Overcoming Oedipal Exclusions

Abstract

AN IRIGARAYAN CRITIQUE OF JUDITH BUTLER Both Judith Butler and Luce Irigaray critique Freud's view of the Oedipus complex in order to determine who is excluded by his theory of subject formation. Butler develops the provocative theory that the heterosexuality of the Oedipus complex is a ruse of power that squelches sexual diversity. Both Gender Trouble and The Psychic Life of Power discuss how the Oedipus complex results in a form of melancholia that belongs to men and women alike. In contrast to Butler, Irigaray claims in Speculum of the Other Woman that our culture is most concerned with the exclusion of women and, thereby, "true" heterosexuality. Contrary to Butler, Irigaray argues that there can be no consonance between the male and female experience of melancholia. This essay argues that, in order to keep Butler's view from eliding female subjectivity, Butler's view must be tempered by Irigaray's mimetic engagement with the Oedipus complex on the exclusion of women from subjectivity. While focusing on a critique of Butler, this essay ultimately suggests that neither Butler's nor Irigaray's theory can, by itself, sufficiently guard against social and political exclusions-they need each other. Butler: Consonance Between Men and Women In her discussions of subject formation, Judith Butler addresses Freud's complete Oedipus complex. The complete complex postulates a pre-oedipal desire for both parents (primary bisexuality) which must be transformed in the Oedipus complex in the interest of solid ego formation. While Freud remains inconclusive about the importance of melancholia to subject formation, and the meaning of the complete complex, Butler believes his view is clear. Although Freud's discussion of bisexuality might lead one to believe that he discusses homosexual desire, its utter exclusion-and melancholic incorporation-is driving his work. Butler supports this claim by arguing in Gender Trouble that primary bisexuality itself is based on an unexamined acceptance of a heterosexual matrix of desire. As a point of access to this claim, she shows how Freud uses "natural dispositions" to explain why the bisexual, pre-oedipal child chooses the "properly" heterosexual route. Referring to Freud's The Ego and the Id, Butler says, At the close of his brief paragraph on the negative Oedipal complex in the young girl, Freud remarks that the factor that decides which identification is accomplished is the strength or weakness of masculinity and femininity in her disposition. Significantly, Freud avows his confusion about what precisely a masculine or feminine disposition is when he interrupts his statement midway with the hyphenated doubt: "-whatever that may consist in-.1 Although Freud admits that he does not fully understand "dispositions," he accepts them as an explanation for heterosexuality. Butler reads Freud's use of "dispositions" as an uncritical acceptance of a discourse that falsely poses as natural. She believes that the heterosexual dispositions are the products of prohibition, not nature. Butler argues that coupling primary bisexuality with a claim about primary and heterosexual dispositions reveals an unquestioned acceptance of a heterosexual matrix of desire as the guiding principle of Freud's work on primary bisexuality. She argues that bisexuality itself is based on heterosexual desire: "The conceptualization of bisexuality in terms of dispositions, feminine and masculine, which have heterosexual aims as their intentional correlates, suggests that for Freud bisexuality is the coincidence of two heterosexual desires within a single psyche. . . . Hence, within Freud's thesis of primary bisexuality, there is no homosexuality, and only opposites attract."2 Butler therefore concludes that Freudian theory is founded on a "primary" denial of homosexual desire. Given the loss of homosexual desire in Freudian theory, and Freud's own argument that loss and melancholia are central to subject formation,3 Butler investigates the implications of his view for homosexual desire. …