Two is Infinite, Gender is Post-Social in Papua New Guinea

Abstract

This paper reads the works of Jacques Lacan and Gilles Deleuze through the anthropological imperative of “multinaturalism” (E. Viveiros de Castro) – a counter-proposal to multiculturalism. Multinaturalism, as I interpret, posits the body as the limit-point of a “fault-line,” where the “impossibility” of both sexual and species relation is given an expression. The fault-lining body, in this view, is a sexed body. The twoness of a sexed body, in turn, inscribes none other than the self-generative nature of socius: how “culture” auto-affectively gives itself the appearance of “nature,” by enfolding the latter into it. Seen this way, the works of Lacan and Deleuze show an impressive fidelity to the anthropological imperative of capturing the self-generative “miracle” (G. Bataille) of socius as it is frequently encountered in non-Western societies. Detailed in the current paper is a case from Melanesia, reported by Marilyn Strathern. I further argue in conclusion that to think multinaturally is to relinquish all either/or logic, which includes the one in the following title by Peter Hallward: “You Can’t Have it Both Ways: Deleuze or Lacan.”

Keywords:

• multinaturalism
• species relation
• infinity
• limit

Notes

For my teachers of anthropology in writing, Joan Copjec and Marilyn Strathern. I am much indebted to my tireless co-editor Arun Saldanha. The opening quote is from Marilyn Strathern, Partial Connections, updated ed. (Walnut Creek, CA: Altamira, 2005) 36.

1. Jacques Lacan, Book XX. Encore, 1972–1973: On Feminine Sexuality: The Limits of Love and Knowledge, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: Norton, 1997).

2. See Rane Willerslev, Soul Hunters: Hunting, Animism, and Personhood among the Siberian Yuqaghirs (Berkeley and Los Angeles: U of California P, 2007).

3. Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, “Perspectival Anthropology and the Method of Controlled Equivocation,” Tipití: Journal of the Society for the Anthropology of Lowland South America 2.1 (2004) 6, available <http://digitalcommons.trinity.edu/tipiti/vol2/iss1/1/>. Subsequent page numbers are given in the text.

4. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990).

5. John L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1975).

6. Peter Hallward, “You Can’t Have it Both Ways: Deleuze or Lacan” in Deleuze and Psychoanalysis: Philosophical Essays on Deleuze's Debate with Psychoanalysis, ed. Leen de Bolle (Leuven: Leuven UP, 2010).

7. Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, trans. Charles Stivale (New York: Columbia UP, 1990) 257–58.

8. Jadran Mimica, Intimations of Infinity: The Mythopoeia of the Iqwaye Counting System and Number (London: Berg, 1988). Henceforth cited as “II,” with page numbers given in the text.

9. Kiarina Kordela, $urplus: Spinoza, Lacan (Albany: State U of New York P, 2007).

10. Georges Bataille, The Accursed Share vols. II and III: The History of Eroticism and Sovereignty, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Zone, 1991) 201.

11. See Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Elementary Structures of Kinship (Boston: Beacon, 1969) chapters 1 and 2.

12. Marilyn Strathern, The Gender of the Gift: Problems with Women and Problems with Society in Melanesia (Berkeley: U of California P, 1988). Henceforth cited as “GG,” with page numbers given in the text. Let me hasten to add that I am no expert on Melanesia. Although I am an anthropologist by profession my qualification for the matter at hand is only that of an interested amateur, or dilettante, if you will. I would like to borrow this occasion to thank my Melanesianist colleague David Lipset, who has endured my credulity with the patience of a true expert. Needless to say, the resulting shortcomings are all mine.

13. Strathern, Gender of the Gift 379. Both Strathern's and Mimica's primary research sites, Sambia and Iqwaye, belong to the same language group, Anga, which is highly suggestive of intermarriage. David Lipset, pers. comm.

14. Roy Wagner, An Anthropology of the Subject: Holographic Worldview in New Guinea and its Meaning and Significance for the World of Anthropology (Berkeley: U of California P, 2001) 227.

15. Idem, “Afterword: Some Comments on the Iqwaye Mathematic” in II.

16. Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New York: Columbia UP, 1994).

17. Alain Badiou, Being and Event, trans. Oliver Feltham (London: Continuum, 2005); Deleuze, Difference and Repetition.

18. For this reason, I will use the words “sex” (or sexual) and “gender” interchangeably.

19. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1986).

20. In the interest of the flow of the argument, I address variations within Papua New Guinea only when very necessary.

21. Ibid.; emphasis added.

22. Gilles Deleuze, Proust and Signs, trans. R. Howard (London: Athlone, 2000) 80. Such “identity of extremes” is Deleuze's definition of infinity; see Difference and Repetition 42.

23. Ibid. 220. Growth generally “has a retrospective character to it. It is in anticipation of the separation of grown thing from the grower that the thing so grows, for it is only known to have done so after the event” (280). Growth belongs to only one kind of object-relation called “unmediated.” The other one is “mediated,” which includes gift exchange. However, at the root of Strathern's feminist innovation is the elimination of this long-held distinction between growth (read female and convention-driven) and exchange (read male and inventive). This distinction disappears when a person is also a kind of object, when growth is also viewed as an inventive objectification that exceeds convention.

24. Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, “Intensive Filiation and Demonic Alliance” in Deleuzian Intersections: Science, Technology, Anthropology (New York: Berghahn, 2010).

25. Ibid. 221.

26. By “particle” I have in mind Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1987): e.g., “Sexuality proceeds by way of the becoming-woman of man and the becoming-animal of the human: an emission of particles” (307). This is different from the atomic view of gender propagated in Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane (New York: Penguin, 2009) 69–70.

27. Ibid.; see also Donald Tuzin, The Cassowary's Revenge: The Life and Death of Masculinity in a Papua New Guinea Society (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1997).

28. Cf. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition 73.

29. Ibid.

30. Badiou, Being and Event 147. I also have in mind here Badiou's passage on the limit ordinal. The limit ordinal is Other, in that “it can never be the still-one-more which succeeds an other.” “Not belonging to itself,” he continues, “it ex-sists from the sequence whose limit it is” (150).

31. Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus.

32. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition 140, 81.

33. Ibid., 101, 103.

34. Bataille, Accursed Share 201.

35. Badiou, Being and Event 147.

36. Joan Copjec, “Gai Savoir Sera: The Science of Love and the Insolence of Chance” in Alain Badiou: Philosophy and its Conditions (Albany: State U of New York P, 2005) 123.

37. Deleuze, Logic of Sense 50.

38. Gilles Deleuze, unpublished lecture on Kant, 14 Mar. 1978, available <http://www.webdeleuze.com/php/texte.php?cle=66&groupe=Kant&langue=2>. It is possible that in this lecture Deleuze made Kant a Nietzschean of sorts; see Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam, translator's introduction to Gilles Deleuze in Kant's Critical Philosophy (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1984). This lecture is close to how I myself came to read Kant by way of Joan Copjec's reading of him.

39. See Copjec, present issue. As a corollary, with Kant, perception is no more a subject–object encounter. The subject is never “in the present” with the object. Rather, every perception now has a temporal gap – an “anticipation of perception” (Deleuze, lecture on Kant).

40. Viveiros de Castro, “Perspectival Anthropology and the Method of Controlled Equivocation” 4.

41. Ibid. 14.

42. See Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Elementary Structures of Kinship (Boston: Beacon, 1969) 31.

43. See Alan Schrift, ed., The Logic of the Gift: Toward an Ethic of Generosity (New York: Routledge, 1997).

44. Deleuze and Guattari cited in Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, “Intensive Filiation and Demonic Alliance” (undated unpublished manuscript available <http://amazone.wikia.com/wiki/Intensive__filiation__and__demonic__alliance__-__E.__Viveiros__de__Castro>) 19. This piece was later published in Deleuzian Intersections: Science, Technology, Anthropology (New York: Berghahn, 2010). The two versions are slightly different, so I cite both with appropriate citations.

45. Viveiros de Castro, “Intensive Filiation and Demonic Alliance” (2010) 258.

46. Idem, “Intensive Filiation and Demonic Alliance” (n.d.) 24.

47. Ibid.

48. Cf. Joan Copjec, Read my Desire: Lacan against the Historicists (Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 1994) 60.

49. Idem, “Gai Savoir Sera” 123.

50. Viveiros de Castro, “Intensive Filiation and Demonic Alliance” (2010) 236.

51. Gilles Deleuze, “The Fold,” trans. Jonathan Strauss, special issue on Baroque Topographies, ed. Timoth Hampton, Yale French Studies 80 (1991): 227–47.

52. Deleuze, Logic of Sense 41.

53. Lévi-Strauss, Elementary Structures of Kinship 12.

54. Kojin Karatani cited in Kordela, present issue.

55. Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus chapter 3.

56. Ibid. 162.

57. See also Lévi-Strauss, Elementary Structures of Kinship 13–31, 185–88, 309.

58. Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus 162.

59. Myth plays the same role as “dishonoring” in their interpretation, which I am not going to delve into here.

60. See Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1976) 103–04. By this formulation, I have in mind another famous case of limit concept: that of taboo in Sigmund Freud's Totem and Taboo, trans. A.A. Brill (Amherst, NY: Prometheus, 2000), first published in 1919. Freud's question is how “primitive” societies maintain order in the absence of the written code of law (32) – i.e., the origin of the law. The answer is: those who violate taboo themselves become tabooed objects. That way, taboo acquires a self-warranting objectal force, whose authority does not need to conjure pre-existing codes. In the “disfigured” body of the guilty, taboo makes an objectal “representative” of itself. What had been excepted from taboo (for having violated it) becomes an exemplary “representative” of the same taboo. A regular example chosen from the “inside” would not do. For it to carry the weight of the entirety of taboo in the body – to embody the very force of prohibition's decisionism qua “differentiator” – the example must be always-already an exception. It is precisely the undecidability between exception and example, outside and inside, which turns merely one guilty person to miraculously embody the entirety of the socius.

61. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition 143.

62. Bruce Fink, The Lacanian Subject (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1995) 77; Deleuze, Difference and Repetition 65.

63. By this expression, I am re-invoking the idea of “a priori past” or “pure past”; Deleuze, Difference and Repetition 81–82. It is not a past that had “existed” (and now manifests itself) but one that only “insists” (82). For Deleuze, pace Bergson, without positing this transcendental horizon of a past that had never been a lived-present, we cannot conceive the passage of time at all: “No present would ever pass were it not past ‘at the same time’ as it is present; no past would ever be constituted unless it were first constituted ‘at the same time’ as it was present … It gives the reason for the passing of the present” (81). In short, some dimension has to be a past always-already. Similarly, in Strathern, one can argue that this a priori dimension named androgyny – precisely as it is “insistent” and not “existent” – is what is “causing” the kind of passage of time she calls “recursivity,” and the performative act that subsists in it.

64. Hence, both androgyny and act qualify as the supernumerary One for Strathern. She does not explicitly characterize the former as such, but she does with the latter. “Each act is ‘One’ act,” she writes (II 274). We can infer her androgyny's Oneness from her description of act. The Oneness of act, for her, is emphasized against what I called at the outset performativism. Performativism argues for the contingency of any act, whose outcome reserves plural interpretive possibilities. For Strathern, in contrast, an act is a construction-and-given, cultural-and-natural, and contingent-and-necessary. She writes: “An agent's social position is a multiple one … but his or her consequent acts are singular” (II 274).

65. For this reason, I think the proposition such as the following misleading: woman is “infinite to man, not in itself.” Richard Reinhardt, “Toward a Political Theology of the Neighbor” in The Neighbor: Three Inquiries in Political Theology, by Slavoj Žižek, Eric L. Santner, and Kenneth Reinhardt (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2005) 61.

66. Deleuze, Logic of Sense 50.

67. Ibid.

68. Ibid. passim.

69. Ibid. 49.

70. Hence, “all at once” is not to be confused with “singularity,” as is often the case. This “all at once” is close to my expression per Strathern: “all particles are already there.” See Deleuze's discussion of Lévi-Strauss's concepts of “signifier” and “signified” as series; Deleuze, Logic of Sense 48–51.

71. Ibid. 15–16.

72. Contra Kordela, $urplus, especially 93–106.

73. Badiou, Being and Event 147.

74. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition 222.

75. There are moments when Copjec sounds as if she is arguing for this. Read my Desire chapter 8.

76. Deleuze, Logic of Sense 48–51.

77. As can be seen from my lack of detailed and direct engagement with Kant's antinomies, I suggest this angle in the spirit of provocation or even experimentation, not criticism. My somewhat cavalier sauntering here is entirely thanks to – or, perhaps, at the expense of – disciplined readers of Kant/Lacan, such as Copjec and Kordela.

78. Copjec, Read my Desire 220–35.

79. Kordela, $urplus 101.

80. Fink, Lacanian Subject 125.

81. Badiou, Being and Event 146–48.

82. Wagner, “Afterword” 227.

83. Kordela, $urplus 101–02.

84. See Kordela, present issue.

85. Ibid.

86. Wagner, Anthropology of the Subject 227; emphasis added.

87. Ibid. 162.

88. Peter Hallward, Badiou: The Subject of Truth (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2003) 68.

89. Kordela would disapprove of this equating, this equation that aligns Strathern-made-Kantian with Cantor's “object”; see Kordela, $urplus 103. For her, only in Cantor's set theory can we conceive of an object that is worthy of the Lacanian name “ex-timate.” Kant's antinomies (especially the dynamical) do not qualify.

90. Kordela, $urplus 102; this undecidability is Cantor's definition of infinity. His idea is about how even the “underdetermined” can become determinable when put in relation to each other. In this determination of the underdetermined, the difference at issue is not a structural one but “difference in kind” – the “cut” between determinablenesss and underterminableness; see Deleuze, Difference and Repetition 172.

91. I put Cantor's paradox in two propositions in order to re-emphasize the fact that in both Kant's antinomies and Cantor you need both “series” – of the impossible and the prohibited. For Cantor's thesis, in my view, is not just a simple negation of the thesis that infinity is unreachable. He is not therefore saying that infinity is conceivable, and that the paradox of inclusion/exclusion or all/not-all is precisely that. He is not saying what infinity is or is not. Rather, the inclusion/exclusion paradox is merely pointing out that we are “prohibited” from saying what infinity is/is not. For that, you need both propositions. I believe this is just a slight re-reading of Joan Copjec's detailed clarification of Kant's antinomies. Copjec, Read my Desire chapter 8.

92. Modern mathematics, according to Deleuze, is characterized by the function of the “cut” or “limit” (Difference and Repetition 172). The cut announces itself by the “universal in number.” And “the universal of number as consisting in the cut” constitutes the “next genus of number,” the “pure element of quantifiability.”

93. This is maintained through progeny because in procreating his son the man is viewed as procreating his own father. This all means that “the corporeality of man is also the physical realm of the cosmos” (II 77). Most impressively, the author is able to demonstrate convincingly how this cosmogony is faithfully reproduced in the practicalities of kinship. Regrettably, it is beyond the scope of the present paper to share this elegant demonstration with the reader. Put simply, through marriage preference man indeed effectively turns himself into a self-birthing being. For “in procreating his son the man … procreate(s) his own father,” he writes (II 88). All this because of the elegantly simple axiom that one marries one's “classificatory” father's mother – which is, in fact, father's mother's brother's sister's daughter, or, what is the same, FMBSD (87). This results in ego's son marrying ego's (classificatory) mother, and as such practically giving birth to ego himself (II 88).

94. Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic, 1973).

95. “In the Iqwaye counting system, infinity is implicit only by interpretation” (II 122).

96. Eduardo Viveiros de Castro and Marcio Goldman, “Slow Motions: Comments on a Few Texts by Marilyn Strathern,” trans. Ashley Lebner, Cambridge Anthropology 28.3 (2008/2009): 23–43.

97. Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus 162.

98. Martin Heidegger, “Letter on Humanism” in Basic Writings: Martin Heidegger, trans. Frank Capuzzi and J. Glenn Grays (San Francisco: Harper, 1977) 204.

99. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition; Lacan, Encore.

100. Hallward, “You Can’t Have it Both Ways” 41.

101. Copjec, Read my Desire 201.

102. Hallward, “You Can’t Have it Both Ways” 39–40. Hallward's choice of the password in order to demonstrate the “interpersonality” in Lacan's idea of speech is surprising. The password is the paradigmatic example of Lacan's idea of (in French) signifiance, or “signifierness” in Bruce Fink's translation. Fink annotates:

When Lacan uses the term, it is to emphasize the nonsensical nature of the signifier, the very existence of signifiers apart from any possible meaning or signification they might have … [It refers to] “the fact of having effects other than meaning effects.” We should hear [from this word that] the signifier defies the role allotted to it, refusing to be altogether relegated to the task of signification. (Lacan, Encore 18–19)

In other words, the “coincidence of signification and object.”

The most stimulating expression of this idea is in Derrida's commentary on Paul Celan's work on the theme of shibboleth qua password. In this exposition, Derrida portrays the “machinic” aspects of sovereign power with the password of shibboleth working as its instrument. (Jacques Derrida, Sovereignties in Question: The Poetics of Paul Celan, trans. Thomas Dutoit and Outi Pasanen (New York: Fordham UP, 2005) passim)

103. Hallward, “You Can’t Have it Both Ways” 43–46.

104. Whether Hallward is in fact Deleuzian or Lacanian is not my concern here.

105. Deleuze, Proust and Signs; idem, Difference and Repetition chapter 2.

106. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition 80.

107. Ibid. 82.

108. Ibid. 81.

109. See also Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus 142.

110. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition 79; emphasis added.

111. Claude Lévi-Strauss, Introduction to the Work of Marcel Mauss, trans. Felicity Baker (New York: Routledge, 1989) 60–64.