Derivas Analíticas Journal - Nº 20 - March 2024. ISSN:2526-2637
Considerations on necropolitics and the feminine
Bárbara de Faria Afonso
Psychoanalyst
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The constitution of civilization implies different forms of malaise, the most challenging of which are social ties. Since Freud (1921/2006), it has been known that all individual psychoanalysis is also social, and that it is not possible to think about culture without the death drive, segregation and its worst effects.
The term necropolitics was coined by the Cameroonian philosopher Achille Mbembe (2016) to put a new twist on Foucault's construction of biopolitics, which implied the maxim “make live and let die”. Foucault (1975-76/2005) coins the concept of biopolitics to state that there is a political power around life and death, by which the measurement of populations in their birth rates, mortality rates and statistical and demographic rates of disease and aging are targets of life control. Mbembe (2016) emphasizes how the management of death separates those considered human and those considered inhuman and disposable. Necropolitics constitutes ways of managing power by segregating and deciding who can live, who must die and who is subject to mourning. It is important, therefore, to question how it is possible for there to be ways of governing through the production of death and corpses. This way of operating power involves the State, illegalities intrinsic to public power, but mainly different forms of necropolitical power ramifying in the social fabric.
Necropolitics is a concept that is constantly being updated, Mbembe (2016) starts from post-colonial historical scenarios that complicate the logic of Foucauldian biopolitics as the State gives up its monopoly on violent death so that it can be disseminated in social ties, allowing people to kill one another. As a consequence, we have lives condemned to non-existence, to forms of death in life, to the control of people through the docilization of bodies, operated by disciplinary powers, and also in zones of exclusion, which can constitute paths towards violence and death. These death targets are those for whom the place of object-rest is intended. There is a segmentation into markers such as race, class, gender, religion, people, what Mbembe (2017) names as the delusion of races and the becoming-black-of-the-world. There are more and more people in exclusion zones where forms of extermination and murder are legitimized. Sentence of the social Other of indifference, violence or death, forms of devaluation, denial of the place of subject and existence.
Necropolitics produces enemies, rancor, hatred, conflicts, actions, wars and states of exceptions in which there is a legitimization of death due to a suspension of rights, which makes injustice the rule.
If we can think that the concept of biopower implies the social bond, we are left with the question: how to live together? Faced with this challenge, Lacan (1973/2003) had already predicted the rise of racism. Each person's jouissance is experienced as a familiar strangeness, something that cannot be eradicated, since it is present since the impact of language on the body of the speaking being. However, Lacan (1973/2003, p.532) diagnoses that there is the “folly of our jouissance”, a mode of jouissance of the One on the basis of the hatred of the Other, of racism against the jouissance of the Other, which is taken as underdeveloped.
Lacan warns us: in human communities there is always rejection of an inassimilable jouissance, the seed of possible barbarism (Laurent, 2014, s/p). Laurent (2014, s/p) states that collective logic is founded on threat: “a primordial rejection, a form of racism: a man knows what is not a man. And it's a question of jouissance. He whom I reject as having a different jouissance from mine is not a man.”
Foucault (1975-76/2005) will say that the murderous functions of the State and the distribution of death become possible and are regulated by racism. Mbembe (2016, p. 11) states that “the Euro-American worlds in particular, have made black people and race two versions of one and the same figure: that of coded madness functioning as a material, ghostly category” and that “black is the one (or still the one) we see when nothing is seen, when we understand nothing and, above all, when we want to understand nothing.” Based on these quotes, and also when explaining that “race and racism are part of the fundamental process of the unconscious” (Mbembe, 2017, p. 31), we can ask ourselves about a possible approach to psychoanalysis. In this way, violence raises concerns and is involved in a plot that is both subjective and led by our drives, as well as political and social. We will delve into how the issue of the feminine participates in this discussion.
For Freud (1905/2006), female sexuality has always been an enigma, “the dark continent of psychoanalysis”. There is always something impossible to say about sex and death. From Seminar 20 onwards, we can think, with Lacan (1972-73/1985), of the table of sexuation, which grants jouissance to the feminine side as supplementary and unnameable. We are led to the real of sex by the Lacanian aphorism “there is no sexual relationship”, that is, there is no reciprocity or complementarity between the sexes. There is an impossibility for two to make One. The position of phallic jouissance implies castration and the notion of a set constituted through the fiction that there would be at least one who would not be castrated. On the other hand, feminine jouissance participates in phallic jouissance, but, in a not-whole way, it is a mode of jouissance that escapes, disjoint and not identical with itself; it testifies to this impossible. We can approach this point with the Lacanian statement that “Woman does not exist”, that is, there is no logic of essence or a set of women. There is no signifier that names the feminine, and, in this sense, there is no Woman, but the Heteros exists (ex-siste), as radically present in the Other sex that femininity embodies. Wouldn't the impossible to say and name of the feminine be the reason for its horror and rejection?
In his text on aggressiveness, Lacan (1948/1998) indicates that it is possible to think that, where there is culture and civilization, there is violence. The subject can try to eliminate in the other what he cannot integrate into his own narcissistic image unity, implying an absolute rejection of the different, the heterogeneous. When the trace of difference appears as unbearable, violence can come as a form of discharge in an attempt to reject the feminine, as this unspeakable jouissance of the Other, impossible to bear. In cases of violence against women and femicides, it is possible to think that the attacks occur out of horror at the apprehension of the feminine jouissance as unlimited and the impossibility of saying it. In many cases of femicide, after the murder, the subject commits suicide, indicating the presence of an intimate, unfamiliar and strange object of jouissance. Specular aggressiveness is therefore related to the impossibility of integrating this jouissance, which escapes as an excess without borders and presents itself as alterity.
Faced with the problem of jouissance and segregation, Mbembe (2017) in Critique of Black Reason recalls how the concept of race comes from the logic of animalizing the other, a fictional construction useful for naming non-European humanities, implying degradation and an insurmountable difference. Mbembe (2017) helps us understand the issue of racism through a reflection on the name “Blackness”, a name inherited from the Other, which comes as an insult out of habit, a word that has gone through a process of reification, an order to remain silent and not be seen that is imposed by a scheme of power as a symptom or destiny. Thus, from the beginning, the name “Blackness” implies an absence in relation to the same, to the European taken as man and model. The “Blackness” nomination only exists through a power that invents it in a relationship of submission and lack of differentiation, in a framework in which a constitution of the other is projected as alterity, a threat from which it is necessary to protect oneself. It is in this aspect that the notions of necropolitics and racism intertwine. Race is behind appearance and under what we perceive:
« They exist behind appearance, underneath what is perceived. But they are also constituted by the very act of assigning, the process through which certain forms of infralife are produced and institutionalized, indiference and abandonment justified, the part that is human in the other violated or occulted through forms of internment, even murder, that have been made acceptable. (MBEMBE, 2017, p. 32)
As we know, “race does not exist as a physical, anthropological or genetic fact. But it is not just a useful fiction, a phantasmagoric construction, or an ideological projection whose function is to draw attention away from conflicts judged to be more real (...). In many cases race is an autonomous figure of the real whose force and density can be explained by its characteristic mobility, inconstancy, and capriciousness.” (MBEMBE, 2017, p. 11). Thus, the “black” signifier is often filled with fictions, meanings and imaginary projections of the worst. The subject who has a black body appears in this way as a radical difference, strangeness: “The Blackness does not exist as such. It is constantly produced. To produce Blackness is to produce a social link of subjection and a body of extraction, that is, a body entirely exposed to the will of the master, a body from which great effort is made to extract maximum profit.” (MBEMBE, 2017, p. 18, emphasis in original).
From this conception of “blackness” as absence, unknown and otherness, we can bring it closer to the feminine which, in turn, insists as mystery and as what escapes meaning. We could ask ourselves, then, whether there would be a certain equivalence between the propositions “the sexual relationship does not exist” (LACAN, 1972-73/1985, p. 86), “Woman does not exist” (LACAN, 1972-73/1985 ) and “Blackness does not exist” (MBEMBE, 2017, p. 18). These non-existences, of the sexual relationship and of Woman, present themselves from a meaning that never ceases to escape, which implies the unnameable of jouissance in each one, on the woman's side of the table of sexuation designating what is by structure outside of place and exile (ALBERTI, 2022), as “the woman's place [...] remains essentially empty” (MILLER, 2022, p. 18). The radical alterity of the feminine can give rise to domination, possession and cruelty, as intolerance always aspires to annul any difference (HARARI, 2022). Hatred of the jouissance that is seen as different from mine is a way of displacing this disruption of the satisfaction experienced in the body onto others and locating it as someone else's, trying to create a distance from what pulsates in the most intimate part of each person. This hatred is also at the basis of racism, as we see for example in Brazil, in the trivialization of everyday news about the deaths of black people. Now, psychoanalysis, on the contrary, in its approach to the feminine and racism, both relies and bets on the absolute difference of one and one, on what does not make a set, seeking clinically as well as politically to give each person a place in their alterity.
References
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English version by Ana Helena Souza.
