Against Yin-Yang

Abstract

Forcing some uneasy encounters between the universalizing feminism of Irigaray, Lacan’s concept of sexuation, the communism of Badiou and Žižek, and Daoism, this article argues that feminism is not a kind of identity politics but an entirely necessary accompaniment to any radical, that is, planetary, project of emancipation. The ancient Chinese dialectic of yin-yang, however, as implicitly discernible in Irigaray, has a complementary and harmonious conception of the sexual binary. Instead, it is the more abstract and paradoxical versions of Daoist ontology that could inspire the kind of subversive universalism capable of overthrowing patriarchal world-capitalism, which is, as we know, currently as much US- as China-made.

Keywords:

• feminism
• universalism
• Daoism
• Lacan
• dialectic
• communism

Notes

The epigraph is from The Book of Chuang Tzu, trans. M. Palmer with E. Breuilly (London: Penguin, 2006) 236–37. Written in the fourth century BCE.

1. Luce Irigaray, Sexes and Genealogies, trans. Gillian C. Gill (New York: Columbia UP, 1993) 140.

2. Idem, I Love to You: Sketch for a Felicity in History, trans. Alison Martin (London: Routledge, 1996); idem, Democracy Begins between Two, trans. Kirsteen Anderson (London: Athlone, 2001).

3. Idem, The Way of Love, trans. Heidi Bostic and Stephen Pluháček (London: Continuum, 2002).

4. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1987) 176ff.

5. Naomi Schor, “French Feminism is a Universalism,” Differences 7.1 (1995): 15–38.

6. Alain Badiou with Nicolas Truong, Éloge de l’amour (Paris: Flammarion, 2009) 52–56.

7. Félix Guattari, “The Micro-Politics of Fascism” in Molecular Revolution: Psychiatry and Politics, trans. Rosemary Seed (London: Penguin, 1984) 217–32. Though Guattari himself does not espouse universalism, his transversal communism nevertheless aims at trespassing all prior divisions of humanity.

8. Félix Guattari and Antonio Negri, Communists Like Us: New Spaces of Liberty, New Lines of Alliance, trans. Michael Ryan (New York: Semiotext(e), 1990).

9. Alain Badiou, The Communist Hypothesis (London: Verso, 2010).

10. Irigaray, I Love to You 47.

11. The concern that Irigaray neglects trans-, inter-, and queer sexualities downplays decades of debate on the intractable failures of actual sexual difference to stand up to its posited binarity. Underestimating the work that most humans put in conforming to sexual dimorphism, many queer theorists and interpretations of Deleuze and Guattari, even when they are correct in denouncing heteronormativity, postulate too cheerfully a realm of betweenness as new global destination.

12. Penelope Deutscher, A Politics of Impossible Difference: The Later Work of Luce Irigaray (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 2007).

13. Margaret Whitford, “Irigaray, Utopia, and the Death Drive” in Engaging with Irigaray: Feminist Philosophy and Modern European Thought, eds. Carolyne Burke, Naomi Schor, and Margaret Whitford (New York: Columbia UP, 1994) 381; Luce Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman, trans. Gillian C. Gill (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1985), which appeared in French in 1974.

14. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What is Philosophy?, trans. Graham Burchell and Hugh Tomlinson (New York: Columbia UP, 1994) 10.

15. Alberto Toscano, “The Politics of Abstraction: Communism and Philosophy” in The Idea of Communism, eds. Costas Douzinas and Slavoj Žižek (London: Verso, 2010) 197.

16. See, for example, Slavoj Žižek, “Plagiarizing from the Future,” Lacanian Ink 36 (2010): 148–61.

17. Slavoj Žižek and Mao Tse-tung, Slavoj Žižek Presents Mao: On Practice and Contradiction (London: Verso, 2007) 42.

18. Elizabeth Grosz, “Sexual Difference and the Problem of Essentialism” in The Essential Difference, eds. Naomi Schor and Elizabeth Weed (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1994) 82–97.

19. See Elizabeth Grosz, Sexual Subversions: Three French Feminists (Sydney: Allen, 1989).

20. Jacques Lacan, “The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire” in Écrits, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: Norton, 2002) 671–702.

21. Ibid. 695.

22. A central source on the political intricacies of the dialectic is the discussion between Laclau, Žižek, and Judith Butler in Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left (London: Verso, 1999).

23. Ernesto Laclau, Emancipation(s) (London: Verso, 1996) 52–54.

24. Ibid. 57.

25. Linda M.G. Zirelli, “This Universalism Which is Not One,” Diacritics 28.2 (1998): 3–20.

26. Laclau, Emancipation(s) 33.

27. Joan W. Scott, “Universalism and the History of Feminism,” Differences 7.1 (1995) 7.

28. Alain Badiou, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, trans. Peter Hallward (London: Verso, 2001).

29. See idem, The Rational Kernel of the Hegelian Dialectic, trans. Tzuchien Tho (Melbourne: re:press, 2011), an early essay reconstructing Hegel via Maoism.

30. Peter Hallward, “Translator's introduction,” Badiou, Ethics xxviii.

31. Irigaray is easily distinguished from socialist feminism. First, her politics derives from the universality of sex not capital. Second, Marx is only one in a series of male conversation partners, including Plato, Merleau-Ponty, and Heidegger, of little relevance to socialist feminism. Third, the spaces where creativity emerges for Irigaray are conventionally called secondary in Marxism: language, touch, the imagination, etc.

32. Luce Irigaray, I Love to You; idem, Thinking the Difference: For a Peaceful Revolution, trans. Karen Montin (London: Athlone, 1994).

33. Sebastian Budgen, Stathis Kouvelakis, and Slavoj Žižek, eds., Lenin Reloaded: Toward a Politics of Truth (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2007); Yannis Stavrakakis, Lacan and the Political (London: Routledge, 1999).

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

35. Fredric Jameson, “Cognitive Mapping” in The Jameson Reader, eds. Michael Hardt and Kathi Weeks (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2000) 277–87.

36. My stupidity, too, will at some moment become clear.

37. See James Penney, “(Queer) Theory and the Universal Alternative,” Diacritics 32.2 (2002): 3–19; Nina Power, One Dimensional Woman (London: Zero, 2009); Jasbir Puar, Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2007).

38. This essay focuses on universalism in politics even though science, art, pedagogy, the media, and travel also are in dire need of universal-feminism.

39. In Dorothea Olkowksi's The Universal (in the Realm of the Sensible) (New York: Columbia UP, 2007) the subversive agendas of feminism and universalism unfortunately get lost in the sheer expanse of Deleuzian and Kantian musings on phenomenology, cosmology, poetry, and logic.

40. Luce Irigaray, Between East and West: Between Singularity and Community, trans. Stephen Pluháček (New York: Columbia UP, 2002) 48.

41. For universal-feminism more comparison would be in order. Sexual dualisms are ubiquitous and became especially abstract in Mesoamerican cosmologies. The Mexican dialectic, though also emanating from feudal-military empire, places more emphasis on the death drive, possibly because it remains rooted in hallucinogenic rites. See Sylvia Marcos's Irigarayan interpretation of Aztec sexualities in Taken From the Lips: Gender and Eros in Mesoamerican Religions (Leiden: Brill, 2006). The question is indeed why European philosophy did not resort to male and female vital principles more often.

42. Irigaray, Sexes and Genealogies 57.

43. The orientalization of the Orient is now associated with the Wade-Giles spelling and I use the pinyin system throughout – Daoism instead of Taoism, Mao Zedong instead of Tse-tung. Daoism includes its popularization in the West, the Chinese diaspora, and post-Mao Chinese capitalism. Though intercultural efforts like Fritjof Capra's The Tao of Physics: An Exploration of the Parallels between Modern Physics and Eastern Mysticism, 25th anniversary ed. (Boston: Shambhala, 2000) deserve close analysis, it is also evident that New Age interpretations of the Way form an ideological accompaniment to laissez-faire economics and the self-cultivation industry. The aura emanating from indexes the fact that a metaphysic of sexual difference is widespread in consumer capitalism; unsurprisingly is most often encountered in sex manuals.

44. The Dark as expounded here approximates a materialist adoption of the null-set (Ø) which uniquely accompanies every other set, what Badiou calls the “subtractive suture of being” in Being and Event, trans. Oliver Feltham (London: Continuum, 2005) 66ff. Nonetheless, void is fully real insofar as it is to-become-physical, interstitial to being. Particle physics is helpful here; see Frank Close, The Void (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2007).

45. Confucius, The Analects, trans. Raymond Dawson (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1993) 12.12.

46. Kenneth Dean and Brian Massumi argue in First and Last Emperors: The Absolute State and the Body of the Despot (Brooklyn: Autonomedia, 1992) that in its intolerance of “floating elements” – scholars, ascetics, salespeople, beggars, outlaws, lower clerks, sex workers – the First Emperor invented the diagram of the perfect state, still discernible in the corporatist United States. One major difference between the American and Chinese empires is, of course, that the latter enfolded professional philosophy into its very functioning.

47. Sarah Allan, The Way of Water and Sprouts of Virtue (Albany: State U of New York P, 1997).

48. Laozi, Daodejing, trans. Edmund Ryden (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2008) chapter 1. Cf. Stephen Mitchell, Dao Te Ching: A New English Version (New York: Harper, 1998); Richard G. Wagner, A Chinese Reading of the Daodejing: Wang Bi's Commentary on the Laozi with Critical Text and Translation (Albany: State U of New York P, 2003). Subsequent chapter references are given with translator.

49. Mitchell's freer wording has a similar perverse ring to it: “The Dao is called the Great Mother: empty yet inexhaustible, it gives birth to infinite worlds. It is always present within you. You can use it any way you want.”

50. Brian Massumi, “Translator's Foreword: Pleasures of Philosophy” in Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus xi–xii.

51. Dean and Massumi, First and Last Emperors 83. Dean and Massumi let Daoism off the hook.

52. A.C. Graham, Yin-Yang and the Nature of Correlative Thinking (Singapore: Institute of East Asian Philosophies, 1986).

53. James Miller, Daoism (Oxford: OneWorld, 2003) 51.

54. Irigaray, Speculum 237.

55. Idem, Marine Lover of Friedrich Nietzsche, trans. Gillian C. Gill (New York: Columbia UP, 1991); idem, “The ‘Mechanics’ of Fluids” in This Sex Which is Not One, trans. Catherine Porter (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1985) 106–18.

56. Irigaray, Marine Lover 37.

57. Alison Stone, Luce Irigaray and the Philosophy of Difference (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2006).

58. Elizabeth Grosz, Becoming Undone: Darwinian Reflections on Life, Politics, and Art (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2011).

59. I take the liberty of combining the translations of Mitchell, Ryden, and Wagner.

60. Wagner, A Chinese Reading 266.

61. Richard G. Wagner, Language, Ontology, and Political Philosophy in China: Wang Bi's Scholarly Explorations of the Dark (Xuanxue) (Albany: State U of New York P, 2003) 69–70.

62. Ibid. 143–44.

63. Dark vitalism is what philosophy blogger Naught Thought calls his brand of speculative realism.

64. Slavoj Žižek, For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor, 2nd ed. (London: Verso, 2008) xxvi.

65. Miller, Daoism 164.

66. Slavoj Žižek, The Parallax View (Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 2006) 7.

67. Jacques Lacan, D’un discours qui ne serait pas du semblant. Le Séminaire de Jacques Lacan Livre XVIII, 1971, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller (Paris: Seuil, 2007). Guy Flecher has compiled all Lacan's references to Chinese philosophy and makes them converge on <www.lacanchine.com>. On sexuation see Jacques Lacan, Encore: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book XX. On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge, 1972–1973, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller; trans. Bruce Fink (New York: Norton, 1998).

68. Lacan, D’un discours qui ne serait pas du semblant 65–71.

69. Bruce Fink's translation of côté (side, in the table of sexuation) as “pole” is unfortunate. See his note in Lacan, Encore 8 n. 32.

70. Ibid. 73.

71. Joan Copjec, “m/f, or Not Reconciled” in The Woman in Question: m/f, eds. Parveen Adams and Elizabeth Cowie (Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 1990) 17.

72. 

[The supplement] adds only to replace. It intervenes or insinuates itself in-the-place-of; if it fills, it is as if one fills a void … : whether it adds or substitutes itself, the supplement is exterior, outside of the positivity to which it is super-added, alien to that which, in order to be replaced by it, must be other than it. Unlike the complement, dictionaries tell us, the supplement is an “exterior addition.” (Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri C. Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1997) 145)

73. Luce Irigaray, Je, Tu, Nous: Toward a Culture of Difference, trans. Alison Martin (London: Routledge, 1993).

74. Idem, To Be Two, trans. Monique Rhodes and Marco F. Cocito-Monoc (New York: Routledge, 2001).

75. Emphasizing jealousy, misogyny, emasculation, etc., the usual explanations of Islamic fundamentalism conceal how Western interests produce the socioeconomic conditions for political radicalization. Inversely, Islamophobia derives primarily from anxieties about property and borders, not from imagining a diabolical other possessing a mysterious fullness of being. More than the reproduction of stereotypes, the ideological problem here is the obscuring of material relations. Psychoanalysis falls into an ideological trap when it treats racism and nationalism as individual pathologies – Žižek's figure of the anti-Semite – instead of intrinsic to the state, division of labor, medicine, and policing.

76. Michel Foucault, “Right of Death and Power over Life” in The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Random, 1978) 133–60.

77. My argument combines Janet Abu-Lughod, Before European Hegemony: The World System A.D. 1250–1350 (New York: Oxford UP, 1989); Samir Amin, Eurocentrism, 2nd ed. (New York: Monthly, 2010); David Harvey, The New Imperialism (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2003); and Denise Fereira da Silva, Toward a Global Idea of Race (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2007). One could understand primitive accumulation as “primitive” not in Marx's chrono-logical sense but in that it reveals the savagery of European modernity.

78. Kalpana Seshadri-Crooks, Desiring Whiteness: A Lacanian Analysis of Race (London: Routledge, 2000). Cf. Ann Laura Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault's History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1995).

79. Helena P. Blavatsky, The Secret Doctrine (Madras: Theosophical, 1978).

80. More on this paradox in my Psychedelic White: Goa Trance and the Viscosity of Race (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2007).

81. Francis Gray, Jung, Irigaray, Individuation: Philosophy, Analytical Psychology, and the Question of the Feminine (New York: Routledge, 2008). Incidentally, the commonalities of Jung and Daoism have also often been pointed out. See the biographical sketch in David H. Rosen, The Tao of Jung: The Way of Integrity (New York: Penguin, 1996).

82. Joseph Goebbels quoted in Andrew Samuels, “New Material Concerning Jung, Anti-Semitism, and the Nazis,” Journal of Analytical Psychology 38.4 (1993) 465.

83. Cf. James E. Goggin and Eileen Brockman-Goggin, Death of a “Jewish Science”: Psychoanalysis in the Third Reich (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue UP, 2001), especially chapter 5.

84. Slavoj Žižek, “Mao Tsetung: The Marxist Lord of Misrule” in On Practice and Contradiction 9–10. The ancient philosophy that Mao did loosely relate to was not Daoism but Legalism. Badiou subsequently comes to celebrate Legalism as precursor of Robespierre and Mao, downplaying its totalitarianism in favor of its antimoralist formalism. Logics of Worlds: Being and Event 2, trans. Alberto Toscano (London: Continuum, 2009) 20ff. Han Fei (?280–233 BCE) compiled Legalist thought only to create an empire based on a paranoid penal system. Han Feizi, Basic Writings, ed. and trans. Burton Watson (New York: Columbia UP, 1964). Bringing Daoism into the (Hegelian) equation, Žižek also does not consider this absolute predominance of state desire:

The ideological constellation in ancient China was dominated by the opposition between Confucianism (reliance on traditional customs, authority, and education) and Taoism (spontaneous self-enlightenment) – with the uncanny third position of “legalists” rehabilitated by Mao Zedong, partisans of egalitarian revolutionary terror. In our perception, today's ideological constellation is determined by the opposition between neoconservative fundamentalist populism and liberal multiculturalism – both parasitizing on each other, both precluding any alternative to the system as such. (Parallax View 349)

There are Confucian echoes in Bushite neoconservatism but far more so of Legalism, whose terror is not uncanny or egalitarian but ruthlessly simple and authoritarian. Meanwhile Daoism could arguably resist the pull of liberal multiculturalism insofar as it sticks to the paradox, negativity, and anti-imperialism propounded in the Daodejing.

85. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus 140–43.

86. Karyn Lai, “The Daodejing: Resources for Contemporary Feminist Thinking,” Journal of Chinese Philosophy 27.2 (2002): 131–53.

87. Félix Guattari, The Three Ecologies, trans. Ian Pindar and Paul Sutton (London: Athlone, 2000).

88. Joan Copjec, Imagine There's No Woman: Ethics and Sublimation (Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 2003) 7.

89. Slavoj Žižek, The Metastases of Enjoyment: Six Essays on Woman and Causality (London: Verso, 1994) 150, 143.

90. Badiou, Being and Event 256ff.

91. Idem, “What is Love?” in Conditions, trans. Steve Corcoran (London: Continuum, 2008) 196.

92. Luce Irigaray, Sharing the World (London: Continuum, 2008).

93. See Badiou with Truong, Éloge de l’amour.

94. Guattari, Molecular Revolution 234.

95. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus 291.

96. Julia Kristeva, About Chinese Women, trans. Anita Barrows (New York: Boyars, 1977).

97. Mao Tsetung, Quotations from Chairman Mao Tsetung (Peking: Foreign, 1972) 294, 297.

98. Žižek, For They Know Not What They Do 192.

99. Žižek's voracious universalism can be careless, as when he makes a slip while arguing for the superiority of Christianity:

while in a tragedy, the individual actor represents the universal character he plays, in a comedy, he immediately is this character. The gap of representation is thus closed, exactly as in the case of Christ who, in contrast to previous pagan divinities, does not “represent” some universal power or principle (as in Hinduism, in which Krishna, Vishna [sic], Shiva, and so on, all “stand for” certain spiritual principles or powers – love, hatred, reason): as this miserable human, Christ directly is God. (Parallax View 105)

As far I know Hindu divinities do not represent but are complex literal embodiments, not of anthropic conditions like love or reason but of cosmological principles and mythic narrative. Krishna is the most important avatar of Vishnu, who ensures the maintenance of things; Brahma is their Creator, Shiva their Destroyer. Except for some androgynous depictions of Shiva all three are clearly male. In Vedanta philosophy Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva form the quasi-monotheistic unity of the One-Absolute, the unsexed Brahman. Does Žižek's slip hint at an unconscious femininization of polytheism for being naive and local? He later juxtaposes Che Guevara to what he calls the “Oriental” solution to the antinomy of renunciation and struggle exemplified in the brainwashed Zen warrior. “Freedom is not a blissfully neutral state of harmony and balance, but the very violent act which disturbs this balance. Buddhist (or Hindu, for that matter) all-encompassing Compassion must be opposed to Christian intolerant, violent Love” (Parallax View 282). Of course belief systems are more polyvalent than such an opposition implies. More important for universalism is to avoid the masculinism of an evangelical position basing belief in Jesus and Che as sacrificial exceptions to ordinary manhood to be approximated across the world.