The Better Story: Queer Affects from the Middle East

Notes

153 Notes Introduction 1. For Melanie Klein, phantasy is not a wish fulÀllment or a dream but as Juliet Mitchell explains, it “describes the human being’s vast elaboration through perceptions and experience” (1986, 22) of instincts and drives. Phantasy links our internal unconscious world to the external world. Though fantasy is distinguishable from phantasy in that it consciously imagines unreality, it can also contain deeper unconscious phantasies. Chapter 1. Two Stories in One 1. My use of “feminine” and “masculine” in this chapter refer to the social categories of gender. As categories, they signify a set of characteristics , not how people actually embody their complex gendered subjectivities. For instance, girls are hardly categorically incapable of bullying each other. 2. Here, I am borrowing Lawrence Langer’s (1991) phrase, the “deep memory” of individual human experience. Friedlander, who makes a qualitative distinction between collective memory and Langer’s conceptualization of “deep memory,” suggests “collective memory tends to restore or establish coherence, closure and possibly a redemptive stance, notwithstanding the resistance of deep memory at the individual level” (1992, 41). 154 Notes Chapter 2. When the Subaltern Speaks and Speaking of Suicide 1. Spivak’s thinking on original loss is inspired by Melanie Klein’s work. For Klein, originary loss is the phantasmatic loss of the “wholly other,” which involves the infant’s attachment to the body parts, prototypically of the mother and speciÀcally her breasts. In Klein’s “The Importance of Symbol-Formation in the Development of the Ego,” she explains that the nature of these early attachments occupy a “symbolic equation” wherein objects stand in for feelings. Such equations Ànd expression in paranoid phantasies such as the attack of the bad breast. This stage is characterized by splitting the object into the “good breast” and the “bad breast.” The infant’s identiÀcation with the mother Ànally stabilizes through a process of reparation . At this stage, what Klein calls the depressive position (1935), the infant begins to establish a relation to the mother as a whole object, embodying both a good and bad breast. As a child works through its guilt from its phantasies of destruction, it develops the capacity to love. However, as Spivak points out in her footnote, when the infant begins to recognize the mother as a whole person, there is “in a certain sense a commemoration of that initial loss as loss” (1999, 198). Hence, reparation inaugurates us into recognizing both loss and destruction. What Spivak suggests is that our relation to the other is always conÀgured by loss, wherein what determines that relationship is no longer imaginary but real. Whereas the phantasy of symbiosis and absence of conÁict mark the imaginary relationship, the real is marked by distance , loss, and indeterminacy. 2. Spivak’s reading of Derrida’s “diͿérance” suggests that the other (the diͿered) acts as “supplement” (1999, 428) for what has been deferred, namely, an indeterminate trace. For Spivak, loss does not have ontological status: trace renders experience impossible to consciousness. Every claim on being present in an experience is always already compromised by a trace, or a residue of a previous experience, that precludes us ever being in a self-contained “now” moment. Deconstruction helps to conceptualize the ephemeral quality of experience, and the psychic imperative, as Spivak argues, to supplement or represent “impossible” experience through an other. Representation of the other therefore Àlls the gaps of impossible experience. Hence, an ethical position, as she argues, must sustain “structureless structures” Notes 155 (1999, 427) wherein the self can neither be constructed nor deconstructed . For Spivak, when we represent the subaltern woman, we are giving imperious content to a “structureless structure.” 3. The “playground” reference is from Freud’s essay “Remembering , Repeating, and Working Through.” This metaphor captures the unwieldy characteristic of transference in the analytic context in which, as he writes, it “has license to express itself with almost total freedom” (1914, 154). 4. Mary Jacobus reminds us that the popularity of trauma theory has been extended to think about the formation subjectivity in early childhood experience, be it by way of our “castrated entry into the symbolic” (Lacan); through the traumatic mode of our sexualization (Laplanche); or by way of early anxieties about separation and object loss summarized by Freud himself (Jacobus 1999, 127). These theories help us think about how originary loss or early childhood experiences sets us on a path...