Pleasure, Perversion and Death 4.1 Subjectivity and Lived Bodies

Seyla Benhabib’s Situating the Self is a valuable and important set of ideas with which to close this book because it addresses some of the more urgent yet forgotten implications of the joy post-modern theories of subjectivity presume. Although many of Benhabib’s premises for ethical subjectivity, which she calls ‘self’hood are in accordance with post-modern and post-structural desires for new modes of figuring the subject, many of these modes are re-thought by Benhabib in order that they remain accountable and ethically interactive with other selves. Benhabib defines the ‘self’ as opposed to a subject in its potential for and being in a community. The self is the body, which is no longer simply alive but is implicitly interactive within a social context. The reason Benhabib demands a new word in order to speak of ‘I’ is against the Enlightenment idea of a disembodied and transcendent cogito to which the word ‘subject’ often refers. She states

Although the human is humanized through social interaction, it is those humans whose bodies represent difference that are denied the luxury of being ‘subjects of reason’. Only a subject who is able to escape oppression by being a passable (white, male) body is truly able to achieve pure social being. Those who are forced into interaction based on the specific minoritarianism of their flesh are those who also disprove the potential of any concept of enlightenment being for all humans. Enlightenment subjectivity insinuates a repudiation of the body, hence a repudiation of other bodies and the effects of the self upon them within a social, material and interactive context. This repression of the corporeal corresponds to those subjects within Enlightenment thinking most repressed or robbed of potential for thought by way of the being of their bodies; those racially or sexually different to the level zero body of the cognitive thinker. The popularity and importance of body theory is making something which has hitherto been invisible become visible, contrary to Enlightenment theories of representation in which the female and the racially other body has always been ultra-visible. Against this theory, body theory has been about making the male theorists’ body visible as a particular speaking subject, a social being rather than a truth giving transcendent ‘cogito’. Body theory is also about pointing to the importance of specific bodies within specific contexts and the ways in which these bodies interact in order that the specificity of any moment is privileged over ideas of immutable universalism or truth. Further from this springs the desire to propel the body into flux – its visibility is matched by its celerity. For this reason any theory of the ‘self’, although Benhabib does not specifically state this, implicitly is a theory of the embodied self. Benhabib’s self is a body within a community of other bodies. Her idea of the body however is against what she calls the two extremes of Enlightenment absence of body, and the pure body as “a bundle of impressions”. [7] Her ‘community body’ is indivisible from being but also from effect towards others. [8] Through this figuration speaking positions are elucidated, along with privilege or historical lack of voice; and experiences which may (or may not) effect what is spoken. This occurs without insinuating fixity of subjectivity or a truth within or of the body that allows a prediction of future actions and effects by that body. Benhabib’s embodied ‘self’ is historically and socially specific without being fixed or predictable, playfully interactive (actions and thoughts are not fixed with truthful meaning) but still accountable.

This book has continually posited a self alone, in relation to an other which is permanently and irrefutably object with no recourse to subject-hood - the television. This interactive matrix aims at transforming the self alone, creating and elucidating others within the self so that the self need no longer be theorized as one, as unity, and hence, as valuable or not valuable based on traditional concepts of the subject as immutable and representative of its corporeal self (according to race, sex and other binary, implicitly body-based oppositions). It is a particularly embodied self that repudiates logic and the subject as complete representative of pure reason. It is a subject in community with itself. Where Benhabib sees the self existing only within its community, I see a potential for a community to exist within the self, which takes further her idea of interactivity. The self in front of the television is implicitly within its community because no product of culture does not effect or efface the self with the culture it lives in. The television and what it screens is an explicit moment of community. My aim is to introduce the many selves which interact with each other in one body as a result of an image of community, be it an image for or against (but specifically against) communitative norms.

Benhabib introduces three suggested solutions to three problems which Enlightenment thinking presents. Although communitarianism, feminism and post-modernism have all addressed elements of the three problems, Benhabib points to certain areas yet to be addressed sufficiently in order that an ethical post-Enlightenment socially contingent methodology is produced. [9] The three main problems Benhabib sees as essential to address if an ethical post-Enlightenment universalism is to be theorized are: 1) A move from legislative to interactive thinking, [10] whereby notions of truth are engaged with and reformulated rather than aspired towards in an immutable and universally apparent context. 2) Recognition of gender difference rather than universal theories guilty of gender blindness. [11] This repudiates the great thinkers of the Enlightenment who insinuated subjectivity extricated from a body and transcendent of flesh. Abstract subjectivity masquerading as a necessarily male ego is only able to think thoughts extricated from the flesh because the flesh is not what embeds the thinker in an abject realm. 3) Sensitivity to context, not indifference to the specificities of speaking position and contexts of life-situations. [12] Benhabib points to the ‘concrete’ and ‘generalized’ others that are opposed to the ‘anything outside me’. Instead of an indifferent consideration of anything outside the body of the self Benhabib impresses the need to consider the specific other, either in individual relationships (concrete) or politically (generalized). [13] She quotes Hannah Arendt’s response to Kant stating individual formation of morality “needs the presence of others ‘in whose place’ it must think, whose perspective it must take into consideration, and without whom it never has the opportunity to operate at all”. [14]

Thus far we can glean a subject which Benhabib posits as potentially ethical and which includes the following:

Within these modes of being there exists the recognition of specificities of race, gender and social position as well as a concrete aversion to all monolithic concepts such as truth and anything which is ‘given’, disembodied, non-specific, unchanging or unchangeable ‘being’ and law (without question).

For the purpose of this book and to encompass what I see as the most important points, which connect Benhabib’s suggestions for ethical selfhood, the nature of subjectivity must be addressed. Subjectivity here refers to the post-Enlightenment version of an embodied self still in its epistemologically infantile phase, which is currently being re-addressed and transformed by post-modernism and which is one point of contention that Benhabib sees as antagonistic to feminism’s goal of ethical being.

[6] Benhabib, 1992, p. 5.

[7] Ibid., p. 5.

[8] Effect as action, rather than affect as full embodied being active.

[9] Benhabib uses John Rawls’ idea of the metaphysical versus the political here. The metaphysical stands for the universal while the political encompasses the socially contingent, in respect to both a moral consideration and within the self, seeing the self as contingent also. Benhabib, 1992, p. 7.

[10] Ibid., p. 3. The way in which Benhabib wishes selves to interact with truth is reminiscent of the way Foucault posits subjects interacting with power. Benhabib does not wish to eradicate any notion of truth as some post-structuralists aspire towards. She does wish truth move from fixed universal, or monolithic object, to justifiable suggestion with which selves interact and hence may alter, through their own different justifications for the validity of such a ‘truth’ so that truth is fluid and ‘interactive’. So like Foucault’s transformation of power as monolith owned by few to power as interactive between subjects, Benhabib’s truth transforms from monolith owned by (usually) dominant subjects and not justified, to accountable idea interacted with by all.

[11] Ibid., p. 3. Although outside the scope of this book, the implications for race are probably comparable, though with their own specificities. Benhabib is focused on a particularly feminist ethics and hence race is important for the third problem of sensitivity of context and speaking position within her argument.

[12] Ibid., p. 3.

[13] This is somewhat of a simplification of Benhabib’s ‘others’ in order to express the basic nature of these definitions. The concrete and the generalized others are actually along a continuum, where a need to address both generalized others (in law for example) and concrete others (relationships) but not necessarily always separated from each other so succinctly. She states “… the standpoint of the generalized and the concrete other(s) are thought of as existing along a continuum, extending from universal respect for all as moral persons at one end to the care, solidarity and solicitation demanded of us and shown to us by those whom we stand in the closest relationship at the other…” ibid., p. 10. Benhabib points out also that relationship is both kinship and friendship as defined by the individual in relation to whom is closest to them, regardless of blood or legal ties. Ibid., p. 19,n. 12).

[14] Ibid., 1992, p. 9, quotes Hannah Arendt ‘The Crisis in Culture’. In Between Past and Future: Six Exercises in Political Thought. New York: Meridian. 1961, pp. 220-1. Benhabib later states “there can be no coherent reversibility of perspectives and positions unless the identity of the other as distinct from the self, not merely in the sense of bodily otherness but as concrete other, is retained,” p. 10.

[15] Benhabib points to Derrida’s idea about differànce being the process and act of differing not just an appropriation or repudiation of an other, ibid., p. 15.