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izek (2000: 15), but rather about the unpredictable and spectral becomings of
gender and queer melancholia in face of losing the perspective of a recognisable
human subject. We deal here with modes of becoming that, in their entwinement to
multiple forms of undoing and being undone, do things, as they effectively become an
occasion for gender and queer resistance.
Subjects are constituted in being profoundly haunted by registers of injunction
and self-shattering that precede them, while unwittingly producing spectral doubles of
themselves, that is, identications that must remain foreclosed and repudiated but can
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make their ghostly appearance in improper contexts. Carla Freccero (2005) has
illustrated this double affective temporal movement of being haunted and becoming
ghostly, in her work on an ethics of haunting that would motivate a historiographic
project of queering temporality. Drawing on Jacques Derridas concept of spectrality,
she proposes an account of fantasmatic historiography that interweaves past and
present, history and fantasy, event and affect. Like past texts and events persist within
the present in spectral form, subjectivity is itself a social temporality open to being
haunted and ghostly at once, as Freccero (2011: 22) has shown in forging the notion
of queer spectrality: ghostly returns suffused with affective materiality that work
through the ways trauma, mourning, and event are registered on the level of
subjectivity and history. Indeed, the very undenability and productive indetermi-
nacy signalled by the term queer (in its implications of appropriation,
disidentication, and alterity within mimesis) lends itself not only to a critique of
heteronormative presumptions but also to opening the stage for theorising unnished,
unnishable and reanimated temporal proprieties as well as their future possibilities.
Subjectivity, then, is inescapably haunted by the never-perfect dynamics of
identication and disidentication; by unnished and unrealisable pasts, presents and
futures. The logic of spectral subjectivity refers to the paradoxical, elusive and
indeterminate logic of that which is neither present nor absent, neither here nor
there, neither now nor not now, neither merely material nor merely spiritual
(Derrida, 1994). The indeterminacies of subjectivity bring together, in an uncanny
and disquiet way, presence and absence, spirit and matter, negativity and afrmation,
active and passive, situatedness and otherwordliness, affect and event, the traumas of
abjection and the promises of radical resignication.
As subjects-in-process abandon and repudiate potentialities of gender and sexual
subjectivity that are dened as fundamentally unthinkable and unlivable, the formation
of the subject is premised upon foreclosed identications and repressed desires, which
recur and persist in spectral form, without overtly articulating themselves. The logic of
subjection, premised as it is upon abjection, displacement, and foreclosure, is
interminably mapped onto our bodies through normative matrices of gender, raciality,
sexuality, intimacy, able-bodiedness, economy, and citizenship. But it is also enacted in
the ordinary not merely as domination but as a metastructure of consent (Berlant,
2011: 185), as spontaneous appreciation of and desire for the comforts of social
belonging, recognisability, liveability, and lovability. The embodied ordinariness of
subjection, in other words, involves both authoritarian desire and aspirational
conventionalities, both subordination and sustaining fantasies of appropriateness as the
ground of belonging in established sociability. In the context of queerly deconstructed
subjectivation, gendered and sexual subjects emerge (always being in the process of
coming into being) both as the effect of regulatory power, through the intimate folds of
prohibitions, incitation, acquiescence and self-regulation, o1 as the condition of
possibility for social resignication, subversion, and self-altering.
Radical desire, or trouble in desirability
How does gender resistance emerge within and against the subjects fundamental
attachment to regimes of idealised and embodied norms that seem or promise to
2 0 8 E U R O P E A N J O U R N A L O F E N G L I S H S T U D I E S
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secure its own recognisable being and becoming? How does the subject undo and
unlearn its own desire for the condition of its own or anyones subordination and
convert it into a political desire for collective resistance and alteration of the terms of
subordination? How do we undo the passionate attachments that sustain us, such as
the hetero-normalisation of desire? It is important for the purposes of this particular
text to situate gender and queer resistance in the imbrication of desire and subjection.
The powers of subjection, powers that form the subject, provide the condition of the
subjects desire, including its desire to contest. It seems crucial here to resist the
model of desire that would set up the desiring subject as situated prior to the
phallocentric, heterosexual, and racial matrices of desire.
In Hegelian thought, desire is posited as the means that produce reexive
consciousness and the self-knowing subject by way of the subjects conceptualising and
dialectically superseding alterity. Whereas Hegelian formulations and their appro-
priations by French post-Hegelian traditions are concerned with the ways in which
desire works to exceed the negativity of human life, Lacanian psychoanalysis retains
the role of the desire in subject formation, but emphasises that it is the repression of
desire that constitutes the subject as incomplete and eccentric. In her own account of
desire, one that is at once indebted to and critical of Hegel, Butler (1987) turns to
Nietzsche and Deleuze in order to respond critically to the Hegelian narrative of the
subjects full realisation and afrmation through its desire to supersede difference. She
also turns to Foucault in order to account for the discursive historicity of desire;
desire is not situated prior to the world, as in the Hegelian metaphysics, or prior to
repression, as in the Lacanian perspective, but rather is produced by power workings
and discursive formations that precede and exceed the subject. Butlers account of the
subjects of desire draws precisely on Foucaults critique, in which desire does not
merely constitute a means to describe an affective experience but also a regulatory
ction through which that experience is discursively determined. Thus, Butlers
desiring subject is an incomplete, not self-identical, and ek-static one, a subject
outside itself. The subject that contests the regulatory power that compels and enables
it always draws from that power in order to enact its critical agency.
This account of the social and psychic formation of the desiring subject in
submission is of particular interest here. The subjects interpellation into existence
takes place in provisional, insidious, insistent and insinuating ways, and, above all, in
ways which allow for, and render subjection vulnerable to, various infelicities,
falterings, and deferrals. Far from being a programmed reinstatement of an all-
encompassing power, and far from being mechanistically aligned with the formative
workings of discursive apparatuses, desire emerges in this process as an affective
potential at once produced through and subjected to regulatory power; as a potential
which belies the crisp distinction between being produced and being subjected, or
between becoming a subject and becoming subjected. Thus, although critical agency
takes place within the matrices of power, it is not entirely regulated by them. Gender
and queer resistance takes place within the terms of gender and sexual normativity but
in ways that potentially counter those terms. In this sense, gender and queer radical
desire constitutes an affective and performative dissonance in the processes and
apparatuses that produce and regulate desirability. The question of critical agency
commits us to the constant call for imagining and inventing new forms of political
subjectivity, in the direction of transforming the conditions through which the
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political is established, activated, effected and affected. It is this mode of theoris-
ing critical agency, which Ewa Plonowska Ziarek (2001) calls an ethics of
dissensus, that would provide an alternative both to liberal predication on
individualised, self-contained, disembodied selves and to normalising, conservative
communitarianism.
Conclusion: Undoing the melancholic properness of
intelligibility
The question that has concerned me throughout this text is how gender and queer
resistance becomes an occasion for undoing the melancholic properness of
intelligibility through what Butler (1997a: 161) has aptly called the political promise
of the performative. Thus what emerges from an inquiry into gender resistance is a
multifaceted critical engagement with incongruities and infelicities between
interpellative command and its performative (dis-)identicatory effects.
If critical agency presupposes some notion of the self, the latter is not construed
here as an individuated substance (or as the atomistic market maximiser of neoliberal
governmentality) but rather is taken in its being-at-the-limit, or singular plurality.
4
Importantly, therefore, gender and queer resistance, what I have called the desire to
contest, does not imply the conceit of a pre-discursive sovereign I that performs its
volition or pure opposition in the sense of transcendence of existing normative
regimes of racial, ethnic, class, kinship, heterosexual gender norms. On the contrary,
it refers to a practice of freedom akin to a performative rupture in the discursive
constitution of prevailing truth-regimes of intelligibility. This rupture is marked by
and contingent upon the spectral return of what has been disavowed and foreclosed by
the regulatory repetition of the norms that sustain subjectivation. The we of gender
resistance and critical agency is acted upon, yet acting. As we desire to contest, we
are haunted and interpellated by certain histories of desire and given terms of
desirability. The singularity of our radical desire that contests gender normativity
cannot be contained and xed once and for all by the use of proper names as signs of
pure identity. Rather it is itself always plural and differential, partially identiable and
partially unidentiable. As I have tried to show in this essay, this laying bare of the
ontological presuppositions of critical agency (such as the idea of an initiating or
originating agency) does not foreclose but rather opens up the space for the political.
In other words, the unavoidable entanglement of our desire (both as resistant
gendered desire and desire for gender resistance) in the very terms of desirability
which haunt the identitarian apparatus and the plural pronoun of our desire does not
refer to a retreat of the political but rather is concerned with the affects of dissension
that the political is made of.
To that extent, I would claim, the subject returns, in a way, not as a
transcendental signied and a pre-existing and self-determining volitional agent, but
rather as a plural and provisional, performative approximate occasion of its own
subjectivation and exposure. It is the space of this approximation which opens up the
possibility (but also the wounds) of a spectral altering an agency of internal
disruptive reworking and making over of the terms by which subjectivation takes
place as an embodiment of norms. Desiring gender and queer resistance is the site of
2 1 0 E U R O P E A N J O U R N A L O F E N G L I S H S T U D I E S
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this incalculable and inevitable expropriation; above all, the expropriation of a certain
relationship between identication and desire.
Notes
1 Foucault (1994: 342) has importantly argued that the void left by mans
disappearance constitutes the unfolding of a space in which it is once more
possible to think.
2 As Rosi Braidotti (1991: 146) writes, the term dissonance seems apt to emphasise
the falsely reassuring nature of any dream of unity or global synthesis. Interestingly
enough, Braidotti deploys the term dissonance to denote also the diverging routes
that feminism and post-structuralism have taken in pursuing the seemingly common
project of revisiting the subject. Feminist epistemology differs from philosophical
anti-humanism in that it poses a vision of subjectivity as embodied, multiple,
relational, and differentiated. The crisis of modern mainstream visions of
subjectivity, conventionally perceived as loss and decline, marks for feminism an
opening-up of new conceptual and political schemes of thought and action, which
themselves stem from undoing hegemonic masculinity and compulsory heterosexu-
ality as the unquestioned norms of humanness.
3 See Love (2007) for an apt deployment of backward feelings to respond to Elizabeth
Freemans (2010) argument that the turn to loss, grief, shame, and suffering in queer
studies has made it impossible to envision and enact a politics of pleasure. See also
Eng and Kazanjian (2003).
4 Jean-Luc Nancys notion of singular plurality argues for a primacy of relatedness and
mutual exposure to one another, which preserves the difference and the freedom of
the self (2000). In this conceptual context, both community and individuality are
problematised and de-essentialised.
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Athena Athanasiou is Associate Professor of Social Anthropology at Panteion
University of Social and Political Sciences, Athens, Greece. She holds a PhD from the
New School for Social Research, and was a postdoctoral fellow at the Pembroke Center
for Teaching and Research on Women, at Brown University (20012002). She has
authored the books: Life at the Limit: Essays on Gender, Body and Biopolitics (Athens,
2007); and Crisis as a State of Exception: Critiques and Resistances (Athens, 2012). She
has also edited Feminist Theory and Cultural Critique (Athens, 2006); Rewriting
Difference: Luce Irigaray and the Greeks (co-ed. with Elena Tzelepis, SUNY Press,
2010); and Biosocialities: Perspectives on Medical Anthropology (Athens, 2011). She
recently co-authored (with Judith Butler) the book, Dispossession: The Performative in
the Political (Polity Press, forthcoming).
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