key terms Flashcards
Identity
Freud: There are parts of ourselves that we cannot know.
Lacan: The self as we know it is a sign.
Derrida: The self contains the Other.
Cixous: Woman is bisexual, and in this there is creativity. Woman is not just the opposite of man, but the opposite of opposites. Psychic wholeness may be a mistaken assumption.
Irigaray: Woman has two bodies- ‘natural body’, and ‘use-value’ body- an exchangeable signifier.
Butler: Sexual identity is culturally constructed and it has no center. Sexual identity is not even natural. Nature/culture divide is constructed. Homosexuality within it’s signifying economy has been conceived as unnatural and uncivilized, but this only serves to legitimize heterosexuality. “The body” is not even natural, it is always signified- it exists in a hierarchical chain of signifiers, bound by systems of expulsion and repulsion that maintains a boundary for the purposes of maintaining social control. The body is doubly other, excreted and repulsed- effectively this is how the Other becomes shit.
Like Foucault and Nietzsche, cultural values are inscripted upon the body- however, in order for this inscription to signify, the medium must be destroyed, fully transvalued into a sublimated domain of values.
Gender parody reveals imitation without origin- they imitate the myth of originality itself. Gender can never fully be internalized, nor lived up to, because it is an idealized norm. Gender identity is thus revealed as a regulatory fiction.
Lyotard: Postmodern knowledge refines our sensitivity to differences.
Deconstruction
Nietzsche: Dionysus deconstructs Apollonian.
Derrida: The sign contains the other.
Cixous: Philosophy is constructed on woman’s abasement. These dichotomies are never innocent, always hierarchical. There is a hidden dichotomy behind man/woman- father/son.
Drives
Nietzsche: Dionysus.
Freud: Id.
Lacan: the subject is a desiring object whose desire is created through perpetual lack, is forever delayed, never fulfilled; desire is sublimated into The Real.
Presence
Derrida: Signs represent deferred presence.
Contradiction
Levi-Strauss: Myth holds contradiction.
Derrida: Center (transcendental signified) is both inside the structure and outside it.
Cixous: Woman is bisexual, and in this there is creativity. Woman is not just the opposite of man, but the opposite of opposites.
Butler: Gender parady reveals imitation without origin- they imitate the myth of originality itself.
Structure
Saussure: In language there are only difference, no positive terms.
Levi-Strauss: Myth is a structure that obeys laws that govern thought.
Lacan: The Unconscious is structured like a language.
(Phal)logocentrism
Derrida: Western metaphysics has had a logocentric tradition.
Cixous: Philosophy is constructed on woman’s abasement. These dichotomies are never innocent, always hierarchical. There is a hidden dichotomy behind man/woman- father/son.
Irigaray: Jamming the theoretical machinery. Suspending the pretension to ‘truth’ and uni-vocal meaning. Every dichotomy must be disputed. The economy of desire, of exchange, is man’s business. That economy subjects women to a schism that is necessary to symbolic operations. That schism is characteristic of all speaking nature.
Lyotard: Postmodern knowledge refines our sensitivity to differences. A descriptive statement doesn’t justify a prescriptive statement- this is a naturalistic fallacy that serves to legitimize the staus quo, legitimizing itself by what is desired.
Purity
Saussure: Assumes a ‘pure’ transcendental signified.
Art + Literature
Kant: Art is purposeless; it should chase the sublime.
Marx & Engel: Art and literature is are products are therefore determine the superstructure; they should demystify conditions.
Nietzsche: Tragedy reveals Dionysus; art sheds pretense of truth; helps to reconnect man with the social and the universal.
Freud: Literature is illustrative for his theories; it unveils the repressed; it functions against reason; it brackets reality and therefore allows the depths of the psyche to be gauged.
Lyotard: The postmodern aesthetic has given up on rationally-based ideas of progress and freedom. It has become a sort of bricolage. The sign is no longer ‘whole’ and the signifier is no longer subjected to the signified, the postmodern plays with signifier and signified- using older styles which are playfully integrated. We have to integrate our past or else it will be repressed and we will be haunted by it.
Like Kant’s sublime, which he views as a collision of language games- between imagination and reason. For Lyotard, the sublime in postmodern art accedes its impossible to represent that clash. Postmodern art’s goal is thus to represent the unrepresentable- that insoluable ‘different’ of language games.
The sublime for Lyotard is like Crane’s “The Open Boat” where he tries to explain how he finally understood the meaning of the fate of the soldier in a life-threatening situation once he was in a life-threatening sitution. He is thus skeptically representing the unrepresentable. The double distance is introduced- between Crane who experienced the shipwreck, and Crane looking back upon it. The self-reflexivity makes it post-modern, even before it was modern.
The Unconscious
Freud: Es has a determining ‘presence’ that is never present.
Lacan: The Real is not captured by The Imaginary or The Symbolic; it is structured like a language.
Metaphor
Nietzsche: Truth is an army of metaphors.
Lacan: Metaphor is the mechanism by which the symptom is determined; the “I” is a metaphor; in dreams it is a synecdoche- where the part stands for the whole.
The Center
Levi-Strauss: The Center allows for the play of actual myths to take place.
Lacan: Supplementary chain of centers.
Derrida: the Center is paradoxical, it allows for structure to be organized, yet escapes structurality. The structurality of structure. Permits play of the elements inside. Everything is discourse. There is no outside text.
Butler: Sexual identity is culturally constructed and it has no center. Sexual identity is not even natural. Nature/culture divide is constructed. If something like an unchanging, ‘pure nature’ exists, who’s to say what should be included and excluded?
Bricolage
Levi-Struss: to work with what is at hand. Contrary to the Bricoleur, the engineer is the origin of his own discourse- which is impossible, this is another myth. The engineer is a myth created by the bricoleur- a transcendental signified.
Lyotard: While modernism assumed that something like an Engineer/Center/TS is possible, postmodernism realized the only option is a form of bricolage.
Performance
Irigaray: One assumes the feminine role deliberately. Is gender natural? What if men had been exchanged? Would it look different, or would it even have been possible? Gender is a cultural construct.
Butler: Gender parody reveals imitation without origin- they imitate the myth of originality itself. Gender can never fully be internalized, nor lived up to, because it is an idealized norm. Gender identity is thus revealed as a regulatory fiction.
Lyotard: the legitimation of power is based on its optimizing the systems performance- efficiency. This operation to all other language games necessarily entails a certain level of terror.
Master Narratives
Butler: Like Foucault and Nietzsche, cultural values are inscripted upon the body- however, in order for this inscription to signify, the medium must be destroyed, fully transvalued into a sublimated domain of values.
Gender parody reveals imitation without origin- they imitate the myth of originality itself. Gender can never fully be internalized, nor lived up to, because it is an idealized norm. Gender identity is thus revealed as a regulatory fiction.
Lyotard: The postmodern is the end of any legitimate master narratives. Master narratives are transcendental signifieds, hierarchically arranged around the local narratives that they comprise. Consensus does violence to the heterogeneity of language games. Postmodern knowledge refines our sensitivity to differences. You cannot changes the rules of the language game of invent new figures, you can only come up with good moves.
