Sexual Difference Beyond Life And Death

Abstract

This essay understands and reflects on Elizabeth Grosz’s latest work in terms of the passage from “the linguistic turn” to “the biopolitical turn” in twentieth-century thought. In particular, this essay asks what it means to want to hybridize feminism of sexual difference and evolutionary biology today, as Grosz does in her paper “Sexual Difference as Sexual Selection: Irigarayan Reflections on Darwin.” In the end, this essay questions such a hybridization by confronting it with the difference between “instinct” and “drive” in Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, as well as Luce Irigaray.

Keywords:

• Elizabeth Grosz
• biopolitics
• life
• language
• drive

Notes

This essay is a revised version of my response to the lecture which Elizabeth Grosz delivered at the “What is Sexual Difference Now?” symposium, 13 Nov. 2009, at the University of Minnesota, and which constituted the basis for her essay included in this special issue of Angelaki. I am very grateful to my friends and colleagues Arun Saldanha and Hoon Song for having invited me to participate in the symposium as a respondent to Grosz, as well as for their enthusiastic comments and repeated encouragements that have proved essential for revising my response into this essay. I am very grateful also to Grosz for having given me the opportunity to ponder such vital matters and hence for having produced much thought in me.

1. Arguing against such a historiographical cliché (namely, against the characterization of twentieth-century thought as having been marked above all by a linguistic turn), Alain Badiou writes around the end of that century:

Our epoch can be said to have been stamped and signed, in philosophy, by the return of the question of Being … When all is said and done, there is little doubt that the century has been ontological, and that this destiny is far more essential than the “linguistic turn” with which it has been credited. (Alain Badiou, Deleuze: The Clamor of Being, trans. Louise Burchill (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1999) 19)

The reason why, unlike Badiou, I find the cliché of the linguistic turn to constitute a largely adequate assessment of twentieth-century thought is that what he calls “the return of the question of Being” happened to take the route of language, that “Being” returned by traveling along the path of language, and hence that the return of being and the turn to language are in strictly complementary and symbiotic relations to one another: being returned via language and language turned to being at one and the same time. Moreover, as I will suggest shortly, the return to ontology since the beginning of the twentieth century has been characterized by two interrelated yet distinct phases and aspects, only one of which was constituted by the linguistic turn, whereas the other (and ongoing) one is what I refer to as the biopolitical turn.

2. Martin Heidegger, “Letter on Humanism” in Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell; trans. Frank A. Capuzzi with J. Glenn Gray (New York: HarperCollins, 1993) 217.

3. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, eds. P.M.S. Hacker and Joachim Schulte; trans. G.E.M. Ascombe (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009) 11.

4. These questions, in other words, are not rhetorical; they are, rather, questions to which I have not found entirely satisfactory answers yet and which I continue to ask not only others but also myself. See, for example, “Three Theses on the Life-Image (Deleuze, Cinema, Biopolitics)” in Releasing the Image: From Literature to New Media, eds. Jacques Khalip and Robert Mitchell (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2011) 156–67.

5. Before his 1978–79 lectures at the Collège de France on the birth of biopolitics, Foucault mentions the term biopolitics for the first time in a lecture titled “The Birth of Social Medicine,” delivered in Rio de Janeiro in 1974. He returns to this term and develops it further in 1976, in that year's lectures at the Collège de France as well as in the last chapter of his History of Sexuality, Volume 1 (New York: Vintage, 1990). Michel Foucault, “The Birth of Social Medicine” in Essential Works of Foucault, 1954–1984: Power, ed. James D. Faubion; trans. Robert Hurley and others (New York: New, 2000) 134–56; idem, “Society Must be Defended”: Lectures at the Collège de France 1975–1976, trans. David Macey (New York: Picador, 2003), especially 239–72.

6. Elizabeth Grosz, “Sexual Difference as Sexual Selection: Irigarayan Reflections on Darwin,” paper presented at the “What is Sexual Difference Now? A Conversation with Joan Copjec and Elizabeth Grosz” symposium, University of Minnesota, 13 Nov. 2009.

7. Ibid.

8. I am invoking the Möbius strip model advisedly, since this is a model that Grosz at once deploys and critiques in effective ways in the closing pages of what is arguably one of her most important books, namely, Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1994) 209–10. It goes without saying that my characterization of the Irigaray–Darwin coupling as “most perverse” is informed by the critical investigation, re-elaboration, and reclaiming of the question of perversion by Grosz and others (such as Teresa de Lauretis and Judith Butler) rather than by the always patriarchal (as well as almost invariably sanctimonious and censorious) deployment of perversion in Freudian psychoanalysis, if not also in Sigmund Freud's works; for Grosz's engagement with the question of perversion, see at least the essays comprising the third and final section of her Space, Time, and Perversion (New York: Routledge, 1995) 141–227.

9. Grosz, “Sexual Difference as Sexual Selection.”

10. Ibid.

11. Spinoza makes this argument both implicitly and explicitly on numerous occasions throughout his works, but see especially the opening paragraph of the Preface to Part Three of his Ethics, in which the expression imperium in imperio (empire within an empire) occurs. Spinoza, Ethics, ed. and trans. G.H.R. Parkinson (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000) 163.

12. Ibid.

13. Luce Irigaray, An Ethics of Sexual Difference, trans. Carolyn Burke and Gillian C. Gill (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1993) 93.

14. The term and concept of “biocapital” has been articulated admirably by Kaushik Sunder Rajan in his Biocapital: The Constitution of Postgenomic Life (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2006). On these and related matters, however, see also Melinda Cooper's important Life as Surplus: Biotechnology and Capitalism in the Neoliberal Era (Seattle: U of Washington P, 2008).

15. Foucault, History of Sexuality, Volume 1 145.

16. Gilles Deleuze, Foucault, trans. Seán Hand (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1988) 92.

17. Giorgio Agamben, “Absolute Immanence” in Potentialities, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1999) 232.

18. This is in essence the main conclusion reached by Wittig regarding the category of sex in the essay from which the epigraph to my essay is extracted. Monique Wittig, “The Category of Sex” in The Straight Mind and Other Essays, trans. Louise Turcotte (Boston: Beacon, 1992) 1–8.

19. Deleuze made this argument in a variety of ways throughout his life, but see especially the chapter (with Guattari) on “The Plane of Immanence” in What is Philosophy?, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell (New York: Columbia UP, 1994) 31–60, especially 59–60.

20. The fundamental text for the theorization of the death drive is, of course, Freud's Beyond the Pleasure Principle. For Jacques Lacan's critical re-elaborations of the theory of the drive, see at least his The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller; trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1998).

21. For Spinoza's arguments regarding death, see at least the Scholium to Proposition 39 in Part Four of the Ethics 256–57.

22. Grosz, “Sexual Difference as Sexual Selection.”

23. Luce Irigaray, “Towards a Sharing of Speech” in Key Writings, trans. Gail Shwab (London: Continuum, 2004) 78.