This essay draws on Adorno's concept of the non-identical in conjunction with Lacan's concept of the Real to propose a “theoretical outline of the subject” as central for feminist political theorizing. A theoretical outline of the subject recognizes the limits of theorizing, the moment where meaning fails and we are confronted with the impossibility to fully grasp the subject. At the same time, it insists on the importance of a coherent (if not whole) subject through which to effect transformations in the sociopolitical sphere. Since the non-identical is more grounded in the material world than the Real, and the Real allows us more than the non-identical to grasp the anxieties and desires that lead to totalizing theories, it is a complementary Adornian-Lacanian theoretical framework that holds a central promise for feminist political theorizing.
Linda Zerilli, Feminism and the Abyss of Freedom (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press , 2005), 170.
2.
In earlier drafts, I used the term minimal theory of the subject. However, the suggestion of a "minimum" tends to undermine my own call for a coherent (if not whole) subject as vitally important for transforming the sociopolitical sphere, while at the same time, a theoretical "outline" of a subject that can never be wholly defined recalls the sense in which this discussion takes place at just the moment where theory fails. I am indebted to Elric M. Kline for this insight.
3.
I use the term theorizing instead of theory to underline this resistance to absolute signification.
4.
Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book III; The Psychoses, 1955-1956, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller (New York: W. W. Norton, 1981, 1993), 164.
5.
While continental philosophers have always been skeptical of the idea that the human subject could be considered a fully autonomous, self-conscious agent, in the late 1960s, this idea underwent the most radical assault that it had been exposed to until that date: With essays like "The Ends of Man," Jacques Derrida pronounced that the subject was merely a fiction of the narratives by which she constructs herself. Michel Foucault announced the "death of (wo)man" in the Order of Things and argued that the subject was nothing else but the product of discourses that were themselves the outcome of oppressive networks of power. Although both thinkers aimed at a "return to the subject" in their later works, Derrida remained skeptical about the possibility of rethinking the subject without evoking the self-identical subject of modernity, and Foucault's account of the subject remains the weakest part of his thought.
6.
We find such an approach to Adorno, for example, in the works of Hauke Brunkhorst, Adorno and Critical Theory (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1999), and Peter Dews, Logics of Disintegration: Poststructuralist Thought and the Claims of Critical Theory ( London and New York: Verso, 2007 ). In recent work, there is also a "return to the subject" in Adorno. See David Sherman, Sartre and Adorno: The Dialectics of Subjectivity (Albany : Sate University of New York Press, 2007).
7.
Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (New York and London: Continuum, 1966, 1973), 135, 406.
8.
Recently, Rebecca Comay explains some of the commonalities and differences of these two thinkers' writings on Kant and de Sade: "Adorno avec Sade . . . ," differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies17:1 (spring 2006): 6-19. However, Comay's treatment of Lacan remains marginal.
9.
An exception is the collection of essays in Maggie O'Neill, ed., Adorno, Culture and Feminism ( New York: Sage, 2001).
10.
see Renée Heberle, ed. Feminist Interpretations of Theodor Adorno, (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006); and Lisa Yun Lee, Dialectics of the Body: Corporeality in the Philosophy of T. W. Adorno (New York and London: Rutledge, 2005); and Wendy Brown, "Feminist Theory and the Frankfurt School: Introduction," differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies17, no. 1 (spring 2006): 1-5, 2.
11.
Carry Hull shows us that the non-identical challenges totalizing concepts of "women" and acknowledges an objective material "reality" of women. Carry Hull, "Materiality in Theodor W. Adorno and Judith Butler," Radical Philosophy84 (1997): 22-35. More recently, Gillian Howie explains the centrality of Adorno's non-identical to grasp the concrete historical dimensions of "women" without eliminating the contradiction this term implies. Gillian Howie, "The Economy of the Same: Identity, Equivalence, and Exploitation," in Feminist Interpretations of Theodor Adorno , ed. Renee Heberle ( University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press , 2006), 321-44.
12.
Joel Whitebook's critical reception of Lacan allows him only to briefly explain similarities between Lacan's and Adorno's critiques on an autonomous ego in his Perversion and Utopia: A Study in Psychoanalysis and Critical Theory (Cambridge and London: MIT Press, 1995). Moreover, Lacan has yet to make an entry into the contemporary Frankfurt School. "Until today the works of the psychoanalyst Lacan are modestly engaged with in this country [Germany]," argues Tim Böhme, "and if, then in a critical way" Tim Casper Böhme, Ethik und Geniessen: Kant und Lacan (Vienna: Turia & Kant, 2005), 9 (my translation).
13.
The Anglo-American feminist reception of Lacan is mainly based upon his reading via French feminist theorists and the few texts of Seminar XX published in Juliet Mitchell and Jacqueline Rose, eds., Feminine Sexuality: Jacques Lacan and the Ecole Freudienne, trans. J. Rose ( New York: W. W. Norton, 1982). Moreover, the full translation of Book XX, Encore, has only in 1998 become available to an English-speaking audience. French feminists, such as Julia Kristeva, Luce Irigaray, and Hélène Cixous, have greatly developed Lacan's concepts of the imaginary and the symbolic but have less focused on the Real.
14.
There are some feminist political theorists who draw on a psychoanalytic (albeit not Lacanian) framework. Iris Marion Young explains the unconscious moments of injustice with the assistance of Julia Kristeva's notion of abjection. Justice and the Politics of Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), 122-55. Also Judith Butler draws on the notion of abjection in her feminist political theory. See Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity ( New York: Routledge, 1990).
15.
Butler's early reading of Lacan in Gender Trouble is almost entirely based on Irigaray and Kristeva and the few texts of Encore published in Feminine Sexuality; see especially chapter 2. Her most sustained discussion of the Real in Bodies that Matter is entirely based on Slavoj i ek's reading of this concept. See "Arguing with the Real," in Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex (New York: Routledge, 1993), 187-222. Also in her more recent work, Undoing Gender (New York: Routledge , 2004), 46, she critiques Lacan without engaging with his work in a substantive manner.
16.
Suzanne Barnard and Bruce Fink, eds., Reading Seminar XX: Lacan's Major Work on Love, Knowledge, and Feminine Sexuality (Albany: State University of New York, 2002).
17.
That is, at the age of six to eighteen months.
18.
Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book II; The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis, 1945-1955, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Sylvana Tomaselli (New York: W. W. Norton, 1981, 1993), 166.
19.
Jacques Lacan, On Feminine Sexuality: The Limits of Love and Knowledge, Book XX; Encore! 1972-1973, trans. Bruce Fink, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller ( New York and London: W. W. Norton , 1998), 28.
20.
Butler, Undoing Gender , 27.
21.
Adorno uses identity thinking interchangeably with instrumental rationality.
22.
Adorno, Negative Dialectics , 5.
23.
Lacan, Book XI, 167; Book I, 66.
24.
Adorno, Negative Dialectics , 53.
25.
Ibid., 14.
26.
Because Adorno did not as clearly distinguish between the subject and the ego as Lacan did, he proposes at times a strengthening of the ego as a prerequisite to resistance against identity thinking. See Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia.Reflexionen aus dem beschädigten Leben (Frankfurt, Germany: Suhrkamp Taschenbuch Verlag, 1997), 47, 79. However, a reading of Adorno with Lacan makes clear that whenever we have an ego, we can only be in the imaginary domain, which is the domain of identity thinking.
27.
Adorno, Negative Dialectics , 162, 157.
28.
Ibid., 178.
29.
Lacan, Book II, 7.
30.
For Lacan, these are the images of "mutilation, dismemberment, dislocation, evisceration, devouring, and bursting open of the body." Jacques Lacan, "Aggressiveness in Psychoanalysis," in Ecrits: A Selection, trans. Bruce Fink ( New York and London: W. W. Norton , 2002), 13.
31.
Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialektik der Aufklärung ( Frankfurt, Germany: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 1969), 146, 134.
32.
Adorno, Negative Dialectics , 70.
33.
Ibid., 149.
34.
Ibid., 197.
35.
Adorno, "On Subject and Object," in Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords, trans. Henry W. Pickford (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 245-58, 250.
36.
Adorno, Prisms, trans. Samuel Weber and Shierry Weber (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994), 235.
37.
Adorno, Negative Dialectics , 135.
38.
Lacan, Ecrits , 388; cited in Dews, Logics of Disintegration, 104. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 113, 183.
39.
Butler, Bodies that Matter , 207.
40.
The Real and the non-identical are then consistent with Adorno's notion of immanent critique. In contrast to a "transcendent critique" that critiques other theories from outside through its own principles, immanent critique unfolds through internal contradictions, which it does not aim to erase. Adorno, Negative Dialectics , 5.
41.
Lacan, Book II, 97.
42.
Jacques Lacan , The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book VII; The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 1959-1960, trans. Dennis Porter ( New York: W.W. Norton, 1986, 1992), 118.
43.
Drucilla Cornell , "The Ethical Message of Negative Dialectics," in The Philosophy of the Limit (New York: Routledge, 1992), 13-38, 24.
44.
Adorno, Negative Dialectics , 162, 157.
45.
Lacan, Book II, 227.
46.
To take away the fear of nature was already the central aim of myths; however, argue Max Horkheimer and Adorno , Enlightenment thinking is "mythic fear turned radical." Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming ( New York: Continuum, 2002), 16.
47.
Andrew Robinson , "A Political Theory of Constitutive Lack: A Critique," Theory and Event8, no. 1 (2005). His critique is almost entirely based on secondary literature.
48.
For the Real in relation to trauma, see The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book XI; The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: W. W. Norton, 1973, 1977), 55.
49.
Jacques Lacan, Television: A Challenge to the Psychoanalytic Establishment, trans. Jeffrey Mehlman, ed. Joan Copjec ( New York: W. W. Norton, 1974, 1990), 82.
50.
Adorno, Negative Dialectics , 241, 281, 158.
51.
Robyn Marasco shows us the prevalence of identity thinking in Adorno's depictions of the feminine. More recently, I show how the feminine interacts with class in Adorno's depictions of the working-class woman. See Claudia Leeb, "Desires and Fears: Adorno and the Working-Class Woman," Theory and Event11, no. 1 (February 2008).
52.
Lacan, Television, 112.
53.
Sebastiano Timpanaro even argues that we find in Lacan a favoring of the mind and a rejection of the body. Timpanaro's discussion of his argument remains scarce and he puts Lacan in the same "pot" as Foucault. On Materialism, trans. Lawrence Garner (London: Verso, 1980), 188.
54.
Materialism means here to "start out" from matter (and those poles associated with it, such as the object and the body) to counter the primacy of spirit (or the subject and the mind), prevalent in capitalist societies. However, by starting out from the secondary pole, Adorno (much like Marx) does not mean that we can do away with the dominant pole altogether, since this would imply another abstraction. Rather, the goal of his critical theory is to abolish the hierarchy between oppositions.
55.
Jean-Joseph Goux, Symbolic Economies: After Marx and Freud, trans. Jennifer Curtis (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1973, 1990).
56.
Das Kapital: Kritik der politischen Ökonomie, Erster Band, Buch I, in Karl Marx Frederick Engels Werke, Band 23 (Berlin : Karl Dietz Verlag, 1947, 2001), 52 (my translation).
57.
Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 49. The non-identical is then linked to Marx's notion of use value, which both Frederic Jameson and, more recently, Espen Hammer argued. Frederic Jameson, Late Marxism Adorno, or, The Persistence of the Dialectic (London: Verso, 1990), 23; Espen Hammer, Adorno and the Political (London and New York: Routledge, 2006), 31.
58.
Both thinkers, albeit in unacknowledged ways, draw on Marx's theory of alienation in their explanations.
59.
For a detailed discussion of Marx's theory of alienation, see Claudia Leeb, "Marx and the Gendered Structure of Capitalism," Philosophy and Social Criticism33, no. 7 (November 2007).
60.
Lacan, Book III, 146.
61.
Lacan, Ecrits, 6 (my emphasis).
62.
Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment .
63.
Adorno, "On Subject and Object," 252.
64.
Adorno, Negative Dialectics , 172.
65.
Ibid., 149.
66.
Lacan, Book II, 95.
67.
Filled out as a critique of poststructuralism, this is precisely the reason that constructionism and positivism, for all their apparent conflicts, seem to be settling down as complementary poles of a singular ideology of social science within late capitalist society, an ideology that wipes clean any notion of a subject capable of change outside the all-powerful "market."
68.
Adorno, Negative Dialectics , 205
69.
Simon Jarvis points out that Adorno's materialism implies an impulse to end suffering: "Adorno, Marx, Materialism," in The Cambridge Companion to Adorno, ed. Tom Huhn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 79-100, 80.
70.
See Renée Heberle, ed., Feminist Interpretations of Theodor Adorno.
71.
Lacan refers here to the specific function of the signifier, which "functions as a signifier only to reduce the subject in question to no more than a signifier, to petrify the subject in the same movement in which it calls the subject to function, to speak, as subject." Lacan, Book XI, 207.
72.
Lacan, Book II, 95.
73.
For Adorno, suffering and, with that, physical impulses are the central source behind dialectical thinking: "The physical moment tells our knowledge that suffering ought not to be, that things should be different." Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 203.
74.
Theodor W. Adorno , Minima Moralia.Reflexionen aus dem beschädigten Leben (Frankfurt, Germany: Suhrkamp Taschenbuch Verlag, 1997), 47, 79.
75.
Jay Bernstein, Adorno: Disenchantment and Ethics ( Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 402.
76.
Lacan, Book I, 276.
77.
Lacan, Television, 31.
78.
For Lacan, such a violent reduction underlies the activities of the philanthropist, the pedagogue, and the reformer. Lacan, Ecrits, 9.
79.
Adorno, Negative Dialectics , 191.
80.
Drucilla Cornell , "New Political Infamy and the Sacrilege of Feminism ," in Feminists Contest Politics and Philosophy, Philosophy and Politics Series, ed. Lisa Gurley Claudia Leeb, and Anna Moser ( New York and Brussels: Peter Lang, 2005), 247-67.
81.
Regina-Becker Schmidt, "Identitätslogik und Gewalt: Zum Verhältnis von Kritischer Theorie und Feminismus," Beiträge zur Feministischen Theorie und Praxis 12 (1989): 51-64, 57.
82.
Butler, Undoing Gender , 47.
83.
Lacan, Book XI, 204.
84.
Luce Irigaray , This Sex which is not One, trans. Catherine Porter (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985).
85.
Lacan, Ecrits, 143.
86.
Lacan, Book I, 264.
87.
Butler, Undoing Gender , 177.
88.
Ibid, 47.
89.
Lacan, Ecrits, 275.
90.
It seems to me that Lacan's notion of "phallic jouissance," which is for him the "idiot's jouissance" because the subject never stops trying to reach an impossible wholeness, is perhaps more than his equation of the phallus with the Real in a position to expose the imaginary delusion of the phallus. I would like to thank Patchen Markell, who pushed me to rethink Butler's critique . Lacan, BookXX, 111.
91.
Adorno, Minima Moralia , 103.
92.
Hammer, Adorno and the Political, 161.
93.
Lacan, Book III, 198.
94.
Adorno, Negative Dialectics , 174.
95.
Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press, 1997).
96.
Ibid, 110.
97.
Adorno, Negative Dialectics , 18.
98.
Like Lacan, Adorno is then rather suspicious of any notion of utopia or reconciled state of oppositions. However, we find in Adorno-more than Lacan-the hope that we might find oppositions one day not as aufgehoben, since this is impossible, but at least in a reconciled state, which opens the possibility for a future, less (class-) antagonistic society.
99.
Adorno, "On Subject and Object," 247.
100.
I do not aim here to explain out in more detail the similarities and differences between Butler and Adorno/Lacan, since this would go beyond the scope of this essay.
101.
Butler, Gender Trouble , 21.
102.
Butler, Undoing Gender , 180.
103.
This is what makes her work more of a "flip side" to positivism than a genuine theoretical challenge. A subject employed as merely pragmatic strategy cannot enact political change, because subjectively motivated change presupposes a subject-in-outline. In fact, without subject, there is no non-identical, because everything is totalized under the "object"-which was just the program of positivism from the beginning. Foucauldian approaches to feminist political theorizing get the same result from a different direction.
