psrigyan p&c w10 annotation 2

Why ambivalence and not "happiness"?“This way [Benjamin's third where negation can produce joy] of approaching the triadic relation is a happy one, but I confess that I am not sure it is finally credible or, indeed, desirable. It is indisputably impressive, though, as an act of faith in relationships and, specifically, in the therapeutic relationship itself. But as an act of faith, it is difficult to “argue” against. What I hope to do in what follows is less to counter this exemplar of happiness than to offer a few rejoinders from the ranks of ambivalence, where some of us continue to dwell.” (Butler, 2000, p. 275)“To claim, as Benjamin does, that the third comes in as the intersubjective process itself, as the “surviving” of destruction as a more livable and creative “negation,” is already to make the scene definitionally happier than it can be.” (Butler, 2000, p. 279)“To be itself, it must pass through self-loss, but when it passes through, it will never be “returned” to what it was. To be reflected in or as another has a double significance for consciousness, however, since consciousness will, through the reflection, regain itself in some way. But it will, by virtue of the external status of the reflection, regain itself as external to itself and hence continue to lose itself. Thus, the relationship to the Other will be, invariably, ambivalent.” (Butler, 2000, p. 286)“The price of self-knowledge will be self-loss, and the Other poses the possibility of both securing and undermining self-knowledge. What becomes clear, though, is that the self never returns to itself free of the Other, that its “relationality” becomes constitutive of who the self is.” (Butler, 2000, p. 286)“But I do wonder whether an untenable hopefulness has entered into her most recent descriptions of what is possible under the rubric of recognition.” (Butler, 2000, p. 283)Overinclusiveness“Benjamin’s use of the notion of “overinclusiveness” implies that there can be, and ought to be, a postoedipal recuperation of overinclusive identifications characteristic of the preoedipal phase, where identifications with one gender do not entail repudiations of another (pp. 54–59)” (Butler, 2000, p. 276)“the model of overinclusiveness cannot quite become the condition for recognizing difference, as Benjamin maintains, because it resists the notion of a self that is ek-statically1 involved in the other, decentered through its identifications, which neither exclude nor include the Other in question.” (Butler, 2000, p. 277)On Gender“But what were those questions, and were they really posed in the right way? Were we right to presume the binary of man and woman when so many gendered lives cannot assume that binary? Were we right to see the relation as a binary when the reference to the tertiary is what permitted us to see the homosexual aims that run through heterosexual relationality? Should we have asked these questions of gender instead? At what psychic price does normative gender become established? How is it that presuming complementarity presumes a self-referential heterosexuality that is not definitionally crossed by homosexual aims? If we could not ask these questions in the past, do they not now form part of the theoretical challenge for a psychoanalysis concerned with the politics of gender and sexuality, at once feminist and queer?” (Butler, 2000, p. 283)“But it seems fair to assume that a certain crossing of homosexual and heterosexual passions takes place such that these are not two distinct strands of a braid, but simultaneous vehicles for one another.” (Butler, 2000, p. 281)