuse et brisée, est régressivement assimilée au réel, pour être progressivement désassimilée du réel, c’est-à-dire restaurée dans sa réalité propre. Action qui témoigne de l’efficience de cette réalité.” 67

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12. Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (Edited by Jacques-Alain Miller, translated from the French by Alan Sheridan. New York and London: W. W. Norton and Company, 1998), 53-64. 13. Ibid., 53-54. 14. Ibid., 54. 15. Ibid., 54-55. 16. See: Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau and Slavoj Žižek. Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left (London: Verso Books, 2000). 17. Alenka Zupancic, The Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan (Wo Es War) (London: Verso Books, 2000), 234. 18. Laruelle, PNP, 40. 19. Ibid., 50. 20. Ibid., or in the French original: « On dira que c’est un Reflet non-thétique (du) réel, reflet non-spéculaire ou sans miroir, ou une description ‘en dernière instance seulement’ de l’Un. » 21. Ibid., 12-13: « Or cette règle ultime des agrégations conceptuelles en régime philosophique n’est pas brisée, elle est épurée et devient plutôt immanente dans le sérialisme philosophique contemporain et même dans la déconstruction où l’un des opposés de la Dyade est remplacé simplement par l’Autre-qui-n’est-pas. » 22. Ibid., 50: « On se gardera de dire que tout langage trahit l’Un, parce que le langage manipulerait toujours, comme c’est le cas, des couples d’opposés et serait l’élément nourricier des dualités unitaires. C’est là une pensée qui postule que le langage est reflet spéculaire de l’Un, qu’il a même structure que lui (cf. L’argument du Tractatus) ou lui est isomorphe. C’est le postulat de l’ontologie et de la théologie négative, c’est surtout une présupposition supplémentaire et inutile : le langage peut décrire l’Un, qui n’a pas du tout la même structure que lui, sans le refléter exactement ou le reproduire. » 23. François Laruelle, Théorie des identités (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1992), 93 (hereafter cited in text and notes as TI): « La distinction des deux objets ne recouvre pas en effet celle de l’expérience et du concept, du concret et de l’abstrait, de l’expérimentation et du théorique – ni aucune de leurs ‘dialectisations’ ou ‘couplages’. » 24. Ibid. 25. Ibid. 26. Ibid. 27. See Laruelle, TI, 93: « […] qu’une connaissance se soumet au réel et ne prétend que le ‘refléter’ ou le décrire à travers l’opération même de production théorico-expérimentale de ses représentations. » 28. Drucilla Cornell, Philosophy of the Limit (New York and London: Routledge, 1992) (hereafter cited or referred to in the text and in the notes as PL). 29. Cornell, PL, 1. 30. Ibid., 71-72. 31. Ibid., 71.

CHAPTER 4

THE REAL TRANSCENDING ITSELF (THROUGH LOVE): RADICAL SOLITUDE IN THE HEART OF LOVE 1. “Fidelity,” the “Radical,” and the “Fidelity to the Radical” The two perhaps most controversial thinkers of today’s French philosophicotheoretical scene, Alain Badiou and François Laruelle agree in their devotedness to the Project of re-claiming the Thought of the Radical, in spite of the critical difference between the two respective theories, consisting of the fact that the first invokes the radically philosophical (subscribing to a certain metaphysical tradition, i.e., Platonism), while the latter attempts to radically subvert any possibility for a philosophy. The radical thinking – or the “Thought of the Radical” – in both authors does not entail the ensemble of the concomitant meanings, such as extremism of revolutionary stance, that are habitually implanted within this notion. It merely refers to the theoretical positioning of fidelity to the immanence of the act of conceptual production in its unrepeatable singularity, as well as to its immanently auto-generated laws. The fidelity to the “act” of conceptual production is to be read as fidelity to the “event” of truth production and the laws of its auto-constitution which are immanent to this unique event. This type of “radicalism” stands for fidelity to the reality of the unique, solitary act of Thought correlating with a unique, solitary instance of the Real (of the theorized reality), as opposed to the fidelity to the scholastic backdrop as the ultimate instance of legitimacy. This claim is appended by that about the greater theoretical workability and productiveness – explanatory power; or, to put it aphoristically, a status of a “more truthful Truth” – of the name/notion/ instance of the One (Laruelle) or the Same (Badiou) vis-à-vis the Difference. One of the central concerns in this sort of theoretical positioning is the attempt for “linguistic recuperation” of the Real, that is to say, of creating a form within Language that can inform not only about the presence/absence of the Real, but also of its workings, of the impacts and experiences resulting from the Real. (Badiou speaks of the Void of linguistic recognizability within the “evental site,” around which a new Truth, together with a New Language, emerges; Laruelle invokes the radical immanence – namely, the Real – as the ultimate instance of legitimization of Thought.) Nevertheless, it needs to be said that their theoretical trajectories diverge into two entirely different, perhaps opposed courses of thought. I will avoid entering into any scholastic comparative discussion and will merely point to the critical, to the founding and fundamental difference between the two authors: while Alain Badiou invokes the radically philosophical thought, François Laruelle calls upon the radicalism of non-philosophy. In spite of – or, quite simply, along – this critical divergence, their respective theories share another important trait: the argument that the act of theoretical work is always already a universalistic gesture (of thought) that is, nonetheless, a radically individualistic 69

(solitary), non-totalitarian and non-universal/izing one. The central argument of this sort of “particularistic universalism” would be that the act of theorizing is always already an act of producing a “Universe” never witnessed by any other universe before. Laruelle speaks of a “Langage-Univers,” while Badiou clearly claims: “Every universal is a singularity.”1 Laruelle’s “Universe” is non-thetic, and it is “a dimension which is not total, but a sheer non-decisional totality.”2 In his Thesis no. 2 on the universal, besides the statement that “every universal is a singularity,” Badiou says: “The universal cannot be directly articulated with any recognizable particularity, grouping, or identity.”3 In the both theoretical positions there is neither pretension nor epistemic possibility to “colonize” the different cultures of discursivity or the subaltern, since they are both positions strongly claiming the possibility of each thinking singularity to produce a universe and universality. There is no need to defend the position of “fragment/al,” since they do not assume a Whole (that would have undergone the process of fragmentation). The instance of “langage-univers” is a product of the Vision-in-One of the Representing (representational) Subject, which has accomplished the process of “dualysis” (of dismantling dualism inherent in philosophical language), and has resorted to the “chôra,” the “transcendental material,” to Language inasmuch as material unorganized into a discursive Cosmos. The products of such a process (of Thought interacting with the Real) are called “langages-univers,” and they are “that ‘final’ product which is always subject to infinite reformulation and rectification.”4 Therefore, these “universes” are contingencies as well. Differently from Laruelle, Badiou presupposes the existence and (universal) pertinence of the level of transcendent Truth/s (quite Platonic and declaredly so), transcending the level of history even though originating from it. What they share, then again, is the view that the position of the universal is, in fact, the position of the radical (inasmuch as that dictating singularity drawing legitimacy from its immanence, not from the interpretational instance of discursivity). Introducing the names of Laruelle and Badiou into the very initiation of this theorematic attempt does not announce any further in-depth comparative discussion of their theoretical opuses. It is in their respective theories that I find the terms that have been excluded from the poststructuralist discursive possibility as operative conceptual creations that need not establish conflict with some of the claims of poststructuralist (postmodern) theories valuable to me. I am, of course, referring to the notions of the One/Same, the Real, the Radical and the newly introduced Universal. Legitimizing gestures of Thought (that is to say, the work of generating truths) that would resort to these notions or merely names are simply precluded by the poststructuralist legacy of thought. Let us once again repeat what has been said in the previous chapters, thinking in the vein of the poststructuralist and/or deconstructionist theoretico-philosophical tradition – either tacitly or openly – rejects the possibility of conceptualizing a certain “radical” or “same” or “universal” or “real” that would not be in collision with what this legacy stands for.

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This prohibition, or rather inhibition, of thought also implies, among other things mentioned previously, the following: for the discursive lineage of postmodernism – and in particular, of feminist poststructuralism (originating predominantly from the States, and relying heavily on the continental philosophical tradition) – these “names” from the western philosophicotheoretical vocabulary are not merely linguistic phenomena, but once and for all defined concepts, finite determinations, nominal accomplishments. They have been, indeed, treated as if a certain “nominalistic real,” and in particular so by the US feminist philosophers of postmodern (poststructuralist, deconstructivist or constructivist …, and so on) provenance: the “Stable,” the “Same” or the “Universal” seem to have a fixed and unchanging position that can rightfully claim the status of an unshakeable Real. Their nature of inalterability within or according to the discourses in question, and the fact that other categories have been excluded on the basis of the status of “virtually non-existent” that they have been accorded by this discursive legacy, can speak of a tacit pretension of the language/thought to re-present the real/ity. Through the repeating of these statements I am attempting to reiterate and reaffirm my transgressive and heretical position vis-à-vis the contemporary poststructuralist feminism (and gender and queer theory), while still subscribing to a considerable part of it, as I am assuming a rather heretical position visà-vis Laruelle’s non-philosophy as well. I am relegating the doctrine of nonphilosophy to the realm of the chôra, to the domain of the transcendental (philosophical) material together with that of poststructuralist, deconstructive and postmodernist (or any other) theories that I dispose with in my attempts of theorization. What I am keeping in my work of theorizing from the nonphilosophical doctrine is the mere, empty posture of thought which remains in fidelity to the Real and “aware” of (or, always already facing) the fact that what it can dispose with in the process is the transcendental material inasmuch as material – chôra, and not an organized and intelligible body of knowledge, not a Cosmos. This position in itself is hardly heretical with respect to the theory of non-philosophy compared to another of the positions that I am adopting here: I believe that we are inescapably “made of” the World of Discursiveness, of the available thinking of our time. Consequently, the empty non-philosophical posture of thought is a purposely produced crack within the always already (con-) textualized thought, an opening from within the Text/ure we have been made of. However, it is our non-philosophical “duty” to persevere in this posture and secure the keeping of this opening alive, preserving it there. Thus, I disbelieve the validity of any attempt of doing away in totality with the discourses of poststructuralism and deconstruction (or of any authority relevant for the way the World sees itself today). Plainly, I do not believe that anyone can yield a convincing and consistent theoretical claim to have entirely dismissed the authority of the thought shaping the epoch in which one lives, although one can produce a radical situating from within the Situation (in Badiou’s sense of the word) and, therefore, a radically different truth. But a singular one, which cannot and does not wish to – it is radically indifferent in this respect – to 71

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undermine the entirety of a Discursive World, to replace the System with a new and radically different one. The radically different situating, the birth of a new truth from the Void or from the Limit (and the Real), and still from within the Situation (Badiou) or the World (Laruelle), can produce a dramatic shift propagating an entirely different Discursivity, a new “System,” but never as a result of such pretension. The radical situating is singular and, therefore, immanently indifferent to such pretensions. Returning to the question of “heresies,” the authorities, besides the already mentioned Laruelle and Badiou (as the principal points of reference), on whose thought I am drawing in the forthcoming pages are also Rosi Braidotti, Luce Irigaray and Gilles Deleuze. These (minimum) two different lines of theory will meet and intertwine here, establishing a dialogue of not merely doctrines but also, and even more so, of possible usages of language creating a complementing inter-argumentation. The ad hoc correspondences of the “philosophical/transcendental materials,” regardless of the scholastic provenance, will be in-forming the thought which has assumed the posture of “correlativity” with the Real. It is the consonance of the different appropriations of Language echoing the experience of the Real that will be filling the empty posture of Thought, which, on the other hand, will itself be in the always already reiterating state of re-creating anew its status of emptiness. Only to be filled in again by a new texture of language in the – ultimately futile – attempt of capturing the resonances of experienced (Real). It is an always already failed effort, but only in the last instance. Traces of the experience (the Real) are inevitably inscribed in that atonal music produced by the resonances of Language correlating with the Real; even its powerlessness-in-the-last instance (to capture the Real) is inscribed in the Language recreating and communicating the experience in that always already incomplete way, doomed to the repetitive act of always already striving for completion. It is the desire for this completion which inevitably situates the thought as empty for doctrine and thirsty for the satisfaction endowed by the experiential (the Real). The satisfaction is taken in the form of the token of this “love”: the translucent texture of Language, weaving around the thickness of Experience.

2. Solitude radicale Radical solitude is one of the many names that Laruelle’s non-philosophy gives to (the state of inhabiting) the identity-in-the-last-instance of the Human Being, also called the Man-in-Man (l’Homme-en-Homme) inasmuch as the Real (of “Humanity”). I will allow myself the freedom of re-naming the instance of “Man-in-Man” into “Wo/Man-in-Wo/Man.” Nonetheless, in most of the cases I will simply resort to the translation of “l’Homme-en-Homme” as “Human-in-Human.” The remnant of what cannot ever be mediated to the Other, elevated on the level of the Transcendental, and, therefore, enable a certain self-deliverance from the self-enclosure (in one’s “Real of Being”), is indeed a state of radical solitude – the territory we have always already inhabited. And

such is also the theoretical stance of thinking in terms of the Real – in fidelity to the Real – and not to the doctrinal Cosmos. This sort of theoretical self-situating can be named non-philosophical, since it is the non-philosophy which has professed it in that radical and uncompromising form that I am invoking here, and it is this discourse that I draw on when referring to it. The non-philosophy, however – or, more accurately, its founder, François Laruelle – categorizes it also as “scientific.” What is primarily understood by the latter is in fact the “ingredient” of the type of thinking canonically labelled as scientific that Laruelle considers defining (of his “scientific method”): thinking from the perspective of the object of investigation in its ungraspable elusiveness (in its aspect of the Real and inasmuch as the Real) whereby the doctrinal material is used, referred to as merely that – a material (of available conceptualizations). It is a kind of thought which does not situate its starting point in the doctrine but in the subject of thought, and makes use of the different available doctrines creating an entirely inter-doctrinal (or inter-disciplinary) assemblage of utter scholastic discrepancies with the sole aim of understanding the particular object of investigation. Such thinking is dictated, but by the object of investigation, by the vicissitudes of the unpredictable Real. Therefore, the term “scientific” is not used in the conventional sense of the word, although it refers to a certain aspect of the scientific method in the conventional sense of the word; it is that aspect which differentiates this type of thought from the one called by Laruelle “philosophical.” Philosophy is that always already grand vicious circle of mastering both the Real and itself (the Thought or the Transcendental) on the basis of – according to the non-philosophy – its decisionism. Or rather, it is philosophy’s auto-decisionism– the self-legitimizing status at the heart of its (philosophy’s) adventures – which brings it to the state of self-sufficiency, a constituent shared by any and all philosophy – claims Laruelle – and that thing which renders philosophy self-enveloping. This intrinsic, structuring component is inevitable to and insurmountable by philosophy as such, since it is its juncture of origin: the grounding division between Thought and the Real, and the perennial, endless dance of attempted inter-reflection led by the active thought vis-à-vis the dormant passivity of the Real. Any philosophy’s unavoidable point of departure and genesis is the decision it establishes of the relation between Thinking and the Real, while the results of all its investigations must confirm and be in consonance with this founding decision. This is something that also the non-philosophy does, and this is why it remains to be philosophy in addition to and in spite of the prefix of “non-”. What makes it, however, a “non-” of the philosophy is the dismantling of the logic of relationism as founding for the philosophy and the suspension of decisionism. The non-philosophical arguing for a Thought that is treated as an operation devoid from any ontology, subjected to the Real, issuing from it as its “nonthetic reflection,” “an absolute reflection, or without mirror,”5 is arguing for non-divisionism. There is only one immanence, which is the same thing as the 73

Real, and the Thought (or “cognition,” the term more frequently used in, e.g., Théorie des identiés) operates on its territory as an occurrence of a different status (in terms of the identity-in-the-last-instance): it is transcendental (not immanent). However, the argument that the Thought always already assumes the status of the Transcendental, does not imply that it has been seceded once and for all from the immanent – the Real. On the contrary, non-philosophical cognition is “founded as absolute power (even though finite) upon a pure immanence […], exigent of the transcendence of its objects and of its representations, it participates in that absolute essence or in that phenomenality entirely immanent.”6 The non-philosophical thought subjects itself to the Real (“se soumet au reel”),7 correlating with it in the attempt to reflect it (non-thetically). The argument about the immediacy of the Thought’s connection with the Real is strengthened by the claim that its Medium’s identity-in-the-last-instance is the Real: the Human-in-Human (l’Homme-en-Homme); and even more so, by the ambiguous claim of Laruelle that the chôra of the transcendental material is, in fact, “a materiality or an absolute transcendence.” Evidently this claim disturbs also the classical understanding of the notions of “matter” or “materiality”: “La chôra est une matérialité individuée radicalement comme matérialité.”8 So, transcendentally produced, it is the “diverse topique of and for its (thought’s) distinctions,”9 it is the “place” which is irreducibly that – nothing-but-the-transcendental. The chôra is the “place” where the transcendental “lives” in its identity-in-the-last-instance: generic and specific categories non-organized in a (philosophical) Cosmos that would place it only in itself (that Cosmos dictating the meaning and the place of a particular category). This is another level of radicality, a posture of thought as liberated as possible from the restrictions produced by the Dictate of Thought living its self-enclosed life, securing a more “efficient” subjection of Thought to the Immanent. This is why we cannot speak of divisionism regarding the Thought/Real relation in non-philosophy: the immanence is not split and the transcendental does not assume the position of the immanent, even though the latter is its origin and its “medium.” Non-philosophy proposes thinking in terms of the Real: thinking which does not only overcome any pretension of (re-) claiming the Real, but by way of abandoning Thought’s auto-referential obsession (by way of self-situating with respect to the Real) performs the theoretical gesture of its own self-suspension. This is an act of self-positioning of the thinking subject that is based on the f/actual giving way to the primacy of the Real. There is no pretension of Thought over the Real, that could eventually produce a split in it, including that regarding the Thought and the Real – because their difference exists only on the level of the Transcendental, not on the level of the Immanent. The Immanent is indifferent (in the last instance) to this difference, as it is indifferent (in the last instance) to the aspirations of the Transcendental. This indifference is radical, not absolute. The Transcendental, however, gravitates around the axis of the Real; it is there because the Real is there – it is the product of the Human-in-Human’s (which is the Real of our Self) effort 74

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to mediate the “World-of-the-Real,” that is to say, the Real, to Her/HimSelf. And the non-philosophy proclaims – and installs this proclamation as an axiom – the posture of thought which has succumbed to the rule of the Real to be the act of a Vision-in-One, of seeing things in terms of the Real. The operation of “Seeing-in-terms-of-the-One” (or the Real) has an entirely different ontological (or “ontological”) status – in fact there is no ontological status in the strict sense of the word that it could inhabit – and because of this radical asymmetry there can be neither division nor equation between them. It is something which has nothing to do with the “Science of Being.” It is merely a human practice – or practice of all beings endowed with the faculty of cognition – which has nothing to with the “Being” which is a question radically different and incommensurable in terms of the dimensions of “subject matter” with that of the practice of cognition and production of knowledge exercised by the human beings. The Real and the Thought can establish neither equations or reciprocities nor schisms of any kind, since they are not “equal.” The mutual equality and the eventual inter-mirroring is impossible, because, non-ontologically put, there are no Two (that could establish a relation of reciprocity) but only the One. Thinking participates in this One, i.e., in the Real as its “superstructure,” as that translucent level of transcendence without an ontology of its own enveloping the Real or the One – as its instance of “auto-sublimation.” It is merely the level of interpretation, of giving meaning, of signification that dilutes the thickness of the incomprehensible Real, populates it with Signs and makes it liveable through the “device” called Language. In a way, the instance of Thought (or of Language) is the human – or of any being capable of cognition – appropriation of the Real (the One); the Human-in-its-last-instance, inasmuch as the Humanin-Human, or the Wo/Man-in-Wo/Man (l’Homme-en-Homme), is (the) Real and the inexorably One. It is a One, as already said, that is neither totalizing nor total, it is rather the minimal – the densest and irreducible “quantity” of the radical (or the pure immanence). Neither is it the universalizing One (in the sense of the reductivist idea of Unity of differences), but the unique and solitary One. The Real always already finds itself in an irredeemable solitude vis-à-vis the World (the Transcendence, the Language, the Thought and Mediation) and vis-à-vis the Other (mediated through the World). Thinking in terms of the Real/One as the point-of-departure and as a point of gravitation implies universalistic gestures of Thought, however, not in the sense criticized by the historicists – that is to say, not as a universalizing Unity of differences – but as concurrently contingent ones. They are universal in the sense of its creation of a unique language-universe (Laruelle) or a Truth embodying the Desire to be valid for everyone (universally). If we accept the claim of the postmodern appropriations of the Lacanian Real as the Unthinkable, as the Untouchable by Thought (also in the sense of “not to be touched”), we would be in fact claiming its factual rule over the Thought, since this sort of claim resides upon the premise about Thought’s unmitigated helplessness and detachment with respect to the Real. This would be 75

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the radically disabling of any validity of the “Universe of Thought” with respect to the “Universe of the Real” that would speak of our irreparable helplessness in the face of the absolute Power of the Real. Laruelle’s (and Badiou’s, in a variation of its own) arguing for a thinking in terms of the Real, whereby the Thought suspends its pretension of authority over the Real and merely correlates with it, opens the possibility of Thought’s communicating with and of the Real. This is an always already failed undertaking but only in the last instance, a failure of the attempt to grasp the Real in its totality and without a remnant. However, on the level of expectation which allows the incompleteness of this attempt, on the level of mediation or of communicability, the assumed stance of correlation produces certain degrees and forms of the Real’s emplacement in and for the “World.” The non-philosophical or the radical stance of thinking in accordance with the dictate of the illogical, unpredictable, uncontrollable Real by taking recourse to an inventive use of the available doctrinal material entails also producing of new conceptual devices (issuing into new doctrines). However, the primary goal is not the latter (the creation of new conceptual devices or doctrines). Instead, it is a Posture of Thought devoted to – or in a state of fidelity to the task of – understanding a certain Singular Reality, lonely in its radicality: a certain identity-in-its-last-instance (the Real). (Just as it is the case with the motivation and the ways of the scientific thinking.) This is one possible way of overcoming of the fact that philosophy, at least in its occidental sense, has always already maintained a (or, the) dyadic structure (of the reciprocal mutual hold between Thought and the Real).10 This is, namely, a method of radical submission of Thought to the Real, by way of suspending its desire to master it, however, without the postmodern solution of entirely forsaking it both as a question and as a place to inhabit. (Since the postmodern solution of “divorce” from the Real, re-produces the Old Dyad, as explained in the previous chapter.) I would like to propose here a way of seeing the question of the relation between the Real and the Thought or Language (consequently, between the Real and the Other or the World) as a question of Love. The need to exit the Real of one’s radical situatedness (or situatedness-in-the-last-instance) in oneself as an act of Love, of attempting to reach out to the Other as the instance of salvation from one’s radical self-enclosure. The inevitable need of the Real to be mediated (for the Other/the World) is something that implies the need of everyone in his/her identity-in-the-last-instance which is the Real (of His/ HerSelf) to be for and through the Other. The attempt to speak of the Love of Real will also be an attempt to speak of (the Real) Love. This double attempt automatically bifurcates into two different and parallel series of questions. Firstly, the one aiming to investigate the possibility of thinking Love in some mode of nostalgic craving for the impossible, one ensuing from the instance of the Human-in-Human (l’Homme-en-Homme) inasmuch as the Real, the irrevocable and inconsolable One, as the instance of – the Radical Solitude. Secondly, a series of questions interrogating the possibility

to conceive of what Love might be in its own radical identity, in its identityin-the-last-instance. How are we to think of Love in the light – or the gloom – of its essential impossibility, as a form of impossibility itself, as an undertaking with an inborn auto-abortion? I will attempt to situate my vision on this question in the way purported by Laruelle under the name of a Vision-in-One. I will conform my account to the unpredictable dictate of the experience of radical solitude, produce a posture of thought in fidelity to the singularity of that experience or event. Put differently, I will allow my narrative to succumb to the dictate of the Real of the event – that of radical isolation. For the purposes of this account it can be a recreation of an event stored and operating on the level of memory, i.e., internally; or an event happening also on the level of exteriority, radical solitude installed by the relentless absence – death – of a loved one, and continuously experienced as inescapable. The reference to the necessary “recreation” of the event should only remind us that the non-philosophical posture of thought reproduces its “object” of (scientific) investigation with the unavoidable presence of the “theoretical-technical-experimental” ingredients.11 It is a situation of “the mixed,” but of a particular kind: the author of thought affirms the difference in status between the object of thought (correlating with the Real) and the Real of the object in a way where the first is recognized as transcendental and the latter as immanent. My initial claim about Love as the compulsory mode of “being” for the Real is the following: radical solitude (the situation of the Real) radically urges itself to be mediated through interventions of transcendence, i.e., through Language or Truth. And it always already is. This bridge of mediation builds the stage for the various inventions and re-inventions of Love, in the “worldly” sense of the word: that experience known to every living being appearing in a number of predetermined forms, that we are all competent of (for a more-orless achieved rendition of them, or through failing in some of these forms of loving experience). The process of relentless auto-imposed – “auto,” since there is no one and nothing but the One to impose – mediation of the Real is the allsupporting and all-generating wheel of the experience of love contained in the various perceptions and conceptions, ideas and idealisms (of Love). Laruelle invents the theoretical construct of the “Stranger” (l’Etranger), to explain the becoming of the “World” and of the Person of and for the World (Person-in-Person) as the result of the necessary process of the auto-alienation of the Human-in-Human (of the Self in its Real). The workings of the level of the Stranger vis-à-vis the Real (or the Ego in the “non-analytical”* sense of the word) are elaborated in much detail in Laruelle’s Théorie des Etrangers (1995) and Ethique de l‘Etranger (2000). The central argument of this theory is that the Human-in-Human (i.e., the Real) is always already, necessarily alienated (to itself) through the instance of the Stranger. My free and perhaps over-simplifying interpretation of the theory of the Stranger, in an attempt to extract its “bottom line” would be: the Real makes use of its own superstructure, the instance of auto-alienation – the Stranger in order to be able to receive, *Non-analysis is the non-philosophical appropriation of (Lacanian) psychoanalysis.

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produce and process the World. (The latter comprises the existing and potential transcendental material, its Lacanian analogy would be the Language.) The repetitive act of further auto-alienation is auto-installed through the metastructure called Subject (it is “meta” both with respect to the Stranger and to the Real). This distinction between the Real and the Stranger (and, thus, the World) is however not to be considered as a division, as a split constituting a fundamental duality, since the difference between them is unilaterally established. The act of “unilateralization” (unilatéralisation) is an act of non-relative and nonrelationalist establishing a relation of difference. This is an act of a singularity, made of singularity – a radically solitary act of unilateral self-differentiation.12 The concept of unilateralization can be understood through a re-appropriation of the notion of unilateral difference passionately invoked by Deleuze in Difference and Repetition, and by way of resorting to the language used in this work as a rather adequate translation of the Laruellian account (on the same theme). This mode of unilateral differentiation and the generic claim of the One render the non-philosophy thought in terms of – or rather, in correlation with – the Real and radically non-dichotomous. However, emphasis should be made that, according to Laruelle, the gesture of unilateral differentiation is pertaining to the instance of the Stranger/Subject, whereas the Real not only remains indifferent to it but is also deprived of the possibility of performing such or any kind of gesture. The Real remains immanently indifferent to this operation, says Laruelle. And I would like to rephrase this Laruellian thesis through a slight shift of the argument by saying that the Real is immanently indifferent to the relation of difference established by the act of unilateralization, and vice versa: the Transcendental unilaterally produced is radically indifferent to the relation of indifference of the Real, as it is to the difference it might re-present to it (which is something which may be implicated by the position of indifference itself). I would like to look into the possibility of conceiving of – or merely imagining – the imprints, the motions and commotions of the experiences of (the unavoidably imagined, idealized, always already engaged in the World) Love on the territory proper of the experiential, the unreflected lived (Laruelle: vécu) – the Real (of the Human-in-Human). Thus, what I am proposing in this chapter is look into the possibility of recreating the traces of Love – which is the both: a linguistic and an experiential category – inscribed on the flesh of the purely experiential (le vécu), that is to say, the Real. Bearing in mind Laruelle’s clear insisting on the Real’s radical indifference to the linguistic operations as a “thing” taking place in and for the World, this proposition may sound somewhat unorthodox (with respect to non-philosophy). However, I will argue that even within the framework of the Laruellian theory this possibility is not so rigidly excluded, since the “communication” between the Real and Stranger is not severed. There is a territory where these two levels necessarily meet: it is the Lived (le vécu) termed also as the “Joui” (the Enjoyed) of the “Jouissance” (Enjoyment) coming from the World. The

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terms belong to Laruelle’s theory of non-psychoanalysis,* a non-philosophical re-appropriation of the Lacanian psychoanalysis (presented in a most richly elaborated form in his Théorie des Étrangers from 1995, although developed throughout his entire opus).13 The imaginary approximation of this territory I find in Luce Irigaray’s hiatus within the Symbolic, in the fecund muteness scarring the Language and in the proximity of Language to the Body. I find it in the fluidity of Body unavoidably marked with Meaning and, in fact, producing it: in that dim “materiality” of our flesh relentlessly emanating virtually undecipherable signification. This body populated by the Imaginary, traversed by Language is not the result of a one-sided action (that of the active Language/Subject vis-à-vis the “passive” body) the way Judith Butler proposes to see its “imaginarization” (which is a démarche of ascribing sovereign authority to the realm of the Language over the signifying body). It is also an active co-creator of signification, a contributing instance on the level of Language, bursting with effort to translate its vibrating life, its fluctuations of both rise and fall into an articulated expression, into a form of auto-sublimation. This does not, of course, imply that the body acts as a form of a parallel “agency,” performing “on its own” the gestures of auto-translation (of the Body into the Language), but that the “I” is urged to translate its bodily experiences into Language, that the urges of the Body shape (or participate in shaping) the Language. This theory of Irigaray attempting to speak with “voice of the body” can be extended to Rosi Braidotti’s “materialism of becoming.” The latter is a theory which not only builds on Irigaray but is also a qualitative leap into something new taking Irigaray’s understanding of the sexual (bodily) difference as formative of the subjectivity (always already sexually determined: female or male) further towards the creation of a meticulously elaborated discourse called “materialism of becoming.” It is a theoretical construct drawing to a large extent on Deleuze, and in particular: his idea of repetition (and difference) and the revision of psychoanalysis carried out together with Felix Guattari. Braidotti’s materialism of becoming does not occlude the unpredictability of the never totally conceivable body (and subsequently, the sexual difference) by way of relegating its elusive remnants of the unthinkable to the Beyondof-the-Real. Quite the opposite, Braidotti sets the route, a methodological compound, of introducing the relevance of the instance of the body – with its disturbing overtones of the-beyond-conceivable-life-Real – into (or interfacing with) Language and Thought. In Metamorphoses, she undertakes the laborious project of articulating the role of the Unarticulated in the act of intellectual articulation par excellence - production of a theory. “The ‘feminine’ for Irigaray is neither one essentialized entity, nor an immediately accessible one: it is rather a virtual reality, in the sense that it is the effect of a project, a political and conceptual project of transcending the traditional (‘Molar’) subject-position of Woman as Other of the Same, so as to express the other of the Other. This transcendence, however, occurs through the flesh, in embodied locations and not in a flight away from them [My italics].”14 *The term far more frequently used in non-philosophy is non-analysis instead of non-psychoanalysis.

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Braidotti’s understanding of the gender identity (or rather: the identity/subjectivity “Woman”) is that it is a “project” of becoming (a Woman by way of “transcending the traditional (‘Molar’) subject-position of Woman as Other of the Same”), and this understanding is “materialist”: “the becoming” takes place through the “flesh.” “Materialism of becoming” is a mode of thinking, a process of continuous re-creation of conceptual apparatuses that takes into account the “occurrence through the flesh” of all Transcendence. Braidotti maps the cartography for the u-topos, the “nowhere land” originally imagined and put into theoretical play by Irigaray. This image of self-situating in one’s own body on the very border of the Real (the ungraspable materiality of the body), while the existing, i.e., the intelligible and communicable signifiers (the Symbolic) – together with the relatedness to the Other enabled by the latter – are suspended, echoes Laruelle’s identity in the last instance. If nothing else (or more), it resonates the state of radical solitude. Radical solitude is the effect of – or rather the “mathematical principle” of the “radical oneness,” upon which resides – our own self-envelopment brought about by the inescapable status of the Real that every Wo/Man is subject to (Laruelle’s Wo/Man-in-Wo/Man). We were all “born” – as an “I”, as that most “primitive” sense of Selfhood – in the most immediate experience of the state of inescapable situatedness (that of the Real) in ourselves. This primacy is not temporal. It is radical. The experience of radical solitude is the most direct communication with the Real (that we all are), in its impossibility-in-the-lastinstance to be encompassed by Thought, and, therefore, a gesture of initial establishing knowledge of it. This means an automatic, structurally constitutive yet radically immanent auto-imposition of the act of reflection, transposition to the level of the Transcendental, while still remaining in the heart of the non-reflected and non-reflectable (experience of one’s own self inasmuch as the Real). Evidently, this is a borderline situating where the Self’s radical immanence – while still situated in the non-reflected experience of the Real – initiates the primary gesture of self-reflection. Therefore, the possibility of reflection is conceived in the very nebula of the non-reflectable, the experience of our own Real. Further, what is contained as conceptual material in this two-fold – yet unilaterally brought about – situation is the insight into the radical solitude. Hence, we can assume that all further mediation of the Real – meaning: all Reflection and Transcendence – is enabled by and originating from the experience of radical solitude; and that the experience of Love and of all of its transcendental configurations finds itself at the very origin of all and any Transcendence, at the heart of the creation of all of our World/s.

3. Love in the Heart of the Radical Solitude We can claim this by putting into operation the simple logic according to which all mediation of the Real is an act of attempt to surpass and console its radically solitary character. In this sense, we can agree with Plato – Philosophy is truly about Love, and not only Philosophy, but also all Transcendental Production, all and any result of the activity of the linguistic (cognitive) agency. Evidently, I have already ventured stating my claim about – or, proposing my “definition” of – Love’s identity-in-the-last-instance: it is the always already ultimately failed striving to surpass our indestructible – except by the advent of Death – enclosure in ourselves, inasmuch as our own unbeatable Real, to surpass and relieve our radical solitude/s. From this point (or: juncture of our discussion) on, we can begin imagining the propagation of this initial gesture into all further transcendental elaboration, into the myriad of translations into the World and worldliness. The act of its own auto-transcendence is thus immanent to the Real, or rather to the Wo/Man-in-Wo/Man inasmuch as real. Transcendence is, therefore, engendered within and by the essentially non-transcendental. And initially, it is an act of Love, if we conceive of the latter as a tendency to overcome the self-enclosure of our radical immanence and introduce fissure into that state of radical solitude. Consequently, the self-dissolution of Real’s radical solitude into an opening to the Other/the World is radically immanent to the instance of radical immanence. The craving for the impossible is inherent to the radical experience of that very impossibility. The deepest yearning for the Other is carved by its very own impossibility. The opening (to the Other) is born on the very ground of the ultimate self-enclosure; and conversely, the ultimate enclosure is always already marked by the opening for an escape to the Other. The “always already” (the repetitiveness) plays the role of a temporal utopia, of a certain temporal presupposition which, however, implies timelessness: in a way it works as the Bergsonian-Deleuzian Duration. The Future (the Becoming) is a Returning Past. The inborn craving for the Other always already marking the Real “works” as a memory of a once upon a time accomplished unity with the Other. That is why any amorous yearning bears an aspect of nostalgic craving (that has given rise to so many myths about the original unity with the Other, such as the one ascribed to Aristophanes by Plato). Nostalgia is a memory made of an inconsolable longing for the lost loved one; every loved one is always already lost. Resorting to Braidotti’s “materialism of becoming,” which draws, among the other Deleuzian ideas, on the already mentioned Bergsonian-Deleuzean concept of the Becoming (Future as Returning Past), we can say that the Real is in an unstoppable process of a continuous, relentless auto-transcendence, overcoming of its own radical solitude. Or, it is the instance of endless, circular movement of assertion of “the potency of expression,” which is “about the transcendence of the linguistic signifier.”15 By making the claim about “the craving for the impossible as inherent to the radical experience of that very impossibility,” seemingly we are joining the 81

perennial acts of celebration of the paradox as a form of escapism serving to appease the aporia one has fallen into; and there is nothing wrong or untrue about the “celebrations of the paradox”. The affirmation of the paradox is a philosophical “Truth” I would subscribe to, nonetheless as a state of a relation established by Two. However, I am shying away from granting to this relation a defining role with respect of each of the singular components constituting the binary (establishing the relation). Each of the singularities is affirmed inasmuch as singularity in correlation with the Real. Resorting to the method of unilateralization (provided by the Vision-inOne), suspending the reason of relationism (and dualism), if we decide to see (establish a “theoria of”) the event of (Real’s) craving for (an escape to) the Other in its singularity – the conclusion would be that it is neither an impossible nor a paradoxical situation. We are faced (or we are able to produce the Image of being faced) by the actuality of the act of craving, regardless of the response of the “one craved for.” This “impossible” yearning is an actuality of a particular desire, producing acts of imaginarization (and, thus, self-imaginarization: turning the brute physicality of the Desire into Signification), constituting an accomplished reality in itself. The castrating impossibility imposed from the outside, by the Other, is a positive reality entering the constitution of the castrated reality (of the “impossible” craving). The Real’s self-translation into that bridging reach towards the Other and the World, does not cut into its own Self with dualism, does not thrust a division within itself, since the Vision of Duality (and of the consequent Impossibility) belongs to the Thought, not to the Real. In spite of the split within Thought produced by the Vision of the inconsolably asymmetric Duality, the Real inescapably reiterates its Desire to transcend the state of radical solitude. In this sense, it remains radically, in the last instance untouched by the happenings on the level of Thought. Its Desire for transforming the grip of radical solitude into a bridge of transcendence through the Other is unilaterally reaffirmed in spite of the asymmetric “response.” The paradox is something that takes place but on the level of the relation, whilst in terms of singularity we are always dealing with something else: with a self-enclosed unilaterality in a state of unstoppable reiteration. (“Unstoppable” unless stopped by another intervention of a Real that can introduce its end: the Death.) Seen from the position of the Vision-in-One the effect of the paradox (always already taking place relationally) translates itself into a force of selffeeding of the Desire with itself. The “crack” of irredeemable insufficiency which lies in the heart of the relation of paradox, translated in the terms of singularity is but that flooding flow feeding into the flux of insatiable Desire of the Real. Seen in their aspect of unilaterality, these workings of our status and state of Radical Solitude are constituted as myriads of unique, radically solitary gestures of ultimately non-reflected experience reproducing themselves as disunited instances of the “operational” Real. In other words, as an experiential stance, the self-transcending move of the Real (of our own radical immanence) imposes itself as a Real in itself, as yet another instance of the non-reflected experiential that we decide to see in its singularity.

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4. To be Loved in One’s Own Radical Solitude Can we love (establish a “relation of fidelity to” and “produce a truth of”) the Other in her/his (or its) radical solitude, in her/his (or its) unmediated singularity and uniqueness while all relationism (and expectation of reciprocity) is suspended? Can we love the Other seen in her/his (or its) resistance to the bridging of her/his (or its) radically solitary self-encompassment? Another way of putting the question would be: can we establish a relation to the Other which is not relationist? Can we love (or establish a relation of fidelity generating truth) radically unilaterally? Can we relate to the Other as if correlating with the Real? Clearly, the Medium of this operation would be the Language: we are dealing with a Desire that is necessarily mediated (just as any other desire) through the Creations of the World (the “transcendental materials,” made of Language). We are compelled to presuppose (or: imagine, or: imagine a narrative of) the unavoidable recourse to the transcendental material in the process of this Desire’s actualization since it is the constitutive property of Thought and Love inasmuch as that engendering gesture of all transcendence. Departing from my declared espousal of the non-philosophical call upon thinking in correlation with the Real, I would like to propose considering the possibility of conceiving of a Love (or Loving Thought) of (the Other’s) Radical Solitude (that is to say, of the Real) in correlation with the Real. Therefore, what I am proposing, more specifically, is to conceive of a Thought which takes into account (which situates itself self-reflexively with respect to the imagined of) its engenderment within the Desire for self-transcendence (through and to the Other) of the Real while incorporating the “imaginary infrastructure” (provided by the Imagined of) Other’s Radical Solitude. Clearly, what can be imagined is only the imaginable itself. In other words, one can imagine only the situation within the World of an instance of Radical Solitude, which has been embodied by a Body “populated” with significations and by an “I,” one can imagine only that estranged Wo/Man-in-Wo/Man (an imaginary/linguistic/transcendental creation) that can be found but in the World. The activation of Thought about (or introducing the stance of Love toward) an embodied Radical Solitude immanently implies the operation of the instance and faculty of signification, that is to say, the Language. Namely, one can imagine only the radical separatedness, the inconsolable solitude of the Other in the World (or her/his/its “radical insufficiency,” in Laruelle’s words), together with the helplessness and vulnerability as intrinsic to this position. I am arguing for the possibility of establishing a relation of empathy with such a transcendental rendition of the Other’s otherness, based on the inceptive gesture of reaching out to the Other by means of enacting solidarity with her/ his (its) imagined radical solitude and insurmountable singularity. This gesture is of a hybrid character moulded out of both reflection (the transcendental, conceptual, cognitive) and of the non-reflected experiential. The empathy with the radical solitude of the Other by way of identifying one’s own enacted state 83

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of radical solitude with that of the (imagined) Other, is an act made both of the event of “living out” (le vécu) as well as of that of the mediation provided by Language (or the Transcendental). This exercise of solidarity extends also to the level of that infinite craving that “reads” itself as inconsolable nostalgia, since what is being imagined in this process is the Other’s radical solitude necessarily intimating her/his (or its) impossibility for auto-transcendence (inasmuch as that inescapable, selfenclosed Real). The enacted experience of nostalgia, of the empathic entering into the state of “impossible” craving – in the name of establishing solidarity with the Other’s radical solitude – is the instance at which the Real (or the Radical Solitude) enters the Play which is in its last instance transcendental. It is the alien body in the heart of the in the unstoppable processes of (self-) alienation: the transcendental production (or truth generation). The Thought (which is in its last instance transcendental) correlating with the Real has been invaded by a presence which is in-its-last-instance of a radically different status: that of the Real or the Radical Immanence. Yet, this invasion does not stop the process of auto-propagation of the estranging instance of the Transcendental. The self-alienation (of the Humanin-Human, as Laruelle puts it, or of the “Life-in-Life”, as I would put it without attempting to assign to this naming the status of a technical term) cannot be escaped: since, the only possible route of interplay between two instances of the Real (both the site of the Imagining Subject and the site of the Imagined) is – the mediation. The Transcendental is the only topos where two identities-inthe-last-instance can meet and interact, that is to say: always already through a Medium, always already establishing a mediated contact. Thus, the Nostalgia as the defining aspect of the Radical Loving Yearning, is not only Grief over one’s own unbeatable Radical Solitude, but also Mourning for the always already lost Other in the immediacy of her/his (or its) non-alienated Real. The experiential encapsulation nesting in the inception of the Act (of Radical Love) is “then” or “simultaneously” translated into a mediation of the imagined and identified with radical identity. (Either of the terms – “then” and “simultaneously” – is not used in the temporal sense, but in the sense of axiological primacy, and only in order to disturb it and suggest horizontality instead.) The object of our investigation that we have received through the Vision-in-One is, in fact, that hybrid of the Self-Enclosed Subjectivity Inescapably Situated as a Stranger in the World. The inceptive pure and puristic move towards a certain radical solidarity will inevitably be intercepted by Language (the Transcendental) and translated into the bordering level of conversion of the latter into solidarity with the linguistically conceivable identity-in-the-last-instance of the Other. Namely, what is imagined, identified and solidarized with is the identity-in-the-last-instance of the estranged for and in the World Wo/Man-in-Wo/Man (or “Life-in-Life”), with her/his (or its) determining idiosyncrasies (contingencies which, inasmuch as contingencies, are, by definition, the result of the impact of the Real) and their solitary uniqueness (the instance of the Radical Solitude, i.e., of the Real once again).

Thinking or loving one’s radical solitude is a position which is immanently radical also according to its Origin or according to the Site of its Operation or according to the Bearer of the Process: that is to say, according to the experience of radical solitude of the Lover (and not only of the Loved one). The bridging of solidarity with the estranged identity-in-the-last-instance arises as a result of the sense and state of unbeatable separation from the Desired One (in his/her or its Radical Solitude or Real). This radical attempt for connecting with the Other (in her/his or its Real) is made of the experience of an always already frustrated interconnecting with the radical immanence of the beloved idiosyncrasies. It is an experience of witnessing the infinite retreat in self-envelopment of those ungraspable emanations of the Real of the Loved One (i.e., of the so called “idiosyncrasies” of the loved Person), of their finite irreplaceableness. This is yet another face of the nostalgic mourning engenderment of all Love – at least of all Radical Love or of all Radical Thought of Love – inside of and for the kernel of Radical Solitude. And such is each Thinking Positioning in this Translucent World Full of Protrusions of Thickness of the Lived Real.

4. The Question of Universalism Revisited: The Universal as Radically Solitary Position This short meditation undoubtedly resonates with what can be identified as universalistic overtones in the language and the stance of my author’s “voice.” And here we are again, returning to the question of universalism. To reiterate the already stated, elaborated and embraced position: concurring with François Laruelle and Alain Badiou, I will reaffirm my belief that every thought is immanently universalistic, since the pretension of universality is constitutively inbuilt in the Desire of Thought. This pretension is unavoidable, as is the naïve or primal compulsion to attain “the most accurate,” “the most truthful truth” – that is to say, the Truth – of an Event or of the World in every thinking endeavour. This naïve compulsion is what gives birth to Thought, and it is certainly prior to any self-reflection, to any auto-referential self-correctives of the thinking process that introduce criticality and (political) responsibility into itself. This megalomanic positioning is immanent to Thought, it is generative of its Desire and it is unavoidably and radically lonely. In that ultimately fragile, vulnerable and weak position of fantasized omnipotence of universality one is radically solitary. The Thought is alone facing but its own Desire for (the Fantasy of) the ultimate Truth as for the impossible immediacy of the Other’s Real. This primal, primitive universalism – which I claim to be unavoidably present in any desiring of Thought – is therefore radically solitary, creating a self-enclosed Universe (“langage-univers” as Laruelle puts it) of its own. This does not mean that the Thought of the World, versed in the rules and vicissitudes of the Transcendental (among other, the “Rule of History”), should succumb to this primitiveness and

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forget what it knows of the World of Difference, of its Multiple Face and the position of criticality the latter dictates. Saying the same in a somewhat different language, I will reaffirm my position that these claims of such universalism do not exclude the self-awareness of the thinking subject (or agency) about her/his constitutive entanglement with the social-cultural-political context and historical background of the available transcendental material. These two presuppositions holding the status of grounding beliefs (or, for that matter, axioms) for the discursiveness employed here do not need to be regarded as contradicting or as colliding within the same argumentation. I am assigning them a fundamentally different “ontological” status: the universalistic gesture of thought occupies the most primitive territory, the one spreading at the Limit of Language (or at the edge of Badiou’s Void), whereas the critical position in-formed by History (politically responsible stance based on the “awareness of the cultural difference”) is a purely linguistic product, it is an immanent product of the immanently linguistic (or in Laruellian speech, of the “Transcendental”). Put in Badiou’s terms, the Thinking Subject always already establishes a relation of Fidelity to an Event, which is in itself (inasmuch as the evental, the experiential) a Void (in the “midst” of the Linguistic): the unutterable as the very tissue of the immanently experiential. However, this Void is at the heart of a Situation that can be but linguistically conceived and established a Truth of “through an endless sequence of investigations.” Thus, the emergence of a New Truth is the fruit of Linguistic Labor, however – around the pre-linguistic, around the Void of the unrepeatable, unique experience for the purposes of whose exchange with the Other (thus, on the level of the Sign) one re-invents the Language. Fidelity to an Event is what re-emerges as the truth process or a generic procedure16 establishing a certain generic subset. According to Badiou, truth does not have an ontological status per se. Nevertheless, its being can be described by mathematics and more precisely through Cohen’s generic set theory. Still, “the truth is true only for its subjects, not for the spectators.”17 This double awareness is at play in the efforts present in this text and consists of the protecting of the process of theoretical production from the arrogance of the totalitarian move of universalization. In other words, it provides us with the vigilance of theoretical responsibility for the simultaneous work of the two parallel tendencies/desires: the universalistic pretension of the singular subject and the historic accountability for the transcendental material at use. This state of vigilance, of that at least double (and potentially, multiple) awareness is again a position of radical solitude. One is taking into consideration the Limit to His/Her Thought and Truth imposed by the Other (and his/her or its Difference). The Real of the Other’s Difference is what the historically responsible agency of truth production faces; this is a radically solitary position. Radical solitude and the pretension of universality it implies is a state which also the historically responsible thinking agency is compelled to find her/himself over and over again into. 86

THE REAL AND “I”: ON THE LIMIT AND THE SELF

A Post Scriptum: Post Mortem (To my father) The experience of Loss of a loved one is complex and comprises many intersecting layers of a heterogeneous origin: some of them of linguistic provenance and character, the others of the purely non-reflected experiential. The latter consists of sheer pain, suffering made of ache, throbbing resulting from the simple experience of being severed from the loved one. Regardless of our convictions about, beliefs and interpretations of the “nature” of (any) connection with and attachment to the Other: whether one claims its always already imaginary, phantasmatic, linguistically mediated character or insists on its specific substance (inasmuch as essence), the experience of grieving itself is that of pure suffering inflicted by the sensation of being severed from the Loved One. Even for a psyche submerged in fantasies (convictions) about the purely phantasmatic character of its relation (of Love) with the Lost Loved One, the state of grief is – primarily or constitutively – made of the non-reflected, the ultimately evasive to any reflection Experiential of Sheer Pain. The irrevocable – radical – parting with the (phantasmatic or “in-the-Real”) Loved One can take place but into-the-purely-Experiential (or in the Event of the Death/Radical Loss of a Loved One, prior to any reflection/truth generation), that is to say, into-the-Real. The irrevocability of the parting-in-the-Real is sensed as the denuded Real, stripped of any meaning, of any significance that “will make sense.” The very Event and Instance – as a state “of being”, of “existence”, an ontological status of “being-into-the-Real” – of Irrevocability is but the presentification of the Real in its absolute form – cleansed from the soothing, i.e., estranging workings of the World. It is the sheer Thrust of the Absurd – beyond Language. It is the brutal and senseless Trauma brought about by and as the Real. Real-of-Grieving is conditioned and defined by its attachment to a unique, unrepeatable Event of an irreplaceable Singularity of a Person, by the fact that the mourning and longing for the lost loved one is but mourning for that particular Person. One inconsolably mourns the loss of a concrete person. That particular and concrete Person is a “particular one” and “concrete” because he (or she) is that singular and unique Human-in-Human, entrapped in his (or her) own now dissolved Real. The concrete person is concrete because he (she) has always and inescapably been that concrete Human-in-Human or – Real (of a Person), who has always escaped into Estrangement, as a Stranger to our always already failed attempts to grasp him (or her) in his (or her) Real. The brutality of the Trauma of the Severance-in-Real can hurt and wound, it can lastingly bring pain only when “cloned” (Laruelle) from a sample from the realities of the World. The numb, organic experience of Pure Pain brought about by the radical severance from the Loved One survives only if planted upon a phantasm, interbreeding with a signification (a memory that gives rise to a state of nostalgia, endless desire for endless repetition of gestures loaded with a certain meaning). The absurd, beyond Thought Real – both in savoured closeness as well as in severance with the Loved One – is kept alive by its 87

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interface with Thought (through sentimental phantasms, or Re-MemberingPhantasms, that is to say, Memory), by its acts of cloning with the Language. And in grieving longing for the lost loved one, in mourning in which the sensation of pure pain is predominant in composition vis-à-vis the soothing elements of Estrangement (the Workings of Reflection – the Transcendental), Phantasm is coloured, invaded by the sensation of the brutal absurdity of the Real. Remembrance (re-membering old and new Phantasms of Desire, i.e., of Love) is projected by the dark, thick sensation of the Real-of-Love and the Real-of-Loss. The event of longing for this (even if and even though fantasized, imaginary or symbolic) loved one (in-dividual) is real, it is in-the-Real. And the dark, thundering Real of this Love invades, and colours in black the brilliant remembrances of Love – and what takes rise is a Sheer-Shriek-ofHurt. The blackness and the luminosity, the absence of colour in the Singularity of Pain and the radiant colourfulness of Craving Memories begin to merge, to create a fusion which will be the gloomy point of genesis of new light and colour. A Nostalgic Song of Love will begin to compete with the Shriek of Ache, in a dolorous yet hopeful struggle to replace it. Put another way, the Real (of the sheer Trauma) and the Thought (of the World of Language) are the coagulating elements of this emerging brilliance of renewed Desire for the Other – of the Anew-Born-Love.

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NOTES 1. Peter Hallward, Badiou: A Subject to Truth (Minneapolis/London: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 250 (hereafter cited in notes as Badiou). 2. Laruelle, PNP, 168. 3. Hallward, Badiou, 250. 4. Laruelle, PNP, 168. 5. Ibid., 97. 6. Laruelle, TI, 93: « Bien que fondée comme pouvoir absolu (quoique fini) sur une immanence pure qui ne contient pas la moindre parcelle de transcendance, la science n’exclut pas définitivement celel-ci, au contraire, mais elle exige que la trenscendance des objets et de ses représentations participe elle aussi de cette essence absolue ou de cette phénoménalité toute immanente. » 7. Laruelle, TI, 93. 8. Ibid., 149. 9. Ibid., 150. 10. Laruelle, PNP, 13: « Comment expliquer cette situation continûment révolutionnaire, en définitive conservatrice, ennemie des vraies mutations? La règle structurale de la décision philosophique – règle transcendantale aussi, puisqu’elle s’affecte elle-même en affectant ce qu’elle organise et distribue - c’est en effet l’Unité-des-contraires, la coextension circulaire – à quelques décalages près – de l’Un et de la Dyade. Or cette règle ultime des agrégations conceptuelles en régime philosophique n’est pas brisée, elle est épurée et devient plutôt immanente dans le sérialisme philosophique contemporain et même dans la déconstruction où l’un des opposés de la Dyade est remplacé simplement par l’Autre-qui-n’est-pas. Bien entendu elle règne plus que jamais lorsqu’elle demeure dissimulée, comme par example dans une certaine pratique ‘rationelle’ et ‘critique’ des concepts qui n’en est qu’une forme particulièrement figée et obnubilée par sa dénégation. Aucune philosophie ne peut suspendre la validité de cette règle qui paraît ‘naturelle’ au philosophe autant que la tonalité au musicien classique ou le capitale au capitaliste. [emphasis of F.L.] Tout au plus a-t-il été possible de l’entemer, de la solliciter, de distendre la Dyade d’une altérité ou d’une Différance: celle-ci est maintenant l’Un sur le mode de l’Autre au lieu de l’être sur le mode de l’Etre ou du deux. Mais rien de fondamental n’a été gagné par là […] . » 11. Laruelle, TI, 93. 12. See: Laruelle, TI, 145-150, although the procedure of « «unilateralisation » has been amply explicated throughout the entire opus of François Laruelle, at a great number of places in virtually all of his books. 13. See: Laruelle, Théorie des Étrangers: Science des hommes, démocratie, nonpsychanalyse (Paris: Éditions Kimé), 221-234, namely the sections : «Le Réel ou le Joui-sans-Jouissance » and « La jouissance : 1) comme organon du Réel » of Chapter III (« Principes de la non-psychanalyse »).

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14. Rosi Braidotti, Metamorphoses: Towards a Materialist Theory of Becoming (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2002), 23. 15. Ibid., 119. 16. What Badiou calls a truth process or a generic procedure is, ontologically, “the coming to be of this subset, through the succession of finite investigations that ‘test’ the elements of the situation with respect to a supplementary element, which is the trace in the situation of the vanished event. A subject is in a sense the active face, the ‘naturing nature’ of these explorations, materially indiscernible from their existence” (Hallward, Badiou, 134). Hallward’s quotation of Badiou’s is taken from “Platon et/ou Aristote-Leibniz: Théorie des ensembles et théorie des Topos sous l’oeil du philosophe” in L’Objectivité mathématique: Platonismes et structures formelles, ed. Marco Panza (Paris: Masson, 1995), 79. 17. See: Hallward, Badiou, 128-134.

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CHAPTER 5

THE GRAIN OF THE REAL INSIDE THE IDENTITY 1. Thinking in Fidelity to the Real (Behind the Identity) How are we to think our situatedness within an identity, such as that of a “Woman” (or any other identitary subjection) while observing one of the main principles of François Laruelle’s non-philosophy – namely, by way of situating the Thought in correlation with the Real? Or, rephrasing the question, how can we think the problems of identitary subjection while escaping the vicious circle of the philosophy thinking itself-conceptualization in relation to another conceptualization, detached from the reality of that which is subject to the particular process of generating truth? How can we produce truths that establish a relation of fidelity (in Alain Badiou’s parlance) to the reality that is being questioned, by way of stepping out of the enclosure of the philosophical self-mirroring? Or rather, how can we proceed with the act of theorizing a particular “sample” of our social-cultural reality that is an identity in which we are inescapably always already finding ourselves, without falling into the trap of becoming accomplices in the perennial play of Philosophy’s own auto-referential self-legitimization? That is to say, how can we theorize by way of drawing legitimacyin-the-last-instance for our insights, not from the doctrinal compounds made of transcendental material, but from the authority of the Real upon which resides the reality that is at stake in that quest for understanding? The non-philosophy of Laruelle engages into the grand project of establishing the theoretical grounds for a thinking that can escape the impasse of Thought’s specularization, of auto-reflexivity and auto-legitimization, as the defining constituent of philosophy. And the unavoidable route of accomplishing this, according to the non-philosophy, is establishing the unilaterally situated Thought, devoid of any relationism and relativism produced by and situated within the doctrinal horizon/s, a Thought of Singularity which (merely unilaterally) correlates but with the Real. I shall attempt to make use of this Laruellian proposition for the purposes of creating a thinking stance that would be faithful in the last instance to the reality of the lived identitary subjection. But that will also be faithful to the reality of the transcendental identitary frame (the identity subjugation as prescribed by the World) acting in such a compelling way upon the Real ((of) the Human-in-Human) that it itself acts as an instance of the Real. Since my trajectory of thought here is evidently establishing a relation of attuning with the ruling overtones of the non-philosophical voicing/s of Laruelle, it is important to note that the language I employ here is not in a seamless correspondence with that of the non-philosophical theory. On the contrary, it deviates at some important points, and in reference to some key notions in the discussion. What is in this text and otherwise (in virtually the entire contemporary theory) known as identity or identitary subjection, with the language of non-philosophy, it is called “the Stranger.” On the other hand, Identity, 91

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according to the vocabulary of non-philosophy, is always the “Identity-in-thelast-instance,” that is to say – the Real. This reality – the identity that we seek to understand, generate a certain truth of – belongs to the World it has been made of the Transcendental, it is a discursive, purely conceptual product/ion (and action: living reality of the Transcendental) that takes place in, by way of and for the World. Yet it is lived by and ruled by the unruly Real (or by a particular unruly real). Thus, the attempt would be to engage in a process of truth-production whereby the ultimate source of legitimacy, the arbiter-in-the-last-instance would be the unique, lived reality of the subject of our quest for understanding, and not the adept observance of the laws of interplay of transcendental accomplishments (philosophical discourses). This is an attempt to be accountable to what is not accountable to the Transcendental – the reality of the lived identitary subjection that always already escapes the Transcendental (the Discursive) seeking to encompass it and fix it by turning it into a meaning. Even if our task is to understand the rules and laws, the strategies of Power distribution within the Discursive Frameworks producing and prescribing the identitary subjection, that which in the reality of that subjection evades the assigned meanings and possibilities of interpretation should not be suppressed but become the source for a new language. Or in Badiou’s terms, the voice or the clamour of “evental site” should become the stage of a new language to emerge, which will initially, perhaps, be in an utter dissonance with the “linguistically available materials” and disturb all the “discourses that make sense.” On the level of the transcendental material, this new and singular Truth will be something that does not make sense, while on the level of the Event (of the “unheard of Reality”) it will have an explanatory power, initially recognizable perhaps only to those who inhabit the evental site.1 A theoretical undertaking of this kind should consist of escaping the (philosophical) mode of thinking in which the philosophical decision would be the arbiter-in-the-last-instance over the reality at stake, that is to say, the Identity as ruled by the Real. Decisionism – as to what the/a reality is about – is that which has been identified by Laruelle as the very origin of philosophical self-sufficiency and specularization whereby one (speculative) decision draws legitimacy from another. Philosophy legitimizes philosophy, and what is, in fact, taking place in this process of narcissistic mirroring is philosophy making claims over that which is extraneous to it, over the/a reality that it seeks to explain – establish a truth of.2 Such an act of Thought is taking place in a way which implies discounting the Real ruling the (a) Reality in its uncontrollable and ungraspable ways inasmuch as the Unthinkable (aspect of any reality), while appropriating that same Reality (of the Identity in question) solely according to the rules of its governing decision. Thus, together with the gesture of establishing an immaculately conceptual possession over the (a) Reality, the (philosophical) Thought also performs an infantile act of engulfing the dispossessed (of any authority) lump of the Real. This is precisely “the relation of the mixed” (le rapport de mixte), the

“amphibological reality,” the “limitrophy of the real,” in which, according to Laruelle, the philosophical generation of truth comprises that which the nonphilosophy strives to surpass – or rather, bypass – by thinking in correlation with the Real. Relational inter-conditioning of concepts is that which necessarily brings Thought to the state and status of Unity-of-(reconciled)-contrarieties, in total, renders it unitary (by way of performing a unification into a Orderly Whole – a Cosmos). (Even when the tension is seemingly preserved through the relation of opposition or paradox between participating contrarieties in the Orderly Whole, what is in fact taking place is their “reconciliation” by way of transforming them into accomplices in the accomplishment of the Order, Structure or Cosmos.) And only to remind ourselves of what has been at length explicated in the previous chapters of this book, the Unity (in the sense of an accomplished Whole, Cosmos, Structure, Organism…, not in the sense of an affirmed Oneness inasmuch as Singularity) is, always already dualistic – synthesizing the two or leaving them in a relation of split (which is still holding them together).3 Thought’s correlation with the Real is an instance of its (Thought’s) unilateral situating with respect to the Real, whereas the latter “responds” to this act of unilateralization with a “non-response,” that is to say, it remains in the last instance indifferent to it (to that pertaining to Thought proper and exclusively, to the Transcendental). (In fact, and to be more precise, the act of unilateralization is characterized by an indifference-in-the-last-instance vis-à-vis the response of the Other also by the Agency of that act.) In such a theoretical undertaking, which does not answer, in the ultimate instance, to any Doctrine (Discourse), but to the Reality that is being explored and to its Identity-in-the-last-instance, which is the elusive Real (participating in that Reality in a way that is deciding) – one faces, yet again, the necessity to operate but with the Transcendental. Thinking operates with that which is immanent to it and, more importantly, with that over which it can claim (legitimate) authority – with the realm of the Thought, with Concepts or Language, with Conceptual-Linguistic Structures or Compounds and their intrinsic modes and laws of generation. Thinking thinks with Thought, but it can decide (which is in itself a philosophical gesture: production of an axiom) to be accountable, in the ultimate instance, to the Reality that has always already been assumed by the vicissitudes of the Real. Thus, the resistance of the Real to Thought’s aspirations to grasp it by enfolding it into a Concept, the limitations that the Real will impose on the pretensions of Thought, will be the authority-in-the-last-instance to the theoretical claims of its “nature,” “essence,” etc. The Limit, the occlusion of Thought stemming from the absurd Real, will be the instance of legitimization (in the sense according a degree of validity) of a Truth that immanently and inescapably strives to appropriate it by turning it into a controllable Meaning. The Real remains indifferent to these processes of Truth Generation. However, Thought is affected by the behaviour of the Real. Its arrogance is being restrained and its aspirations are being disciplined by the undisciplined responses of the disorderly Real. At precisely these points (of resistance), Thought should proffer 93

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its silence, relegate the Real to its own domain, and thereof – possibly, attempt to situate itself with respect to those cracks shoved into the Language by that unintelligent and banal Real. Those cracks will become the voices of dissonance which may give birth to an unheard of and singular appropriation of Language and ultimately, perhaps, contribute in some dramatic transformation of it (the Language). According to Laruelle’s (non-philosophical) “science of the humans,” put in the technical terms of this theory, one can think Humanity (which is always already that of the World, made of the Transcendental) in correspondence with the Real only if taken as a residual of the Transcendental that has been lived by the Real (also called the “Ego” in the non-analysis* – the non-philosophical re-appropriation of psychoanalysis that can also be called “non-Freudian and non-Lacanian analysis”).4 Humanity (the “Representation”) is always already lived by the non-analytical Ego (or the Real, or the “Moi-Un” – the “cause of the Representation”), and this lived Humanity (both its agency and its positive reality) is called the Stranger (l’ Etranger).5 Humanity is but the transcendental material (philosophy), conceptual complexes and compounds interpreting and situating the Human into the World (always already made of these very interpretations, analogous to the psychoanalytical Language, or to the Symbolic actively engaging the Imaginary as its equally relevant, integrated component). However, Humanity is inescapably appropriated through or by the Stranger in order to be or by virtue of being “received and lived in the Ego.”6 It is important to note that, according to the non-philosophical theory of the Human (“the science of humans”) – resorting to its own (re-) invention of a theoretical-scientific apparatus based on the transcendental material provided by psychoanalysis termed as non-analysis – the Ego (or the Real, in all of its names) remains indifferent to all the misfortunes and fortunes of the Stranger. Indifferent to the re-structurings and re-positionings, internal fissures and aporetic conflicts, then to the reconciling unifying moves of synthesis and dialectic resolutions, all that belonging to and taking place on the level of representation (of humanity), that it to say on the level of Humanism. This indifference of the non-reflected and non-reflectable Real intimates the gesture of unilateral difference, always already performed by the Stranger (the bearer of Humanity/Humanism) vis-à-vis the Ego, i.e., the Real. Yet, it lives from and is being lived by the Real. Thus, even if the Thought suffers from the ambition to define the Real, to establish a relation of possession or of reciprocity of any kind, the “numbness,” the radical indifference of the Real disables any relation except that of non-relation, i.e., of unilaterality. The gesture of unilateralization is one of the key theoretical procedures applied by non-philosophy which render it non-dualistic – i.e., non-dichotomous and non-oppositional, and therefore, non-unitary (in the sense of unity of difference). The Stranger is conceived in a unilateralizing posture of Thought, as unilaterally positioned (vis-à-vis the Real). The vision (in-One) of this dual “structure” is non-dualistic: since what is being envisioned is the radical asymIt is also called non-psychoanalysis, but the adopted technical term by Laruelle is “nonanalysis”. (See: Laruelle, TE, 172.)

*

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metry of unilateral ek-stasis (“extase-sans-horizon”)7 of the two notions. There is no relation, no reciprocity, no pretension (by Thought) to usurp the authority-of-the-last-instance of the Human-in-Human (inasmuch as the Real), whatever Thought may think – it remains an a priori for the non-philosophy – the Real radically does “not care” and remains untouched by it. Hence, no internal fissures and no schism into the “tender flesh” of the utmost-intimate-Self have been “possibilized” (as Laruelle would put it) by the “science of the humans.” To sum up, thinking Humanity non-philosophically, establishing a (nonphilosophical) science of the Humans (a Theory/Science/Thought of the Human and of Humanity “cleansed” of the intrusive move of reduction of the Human-in-Human to its interpretation by Humanism) that takes into account the Real, is something founded upon and ensured by the act of unilateralization. The Thought of unilateral differentiation brings forth the concept of the Stranger, of the lived Humanity (lived by the Ego, into the Real). The Stranger is estranged from the radically immanent Self (the Ego), dwelling principally on the territory of the Transcendental. However, through his/her rootedness in, or rather, constitutive intertwining with the Radical Immanence, the Stranger proffers the theoretical tool of the Residual of the Transcendental that has been lived in the Real – the lived Humanity (or, the lived Humanism). “The experience of the human of his (her) humanity is that of the simple transcendence, of an exteriority which does not transcend for the second time on the basis of a (re-) folding over itself, which is given one-time-every-time without being regiven.”8

The sheer experience of Humanity is, thus, the one occurring in an immediate fashion through that instance of mediation called the Stranger, while always already remaining anterior to any further re-creation of the Transcendental through reflection which is inevitably reflection reflecting itself.

2. Who is the Sufferer: The Stranger or the Real? “L’homme est cet Idiot qui existe aussi comme Humanité universelle ou Etranger” Laruelle, Théorie des Étrangers9

The Ego – in non-analytic terms – or the Real, the Human-in-Human, the Identity-in-the-last-instance is the Human in and inasmuch as that utter void of reflection – the Human-in-Human devoid of Transcendence, the Ultimate Instance, which is that of fundamental vulnerability and irreconcilably nontranscended insufficiency.10 It is the instance of the radical solitude, an instance to which the Language or the Transcendental is an exteriority, and it is only through this exteriority that it can survive in the World. It is radically “insufficient only when it comes to thinking, and precisely because it is itself foreclosed to thought,”11 and therefore it is radically insufficient and vulnerable when it comes to its survival in the World. The Real is clearly the instance beyond Thought, beyond Language – the silent, quiet – the quietist Ego – where we all reside in the last instance, it is our radical identity. This “beyond,” in Laruelle’s theory, is not a “meta” – it is rather an “epekeina,” certain “over 95

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there somewhere” that does not establish a vertical or any other pseudo-spatial relation with respect to the Stranger and her/his World. Rather, it inhabits an ou-topos, being a singularity which, by definition, obliterates, engulfs the Space. What is more significant, it is that its difference from and indifference to Thought, to the Transcendental and to the Human-as-the-Bearer-of-the-Transcendental (the Stranger) is unilateral: non-relational, therefore, non-unitary and non-dualistic. Just as is the Stranger (the Thought which could invent the Stranger), unilaterally non-relational, non-unitary and non-dualistic. In other words, and once again, there is no split implied in the Human (-in-Human), since there is no constitutive difference (of the Human, seen in her/his identity-in-the-last-instance) between the Stranger and the Ego because of the unilateral differentiation (vis-à-vis one another). Each of the instances is seen in its radical identity, in its singularity, in its own Real (or “Real” when the reality of the Transcendental is concerned) – in the ungraspable, elusive and uncontrollable by conceptualization uniqueness of its reality. In some way, the Transcendence (Thought, Language) inasmuch as an experience lived by the Human-in-Human in the form of the Stranger, and ruled by the Real, urges to be considered as yet another actuality of the Real. Still, the positive reality of the Stranger, or the “substance” it is made of, or the instance it represents, constitutes and is constituted by is – the Transcendental. Theory will unilateralize the two instances, for the sake of a non-unitary (non-unifying of differences) Thought. For the sake of a non-decisional (of the Real/ity), non-philosophical, non-dualistic thinking, theory will establish a unilateral non-relation of the two instances that establish a certain mixed (mixte) cohabiting via the Stranger without opposing them, without establishing any dichotomy. This theory will search for the points where the Two meet, entangle and co-produce realities, and attempt to “see,” to think these points inasmuch as singularities, that is, in a non-relationist way. In the strict sense, the Real does not inhabit the Stranger proper, the latter being constituted only of Transcendence12. Yet again, Transcendence comprised by and through the Stranger is always already entrenched in a (the) real of a Human (-in-Human) or of a Life (-in-Life) and re-appropriated by the incongruities of a certain radical immanence. Technically speaking, it would be a falsification of Laruelle’s thought to say that the Transcendence (rendered by the Stranger) could be lived by the Real. Namely, the creator of non-philosophy insists on the indifference of the Real to the “humanist processes” that take place in the domain of the Stranger and the World, as inherently philosophical (transcendental) ones. Parallel to this insistence that holds the status of an axiom in his theory, Laruelle also makes the following claim of divergence: “One should note that the Stranger is not the relation of the Ego with the World, a synthetic relation of reciprocity and convertibility. It is a relation, which is relatively autonomous, extracted from the World (of the meta-human mixed) and which is received and lived in-Ego and in-Human without being a relation to the Ego.”13

The notion of the Residual is, thus, based on the founding presupposition about the intrinsic intertwining of the Transcendental and the Real. And this is clearly stated in the following paragraph: “In effect, that residual cannot be constituted by the sole and pure transcendence, supposed to be empirically abstracted from the mixed and opposed to the immanence of the Ego […] We are not making of the Ego yet another metaphysical and idealist use and are, consequently, not saying that it only implies a dissolution without any residue of the amphibology of the Ego and the Xenos.”14

Still, it remains Laruelle’s strong claim that the Real is radically indifferent to the experiences of the Stranger.15 Put in terms that are not – in the technical sense of the word – non-philosophical, one can say that the Stranger is always already touched by the Real – or rather, in the grasp of the Real – whereas the Real continues to be untouched by the concerns of the Stranger and by the World. Laruelle states quite clearly that “(the Real) invalidates the most fundamental Greek presuppositions about ‘man’s place in the World’,” that it is “the end of the cosmo-politic paradigm.”16 However, this does not mean utter dissociation between the two instances and, hence, constitutive split. Quite the contrary: through the Stranger, the Real (the radically immanent Ego) experiences, in its singular mode of the unrepeatable lived, Humanity and the World, while still remaining that disengaged instance of a certain Beyond. The dynamic is asymmetric and the two instances relate without being relationally inter-constituted, creating an interface of unilateral kind. The relation of the Real, or the Ego, to Humanity or to the World is explained in the following way: “There is also the transcendence in general, in which the Ego does not engage itself, but which is engaged by it (by the Ego) as ‘human’.”17

The Human, according to Laruelle, “extracts” the Being (l’Être, which in Laruelle’s theory is a purely philosophical/transcendental creation) from its “philosophical form […] giving it a real, purely human essence or an identity.”18 This operation takes place in-the-Ego (en-Ego) and not beginning with or issuing from the Ego (“non pas depuis ou à partir de l’Ego”).19 To sum up, a Human’s experience of (her/his own) humanity is that of “a simple transcendence, of an exteriority which does not transcend for the second time on the basis of a (re-) folding (“(re-) pli”) over itself, which is given one-time-each-time without being re-given.”20 Thus, the experience of the transcendence which takes place in the Real (or in the Ego) takes place in that instance of the non-reflected, preceding any auto-reflexive auto-transcendence of the Transcendental – it is a sheer experience of the transcendental (Humanity) inasmuch as an exteriority which happens to the Ego-in-Ego and in-the-Ego (not “beginning with the Ego”). I would argue that through this theoretical move (enabling unilaterally initiated “exchange” while preserving the Identity-in-the-last-instance as the One of Singularity), the danger of inaugurating yet another ontology (or non-ontology) of a dichotomous fissure (thus, of Dualism) in the heart of the “Human’s” constitution has been effectively avoided. Laruelle is clear – and rather exhaustive in his clarification – that all which takes place on the level of the Stranger 97

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is “processed,” lived through the Real. Finally, all experience which is in its last instance (the) non-reflected (or rather, which “represents” or constitutes the instance itself of non-reflection) – is but the Real. In line with this, Laruelle speaks of the “Joui” of the Real, taking place inside the instance of radical immanence, while issuing from – and into – the Jouissance whose territory proper is Transcendence, that is to say, the instance of interpretation, representation – the Language. Yet again, the radical quietism of the Real with respect to the World, begets the dilemma as to whether it can create the possibility of putting it into such theoretical use that would create another unintended dualism, in spite of the assurances against it provided by the procedure of unilateralization. More specifically, I am referring to the possibility of a split use of the “explanatory infrastructure” of Laruelle’s theory in spite of the thinking stance of preserving Oneness on the level of the Ego or the Real. In other words, Laruelle’s theory offers the promise of the untouched integrity of the experience of radical immanence by protecting the Identity-in-the-last-instance from the philosophically produced split, and this promise is secured by the principle of Thought’s correlating with this Oneness. However, the purported utter linguistic detachment of the Real may infuse the use of Language with the sense of radical incapacity to embrace the desire for improving the conditions of the Human-in-Human in this World and, hence – of its obsolescence. Although the Real is the identity-in-the-last-instance of everything of humanist provenience that can be experienced, of all that might take place in the World (ruled by the Language), still – it is essentially beyond Language, mute. Laruelle’s claim is (intended as) unequivocal and repeated in many places and ways throughout the entire body of text of his opus: the real Ego possesses radical (but non-exclusive) autonomy.21 Thus, the question is: Is it essentially linguistically incompetent? (Does the “Idiot” aspect of the Stranger come from the irreparably linguistically incapacitated Real of the Human-in-Human?) Furthermore, does the defining seclusion of the Real from the Language not, in some way, imply a constitutive division at the very heart of the Human-in-Human? Resorting to philosophical terminology, let us say that such an implication would be more a political rather than an ontological one. By “political” I mean the (dis-) engagement in the World that the non-philosophy seems to profess which comes down to the “political” disbelief in the pertinence of any efforts to reshape the World. If nothing else, one would expect, to say the least, a sort of a “singularistic” political stance of professing action against singular instances of oppression: in the vein of the political engagement advocated in Alain Badiou’s Ethics consisting of the acting against isolated, solitary instances of oppression without the necessary construction of an entire ideological universe explicating and justifying the action.22 This position enables activism related to those inhabiting the “evental site,” those whose suffering is invisible and whose oppression is unintelligible through the existing forms of discursiveness.23 As for the question of the possible “(non-) ontological” implication of constitutive dualism, I would dismiss that possibility, since, as explicated at

length in this and the previous chapters, the Identity-in-the-last-instance of all World’s happenings is but – the Real, the One-in-One, the Human-in-Human inasmuch as radical immanence whose Oneness is a unilateral matter. This is a position of inherent disabling of any possibility to (philosophically) inaugurate a constitutive division within the Human-in-Human and in the Vision-in-One of Her/Him and of her/his Estranged Self in this World. At this point it is important to raise the following question: if the division and the inner-conflicts (the constitutive splits of human subjectivity or of the sense of Selfhood) can be brought about but by the Transcendental, if they are in the-last-instance philosophically generated, then who suffers in the last instance from the anxieties that accompany these processes? Is it the Stranger in her/his humanist (transcendental) aspect, or is it the Real (participating in that “mixture” called Stranger)? Or rather, where does the identity-in-thelast-instance of the Suffering reside? Laruelle’s answer would be: in the Real. In fact, he explicitly states this in the elaboration of his proposition for a non-philosophical appropriation of psychoanalysis called non-analysis. Namely, speaking of “Joui” – which belongs to the realm of the Real – Laruelle says: “It is the undivided (of) pain – yet not determined by it – as the undivided lived of joy, but never their synthesis, not even immanent.”24

Still, the question remains: If the Real is indifferent to the specific properties of the Stranger (inasmuch as transcendental), and linguistically utterly incompetent, how can it suffer (for) the “violence/s of metaphysics” occurring in the World (of the Stranger)? Put differently, if the identity-in-the-last-instance of the suffering is in the Real, while the latter is being in a defining way indifferent to the Transcendental, then can we assume that, in Laruelle’s non-philosophy, the Real suffers the suffering but not what the suffering is about/what is suffered from/for? The question that I am about to ask is not about resorting to the use of an example within an argument, neither a try to test the applicability of this theory, but an attempt to make use of Laruelle’s science of the humans in a tentative theorematic interrogation of a concrete question. Thus, If I am suffering from an “inflicted sense of dignity” (=Transcendental) of my “identity as a Woman” (=Transcendental), am I really suffering from an inflicted sense of dignity or am I, in the last instance (that of the Real), merely suffering the suffering inasmuch as the suffered? In Théorie des Etrangers, we read: “The Joui-which-is-nothing-but-the-Joui is not the result or the product of an operation of transcendence of the jouissance, it is the Joui-in-Joui or immanent (to) itself, rather than to the jouissance that would give or constitute it.”25

Thus, the “Joui,” the “Lived” – i.e., the Real, is given or constituted by the “Jouissance” (which is transcendental by “nature,” that is, in its positive reality) and yet again, as such, as the Real proper, as the “Joui-which-is-notingbut-Joui,” it is neither a result nor a product of the “transcendent operation of jouissance.” Re-situating this paragraph within the entire setting of Laruelle’s theory, we find it under the light of a theory that allows us to re-read it and re-tell it in the following – perhaps more clarifying – way. Although the 99

Jouissance/the Transcendental can – and always already does – issue into/ render itself as a lived experience – the “Joui,” the latter, as the identity-inthe-last-instance of the lived jouissance, is produced elsewhere – in its own radical immanence. Therefore, the “Joui,” the Real of/as the Lived, is another, autonomous occurrence – event, phenomenon, or mathematically put – a separate unit/set – that has been auto-produced on one level (the Real) upon the intervention of another (the Transcendental). The two occurrences are in their last instance (that of radical immanence) unilaterally generated and positioned, and seen in their last instance (of radical immanence) they are non-related and non-reciprocal. Finally, let us not forget that unilaterality of the difference between the two instances and the in-division of the Human (-in-Human) is the founding principle of the nonphilosophical discourse, the point of gravity of all that has been said and will be said with the Language of this theoretical project.

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At this point, it still seems virtually impossible to locate the point, or – if it is not a question of location, then – to conceive of a process of immediacy of communication (or, perhaps, translation) between the two instances and the two respective genera of occurrences. Surely, what is at stake here is emphatically not a synthesis – a gesture of unification of the two components into a binary construct – but precisely the possibility of communication, of interface between the two instances. Since, I would argue, a fissure, a certain schismatic status is being implied in the very tissue of the most immediate and most intimate (radical and immanent) experiences of the Human, if the Real in its utter muteness – which, as it happens, participates in the genesis of the Stranger – remains inalterably and implacably indifferent and impeded in relation to the concerns of the Transcendental within the Stranger. This absolute indifference would render any flexion and inflexion or, if nothing else, any infliction brought upon the Stranger as nothing but a hallucination for the Identity-in-the-last-instance. If the Real is (the “topos” and the “Material” of) the Identity-in-the-last-instance, and if it always already discounts in an absolute way the relevance of the questions tormenting the Stranger, then, one might conclude, and in terms of this particular theory – it is irrelevant (in the last instance) if one suffers from infliction on her/his “dignity” inasmuch as a Woman or Gay, or Black, or a Citizen of the Third and Impoverished World, and so on. Can one say that contents of infliction is irrelevant to the Real, the latter being mere receptacle of the de-signified Suffering? And are we not being unjust (or “unjust”) – that is to say, not “Caring-of-the-Other” – if we put it so?26 Or, in other words, if the Real bears only the “suffered” and has no bearing on what is suffered from or about, then the sufferings of the inflicted “dignity” of an identity (or of the being on good terms with oneself inasmuch as that particular identity) bear no relevance-in-the-last-instance. Finally, are we to understand that one’s malaise around one’s status as a Woman

– or Gay, or Citizen of the Third World, etc. – is ultimately immaterial to one’s identity-in-the-last-instance, which is that of the voiceless Real? It is only fair to say that Laruelle’s non-philosophical opus neither offers nor provides solid grounds for an explicit or unequivocal response to a question such as this one. At this point, we are left with the possibility of venturing an investigation into the potentiality of this discourse for creating an insight into the possible ways of interface between the two instances that might accord the legitimacy of the Real to the humanist anxieties of identity (or simply, render them Real). Surely, the Real, termed as the Ego (-in Ego), when viewed in its co-relation – yet, and emphatically so, not constitutive relatedness – with the Stranger/the lived Transcendental, is the identity-in-the-last-instance of the Stranger, and, in that sense, it grounds the Stranger as Real. At this point, the crucial question is that of legitimization by the authority of the Real of the positive reality of the Transcendental, incorporated by (or through) the Stranger. Consequently, can I say that I am in the last instance indifferent to the injurious subjection of my identity as a Woman in the World (Language/Discourse – the world/”World” we live in)? Is my identity-in-the-last-instance, that “Self” living within and inasmuch as that inescapable situatedness within the unarticulated and irreducible to any concept/s Real-of-Me, entirely “illiterate” and indifferent with respect to my experiences as a Woman (that identitary, transcendental phenomenon)? Is that “insufficient, frail” Human-in-Human (Laruelle)27 – which I am, in my identity-in-the-last-instance – so absolutely incompetent and numb with respect to my ordeals of a Stranger-Woman? The Real-of-Me is always already non-transcended, therefore irreducible to a Meaning. It is that being grasped within “myself,” which cannot be overturned and transcended-in-the-last-instance. And this grasp can be named “Real,” “Human-in-Human,” “Identity-in-the-last-Instance,” but it cannot be a name, and is indifferent to the naming in the sense that it does not need-it-in-thelast-instance.28 The real of my reality is elusive to naming, conceptualization, irreducible to a meaning, since it is autochthonous and prevails according to its own inconceivable ways, and in spite of the appetite of the Transcendental to appropriate and tame it. In its last instance, it is essentially indifferent to the linguistic pretensions for its re-appropriation. On the other hand, if the Real is not to be taken as a certain “meta-” or/and “idealistic” locus, if it is always already participating in the life of the Stranger (if it is “radically autonomous but not exclusive”), deprived of any potentiality to “live an independent life” in the absolute or exclusive sense, then it cannot be – at a particular instance – entirely linguistically indifferent. And the “particular instance” would be that of the immediately lived exteriority of transcendence prior to its “(re-)pli sur soi,” resulting into the “transcendence’s self-transcendence” or – the narcissistic mirroring of philosophy. The non-philosophical discourse implies constitutive entanglement of the Real with the Transcendental. In other words, it allows us the possibility for a legitimate assumption about the self-generated compulsion of the Real to re-appear, re-establish itself 101

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as the necessary subject to its own alienation – to Transcendence. It allows the possibility for such an assumption by its disallowing of the constitutive split of the two instances, supplemented by these two axioms: a) the Identity in the last instance of all is the Real or the One, and b) the Real is that in which and by which the transcendental Humanity is lived. The instance of estrangement (incorporated in the Stranger) is inevitably lived; the Identity in the last instance of every personalized estrangement, i.e., of the Stranger, is the radically immanent Ego or the Real. If the Real is the Identity-in-the-last-instance of any and all reality (thus, also of the linguistically constituted ones), we can venture the hypothesis that it is the Real that always already propels itself towards its own – although, in the last instance, impossible – transcendence. The suffocating self-enclosure of the Real strives to surpass its own inescapability – through (self-) estrangement, through self-transcendence. Thus, the generation of that “Shadow” – the Stranger – is rooted in the necessity (implied by the very “character” of the Real) that the Identity-in-thelast-instance re-produces itself into (and for) the World. If that compulsion for estrangement originates from a certain genuine discomfort of the Real (and in the minimal sense, from that claustrophobic self-enclosure), then, the ways of (linguistic) articulation of its alienated positioning in the World and of “negotiating” of this positioning with the World cannot be essentially arbitrary. (Both the processes of “articulation” and “negotiation” take place, of course, through the Stranger.) Even though the processes of articulation (the workings of the Transcendental) are taking place on another level, through another instance which is that of the estrangement, the very need for articulation, I would argue, is begotten by the Real (of that non-reflected Identity-in-the last-instance). Even though the articulation (the production of the Transcendental) begins only with the establishing of the instance of estrangement (of the Real from itself) and solely through it, the Begetter of those (alienated) processes cannot be – in an “other-than-the-last-instance” – utterly incompetent in relation to them. Again, this “other-than-the-last-instance” would be the instance of the immediacy of the lived transcendental inasmuch as an experienced Exteriority prior to any “(re-) pli sur soi” of the Transcendence. To conclude, inasmuch as the Real, inasmuch as that Identity-in-the-lastinstance that has not been estranged, the “Ego” (in non-analytical terms) remains indifferent to the workings of identification on the level of the Stranger. Nonetheless, inasmuch as that constitutive – and, moreover, concerned – ingredient within the Stranger, the Real implies a certain signifying competence of its own (kind). If nothing else, even though the Real does not speak the language of the Transcendental, it can and necessarily does respond to it. After all, everything that has been lived by the Stranger, even on that shadowy level of the “humanist Human” (the Transcendental), finds its last instance of identity – inasmuch as (the) lived – in the Real. Therefore, one can claim that the Real remains indifferent to the humanistic anxieties over “who we are in this World,” to those concerns and affairs that belong to the territory proper of the Transcendental. However, I would argue that it is always already

touched – and moreover, concerned and implied – by the “transcendental” that has been lived through that “Idiot that we are” (Laruelle) – the Stranger. In that sense, I will venture the claim that my malaise as a “Woman” thrown into this “World” carries the grain of the discomfort of the Real, and the complicity of the Real rather than its indifference toward my inflicted situating in this world (or “World”).

4. The World In an article entitled “L’identité sexuée” François Laruelle and AnneFrançoise Schmid, argue for a “displacement of the problem of the relationship between the sexes (genders)” inasmuch as a binary construct of opposition endlessly re-created by the Philosophies (this terms also includes science and religion with its philosophical tenets) of the World. Instead of being constantly transcendentally re-produced as a given (by the World) gender identity, they are suggesting the possibility of “living through one’s own destiny the destiny of the World,” and call upon the “faculty of giving the World to oneself” and the “sentiment of being for it rather than in it.”29 This quotation may seem to imply a claim about the possibility of an essential detachment of the Human-in-Human (l’Homme-en-Homme together with his/ her situation and mode of a Stranger) from the World. Arguing for a gesture of “giving the World to oneself” might resonate as intimation about World’s utter arbitrariness and the possibility for a repetitive re-creation entirely according to the Individual’s volition. This way of understanding the quoted paragraph may as well be encouraged and seemingly corroborated by the call for creating a sentiment of “being for” rather that “in the World.” However, such reading of the quotation would be possible and may sound plausible only if the cited words were taken out of the overall context of the non-philosophy. The entire construction of such a hypothetical reading can be undercut by the central proposition in this citation, namely the possibility to live “through one’s own destiny the destiny of the World.” Both this argument and the favouring of a language according to which we are “for” rather than “in” the World, should be read in accordance with the more general and axiomatic presuppositions of the theory of non-philosophy arguing for a Thought that correlates with the Real. Namely, it is a claim that calls upon thinking which draws its legitimacy from the solitary, vulnerable and linguistically impeded instance of the Real of our ultimate-Self, rather from the existing “Cosmos of Discursivenessity.” A thinking that is answerable in the last instance to its own lived experience of the World – or to the Lived through the World, as well as in the Real – and not to the World itself, i.e., not to the ruling Discourse/s and the concomitantly prescribed Practices. One is called upon answering to and drawing legitimacy from one’s own most intimate Self – notably, from the point at which the Real, that ultimate and irretrievable situating of the utmost Self, is being affected by the workings of Language. Considering that non-philosophy professes non-dichotomous thinking, disallowing – from a position of an axiom – the possibility of assuming a 103

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relation of opposition and (mutual) exclusion between the Real and the World, to understand that the authors are making a claim about the essentially illusionary nature of the World would be, if nothing else, misleading. The Real possesses neither a discursive nor real, neither a material nor an ideal, neither an ontic nor a non-ontic “location” (or situation) of its own, that would imply a real (that is, in-the-Real) detachment from and positing beyond (“meta”) the World. The conceptual purity of the two notions should not be confusingly identified with a conceptualizing of two instances (the Real and that of the World) as purified from one another in-(the)-real. The purity of the concept is a theoretical reality, and it does not imply a claim to the Real or – perhaps it is more accurate to say – about the Reality that originates from and lives on the Intertwining-of-the-Real-and-the-World. Within this particular theoretical horizon, the only topological situating of the Real I can conceive of – as a hypothesis (or “imaginarization”) establishing a relation of highest possible fidelity to the basic presuppositions of nonphilosophy – is a location that appears to be a point of gravity around which the World revolves and is relentlessly involved by. (At the same time, this “involvement” – or rather, engagement – implies responsibility in, of and for the both instances, the “worldly” and the “real.”) In other words, this theory does not propose a contention about two parallel realities, severed from one another, in which case, they would plainly introduce a constitutive division into the Radically-Immanent-Self. Such an argument would be undermining of the Laruellian theoretical construct as a whole, in which, it is a repeated claim that the “Real” should not be taken, at any rate, as a “Meta-” instance with respect to the World (or the Stranger). Divisionism and dualism is precisely that which the non-philosophy strives to bypass as recourse of Thought and surpass as a Discursive Reality. The Real is the hearth of the Human-of-the-World, it is her/his most intimate dwelling – the “Place” where he or she re-appears as Human-in-Human, while, on the other hand, the latter is always already inhabited by the Person of the World (or by “Worldliness”). Let us return to the quoted statement according to which one lives the Destiny of the World through the solitary experience of living one’s own individual Destiny of a Stranger. And the following question surfaces: Can this personal and experiential “processing” of the World – through the inevitable acts of reflection and unique interpretations performed by the estranged instance of the “Subject” (or by the Stranger) – offer critique of and proffer ideas about World’s possible changes? I would argue not only that this is possible, but also that it is the only way of “participating” in the (“construction of”) the World that bears the weight of legitimacy and authority provided by the engaging presence of the Real. The (estranged) Human inevitably reflects – he or she always already assumes the status of a thinking subject or agency – (on) the utopia of the Real which has a priori been left behind by the necessary and inevitable stepping into the topos of the Transcendental. This u-topos that the Thinking Human attempts to grasp is a non-place in the sense of its impossibility to be “inhabited,” without being simultaneously

“translated” by and onto the Transcendental. It is a non-place in the sense of its inaccessibility for both the (always already thinking) Subject (of the estranged Self) and the Other, to whom it is inevitably mediated by the Stranger (Transcendental). The “ou” (= “u”) of this u-topia refers but to its impossibility to be there, without the concurrent auto-imposing of the imperative for an instantaneous translation (of that certain “being there”) into and for the World, performed by the Stranger. The (thinking) Subject reflects on that construction that we call here the “World,” in an attempt to find a more adequate, better fitting or less discomforting placement for her/his estranged existence and, together with it, of her/his non-estranged Real (or Human-in-Human). Or rather, the Stranger negotiates with the World his/her own position in it, as well as that of its underlying vulnerability called (by Laruelle) “Human-in-Human.” Through these negotiations, by insisting on a less constraining and a more pleasure generating – thus, less painful – embedment within it, the Stranger, inevitably, reshapes the World. The Stranger (we all are) is compelled to situate her/himself into one of the – at least – two Gender Identities stipulated by the World. The stipulations of Normative Gender Formations – performing a normalizing and disciplinary role – have a constraining effect on both the imaginative flux of the Transcendental as well as on the “tender flesh” of the Radical Immanence. Furthermore, the Gender Identity, that normative formation – just as well as any other Identity produced by and participating in the World – aims to “tame” the Human precisely through putting into a linguistic grid (of meaning) of that which is beyond Language or Meaning – the Body and, in particular, its sexual topology. This automatic urge for “taming through Meaning” becomes even more compelling when femaleness – or the “Human-in-as-much-as-female” – is concerned. Birth, pregnancy and the salient presence of secondary sexual organs and bodily marks, all this calls for a higher extent of appropriation by Thought – for a higher degree of discipline imposed by Discourse (World) on that elusive, material abundance of the feminine body. The higher mass of physicality, of “materiality” calls for stronger measures of discipline imposed by the World, that is to say, subjection of that organic and fluid mess to signification and conceptual Order. Certainly, “materiality” is a concept and what the World, in fact, attempts to appropriate and subjugate by converting it into a concept is that which is ultimately elusive to meaning and language, that which belongs to the mute territory of the Self beyond Language – the Real. The mute and so overwhelmingly organically present female Body is that disturbing Real which is being controlled through a surplus (vis-à-vis the male body) of signification. Thought and World (perennially ruled by “Strangers-inhabiting-male-bodies”) are compelled to capture that utter being-there of the palpably different female Body and the Self that is imagined to inhabit it. (Experienced at the very threshold of the Transcendental – anterior to any workings of the Rational and the processes of “relativization” that are possible only within the complexity of discursive Cosmologies – this difference is perceived as radical.) By virtue of 105

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its natural or “natural” inseparability from assigned (by the World) identities, the particular body, “inhabited” by a particular Ego-in-Ego or simply lived as yet another situating of a particular Real, is dragged into a particular form of identitary subjection. Organic or corporeal occurrences (events) are the most immediate experience (of oneself) that one can have without any intervention of the Transcendental, or immanently independent from and resistant to the level of Mediation (Transcendence). The sense of inescapable situatedness in one’s own body, the organic self-enclosure and corporeal self-circumscription is the most direct experience of the Real of one’s inevitable situatedness in oneself. It is in the Body that one is bound to persist in and survive as One (self), regardless of the processes of Transcendence. Even if the body undergoes a series of transfigurations – through technological interventions, as well – it is still a matter of the survival of that particular organic individuality. The Body is (the Site – or the very Instance? – of) that mute persistence of a Self, Site of the pre-linguistic sensations of the Real of an Ego-in-Ego. Thus, the gender identity not only pertains to the Real (the Identity-inthe-last-instance) but is also – and even more so – necessitated by it, in the sense that the Real of the Organic Femaleness impels its own signification (and, hence, disciplining through Identity). It is one of the creations of the World, part of the workings of the Transcendental that aim to re-present the Real of Fe/Maleness. The possibilities for different (gender) identity configurations and constant re-figurations that our mute, vulnerable and insufficient bodies inevitably live in seem to be virtually numberless, and it is precisely this potentiality that not only allows, but also urges the Stranger to constantly negotiate her/his position in the World. Still, the negotiations take place within the horizon of the existing discursive realities, using the potentialities provided by the available discursivenesses and the voids from within situations made possible through the already existing Language as the “places” of origin for entirely new truths and re-figurations of the World. Again, the novel truths and radical re-figurations of the World are constructed with the Language which undergoes certain changes, radically significant on the “micro-” level of the singularity of a particular use, and virtually imperceptible on the “macro-” level of the linguistic Cosmos. The possibility of utter arbitrariness in the re-figurations of the given-by-theWorld-identities is excluded, by the very limitations imposed by the World (as it is). (In this case, the given reality of the World – no matter how changing and dynamic – enacts, in a discrete way,∗ the role of the Real. Namely, it imposes itself as the Limit that cannot be dismissed, penetrated, removed or overcome from within its actual spatio-temporal coordinates. Anything outside the coordinates of the “worldly actuality” is outside the World, it is in the Nowhere of the Namelessness.) In such a “manifestation” of itself, the World establishes radical discontinuity with its immanent position, creating a functional leap of the kind where it “does the work” of the Real or of the Limit.

∗

The Stranger who is also a Woman (of this World) bears the imprints of that seal (of her gender identity) upon her Body and Person, to the very core of her utmost intimate Self. Her radical immanence can neither be (ultimately) ignorant of nor (ultimately) indifferent to the (forcible) touch – or rather, grasp – of the identitary constraints, which aim to do precisely that – reach and subjugate the Real of her Femaleness. Her Ego-in-Ego which is the Home-ofthe-Lived cannot be disinterested towards and untouched by the enforcement of identitary subjugation and its laws (of subjection, control and discipline). And even though the radical immanence is pre-conceptual, it is inconceivable that it can be insensitive and insensate regarding the Real-of-the-ConstrainingEffect that – through our gender identity – is being perpetuated by the World upon us. The Real of our utmost Self may be indifferent to the doctrinal messages that are immanent to the identity construction. In the last instance, however, it cannot escape the relentless subjection to the state of enduring the regulatory hold of the World.

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1. Hallward, Badiou, 116-122. 2. Laruelle, PNP, 17: “C’est son auto-position fondamentale; ce que l’on peut appeler aussi son auto-factualisation ou son auto-fétichisation – tout ce que nous rassemblons sous le Principe de philosophie suffisante (PPS).” 3. Laruelle, Ibid., 12-14. 4. Laruelle, Théorie des Étrangers (Paris: Éditions Kimé, 1995), 15 (hereafter cited in text and notes as TE) 5. See: Laruelle, TE, 76-77. 6. Ibid., 76. 7. Laruelle, PNP, 90: « Il y a d’une part une ouverture-sans-ouvert, une extasesans-horizon, une transcendance irréfléchie et qui reste en soi, sans donner lieu à un espace, un horizon, une position, dans lesquels elle viendrait sans coup férir se ré-inscrire et s’inhiber. On peut appeler aussi cette région de l’objectivité l’Autre-non-thétique. » 8. Laruelle, TE, 77. 9. Ibid., 78. 10. See: Laruelle’s Le Christ futur: Une leçon d’hérésie (Paris: Exils Éditeur, 2002), and in particular the chapter entitled “La dernière prophétie ou l’hommemessie.” 11. Cf. Laruelle, Ethique de l‘Etranger (Paris: Éditions Kimé, 2000), 259 (hereafter cited as EE). 12. Laruelle, TE, 77: “[…] ‘‘Humanité’ proprement dite, dont nous dirons qu’elle n’est pas habitée d’Ego – l’Ego n’habite pas – mais uniquement d’Etrangers.” 13. Ibid. 76: « On remarquera que l’Etranger n’est pas la relation de l’Ego avec le Monde, relation synthétique de réciprocité et de convertibilité. Mais la relation, relativement autonome, extraite du Monde (du mixte métahumain) et qui est reçue ou vécue en-Ego ou en-Homme sans être relation à l’Ego. » 14. Ibid., 164: « Ce résidu en effet ne peut pas être constitué de la seule et pure transcendance, supposée empiriquement abstraite du mixte et opposée à l’immanence de l’Ego […] Nous ne faisons pas de l’Ego un nouvel usage méta-physique et idéaliste et par conséquant nous ne disons pas seulement qu’il implique la dissolution sans reste de l’amphibologie de l’Ego et du Xenos. » 15. See: Laruelle, TE, 70-74; 76-83. On page 76, we read: « L’Ego est si concret qu’il n’entre dans aucune relation mais peut en recevoir ou en tolérer une sur son mode propre d’Ego. C’est pourquoi l’Etranger est une dualité qui suppose l’Ego mais qui est absolument rejetée hors de lui […] reçue enIdentité sans constituer une partie réelle de celle-ci [My italics]. » 16. Ibid., 82. 17. Ibid., 77. 18. Ibid. 19. Ibid.

20. Ibid. 21. Ibid., 74: « […] l’autonomie radical (mais non exclusive) de l’Ego réel. » 22. Alain Badiou, Ethics (Translated and introduced by Peter Hallward, London / New York: Verso Books, 2001), 7: “I would be delighted to see today so constant an attention paid to concrete situations, so sustained and so patient a concern for the real (le réel), so much time devoted to an activist inquiry into the situation of the most varied kinds of people […].” Also see: ibid., 10-17. 23. Hallward, Badiou, 120. 24. Laruelle, TE, 225: « Il est le vécu indivis (de) la douleur – celle-ci ne le déterminant pas – comme le vécu indivis de la joie, mais nullement leur synthèse, même immanente […]. » 25. Ibid., 222: « Le Joui-qui-n’est-que-Joui n’est pas le résultat ou le produit de l’opération transcendante de la jouissance, il est Joui-en-Joui ou immanent (à) soi plutôt qu’à la jouissance qui le donnerait ou le constituerait. » 26. I am asking this question in addition to the previous, since I strongly disbelieve in the omnipotence of thought and authority of cognition over the real and the messy life, and, hence, in moments of theoretical incapacitation, and following my own “theoretical identity-in-the-lastinstance,” I would choose to follow my sense of “just” and “unjust” (or more exactly: my preference of “caring” versus “uncaring”) vis-à-vis the knowledge of “true” and “false”. I also choose not to define these terms, as I need them as points of non-reflection, of non-cognition in order to preserve my own theoretical attempts from possible omnipotent pretensions or to restrain such Desires which are inevitably inbuilt in any theoretical “self-investment.” Within my own horizon of theoretical attempts these points act as instances of the (Lacanian) Real. 27. Cf. Laruelle’s Le Christ futur: Une leçon d’hérésie (Paris: Exils Éditeur, 2002). 28. Laruelle, TE, 224-225: « […] c’est que le Joui n’a pas besoin de cette symbolization, le Réel excluant par essence et positivement le signifiant […]. » 29. François Laruelle and Anne-Françoise Schmid, « L’identité sexuée, » Identities, Vol. II, no.3 (Skopje, 2003), 55: « Le problème du rapport des sexes au génie pourrait être également déplacé. Dans son interpretation ‘philosophique’ habituelle, il postule la capacité de vivre en son proper destin le destin du Monde et donc se jouer des contraires et de se les donner librement. C’est la faculté de se donner le Monde et le sentiment d’être pour lui plutôt qu’en lui. La-femme passe son énergie dans le Monde, puisqu’elle en assure la stabilité. Le Monde, dessiné par les structures de la philosophie, peut être lui aussi transformé, en ce sens qu’il n’est pas nécessaire de se le donner dans son unité ni sa totalité. Il y faut une généralisation de la philosophie, sa transformation en matériau. Le génie pourrait alors apparaître sous des formes moins totalitaires et impulsives, moins masculines. C’est là aussi tout un travail de transformation des énoncés philosophiques, dont l’objet finit toujours par être quelque chose du Monde. » 109

BIBLIOGRAPHY Badiou, Alain. 2004. Theoretical Writings. Edited and translated by Ray Brassier and Alberto Toscano. London & New York: Continuum. ___. 2003. Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism (Cultural Memory in the Present). Translated by Ray Brassier. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press. ___. 2003. Infinite Thought: Truth and the Return to Philosophy. Translated by Oliver Feltham and Justin Clemens. London & New York: Continuum. ___. 2001. Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil. Translated by Peter Hallward. London and New York: Verso Books. ___. 1999. Manifesto for Philosophy. Translated, edited and with an introduction by Norman Madarasz. New York: SUNY Press. Baudrillard, Jean. 2000. “Photography, Or The Writing Of Light.” CTheory (A083) available at http://www.ctheory.net/home.aspx ___. 1996. The Perfect Crime. Translated by Chris Turner. London/New York: Verso Books. ___. 1995. Simulacra and Simulation (The Body, In Theory: Histories of Cultural Materi alism) Translated by Sheila Faria Glaser. University of Michigan Press. ___. 1994. “Rise Of The Void Towards The Periphery.” CTheory, A016, available: www.ctheory.net/text_file?pick=58 ___. 1991. Simboli~ka razmena i smrt [Symbolic Exchange and Death in Serbo-Croatian translation]. Gornji Milanovac: De~je Novine.

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Bergson, Henri. 1993 (1939). Matière et mémoire. Essai sur la relation du corps à l’és prit. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. ___. 1946. La pensée et le mouvant. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Braidotti, Rosi. 2002. Metamorphoses: Towards a Materialist Theory of Becoming. Cambridge: Polity Press. ___. 1994. Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory. New York: Columbia University Press. Butler, Judith. 2004. Undoing Gender. London & New York: Routledge. ___. 2002. Antigone’s Claim: Kinship Between Life and Death. Columbia University Press. ___. 1999. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. London & New York: Routledge. ___. 1997. The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection. Stanford University Press. ___. 1993. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex”. London & New York: Routledge. ___, Ernesto Laclau & Slavoj Zizek. 2000. Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left. London & New York: Verso Books. ___, John Guillory and Kendall Thomas, eds. 2000. What’s Left of Theory: New Work on the Politics of Literary Theory. London & New York: Routledge.

___, and Joan Scott, eds. 1992. Feminists Theorize the Political. London & New York: Routledge. Campbell, Kirsten. 2004. Jacques Lacan and Feminist Epistemology. New York & London: Routledge. Cornell, Drucilla. 1992. Philosophy of the Limit. New York & London: Routledge. Deleuze, Gilles, 2001. Pure Immanence: Essays on a Life. Translated by Anne Boyman. New York: Zone Books. ___, 1999. Foucault. Translated from the French and edited by Sean Hand. London: The Athlone Press. ___, 1993 (1968). Différence et répétition. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. ___. 1991 (1966). Le bergsonisme. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. ___. 1990. Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza. Translated from the French by Martin Joughin. New York: Zone Books. ___. 1969. Logique du sens. Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit. ___. 1962. Nietzsche et la philosophie. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. ___. and Felix Guattari. 1980. Capitalisme et Schizophrénie: Mille Plateaux. Paris: Les éditions de Minuit. ___. and Felix Guattari. 1972. L’Anti-Oedipe. Paris: Les éditions de Minuit. Derrida, Jacques. 1996. Apories. Paris: Galiléé, 1996. ___. 1992. “Donner la mort.” In L’ethique du don: Jacques Derrida et la pensée du don, edited by Jean-Michel Rabaté and Michael. Paris: Métailé-Transition. ___. 1991. Of Sprit, Heidegger and the Question. Translated by Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. ___. 1984. Margins of Philosophy. Translated by Alan Bass. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. ___. 1981. Dissemination. Translated by Barbara Johnson. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press. ___. 1967. L’écriture et la difference. Paris: Éditions du Seuil. Flax, Jane. 1993. Disputed Subjects: Essays on Psychoanalysis, Politics and Philosophy. New York and London: Routledge. ___. 1991. Thinking Fragments: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and Postmodernism in the Contemporary West. New York and London: Routledge. Foucault, Michel. 1998. The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1: The Will to Knowledge. Trans lated from the French by Robert Hurley. London: Penguin Books. ___. 1992. The History of Sexuality, Vol. II: The Use of Pleasure. Translated from the French by Robert Hurley. London: Penguin Books. ___. 1991. Discipline and Punish. Translated from the French by Alan Sheridan. Lon don: Penguin Books. ___. 1990. The History of Sexuality, Vol. III: The Care of the Self. Translated from the French by Robert Hurley. London: Penguin Books. 111

___. 1977. “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History.” In Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, ed. by D. F. Bouchard. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. ___. 1973. Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason. Trans lated from the French by Richard Howard. New York: Vintage Books. Friedman, Marilyn. 1997. “Autonomy and Social Relationships: Rethinking the Femi nist Critique.” In Feminists Rethink the Self, ed. by Diana Tietjens Meyers. Oxford: Westview Press. Gibson-Graham, J. K. 1999. The End of Capitalism (As We Knew It): A Feminist Critique of Political Economy. Malden, Massachusetts and Oxford: Blackwell Publishers. Hallward, Peter. 2003. Badiou: A Subject to Truth. Foreword by Slavoj Žižek. Minneapolis & London: University of Minnesota Press. Heidegger, Martin. 1988. Bitak i vrijeme [Croatian translation of Sein und Zeit] Zagreb: Naprijed.

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Huntington, Patricia J. 1998. Ecstatic Subjects, Utopia, and Recognition: Kristeva, Heidegger, Irigaray. New York: SUNY Press.

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Kolozova, Katerina. 2003. “Les Troubles et Metamorphoses de Mnemosyne.” Monitor, Journal of the Institutum Studiorum Humanitatis (Ljubljana), vol. V/no.1-2, 17-33. ___. 2000. “Ni~e i poststrukturalisticke teorije subjektiviteta: Citanje kroz Judith Butler [Nietzsche and the Poststrucutralist Theories of Subjectivity: A Reading Through Judith Butler].” Treca br.2/vol.2 (Zagreb), 131-138. ___. & Zarko Trajanoski, eds. 2001. Conversations with Judith Butler (Bilingual edition: English and Macedonian). Skopje: Euro-Balkan Press. Lacan, Jacques. 1999 (1966). Écrits 1. Paris: Éditions du Seuil. ___. 1999. Encore. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XX: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge. Edited by Jacques-Alain Miller. Translated from the French with Notes by Bruce Fink. New York & London: W. W. Norton and Company. ___. 1998. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. Edited by Jacques-Alain Miller. Translated from the French by Alan Sheridan. New York & London: W. W. Norton and Company. ___. 1988. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book I: Freud’s Papers on Technique. Edited by Jacques-Alain Miller. Translated from the French with Notes by John Forrester. New York & London: W. W. Norton and Company. ___. 1973. Les quatres concepts fondamentaux de la psychanalyse. Texte établi par Jacques-Alain Miller. Paris: Éditions de Seuil. Laruelle, François. 2004. La lutte et l’utopie à la fin des temps philosophiques. Paris: Éditions Kimé. ___. 2002. Le Christ futur: Une leçon d’hérésie. Paris: Exils Éditeur.

___. 2000. Ethique de l ‘Etranger. Paris: Éditions Kimé. ___. 2000. Introduction au non-marxisme. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. ___. 1995. Théorie des Etrangers: Science des hommes, démocratie et non-psychanalyse. Paris: Éditions Kimé. ___. 1992. Théorie des identités. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. ___. 1989. Philosophie et non-philosophie. Liège – Bruxelles: Pierre Mardaga. ___, & Anne-Françoise Schmid. 2003. “L’identité sexuée.” Identities, Vol. II, no.3, 49-61. Lowe, Jonathan E. 1996. Subjects of Experience. Cambridge University Press. Meyers, Diana Tietjens., ed. 1997. Feminists Rethink the Self. Oxford: Westview Press. ___. 1994. Subjection and Subjectivity: Psychoanalytic Feminism and Moral Philosophy. New York and London: Routledge. Rosset, Clément. 1978. Le réel. Traité de l’idiotie. Paris: Éditions de Minuit. Siebers, Tobin. 2001. The Subject and Other Subjects: On Ethical, Aesthetic, and Political Identity. University of Michigan Press. Žižek, Slavoj. 1999. The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Center of Political Ontology. London & New York: Verso Books. ___. ed., 1998. Cogito and the Unconscious. Durham and London: Duke University Press. ___. 1989. The Sublime Object of Ideology. London & New York: Verso Books. Zupan~i~, Alenka. 2000. The Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan (Wo Es War). London & New York: Verso Books.

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Katerina Kolozova The Real and “I”: On the Limit and the Self Series of books in theories of identity Editor of the series: Dusica Dimitrovska Gajdoska For the publisher: Research Center in Gender Studies “Euro-Balkan” Institute Partizanski odredi 63 Skopje, Macedonia Publisher: Evro-Balkan Press Proof reading: Jason Brown Design, layout and print: KOMA, Skopje Copies printed: 500

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CIP – Katalogizacija vo publikacija “ Narodna i univerzitetska biblioteka „Sv. Kliment Ohridski , Skopje 141.7 KOLOZOVA, Katerina The Real and “I”: on the limit and the self / Katerina Kolozova. – Skopje: Euro-Balkan Press, 2006. - 114 str. ; 21 sm ISBN 9989-136-48-3 a) Feministicka filozofija COBISS.MK-ID 64471818