Henry Abelove's "Freud, Male Homosexuality, and the Americans" - qbq

Henry Abelove

Henry Abelove

"Freud, Male Homosexuality, and the Americans"

in Deep Gossip  Minneapolis MN: U of MN Press, 2003. (1-20)

Abelove begins with some discussion about and the entire text of Freud's 1935 "Letter to an American Mother" which reads as follows;

I gather from your letter that your son is a homosexual. I am most impressed by the fact that you do not mention this term yourself in your information about him. May I question you, why you avoid it? Homosexuality is assuredly no advantage, but it is nothing to be ashamed of, no vice, no degradation, it cannot be classified as an illness; we consider it to be a variation of the sexual function produced by a certain arrest of sexual development. Many highly respectable individuals of ancient and modern times have been homosexuals, several of the greatest men among them (Plato, Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, etc.). It is a great injustice to persecute homosexuality as a crime, and cruelty too. If you do not believe me, read the books of Havelock Ellis.

By asking me if I can help, you mean, I suppose, if I can abolish homosexuality and make normal heterosexuality take its place. The answer is, in a general way, we cannot promise to achieve it. In a certain number of cases we succeed in developing the blighted germs of heterosexual tendencies which are present in every homosexual, in the majority of cases it is no more possible. It is a question of the quality and the age of the individual. The result of treatment cannot be predicted.

What analysis can do for your son runs in a different line. If he is unhappy, neurotic, torn by conflicts, inhibited in his social life, analysis may bring him harmony, peace of mind, full efficiency whether he remains a homosexual or gets changed. If you make up your mind he should have analysis with me—I don't expect you will—he has to come over to Vienna.

Sincerely yours with kind wishes,

Freud

…and while this short letter is frequently cited and quite familiar to many already, Abelove brings out interesting details and situates it within a context which underlines much that a decontextualized reading cannot provide. 

Noting that Ernst Jones had called the letter a "kindness", Abelove generally agrees with him, noting that "Freud had no previous acquaintance with the woman, yet he took the time to write to her when he was himself deathly ill" (2). But he goes on to write,

But the letter was more than just a "kindness". It was also the considered expression of a viewpoint that Freud had long deeply felt and tenaciously held. Everything about homosexuality that he says in the letter had been an article of conviction with him for more // than thirty years. Summarized: Homosexuality is no advantage; it is also no illness; it should be neither prosecuted as a crime nor regarded as a disgrace; no homosexual need be treated psychoanalytically unless he had also, and quite incidentally, happened to be neurotic. (2-3)

In 1903, Freud had been asked by a Vienna newspaper to comment on a then current scandal—"a prominent professional man was on trial, charged with homosexual practices" (3). This is what Freud is quoted as saying,

I advocate the standpoint that the homosexual does not belong before a tribunal of a court of law. I am even of the firm conviction that homosexuals must not be treated as sick people,for a perverse orientation is far from being a sickness. Wouldn't that oblige us to characterize as sick many great thinkers and scholars whom we admire because of their mental health? (…) Homosexual persons are not sick, but they also do not belong in a court of law! (3)

Freud co-signs a statement with Schnitzler, Werfel and Schlick in an attempt to influence an "Austro-German legal commission" which was deadlocked over the question of repealing laws that criminalized homosexual relations. This statement claimed that homosexuality had "been present throughout history and among all peoples" and that criminalizing it would be an "extreme violation of human rights" that refused them "their very sexuality" (qtd 3). That was in 1930.

Earlier, in 1920 Freud had clashed with his psychoanalytic colleagues about this very issue

(…) the Dutch Psychoanalytic Association had an application for membership from a doctor known to be "manifestly homosexual." Uncertain how to respond, they turned for advice to a member of Freud's inner circle, Ernst Jones (…) Jones kept Freud informed by letter. "I advised against it," he said, "and now I hear . . . that the man has been detected and committed to prison." He then asked whether of not Freud thought that always to refuse homosexual applicants would be "a safe general maxim to act on." (4)

Freud and another close collaborator, Otto Rank, responded to Jones jointly, 

Your query, dear Ernst, concerning prospective membership of homosexuals has been considered by us and we disagree with you. In effect we cannot exclude such persons without other sufficient reasons, as we cannot agree with their legal prosecution. We feel that a decision in such cases should depend upon a thorough examination of the other qualities of the candidate. (qtd 4)

…news of this exchange and of Freud's views spread and the Berlin Psychoanalytic Association's members were "alarmed" and wrote Freud in criticism of his position. [n.b., this is the same Berlin group which—to Freud's dismay also excluded Magnus Hirschfeld which I wrote briefly about already here] The upshot of the Berlin response was simply that they were inclined to see homosexuality as a mark against, regardless of what Freud thought, that it was in effect "a neutral factor" (5), and they may have been more definitive about this had he not been so clear about his refusal to stigmatize or pathlogize.

Abelove also reveals that in his practice, Freud refused to treat homosexuality as something to be cured and regularly refused referrals from others who assumed that he would do so. Because he did not seek to pathologize homosexuality he also did not keep notes about patients sent to him for the wrong reasons, but Abelove has unearthed a piece of writing by someone who saw Freud only once and might have been homosexual. This man's name was Goetz, who had one session with Freud, and spoke of his fantasies about sailors and his desires to kiss them and about his disinterest in marriage.

Freud said (as Goetz reports), "'And the matter with the sailors has never upset you?'" Goetz answered, ""'Never … I was very much in love. And when you are in love,, everything is fine. Right?'" Freud replied, "For you certainly…' and laughed." (6)

Freud kept no notes of this single session and upon sending Goetz from his office, gave him an envelop with enough money to get a good meal as Freud could see that he was not wealthy or well taken care of. 

Freud's views about homosexuality seem to have been quite consistent across the span of his professional life, but "His viewpoint was not wholeheartedly shared by most of his fellow analysts, though no analyst so far as I know directly and avowedly rejected it during Freud's lifetime. But his colleagues did show some hesitation about it, some edginess." (7)

Abelove gives some evidence of Jung's homophobia, but as that is well established I'll move along…

As a contrast to Jung and the other homophobes amongst the early psychoanalytic associations, he are given a quote from a colleague of Victor Tausk who had commented on his analysis with a neurotic homosexual, saying that  "his therapeutic goal for the patient was to rid him of feelings of guilt about his homosexuality so that he could be free to satisfy his homosexual needs" (8).

With the above portrait of the conflicts between Freud and what feels like the majority of the psychoanalytic movement in Europe, we then turn to the other significant subject focus of the article - American Psychoanalysis.

It was in America, however, that Freud's viewpoint on homosexuality was least accepted or maybe most resisted. (…) from the very beginnings of the transplanting of psychoanalysis onto these shores, American analysts have tended to view homosexuality with disapproval and have actually wanted to get rid of it altogether. As early as 1916, when Freud was still very active, Smith Ely Jeliffe, a prominent New York analyst and a founder of the Psychoanalytic Review, declared that "individual training" and "education" should control the "homogenic" tendency and "direct it" to a "normal, well-adjusted sexual life" so that there need be no homosexuality.

Jeliffe's declaration is perhaps distinctly American; it reflects the outlook that historians usually call moralistic and that has always dominated psychoanalytic thinking in this country. It is an outlook that Freud knew, despised, and opposed, but never succeeded in overcoming or even mitigating. (8)

Then Abelove turns to the correspondence between Freud and James Jackson Putnam for an in depth look at how Freud responds to the ever-present moralizing that Putnam seems to assume is what psychoanalysis is all about. Putnam argued in a variety of ways across their correspondence that "the psychoanalytic method needs to be supplanted by methods which seek to hold up before the patent some goal toward which he may strive" (qtd. 9) to which Freud says, in essence, absolutely not.

What would you have us do when a woman complains about her thwarted life, when, with youth gone, she notices that she has been deprived of the joy of loving for merely conventional reasons? She is quite right, and we stand helpless before her, for we cannot make her young again. But the recognition of our therapeutic limitations reinforces our determination to change other social factors so that men and women shall no longer be forced into hopeless situations. (qtd. 9)  

This made no impression on Putnam seemingly as he wrote back not long after saying "As I study patients and try to relieve them of their symptoms, I find that I must also try to improve their moral characters and temperments" (qtd 10). Freud was not swayed to his position and later, poking some fun at Putnam's all-but-Christian moralism he wrote,

You make psychoanalysis seem so much nobler and more beautiful: in her Sunday clothes I scarcely recognize the servant who performs my household tasks. (10)

As their correspondence went on Freud turned somewhat bitter writing to Putnam, 

a chemistry-themed tie, titled
"Sublimation is my specialty"

"As soon," he wrote, as analysts take on "the task of leading the patient toward sublimation, they hasten away from the arduous tasks of psychoanalysis so that they can take up the much more comfortable … duties of the // teacher and paragon of virtue." (10-11)

Then in one of his last letters to Putnam, Freud writes,

Sexual morality as society—and at its most extreme, American society—defines it, seems very despicable to me. I stand for a much freer sexual life. (qtd 11)

In Abelove's gloss "That, too, made no apparent impact on Putnam, and in his next letter he ignored altogether Freud's remark about America" (11).

So analysts in the States operated very much at odds with Freud's position. Louville Emerson published a critique of Freud arguing that "he was wrong to try to exclude 'ethics' from psychoanalysis" and that, in Abelove's summation, "All analysts must try to tell which social relations were, and which were not, 'righteous'" (14). The general view of American analysts was that their task was to "control homosexual feeling and reshape it into 'normal, well-adjusted' sexuality" (14). 

To return to Freud's letter to the American mother. His motive in writing it was by no means just "kindness," nor was it just a determination to restate a position he had long held. He wanted also to hit back at us Americans, at out moralism and our misuses of psychoanalysis. He knew perfectly well that the letter would be noticed. It was a deliberate provocation, and perhaps the heart of it was the passage where he ended: "If you make up your mind he should have analysis with me—I don't expect you will—he has to come over to Vienna." Freud had no need of more patients, and the woman was a stranger. His object was to tell her, and everybody else, too, that her son could not be properly treated in America.  (15)

Abelove then reviews Freud's disagreements with the early homosexual emancipation movement, these hinge primarily on Hirschfeld and Ulrichs insistence that homosexuals comprised a specific type, distinct from others. Freud firmly rejected such "third sex" arguments, though he "willingly endorsed the movement's law reform objectives" (15). In disputing the notion of homosexuals as a separate type of human from the rest, Freud, says Abelove, countered to the effect that "everybody's sexuality was homosexual in large part" (17).

In parliamentary culture, as the Germany of Freud's day in some measure was, or as modern-day America is, group-organizational strength can often translate directly into political influence. Freud understood all of this, and he cannot have been surprised when the homosexual emancipation movement ignored him. But he took his stand against their line anyway, just as he had taken his stand against American moralism, and for the same reason: both line and moralism were, as he saw the matter, in effect repressions. (17)

Freud dies in 1939. "Almost as soon as he was cremated, a host of revisionist essas started rolling off the psychoanalytic presses, especially in America. One of the subjects most eagerly canvassed was homosexuality" (17). Abelove turns next to look at the work of a number of American analysts, and here I will try to be schematic…

Sandor Rado - circa the 1940s - "argued that male-female pairing was healthy, that it was moreover the 'standard pattern,' that homosexuality was an illness based on a fear of women, and that it could often be cured in psychoanalysis" (18).

Irving Beiber claims that (apparently "all") "psychoanalytic theories," (…) "assume that homosexuality is psychopathologic" and he pushes for the now infamous mother-blaming account of its origin "a domineering mother, a cold father" and as Abelove notes "He too was relatively optimistic about achieving cures" (18). 

Charles Socarides' position was that "homosexuality was in fact a severe illness, accompanied often by such psychotic manifestations as schizophrenia or manic-depressive mood swings." [And that, in contrast to heterosexual pairings] "homosexual pairings could bring only 'destruction, mutual defeat, exploitation of the partner and the self, oral sadistic incorporation, aggressive onslaughts, attempts to alleviate anxiety, and a pseudo-solution to the aggressive and libidinal urges which dominate and torment the individual'. Socarides also said that cures were possible." (18)  

See here for a bit more about Charles Socarides.

Abelove notes that "Influenced perhaps especially by Rado, the American Psychiatric Association (APA in 1952 formally classified homosexuality as an illness" (18). This classification was rescinded under much pressure in 1973 (and soon after many other gender-related "disorders" began to populate the DSM, acting, or so it seems, to continue to allow gender "deviance" to be pathologizable). Abelove notes that when it was declassified as illness that the then president of the APA hoped that this woudl be a good thing for "the homosexual minority". "What the president assumed was that homosexuals were indeed a minority, a group with a special character. He assumed as much both because the gay liberation movement was predictably saying so and because their psychoanalytic allies were loudly agreeing" (19). 

He then introduces those "allies" … Judd Marmor and Robert Stoller, both of whom he presents as at odds with Beiber and Socarides and analysts of their opinion about these matters. "Both, denying that homosexuality was an illness, described it instead as the sexual orientation of a minority. In so describing it, they of course rejected the view that Freud had thought theoretically crucial—the view that everybody's sexuality was in large part homosexual" (19).  Marmor claims that Freud's view is "non-operational" and, that it must be set aside (19). Stoller was troubled that with Freud's view it would be difficult to tell who was and who was not a homosexual. "So Marmor and Stoller both saw homosexuality as belonging to homosexuals alone, who were therefor different from everybody else, and thus a minority" (19). Abelove adds that "the corollary of the humane ascription of minority status was this: people outside the minority need no longer think of themselves as in some important way homosexual, too" (19). 

Abelove's conclusion gathers the threads of the discussion thus far very nicely…

At the APA meetings that had led up to the eventual decision to rescind the classification of homosexuality as an illness, all of the // major protagonists has been analysts. On the one side, Bieber and Socarides; on the other, Marmor and Stoller. A strange spectacle" two sets of moralistic analysts, each opposing the other, each claiming to stand in the tradition of Freud, and each espousing a position that Freud had himself rejected as wrong and repressive. In America, Freudianism continues as it began. (20)

Though I much enjoy Abelove's style throughout and this article is peppered with many great sources which I'd not seen cited elsewhere. I am somewhat dismayed that here at the end—in this battle of analysts at the APA meeting—that he provides no citation at all. I'd very much like to see much more information about this meeting, a transcript in fact would be handy. Likewise I'd be interested to see what documentation there is of the initial classification of homosexualty as illness too, if only to see how many and precisely which analysts were involved in this decision, the degree to which they offered a "psychoanalytic" justification, etc.

"Re-Reading Freud on Homosexuality" by Robert May (qbq)

May, Robert. "Re-Reading Freud on Homosexuality." In Domenici & Lesser, Eds. Disorienting Sexuality: Psychoanalytic Reappraisals of Sexual Identities. Routledge: New York, 1995. 153-65. 

May begins be asking why it is that gays and lesbians, queers more generally, are so prone to distrust psychoanalysis. He discusses "two books representative of mainstream American Psychoanalysis's view of homosexuality from the late '50s through the early 70s" these being Irving Beiber Ed. Homosexuality (1962) and Charles Socarides The Overt Homosexual. (1968). & gives some quotes from each that show just how pathologizing each text is.

May, though is trying to clarify Freud's radical unlikeness to the thought of these American analysts.

"The Freud who interests me, and whom I think is the redeeming Freud, is the Freud who is constantly doubling back to undercut distinctions, distinctions to which he himself has allegiance, or even has himself constructed. This self-destructing Freud is in tune with our contemporary sense of the instability of meaning, the limitations of binary positions, and the importance of noticing what's outside the frame" (157).

& restated somewhat

"The Freud who I believe remains most persistently interesting and valuable is the Freud who could never be content with a given formulation and was constantly revising and undercutting" (157). 

Writing of the American psychoanalytic establishment;

"To be established, respected, socially empowered to judge others—this was the triumph of orthodox psychoanalysis in the 1950s. It became, then, an irresistible target for the righteous anger of the unwillingly diagnosed and of those who had good reason to feel excluded and demeaned: women, gays, even psychologists and social workers wanting admission to mainstream psychoanalytic institutes. The rise of biological psychiatry, the radical decline in society's willingness to pay for long-term psychotherapy, and ideological shifts in the culture all have combined to destroy the foundation of psychoanalysis' social power. It will be interesting to see if the anger against psychoanalysis decreases in turn" (158).

…this book was published in 1995, but in the 17 years since then, while surely less people know less overall about Freud, it seems to me that much of what has been retained is the bullshit. Certainly the unthought rejection of Freud is still extremely common, even amongst those who have not heard of 'The Oedipus Complex.'

May notes that while perversion, and pervert sound "harsh and assaultive to many" that "it's important to notice that the vocabulary Freud is trying to free himself from centers around the label 'degeneracy,' a pseudo-neurological term used in his day to categorize (and stigmatize) homosexuality" (159). & indeed this is a good point, though one that dogs all discussion of perversion (and in a different way, psychosis). Still, it bears repeating that Freud was fighting against a large group of medical and sexological and psychological folks who were all positive that homosexuality was the result of some as yet to be found degeneracy of the body itself, against which to classify variation of the sexual instinct as inversions or perversions or whatever was a more (though clearly not totally) value neutral approach.

May writes of Freud's subverting of the definition of 'perversion' that he had himself given. "Here is the enlivening paradox: a binary distinction is bridged, and therefore subverted, by contact between any any two adjacent links in the chain. There must then be a place where the distinction breaks down and we can't tell the difference" (160). As May plays out in more detail that I've reproduced here, Freud sets up the distinction of perverse to "normal" sexuality then almost immediately begins to problematize "perverse" such that much of what we all take for granted as very common 'things to do' with one another, sexually, might be thought of as perverse as well. 

May discusses the insistently "Knowing" attitude (162 & elsewhere) taken by Freud in the work, an all-too-questionable posture it seems from our current perspective. But he is at pains to show how Freud is continually oscillating between statements that seems to be erecting hierarchies and classificatory schemes only to undermine their stability with his next utterance. Likewise, we might grant Freud a bit of leeway as well in that I think we would be hard pressed to find anyone publishing papers in his time who adopts a rhetoric of uncertainty or who insists on ambiguity or undecidability when discussing sexual matters - my hunch is that the were we to look at the discursive situation his works were joining in to we would find a discursive norm everywhere present such that authors presume in advance that classifications are possible, that researchers will be definitive in their claims. This was Freud's academic culture in large part, that he so frequently operates within its rhetorical demands and nonetheless undermines the stability of so many of his and other's classificatory schemes is quite radical in many ways.

That article is all that I am going to mention, but here is a link to the book if anyone is curious about the other articles. Below are several pictures of people turned up by a "Robert May" google image search. I doubt that any of these is the author.

Is that a real theory, or did you make that up?

I like reading Lacan.

Not always mind you.

Not with some desperate impulse barking at my neck, some super-Ego stand-in demanding that I finish a paper or rebut a critique or otherwise pronounce authoritatively upon (& cite of course!) to demonstrate my worth for the big(bloated)Other in some fashion.

But I find just how freakily bizarre Lacan can be, rather… awe-inspiring.

That so much of his work is spoken opens a particular door to it that I often stand in, looking, and wondering (through the haze of multiple English renderings with my non-French eyes) from the improvising poets' room (my room) into Lacan's (as I imagine it) and feeling as if I know something about how things must just have just started to come out - like a tap being turned on, the pipes creak, then you're talking - and it is not as if one is not thinking all the while (in fact it is challenging to think on one's feet, in one's mouth), but to say that one is magisterially directing with knowledge aforethought each utterance in accordance with some grander argument is perhaps even more absurd (noodle in a pincushion) than to suggest that no thought is being exercised in this process. 

O'Hara

Much more like Frank O'Hara than anyone will probably credit, Jacques is going on his nerve.

Or so it seems to me.

But Lacanians, or such has been my experience, are not comfortable focusing overmuch on his seminars or writings as embodying a poetics - as if to find in the language something not importantly content-relevant and connectable to one's real or imagined internal map of Lacanian thought consigns whatever it is to frivolity. 

I see no necessary contradiction with desiring to both make use of the generative charge of Lacan's poetics - a position which would start with him but go wherever, and another which thinks that attempting to tune him in as best as one is able (an endless and recursive process) is important regardless of whether one ultimately 'agrees' and this attempt is an aid to the very generativity of the poetics.

In correspondence recently with my sis, where I was thinking through some of this same stuff somewhat otherwise, I wrote this;

[Lacan's] poetics i do not talk about but simply use, a poetics that is generative (for me at least) and about which i do not have much of anything to say, though there is endlessly something more one can do with it - "doings" which could never have been predicted entirely from knowledge of Lacan, hence the 'generative'

were the generative poetics not present, then the "specific rigor" [of my approach to Lacan's work, her description] would never have taken hold, nor would giving 2 shits about Lacan in all likelihood

in a very similar way (abstracted from the specific contents); 

i hold you to a higher standard - because i love you

None of which should suggest that my reading and thinking and experience of Lacan is not conflicted and ambivalent in many ways. 

That is, in spite of having found ways to enjoy, I am not immune to the suggestion that something crucial is being said, that he is on the verge of giving us the key to grasping it all - and thus of the need (it could strike at any moment!) to be able to bring the lights up, stand, face the group and say "What Lacan means is…"

And this is surely required if one is to accord with the general demands of the University discourse,.. that flash of mastery "What Lacan means…" - as fleeting as a grimace - is quickly diffused with more and more knowledge, tied to the master's words with citation and exegesis, propped up further by pointing at other names who read him in a similar way.

But saying "What Lacan means…" is a rather secondary if not tertiary posture of mastery already, one that any 'Agent S2' in an actual university setting sneaks up on rather than blurting out in most cases, laying all the bricks of justification and citation before daring to pronounce. 

Obviously - in the tone if not the substance - there is something about this which is displeasing to me, constraining.

There is a poetics in that too I guess, but it isn't one that presses my buttons and - as JL himself argues in Seminar XVII apropos the University discourse. 

"…the difficulty endemic to translating me into academic language will also blight anyone who, for whatever reason, tries their hand at it…" 

"Blight" is an interesting choice - and of course that is Grigg, the translator's choice and I do not have the French original to ponder.

Rather we are to be agents of the S2, knowledge purveying a unique packaging (dare I say brand) of some concatenation of 'a stupid' of signifiers, made to appear to have a meaning and should the they be truly classic, the might simply seem to be their meaning (two echoes there might be worth thinking about sometime, not now).

This unique packaging should be reflected on the c.v.,.. naturally.

Brand Lowther (includes the award-wishing Lowther Method ®™)

Google > Image "brand lowther" gave me this pic and this caption;
"As you might expect, Lowther-based loudspeakers were much in evidence at the show. A pair of vintage Lowthers was spotted in the Lowther America room." Now I want a vintage Lowther loudspeaker!

Superego says: [sigh]

So, I like the idea of having a specific rigor, it sounds so butch but maybe we could spin it nicely if the license that the poetic provides is available as a consequence.

There is an ethics there and one not totally unlike that involved in staging a Return to… the text of someone or other.

Which is not to even pretend that the poetics that I find generative would have found favor with Lacan or that he'd even agree that it is there in his work, just that I feel pieces of it there.

"Poetics" here having less to do with words-language-discourse as such as with the ways of working with them, actual practices but also the stances towards the materials would seem to be important.

Since I am already risking an opposition between the poetic and the academic 'Lacans' let me also not forget the clinical one - arguably the one most crucial for Lacan himself from the beginning to the end of his career. 

My hope to tune Jacques in as best as I can as well as to find the points where more thinking is needed, extensions proposed, modification seems necessary, etc - This is where it shades over into the poetics (theory is then improvised and maybe not scrapped after) (this is very like poetry for me, a poem is written or spoken and later one decides… Not all of them can work. Plus if you aren't failing often then you can't be trying very hard. Sometimes they come in bunches, interrelated but distinct and they keep coming for as long as they keep coming and no longer.) to do perhaps with the way the concepts interact, how they fit together and don't, how they unsettle one another or create tensions, the sorts of narratives that emerge from them, a sense (ultimately my own, and not exactly anything I could argue for) of the propulsion or internal dynamics of this as poetics that makes it available for use.

But, just to make matters more impossible(?), it seems to me that whether some modification to the theory is to be justified as "psychoanalytic" in a meaningful sense of that term, then it would also need, at the bare minimum, to not be armful or contraindicated or somesuch thing in the clinic.

No analysands were harmed in the making of this post (so far).

But yes, that is a tough one as I am not an analyst and never even completed my own analysis - though I do admit that I often wonder about becoming an analyst, being an analyst, ( I hear your slips of the tongue, I do, but have learned mostly to pretend I didn't) etc. 

So those are the three styles or modes that I try to keep in mind, the poetic, the 'specific rigor' (scholarship) & the clinic - the first I feel but have some difficulties explaining and do not really desire to try to explain very much - the second I am always trying to adapt to the specifics of university protocols and whatnot but which my allegiance to scholarly pursuits is not framed by those things (MLA format, disciplinary boundaries, peer review) but by the specific texts that I am excited by - and thirdly by my hallucination of the subject as analysand or analyst, my memories of my analysis and others I read about, my never-ending snooping around in my own associations, slips, dreams.

The weak link is the third one.

Which is not to say that the others are über-robust or anything.

Creeley, natch.

My subject line is a riff on the line that poet Robert Creeley so often repeated.

Creeley was reading somewhere - the midwest I think - and after his reading a man came up and asked him, in all seriousness "Is that a real poem or did you make that up?"

If we put theory in for "poem"…?

The whole problematic of the university discourse as discussed above is evoked once more.

Other jokes are possible.

But speaking as a poet I just want to say, 

That's a real theory

because

I made it up.

You talkin' to me?

The Transsexual in Badiou's SAINT PAUL

• Badiou, Alain. Saint Paul; The Foundation of Universalism. Ray Brassier trans. Stanford CA: Stanford UP, 2003.

The cover design they didn't choose.

I was surprised to come upon this here. I was searching in all my ARG-poached files for any reference to trans* and Badiou's book on Paul popped up. Go figure. In the text, Badiou is giving a snarky sort of litany of hyperbolic identitarian positions and asks who will "eulogize the cultural­ marginal-homeopathic-media-friendly transsexual?" and the collision of these varied terms is an index of the general scorn that Badiou has for what he calls identitarian or minoritarian logics. Below is reasonable chunk (I hope) of Badiou in which the reference to the transsexual appears, to help provide a sense of why the transsexual appears at all and what Badiou's point may be, and to what degree we can assume it to have any bearing on trans* persons as such. 

For those not versed in or perhaps even familiar with Badiou this might be steep reading. Keep in mind that for Badiou universalism is not a bad thing and truth and 'truth procedures' are crucial. I'm not the best expositor of this stuff because I am not sure I follow once things get articulated as set theory. Still, in one example (that I might sort of get), that of "politics" being replaced by "management" (see below), part of the point is that politics maintains antagonism as politically constitutive (a point Badiou had made in the 70s but which is independently arrived at by Laclau and Mouffe later in a formulation that is more well known) whereas management elides antagonism, presenting it as something that can administered out of existence by better management. There is a similar elision at work when the terms sexuality, technology and culture replace those of love, science and art in Badiou's analysis. & Badiou's thoughts about love and its truths are related to Lacan's (lack of sexual relationship) if by no means equivalent. (Big topic, not going there.)

Also important to Badiou's philosophy are events and truths and subjects that they create. Being super schematic about all of that…  An event is what can not be predicted based on how the situation or status quo is at any given moment (an event is then not a consequence of what there is, it is an interruption in that field). An event happens and it manifests or embodies a truth in one of the four 'conditions' [art, science, politics, love] and this truth creates subjects, in that subjects hold to the truth, live so as to sustain that truth, in the sense of remaining faithful to that truth - this is what Badiou calls fidelity to truth. To reneg on that, to lose faith in the truth found in some event is evil. (Yeah, no shit, he goes to that word! …which gives you another glimpse of what is so unusual about Badiou.) Anyway, here is the passage from Saint Paul; The Foundation of Universalism…  

The contemporary world is thus doubly hostile to truth procedures. This hostility betrays itself though nominal occlusions: where the name of a truth procedure should obtain, another, which represses it, holds sway. The name "culture" comes to obliterate that of "art." The word "technology" obliterates the word "science." The word "management" obliterates the word "politics." The word "sexuality" obliterates "love." The "culture-technology-management-sexuality" system, which has the immense merit of being homogeneous to the market, and all of whose terms designate a category of commercial presentation, constitutes the modern nominal occlusion of the "art-science-politics-Iove" system, which identifies truth procedures typologically.

Now, far from returning toward an appropriation of this typology, identitarian or minoritarian logic merely proposes a variant on its nominal occlusion by capital. It inveighs against every generic concept of art, putting the concept of culture in its place, conceived as culture of the group, as the subjective or representative glue for the group's existence, a culture that addresses only itself and remains potentially nonuniversalizable. Moreover, it does not hesitate to posit that this culture's constitutive elements are only fully comprehensible on the condition that one belong to the subset in question. Whence catastrophic pronouncements of the sort: only a homosexual can "understand" what a homosexual is, only an Arab can understand what an Arab is, and so forth. If, as we believe, only truths (thought) allow man to be distinguished from the human animal that underlies him, it is no exaggeration to say that such minoritarian pronouncements are genuinely barbaric. In the case of science, cultural­ism promotes the technical particularity of subsets to the equivalent of scientific thought, so that antibiotics, Shamanism, the laying on of hands, or emollient herbal teas all become of equal worth. In the case of politics, the consideration of identitarian traits provides the basis for determination, be it the state's or the protestor's, and finally it is a matter of stipulating, through law or brute force, an authoritarian management of // these traits (national, religious, sexual, and so on) considered as dominant political operators. Lastly, in the case of love, there will be the complementary demands, either for the genetic right to have such and such a form of specialized sexual behavior recognized as a minoritarian identity; or for the return, pure and simple, to archaic, culturally established conceptions, such as that of strict conjugality, the confinement of women, and so forth. It is perfectly possible to combine the two, as becomes ap­parent when homosexual protest concerns the right to be reincluded in the grand traditionalism of marriage and the family, or to take responsibility for the defrocking of a priest with the Pope's blessing.

The two components of the articulated whole (abstract homogene­ity of capital and identitarian protest) are in a relation of reciprocal maintenance and mirroring. Who will maintain the self-evident superiority of the competent-cultivated-sexually liberated manager? But who will de­fend the corrupt-religious-polygamist terrorist? Or eulogize the cultural­ marginal-homeopathic-media-friendly transsexual? Each figure gains its rotating legitimacy from the other's discredit. Yet at the same time, each draws on the resources of the other, since the transformation of the most typical, most recent communitarian identities into advertising selling points and salable images has for its counterpart the ever more refined competence that the most insular or most violent groups display when it comes to speculating on the financial markets or maintaining a large-scale arms commerce.

Breaking with all this (neither monetary homogeneity nor identitarian protest; neither the abstract universality of capital nor the particularity of interests proper to a subset), our question can be clearly formulated: What are the conditions for a universal singularity?

(Badiou, Saint Paul, 12-13)

These days, I restrict myself
to lacy underthings - Alain Badiou

I feel a certain use value in the critique of the "culture-technology-management-sexuality" system launched from the POV of "art-science-politics-Iove" but I am unsure precisely where Badiou stands on some of these. What I guess I am responsive to is in part to the aesthetics of the critique itself, the way that, by ref. to an event the universality of truth creates subjects to that truth (in one of those four areas, art - science, love, politics) a subjection that requires fidelity. So, while I respond to that critique, it also makes me a bit nervous in that "Honor" and "Duty" and all manner of other suspect master signifiers seem to lurk in the wings, waiting for the old narratives to take off running with this purportedly new rationale. After all, I respond to tear-jerkers just like the next moron, but so what?

Another point of ambivalence for me concerns Badiou's thoughts on love. Apparently there is a new book on love out now by Badiou (In Praise of Love), though I've not seen it or read anything about it so far. Again to shoot from the hip; Badiou's language seems to shut things down to the terms of the extant sex/gender regime in what I have read, and he does not seem to be thinking about those who do not fit within it - and yet, the arguments that he makes about love as an event that creates of two people - the lovers - subjects of this shared event, does not seem to be predicated upon sexuality as such and thus, perhaps not to be limited to any M/F predictability. So these various terms like fidelity and truth, and the narrative that is implied in his discussion chimes uncomfortably close to the find your soulmate and never let go dicta that underpins so much of the popular ideology of love. But what if I think sexuality is important too? Can there be no truth of sexuality? Seemingly not for Badiou, events just don't come from there. Yet another wrinkle is added when one tries to factor in that the vast majority of the times when two people both get all gooey for one another and declare that they are in love, that this is probably not "love" as Badiou conceives it. 

Here though is a passage from Žižek's book Violence,

Alain Badiou develops the notion of “atonal” worlds - monde atone - which lack the intervention of a Master-Signifier to impose meaningful order onto the confused multiplicity of reality. // A basic feature of our postmodern world is that it tries to dispense with this agency of the ordering Master-Signifier: the complexity of the world needs to be asserted unconditionally.  Every Master-Signifier meant to impose some order on it must be deconstructed, dispersed: “the modern apology for the ‘complexity’ of the world…is really nothing but a generalized desire for atony.”  Badiou’s excellent example of such an “atonal” world is the politically correct vision of sexuality as promoted by gender studies with its obsessive rejection of binary logic: the world is a nuanced world of multiple sexual practices which tolerates no decision, no instance of the Two, no evaluation, in the strong Nietzschean sense of the term.(34-35)

I'd be curious to read Badiou on Gender Studies, not sure where that is to be found though - the quote that Žižek embeds is from the French version what in English is Logics of Worlds, so perhaps it is found there. What strikes me as a bit weird in this account of atony is that Slavoj tells us that the effort is to get rid of S1s - master signifiers - and yet he writes "the complexity of the world needs to be asserted unconditionally" which, to my mind, nominates COMPLEXITY to the status of S1 - even a more aggressive S1 in that - like the Borg perhaps - it attacks and assimilates all other rivals to itself. But might we not also observe that the assertion of complexity might be understood as pushing the Symbolic in relation to the Imaginary? A strategy that might be thought of as contributing to the loosening of Imaginary fixations. 

None of which is to say that I also do not see a point to his criticism, just that it has these contrary associations as well. I am thus asserting the complexity of the potential meanings of complexity to Žižek (who is surely still reading). 

I bet Žižek likes this notion of atony as well as it echoes his analysis of the rhetoric around wars - where they have profit incentive they are insistently make-or-break, into the breach, combattings of the "obvious" evil etc, but where no profit motive, complexity rules and it is impossible to ascribe clear blame to anyone, the conflict is intractable, time to step back, queue the sociologist-historian, etc. Thus complexity acts as an apology for inaction - there is something to that, and I largely buy his earlier analysis…  just not sure that I can sign off yet on atony as discussed here (though it further contextualizes Badiou I guess).  

Žižek's evocation of the binary is also a bit off-putting, but is anyone seriously reading him for gender politics? The question I can't answer is whether Badiou's thinking about such matters is any different or an sort of "improvement".

To the extent that Badiou's rephrased critique of the "it's a black thing, you wouldn't understand" idea is generalized to all similar identitarian claims, I am intrigued by the charge of barbarism (and how he seems to liken this to essentialism via the brute animality of humans). But, I am uncertain how Badiou gets from there to being in a position, it seems, to blame this logic for the proliferation of all manner of things which it appears he dislikes, things like "Shamanism, the laying on of hands, or emollient herbal teas" (recall that the transsexual above is 'media friendly' and 'homeopathic', the latter term surely fitting in to a sequence with emollient herbal teas for Badiou). So, given that I think that homeopathy is ridiculous (I do actually) am I to see the transexual, who is media-friendly (really?) and culturally marginal, as also being ridiculous (guilt by association?). Or to cut to the quick, is identifying oneself as a "transsexual" (or a "manager" or "straight") in and of itself enough to sustain the charge of barbarism that he formulates? 

& can we really let that "media-friendly" pass without further question? With the terms manager and terrorist (with which transsexual would seem to be substitutable) what would being media-friendly mean? Certainly the media has been thriving on terrorism and transsexuality and in a vastly different way on managers/management - but even with those terms - it seems to me that they are, what they are, in ways that exceed what the media is "friendly" towards and about. Is the media-friendly transsexual the one parodied on Jerry Springer and the one troped as psychotic killer and the one marked prostitute and etc… If so, then it seems ludicrous to name this construct a product of an indentitarian or minoritarian logic as there seems to be nothing behind this "identity" or "minority" at all but refusal, a various phrased but quite insistent "That's not me". 

& throughout, are we implicitly limiting to trans women in this discussion? I ask as the discussion of the media invisibility of trans men is not uncommon and I am having trouble thinking any similar set of delimited connotations for trans man (has there ever been a trans man prostitute story for example?). For terrorist and for manager we have a bewildering variety of associations, the difference being that for terrorist the "positive" connotations are few and far between and the term acts as a flashpoint for negative affective connotations. By contrast manager is rather neutral, or simply open to positive and negative connotations. Transsexual has by contrast has been heavily overdetermined by the few possible articulations (stereotypes might be a better term) above and few others as all (already well-critiqued by folks like Julia Serrano), with actual trans people being pushed or pulled or crammed into one or another of these few narratives.

Anyway, all of this to gesture at how fraught it is to conjoin "media-friendly" with "transexual" as Badiou does.

Maybe something can be extracted from the passages on politics to help think about this…

"In the case of politics, the consideration of identitarian traits provides the basis for determination, be it the state's or the protestor's, and finally it is a matter of stipulating, through law or brute force, an authoritarian management of these traits (national, religious, sexual, and so on) considered as dominant political operators."

…which echoes a statement that will come later

"The two components of the articulated whole (abstract homogene­ity of capital and identitarian protest) are in a relation of reciprocal maintenance and mirroring."

…this feels to me like the real teeth of this critique. That is, if we had good reason to doubt or dispute that "identitarian protest" was in a relationship of "reciprocal maintenance and mirroring" with the "abstract homogeneity of capital" then this critique would have no bite to it. But do we doubt this? Do I, I suppose I ought to ask. 

I recall a discussion a decade or more ago with this poet who was insistent that every artistic form had already been politically neutralized. I asked about graffiti. He acted like I was an idiot and told me exasperatedly that there had been graffiti shows in NYC galleries since the 80s at least, ergo, graffiti had absolutely no status outside of the commodity. The "one drop rule" just flitted through my head, but that's a pretty fraught analogy to work from, even if it works. I'm uneasy with the idea that the potential for politics to emerge from within any group thought to have an "identity," if that identity has, at any time, anywhere, been positioned as a social category to be administered by the economy in some fashion, is thereby liquidated. Certainly I am not trying to uphold barbarism in the form of an "it's a My Identity®™ sort of knowledge (so I just have it) and you are not of my identity (so you never can know it)" but I worry that assuming that because there is a socially mediated niche seemingly already present and something appears to fit there, that whoever that "something" is has become tainted through and through. Does the existence of one "uncle Tom" politically neutralize all African Americans? I don't see how that can be right. 

Another Badiou wrinkle to keep floating nearby is that for him, until one has been subjected to a truth, one is not a subject at all. Badiou is unconcerned with "identities" as generally conceived and does not extend subjecthood on the basis of membership in a group such as women or african americans, dead white guys or male lesbians, etc.

For him, it appears that the sequence of "the transformation of the most typical, most recent communitarian identities into advertising selling points and salable images" could probably be re-articulated endlessly, he gives us "the competent-cultivated-sexually liberated manager (…) the corrupt-religious-polygamist terrorist (and) the cultural­ marginal-homeopathic-media-friendly transsexual" which would seem to allow extensions, such as the vegan-hacker-genderqueer or the bipolar-leather bear-derivatives investor which would have to entail the same scorn from Badiou for making use of the same "identitarian or minoritarian logic." But at this hyperbolic and parodic level are we perhaps failing to address what it Badiou is implying here? That is, the conjoining of all of these terms and insistent S1s in someone's life is not so monovalent as this is it? Does Badiou thereby elide the differences and ambivalences in investment even in the terms most insisted upon? Does he flatten the relational aspect of these things? 

That is, there are probably some who identify strongly with being a manager - but does that have anything like the same range of effects and consequences that being identified as man or woman, straight or queer, muslim or buddhist, etc has for a person? Context is crucial here, no? I frankly find it hard to imagine a symbolic economy wherein the designation transsexual gains or loses in currency or legitimacy in a reciprocal relation with a term like manager - the two seem to operate in radically different zones of social meaning. Admittedly Badiou is probably using these somewhat synecdochally to refer to any and every such term one could produce and thus - by implication the system of differentially constructed identity terms. (This would connect to his claim that in the situation as such, all we have are bodies and languages - until a truth appears that is. See here for more).

Recall though that after his list of compound identities he writes "Each figure gains its rotating legitimacy from the other's discredit. Yet at the same time, each draws on the resources of the other, since the transformation of the most typical, most recent communitarian identities into advertising selling points and salable images has for its counterpart the ever more refined competence that the most insular or most violent groups display when it comes to speculating on the financial markets or maintaining a large-scale arms commerce."

There is a bunch of stuff in this that needs unpacking. Let's start with his recognition that there is/are something called "communitarian identities", temporally marked as "recent" and also as "typical" (though what register that term relates to I am not sure) (are "atypical communitarian identities" not subject to Badiou's critique?). So he seems to acknowledge that communities do confer, in some cases, "identities" upon their members. Is that already a problem? That is, is the identitarian or minortarian logic already at work here in Badiou's POV? I'm not sure really, though surely this is an important question. It seems that these problematic logics are operant at least by the point at which such "identities" have been converted into "advertising selling points and salable images". 

Hi, I'm a spokes corpse!

Here we might think about the way that The Gap used images of Kerouac to sell khaki pants or chinos or whatever they're called. Beatnik as spokes-corpse. Surely the beats have long since been turned into "advertising selling points and salable images" and I am not likely to argue for their relevance to the poetic or literary moment (though I hear that Sha-Na-Na are doing a reunion tour) but I'd also dispute that because something called beat has entered into economic circulation that who the beats were and what their work might persist in provoking in new readers is somehow foreclosed by that fact. 

Is the economic dimension of this the top level of description? That is, when one of these figures "draws on the resources of the other" do we mean that they others are all literally "speculating on the financial markets" and this, their participation in the market, is what taints each and sets up the "relation of reciprocal maintenance and mirroring"? What about groups that don't speculate on the market? Or for whom such interaction with the market is not shared by all - surely even amongst managers there are many who do not invest in the market. Or, from a different direction we might ask if it makes any sense descriptively to discuss "transsexual market investors" as a group? 

I have no published position
on Homeopathy

What does it mean that "communitarian identities" have been used as "advertising selling points and salable images" and that "the most insular or most violent groups" are good at "speculating on the financial markets or maintaining a large-scale arms commerce" - how is the latter a "counterpart" to the former? The answer would have to be for Badiou that they are exhibiting these suspect logics that he's been complaining about. But do they? Let's say that I am a terrorist and I am also great at speculating on the derivatives market and I have a great business plan where I draw my resources from gun running, drug and sex trafficking and this all funnels into and is exponentialized by my market speculation and thus do I plan and fund terror worldwide. How does that sit next to, as the demonstration of the same "logic" the situation of a transsexual, who is media-friendly, culturally marginal and "into" homeopathy? Ok, let's pretend that Chaz Bono is way into homeopathy. Let's also call him culturally marginal just to keep the game going. If we could maintain this thought experiment without it collapsing into stupidity would we see this purportedly identical logic at work in both cases? What sort of perspective would I have to occupy to see the investment savvy capitalist-terrorist and Chaz as equivalent operators or a cultural logic? What makes Chaz media-friendly is his parents and his transition, child of celebs + sex change is like a tabloid wet dream and 'media-friendly' surely encompasses such dreams regardless of whether they aid or victimize their subjects. So, while I would not wish to deny any agency to Chaz Bono and submit him entirely to the enjoyment of the media apparatus - the balance seems to be with the demand of that media apparatus. But in the terrorist example the terrorist as agent is all slickly capitalistic and knows how to work the system, but it does not appear that the terrorist is worked by that system in anything like the same fashion. If these are counterparts, how much weight do we put on counter, do we read "counterpart" as denoting an inversion or reversal? That seems possible if I use my close-reading glasses (which make it impossible to see as far as my toes) but really? Does it really seem that the same logic is in effect in these two scenarios? To me, it does not.

Badiou's discourse here about these identitarian or minoritarian logics doesn't feel to me like it has that solid a grasp upon the ways that identities are adopted, imposed, implied, revoked and many other such "identity processes" of the social take place. I'm unconvinced that such processes can be adequately conceptualized as all exhibiting an identical logic. The terms in question also seem to operate at different levels, mobilizing different potentials of investment and investment that is coded at times, coded along the lines of earlier identifications - as male or female, by race, etc - even as these things may work to inhibit or facilitate certain outcomes. How much more likely circa 1950 in the USA was it for a man than for a woman to attain to the position of "manager" in a business? More perhaps than ended up in that year becoming "firemen" probably, but being identified as woman for the social realm surely impacted what professions one might attain in that time, arguably making this imposed identity more fundamentally determinative than others like 'manager' or 'patriot' or 'vegetarian'. 

Perhaps if one drastically limited the terms to - for example - the designations available on any given US census, then we could begin with the pretense that these categories, all imposed by the same authority, operating on the same plane of reference, might be susceptible to reciprocal mirroring that Badiou discusses. But I am not sure that even in a setting where such is facilitated, like this one, that it can be unproblematically understood that way (which is not to exclude any understanding deriving from such a move, just to add a bracket for further consideration, a step back from the dogmatism of Badiou's presentations). 

The idea that, should any term of identification enter into circulation within the economy, that the "identity" so referred to by the term is now reduced to a commodity-cog of said economy without remainder, strikes me as false. Which is not to argue that when a term of identification enters the economy that there are not many effects - surely there are, only that they cannot be adequately thought along the lines of a 'one drop rule'. 

So, while I continue to find Badiou intriguing and provocative, here at least, little of what he is saying convinces me. My answer to my opening questions about the transsexual in Badiou's text is that - in principle - nearly any other identity term might have been chosen by him. So his use of "transsexual" feels largely spontaneous to me and given my thoughts above, largely irrelevant to whether anyone does or does not find transsexual a useful, necessary, problematic or irrelevant term for self-identification. 

Works Cited

Badiou, Alain. Saint Paul; The Foundation of Universalism. Ray Brassier trans. Stanford CA: Stanford UP, 2003.

Žižek, Slavoj. Violence; Six Sideways Reflections. New York: Picador, 2008.