Preliminary Reflections
Jacqueline Rose
What strikes me most powerfully on reading the five `puzzles’ is the extent to which they turn on questions of sexuality, boundaries, and identification. Of the five, the discussion of the role and status of religious/Sharia law, the cancelling of the play Behzti, the fuss about the Pope’s death, and the question of long- and short- term strategies in relation to Aids/HIV, the issue of sexuality is either explicitly or implicitly at the centre of dispute. Furthermore, and crucially, the issue of sexuality reveals itself in each of these instances to be embedded in the question of identification and recognition, that is to say, it is inseparable from what psychoanalysis would define as the narcissism of subjects, meaning, the urge, perhaps constitutive, of the ego to secure recognition, and the potential violence, instability and intransigence of that process. For psychoanalysis, sexuality does not, as it is so often, and so often wrongly, represented, simply belong to the domain of pleasure. It belongs far more, or at least equally as much, to the realm of identification. According to Freud, the individual subject curtails her or his pleasure in order to ward off the far greater danger of a loss of love. That loss of love refers to a fully social form of recognition, that is to say, to the dictates of the internal superego which requires of the subject – in an internal process that is in many ways as self-destructive as it is self-defeating – that she/he conforms to the law. Discussion of multi-culturalism or pluralism will therefore be ineffective if it does not start by acknowledging how deeply the subject’s sense of what is sexually, but not only sexually, acceptable or normal, implicates the inner boundaries of the psyche, or mind.
Henrietta Moore refers to the unconscious determinants of adherence to a certain form of life (‘passion and desire are part of identification’) and of the ‘unconscious’ motivations and desires that fuel beliefs, values and opinions (p. 7, 11). This offers a challenge, as I see it, to David Held’s intervention whose list of eight cosmopolitan values, relies — clearly as an ideal — on a notion of subjects as rational, accountable, responsible (this is not a criticism but a comment on the disparate notions of subjectivity on which the papers of our two hosts rely). For psychoanalysis it is in the form of their group identifications that subjects are at their least sane (Ernest Jones, Freud’s biographer, famously said that after a lengthy analysis, a patient’s sexual being may be radically transformed without the slightest shift in their political identifications and beliefs). Furthermore, the superego – which represents the group edict inside the mind – is punishing, as it draws its energy from the unconscious it is trying to tame. There is something at once perverse and intransigent at the heart of the law. To this extent subjects are at odds not just with the edicts of society, nor indeed with each other, but – inside their fullest social being – internally to themselves. Taking the allusion to the unconscious further, we might therefore ask ourselves – as the implied sub-text of any discussion of social identities, local versus universal, and so on – what is a group?
It is not therefore just an issue of, say, rational versus irrational determinants of social identities, but something more unsettling. It is interesting to me that the fuss about the Pope turns on his death, and that the debates about HIV turn on how far into the future, beyond we might say the point of their own death, political subjects are able to envisage themselves (the debate about long and short term strategic interventions). Death, that is to say, plays its role in not just the religious, but also the political imagination. In his book, The Natural History of Destruction, which describes the suppression inside German national consciousness of the wholesale destruction of German cities at the end of the Second World War, the writer W. G. Sebald writes of the `psychic energy’ that `has not dried up to this day’ and which derives from `the well-kept secret of the corpses built into the foundations of the state.’ This, he suggests, bound Germans together in the post-war years far more ‘closely than any positive goal such as the realization of democracy ever could.’ [W.G.Sebald The Natural History of Destruction, 1999, Hamish Hamilton, 2003, p. 13.] Sebald is suggesting that death, often stretching back through unspoken histories, can be the most compelling form of social identification. Toni Morrison, in her famous novel, Beloved, about the legacy of slavery in American talks of ‘unspeakable thoughts unspoken’ to suggest the potency of these legacies and the difficulty of raising them – if that is the right word – to the level of rational negotiation and choice. [Toni Morrison Beloved, Chatto and Windus, 1987, p. 199.]
This leads to another issue that strikes me. In each of the ‘puzzles’, there seems to be also a crucial issue of boundaries, boundaries as indeterminate and/or porous, that `blur dangerously’ (p. 5) – the boundary between domestic violence and the law in the case of Sharia law, the boundaries of communities in relation to Behzti, of natural resources in relation to Bolivia (the issue of water is of course one of the central, and rarely spoken, agendas in relation to Israel/Palestine), between religion and the state in more than one; as well as an issue of certainty or conviction, for example in relation to the Pope’s death and the suggestion that his moral credo, even when death-dealing as in the case of HIV, offered solace and succour in relation to an unstable, changing, world. These two facets of our ‘puzzles’ belong, I think, together. If seen as the recto and verso of the same problem, they can expand the idea of ambivalence referred to by Henrietta Moore and also throw light on the obstacles to a liberal cosmopolitanism outlined by David Held. Ambivalence might be, not just reasoned internal argument (although describing this, as in the case of the Mandinga informant, is part of a crucial attempt to situate the debates about female circumcision in the space of internally transformative and multiply determined social identities, and a corrective to prejudice), but a more visceral affair that at once fossilises and blurs boundaries inside the mind. It might be a psychic position – at times internally violent, at others of immense mobile potential – one which it is immensely difficult to translate into anything vaguely resembling policy, identity or social role.
My question for these two days might therefore be put as follows: how can the travails of psychic identity, at their most complex, be recognized as at once decisive in the formation of social identities and transformable? I realize this may sound universalistic, as if the question of what constitutes the psyche has already been settled, as it were, in Freud’s favour. This does not have to be the case. Rather it is a matter, in each specific instance of community, or collective belonging and conflict, of trying to understand: What are the psychic passions of collective, political life?
Professor Jacqueline Rose, June 6 2005
