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Abstract
The field of rhetoric has generated studies of definitional disputes and of the relationship between definition and power. Informed by the idea of collective definition created over time, these studies raise an important theoretical-practical question about definition and contestation that may be approached through a concept of authority. Etymologically, authority precedes or transcends power and is rooted in the twin poles of creativity and reason. Accordingly, this essay proposes a rhetorical manner of contesting definitional authority that performs immanent critique. The manner is warranted by analysis of a 1971 essay that challenged psychiatry's authority to define “homosexuality.”
A preliminary draft of this essay was presented at the National Communication Association Conference, New Orleans, LA, 2002.
A preliminary draft of this essay was presented at the National Communication Association Conference, New Orleans, LA, 2002.
Notes
A preliminary draft of this essay was presented at the National Communication Association Conference, New Orleans, LA, 2002.
1. Edward Schiappa, Defining Reality: Definitions and the Politics of Meaning (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University, 2003), 43, 8–9, 45, 10; and Douglas Walton, “Persuasive Definitions and Public Policy Arguments,” Argumentation and Advocacy 37 (2001): 117–32. Although Walton's work is most often associated with informal logic, it has taken recent advantage of rhetorical theory, notably Aristotle's Rhetoric. See, for example, Douglas Walton, Ad Hominem Arguments (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1998). Additional studies of definitional disputes are published in the special issue on definitional argument, Argumentation and Advocacy 35 (Spring 1999).
2. See, for example, the case study of “person” in the abortion controversy in Schiappa, 89–108.
3. David Zarefsky, President Johnson's War on Poverty: Rhetoric and History (University of Alabama Press, 1986), 1; J. Robert Cox, “Argument and the ‘Definition of a Situation,’” Central States Speech Journal 32 (1981): 197–205; and B. Scott Titsworth, “An Ideological Basis for Definition in Public Argument: A Case Study of the Individuals with Disabilities in Education Act,” Argumentation and Advocacy 35 (Spring 1999): 172, 183. On legitimacy and power, see Jürgen Habermas, “Hannah Arendt: On the Concept of Power,” in Jürgen Habermas, Philosophical-Political Profiles, trans. F. G. Lawrence (Cambridge, MA: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 1985).
4. Schiappa presumes a relationship between the two concepts in Defining Reality, 178.
5. Ethan Andrews, Harper's Latin Dictionary: A New Latin Dictionary Founded on the Translation of Freund's Latin-German Lexicon, rev. enl. Carlton Lewis and Charles Short (New York: American Book Co., 1907), s.v. “auctōritas.”
6. Carlton Lewis, A Latin Dictionary for Schools (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1889), s.v. “auctōritas.” Like Andrews, one of the meanings to which Lewis translates auctōritas is “production.”
7. Hannah Arendt, “What is Authority?” in Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought (New York: Penguin, 1993), 111. See also Oxford English Dictionary Online, 2nd ed., s.v. “authority,” http://dictionary.oed.com/cgi/entry/00015072
8. Arendt, 121, 124.
9. Arendt, 141.
10. Aristotle, The Rhetoric, trans. W. Rhys Roberts (New York: Modern Library, 1984).
11. Butler's interest in theorizing performance is most clearly seen in Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990); and Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (New York: Routledge, 1993).
12. Franklin E. Kameny, “Gay Liberation and Psychiatry,” Psychiatric Opinion 8 (1971): 18–27.
13. On authority's modern release from inert tradition, see Immanuel Kant, “What is Enlightenment?” in On History, ed. Lewis Beck and trans. Louis Beck, Robert Achor, and Emil Fackerneim (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1963). Here, modern authority may be taken to include its epistemological and practical varieties, which at times overlap. To Kant, what holds them in common is the independent test of reason that may always be brought to bear on their claims.
14. On authority and reasoned recognition of knowledge and insightful judgment, see Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, 2nd rev. ed., trans. and rev. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald Marshall (New York: Continuum, 1993), 279–280. Although his focus is on epistemic authority, Gadamer is also concerned with practical authority. This latter concern is evident in his discussion of tradition as a form of authority that influences attitudes and behavior, and that is preserved through an affirmative “act of reason, albeit an inconspicuous one” (281). Habermas takes issue with inconspicuous reason in the well-known Gadamer–Habermas debate. See, for example, Jürgen Habermas, “Hermeneutics and the Social Sciences,” in The Hermeneutics Reader, ed. Kurt Mueller-Vollmer (New York: Continuum, 1989) 294–319.
15. Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, The Dialectic of Reason (New York: Continuum, 1997).
16. Jürgen Habermas, Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy, trans. William Rehg (Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1996), 36–7.
17. On self-referential power, see Max Horkheimer, “Authority and the Family,” in Critical Theory: Selected Essays, trans. Matthew O'Connell and others (New York: Herder and Herder, 1972 ), 71, 87. For an important discussion of problems induced when the creative word turns law, see Giorgio Agamben, Homo Saccer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998).
18. Immanuel Kant, “What is Orientation in Thinking?” in Critique of Practical Reason and Other Writings in Moral Philosophy, ed. Lewis Beck, trans. Lewis Beck, Robert Achor, and Emil Fackerneim (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1949), 303; and Jürgen Habermas, On the Logic of the Social Sciences, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen and Jerry Stark (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1989), 170.
19. Habermas, Between Facts and Norms, 23–27.
20. For the limits of shared rules of debate, see G. Thomas Goodnight, “Controversy,” in Argument in Controversy: Proceedings of the 7th SCA/AFA Summer Conference on Argumentation, ed. D. W. Parson (Annandale, VA: SCA, 1991), 5–6.
21. Judith Butler, Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (New York: Routledge, 1997), 5, 39, 27.
22. Butler, Excitable Speech, 5, 14–15, 41. While Butler's theoretical discussion focuses on injurious terms of subjectivity, her case studies of the names “pornography” and “censorship” show that she also views these terms as performatives.
23. Butler, Excitable Speech, 51, emphasis in original.
24. Butler, Excitable Speech, 28.
25. Michel Foucault, “The Discourse on Language,” in The Archaeology of Knowledge and The Discourse on Language, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Pantheon Books, 1972), 224, 225.
26. Butler, Excitable Speech, 99–100, 158.
27. Butler, Excitable Speech, 28, 39, 27, 40, 27.
28. Butler, Excitable Speech, 91.
29. Murphy discusses the derivation of authority from the performance of “rhetorical traditions” in relation to existing contingencies in John Murphy, “Inventing Authority: Bill Clinton, Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Orchestration of Rhetorical Traditions,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 83 (1997): 75–76. Farrell offers an account of authority as “a rhetorical form of argument” constituted in historical time in Thomas B. Farrell, “Knowledge in Time: Toward an Extension of Rhetorical Form,” in Advances in Argumentation Theory and Research, ed. J. Robert Cox and Charles Willard (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1982), 139.
30. Judith Butler, Antigone's Claim: Kinship Between Life and Death (New York: Columbia University Press), 6–7, 5, 10, 8–9.
31. Butler, Antigone's Claim, 10–11. See also Michel Foucault, “The Subject and Power,” in Essential Works of Foucault, 1954–1984, vol. 3: Power, ed. James Faubion, trans. Robert Hurley and others (New York: New York Press, 2000), 337–38.
32. Butler, Excitable Speech, 32–33, 156–57.
33. Max Horkheimer offers an early formulation; see “Traditional and Critical Theory,” in Critical Theory, 188–252. See also Craig Calhoun, Critical Social Theory: Culture, History, and the Challenge of Difference (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1995), 23, 30–31.
34. I am using “gestures” in the sense discussed by Agamben in Giorgio Agamben, Means Without End: Notes on Politics, trans. Vincenso Binetti and Cesare Casarino (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2000), 58–59. Between desire and its fulfillment, Agamben writes, “The gesture is the exhibition of mediality: it is the process of making a means visible as such. It allows the emergence of the being-in-a-medium of human beings and thus it opens the ethical dimension for them.”
35. The following account is heavily influenced by Erik Doxtader, “Characters in the Middle of Public Life: Consent, Dissent, and Ethos,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 33, (2000): 336–69. I am deeply indebted to Doxtader for introducing me to this work.
36. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality vol. 3: The Care of the Self, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage Books, 1988), 89, 94; and Michel Foucault, “What is Enlightenment?” in Essential Works of Foucault, 1954–1984 vol. 1: Ethics, Subjectivity, and Truth, ed. Paul Rabinow, trans. Robert Hurley and others (New York: New Press, 1907), 309.
37. Doxtader, 359–60. Much like Benjamin's notion of “character,” the generative and relational signs of this manner are “linked to freedom … by way of [their] affinity to logic.” Walter Benjamin, “Fate and Character,” in Reflections: Essays, Aphorism, Autobiographical Writings, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York: Schocken Books, 1986), 311.
38. Doxtader, 360.
39. According to Farrell, a rhetorical argument should address three constituents of rhetorical validity: a participatory audience; field-specific, relational, criteria of “good reasons” for probable judgment; and the constraints of mutually recognizable social knowledge. Thomas Farrell, “Validity and Rationality: The Rhetorical Constituents of Argumentative Form,” Journal of the American Forensic Association 13, no. 3 (1977): 142–49.
40. See Walton, “Persuasive Definitions,” 125, 123. My wording of Walton's second criterion for judging definitions is a bit different from his own but remains, I think, within the spirit of his concern to judge a definition according to its practical purpose. Thus, although Walton looks to the specific goal of a certain dialogue type to constitute the purpose of a definition, I look to the dialogue itself. This shift in focus is warranted by the rhetorical problem of definitional controversy, which finds opposing parties experiencing difficulty interacting with one another. The shift also represents a concern for process which, again, becomes important in controversies. See Goodnight, “Controversy.” Finally, the appropriate place of definitional purpose and standards of evaluation in the process of rhetorical argument is suggested in Farrell, “Validity and Rationality,” 149.
41. American Psychiatric Association, Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (Washington, DC: American Psychiatric Association, 1952), 38–39.
42. “What Mental Health is Not,” The Ladder 1 (June 1957): 21.
43. American Psychiatric Association, Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 2nd ed. (Washington, DC: American Psychiatric Association, 1968), 10.
44. The medicalization of homosexuality is discussed in Jennifer Terry, An American Obsession: Science, Medicine, and Homosexuality in Modern Society (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1999). On the psychiatric screening of military recruits, see John D'Emilio, Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities: The Making of a Homosexual Minority in the United States, 1940–1970 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 17. For the documented removal of the pathological definition of homosexuality per se from the APA's DSM, see American Psychiatric Association, “Gay, Lesbian, and Bisexual Issues,” APA Fact Sheet Series, available at http://www.psych.org/public_info/gaylesbianbisexualissues22701.pdf, accessed February 16, 2004.
45. DSM-I, 38, 39; and DSM-II, 41, 44.
46. Chesebro has argued that, in the social sciences, the word “homosexuality” makes reference to behavior, directing attention to “sexual acts between members of the same sex” to the exclusion of “social and cultural self-definitions” of the acts. James Chesebro, “Paradoxical Views of ‘Homosexuality’ in the Rhetoric of Social Scientists: A Fantasy Theme Analysis,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 66 (1980): 137. For an early critique of the psychiatric frame of interpreting homosexuality, see Parisex (Henry Gerber), “In Defense of Homosexuality,” in A Homosexual Emancipation Miscellany c. 1835–1952 (New York: Arno Press, 1975), reprinted from The Modern Thinker, 1932.
47. DSM-I, 38; and DSM-II, vii.
48. On U.S. doctors’ discourses on homosexuality at the turn of the 20th century and the doctors’ eagerness to keep their discussions outside public earshot, see Terry, 74–87, 103–13. For a crisp discussion of the baiting and maltreatment of homosexuals espoused and inspired by rhetorics of “communist” and “perversion” conspiracy, see D'Emilio, 40–53, and Terry 329–352. Morris details a constitutive relationship between the purported homosexual “menace” and J. Edgar Hoover's desire to squelch speculation about his sexuality in Charles E. Morris III, “Pink Herring and the Fourth Persona: J. Edgar Hoover's Sex Crime Panic,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 88 no. 2 (2002): 228–44.
49. Edmund Bergler, Homosexuality: Disease or Way of Life? (New York: Hill and Wang, 1957), 8–9, 15, 263, 8, 9, 28; Bergler's emphasis. See also Time, December 10, 1957.
50. Society of Medical Psychoanalysts, Homosexuality: A Psychoanalytic Study [by] Irving Bieber [and others] (New York: Basic Books, 1962), 18, 19, 303, 305, 319; Bieber's emphasis.
51. Daniel Cappon, Toward an Understanding of Homosexuality (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1965), 5–6, 7, vii.
52. Senate Subcommittee on Investigations, Committee on Expenditures in the Executive Departments, Employment of Homosexuals and Other Sex Perverts in Government, 81st Cong., 2nd sess., 1950, S. Doc. 241, 3, 19, 2–3, 4.
53. Alan Swanson, “Sexual Psychopath Statutes: Summary and Analysis,” Journal of Criminal Law, Criminology and Political Science 51 (1960): 215, available at http://heinonline.org, accessed November 11, 2002; and Group for the Advancement of Psychiatry, Committee on Psychiatry and Law, Psychiatry and Sex Psychopath Legislation: The 30s to the 80s (New York: Group for the Advancement of Psychiatry, 1977), 840–41.
54. On the outcomes of being named a “sexual psychopath,” see Swanson, 218. For the states with sexual psychopath statutes, see Karl Bowman and Bernice Engle, eds., “Sexual Psychopath Laws,” Sexual Behavior and the Law, ed. Ralph Slovenko (Springfield, IL: Charles Thomas, 1965), 758n2. On the proportion of homosexuals prosecuted under the statutes, see Ralph Slovenko, “A Panoramic View: Sexual Behavior and the Law,” in Sexual Behavior and the Law, 84. For a concise history of “postwar sex crime panics,” see Terry, 321–29.
55. Vicki Coppock and John Hopton, Critical Perspectives on Mental Health (London: Routledge, 2000), 45.
56. Bergler, 9.
57. Alfred Kinsey, Wardell Pomeroy, and Clyde Martin, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (Philadelphia: W. B. Saunders, 1948), 623; Clellan Ford and Frank Beach, “Homosexual Behavior,” in Patterns of Sexual Behavior (New York: Harper, 1951), 125–43; and Institute for Sex Research, Sexual Behavior in the Human Female by the Staff of the Institute for Sex Research, Indiana University: Alfred C. Kinsey [and others] (Philadelphia: W. B. Saunders, 1953), 475.
58. Evelyn Hooker, “The Adjustment of the Male Homosexual,” Journal of Projective Techniques (1957): 30, reprinted in two parts in Mattachine Review 3 (December 1957) and Mattachine Review 4 (January 1958); Evelyn Hooker, “What is a Criterion?” Journal of Projective Techniques (1957): 280; and “Dr. Baker Challenges: Accept Yourself,” The Ladder 1 (May 1957): 6. All references to The Ladder and the Mattachine Review are taken from The Ladder Vols. 1–16, 1957–1970 (New York: Arno Press, 1975) and Mattachine Review Vols. 1–13, 1955–1966 (New York: Arno Press, 1975).
59. Judd Marmor, Introduction to Sexual Inversion: The Multiple Roots of Homosexuality, edited by Judd Marmor (New York: Basic Books, 1965), 16, 17, 18.
60. For an account of a rudimentary form of recognition that acknowledges the institutionalization of violence within its deficient terms and the potential for developing a properly reciprocal recognition, see Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit, trans A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 115–17.
61. On the quest for legitimacy, see D'Emilio, 108–25. For Zeff's remarks, and Bardellini's and Norton's letters, see Sten Russell, “Mattachine Looks at Life – Life Talks Back,” The Ladder 1 (September 1957): 6; “Readers Respond … ,” The Ladder 1 (November 1956): 16; and “Reader Response,” The Ladder 1 (December 1956): 13, respectively.
62. Jim Kepner, “The Women of ONE,” ONE/Gay and Lesbian Archives, University of Southern California, available at http://www-lib.usc.edu/∼retter/onewomen.html, accessed December 5, 2003; and Blanche Baker, “An Open Letter … Dr. Baker Pleads Guilty,” The Ladder 1 (April 1957): 5, 6.
63. Bergler, 11, 28; and Hooker, “Adjustment,” 19.
64. “I've Got a Problem … ,” Mattachine Review 4 (July 1958): 32; “Mattachine Trends—Today's Problems and Tomorrow's Outlook,” Mattachine Review 9 (October 1963): 6; “Announcing the Counsellor's Corner,” The Ladder 12 (September 1968): 8; John Logan, “5th Annual Convention: A Report,” Mattachine Review 4 (October 1958): 29; and Wallace de Ortega Maxey, “Research Projects: Looking Forward,” Mattachine Review 6 (January 1960): 21.
65. F. Conrad, “How Much Research—and Why?” The Ladder 8 (September 1964): 21, 24.
66. F. Conrad, “Research is Here to Stay,” The Ladder 9 (July/August 1965): 15, 16, 17.
67. Conrad, “How Much Research?” 23, 21.
68. Conrad, “How Much Research?” 20, 21, 22.
69. Conrad, “Research is Here to Stay,” 21.
70. Ronald Bayer, Homosexuality and American Psychiatry: The Politics of Diagnosis (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1987), 102–4.
71. Kay Tobin and Randy Wicker, The Gay Crusaders (New York: Paperback Library, 1972), 90, 92, 93–95.
72. Kay Tobin and Barbara Gittings, “East Coast Homophile Organizations Report '64, Part Four: Act or Teach?” The Ladder 9 (February/March 1965): 17.
73. Franklin Kameny, “Does Research into Homosexuality Matter?” The Ladder 9 (May 1965): 20.
74. Franklin Kameny, “Gay is Good,” in The Same Sex: An Appraisal of Homosexuality, ed. Ralph Weltge (Philadelphia, PA: Pilgrim Press, 1969), 129–45. For an important rhetorical account of the homophile movement, see James Darsey, “From ‘Commies’ and ‘Queers’ to ‘Gay is Good,’” in Gayspeak: Gay Male and Lesbian Communication, ed. James Chesebro (New York: Pilgrim Press, 1981), 224–47.
75. Russell Meares, “Towards a Psyche for Psychiatry,” in Nature and Narrative: An Introduction to the New Philosophy of Psychiatry, ed. Bill (K.W.M.) Fulford, Katherine Morris, John Sadler, and Giovanni Stranghellini (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 48.
76. For a discussion of practical purposes of psychiatric definition, see Anthony Panzetta, “Toward a Scientific Psychiatric Nosology: Conceptual and Pragmatic Issues,” Archives of General Psychiatry 30 no. 2 (1974): 154–61.
77. Matthews discusses psychiatry's peculiar occasion to balance psychosocial and somatic theories of sickness in mind; see Eric Matthews, “How Can a Mind Be Sick?” in Nature and Narrative, 82. On therapy as a civic and public good, see Daniel Robinson, “Psychiatry and Law,” Nature and Narrative, 94–95, 99, 101; and Jurgen Habermas, “On Systematically Distorted Communication,” Inquiry 13 (1970): 208, 214–15, respectively. Elliot rightly critiques Habermas’ attempt to “embed” therapeutic discourse in his theory of communicative competence (now discourse ethics), in Anthony Elliot, Social Theory and Psychoanalysis in Transition: Self and Society from Freud to Kristeva, 2nd. ed. (London, Free Association, 1992), 92–109.
78. A detailed discussion of “inquiry” and “quarrel” as dialogue types is found in Douglas Walton, The New Dialectic: Conversational Contexts of Argument (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998), 69–81, 178–86. According to Walton, “The [collective] goal of the inquiry is to prove that a particular proposition is true or false, or that there is insufficient evidence to prove that this proposition is either true or false. The method of the inquiry is to draw conclusions only from premises that can definitely be established as true or false” (70). The goal of quarrelling, by contrast, is individual, such that each participant aims “to ‘hit out’ verbally at the other party. … In a quarrel, the aim of each party is to defeat the other in an adversarial contest” (178–79).
79. Kameny, “Gay Liberation,” 18, 19, 20.
80. Foucault discusses the relationship between discursive practices and authors in Michel Foucault, “What is an Author?” trans. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, ed. Donald F. Bouchard (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977). On “impossible speech” and “speakability,” see Butler, Excitable Speech, 133. Notably, in declaring his selves this way, Kameny recovers the question of invention from Butler's repressive account of “the social domain of speakable discourse.” Burke explains the potential of identification to induce collective engagement with a speaker's interests in Kenneth Burke, A Rhetoric of Motives (Berkeley, CA: University of California, 1969), 20–21, 46. From the twin perspective of rhetoric and consensus, Farrell addresses the question in terms of “social knowledge” in “Knowledge, Consensus, and Rhetorical Theory,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 62 no. 1 (1976): 1–5.
81. Kameny, “Gay Liberation,” 21.
82. Kameny, “Gay Liberation,” 21.
83. The tautological “spinning out of terms” is discussed in Kenneth Burke, “Terministic Screens,” in Language as Symbolic Action: Essays on Life, Literature, and Method (Berkeley, CA: University of California, 1966), 44–57.
84. Kameny, “Gay Liberation,” 22, 23, 22. To Kameny, that “value judgments” are masquerading as objectivity is evidence of the “prejudice, discrimination, and bigotry, directed against a minority group not different in kind from others of our sociological minority groups” (23).
85. Kameny, “Gay Liberation,” 26, 23, 22, 24, 25, 24.
86. Kameny, “Gay Liberation,” 23, 24, 22, 23.
87. Kameny, “Gay Liberation,” 26, 23, 26.
88. Kameny, “Gay Liberation,” 26–27.
89. Kameny, “Gay Liberation,” 26, 27.
90. Kameny, “Gay Liberation,” 24.
91. Here is the quotation from “Gay Liberation” in full:
I am sure that many psychiatrists reading this will both resent it and reject it. Nevertheless these are the feelings and views of a large and growing number of homosexuals and these views are ignored at risk of exiling oneself to an ivory tower [sic]. A minority busy building up a sense of community, imbued with a feeling that gay is good, exhilarated by gay pride, actively entering the political arena, fighting discrimination, creating its own life style and remodeling society in the process, is not going to have much time, patience, or use for psychiatry and psychiatrists whose only theme is conformity to the anachronistic precepts and tenets of a sick society. (27)
92. Kameny, “Gay Liberation,” 27.
93. Kameny, “Gay Liberation,” 24. My reading of Kameny's argument on this point is indebted to Roxanna Thayer Sweet, Political and Social Action in Homophile Organizations (New York: Arno Press, 1975). In a section of her study on homosexuals’ attitudes towards mental health professionals who research homosexuality, Sweet argues that:
There is some element of the feeling that professionals are too wrapped up in fighting among themselves to be able to actually get out and study homosexuality. The homosexuals themselves, because they know so many more homosexuals and spend so much time with other homosexuals … feel that they do not waste time arguing about “what is a homosexual?” as do the learned heterosexuals. (34–35)
94. Kameny, “Gay Liberation,” 27.
95. According to Robert Brookey, although biologists have recently created a “gay gene discourse” that makes reference to several levels of human biology and promotes biological authority on sexual orientation, the discourse also reflects, recycles, and reinstates the pathological definition of homosexuality. Robert Brookey, Reinventing the Male Homosexual: The Rhetoric and Power of the Gay Gene (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2002), 123–24. Similarly, Didi Herman argues that Christian Right activists, who attribute authority to God, rely upon certain psychological theories to reject the idea of legally recognizing gay individuals’ civil rights in part because the theories pathologize homosexuality. Didi Herman, Anti-Gay Agenda: Orthodox Vision and the Christian Right (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 71, 96. One recently founded organization currently generating such theories is the National Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexuality (NARTH).
96. Williams explains the concept of mediation:
When something is immediate, it is not open, but exists by itself, closed off from influence. It is impervious to and exclusive of otherness. However, when something is removed from its immediacy, that is, enters into mediation, it is deabsolutized, decentered, and made relative, that is open to influence and modification.
See Robert Williams, Hegel's Ethics of Recognition (Berkeley, CA: University of California P, 1997), 75. For important distinctions among conceptions of ethical life (Sittlichkeit), see Hegel, “First Philosophy of Spirit 1803/04,” in System of Ethical Life (1802/3) and First Philosophy of Spirit (Part III of the System of Speculative Philosophy 1803/4), ed. and trans. H. S. Harris (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1979); and Hegel, Philosophy of Right, trans. T. M. Knox (Oxford: Clarendon, 1942). Importantly, Hegel distinguishes the ethical form of recognition at work in marital love from human sexual capabilities. Accordingly, “the very conception of marriage is that it is a freely undertaken ethical transaction, not a tie directly grounded in the physical organism and its desires” (Philosophy of Right, 115). A “union on the level of mind,” that is, a “self-conscious love,” the ethical bond of marriage “rises … to a plane above the contingency of passion and the transience of particular caprice” (110, 112). In addition, Hegel conceives of the family as an intersubjective bond prone to parochialism because of its immediacy and naturalness (Naturlichkeit), both of which cut humans off from (relations with) one another. As such, Hegel posits a second conception of ethical life that transcends the family (and clans) and makes recognition between families (and clans) possible. Hegel denotes this sphere, from which intersubjectivity emerges out of struggle, in his concept of “right.” That Hegel conceived these relations in terms of the patriarchal family does not reduce their significance for ethical life (see Williams, 219–26).
97. Rasul et al. v. Bush, President of the United States et. al, 124 Sup. Ct. 2686 (2004). The Bush administration's brief in the case stated that, “The President, in his capacity as commander in chief, has conclusively determined that the detainees—both al Qaeda and Taliban—are not entitled to prisoner-of-war status under the Geneva Convention” (45). See “Brief For the Respondents,” March 4, 2004, available at http://www.jenner.com/files/tbl_s69newsdocumentorder/fileupload500/170/respondent_brief.pdf, accessed August 26, 2004. That the definitional controversy was settled by the Supreme Court is consistent with the idea of intersubjective debate in a constitutional democracy. See James Boyd White, “Constituting a Culture of Argument,” in When Words Lose Their Meaning: Constitutions and Reconstitutions of Language, Character, and Community (Chicago, University of Chicago, 1984).
98. For a particularly compelling set of fragments, see Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University, 1999), 462–75.
99. Arendt, 91, 93, 141.
100. Agamben, Homo Saccer, 4–5.