Castration, Transmodernity, and Resistance
I’m taking this space to assert a thesis, not my own, but with which I profoundly agree. To it I add a psychoanalytic reading that helps better understand the complexity of history and the way it shapes social order.
Enrique Dussel argued that the better descriptor of our times was not post-modernism, but trans-modernism. He (2002) writes that the complexity of our world, beset by cultural change, creativity, and shifting power structures, is characterized by the increasing significance of “Chinese, Southeast Asian, Hindu, Islamic, Bantu, [and] Latin American” cultures (p. 221). That some people in the world finally realize this is nothing short of a minor miracle. Of course it is only in Western history, in the Occident, where these cultures were anything but central to scientific and cultural expression. Transmodernity does a better job including the conceptual richness and political significance of diverse cultures not represented in largely white, Anglo or Western European, capitalist notions of law, history, morality, and economics.
While the transmodernity thesis make sense, as in common sense, I explore what I view as Dussel’s more provocative claim below:
A humanity that only spoke in English and that could only refer to “its” past as an Occidental past would testify to the extinction of the majority of historical human cultural creativity. It would be the greatest castration imaginable and irreversible in humanity’s world history (p. 237)!
The invocation of castration brings to bear the full weight of Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis. This matters for legal thinkers because in a multicultural, multimediated world it is as important as ever to understand the complexities of history and the present. Slavoj Žižek (2016) following Lacan argued forcefully that the Other is “in itself ‘castrated,’ incomplete, thwarted, far from a perfectly organized symbolic network or machine” (p. 22). And so it is here that I see an interesting connection between Dussel, Lacan, and Law (capitalized as Lacan often did). Castration invokes the Other, understood by Lacan as not simply a subject but a radical alteriority. The Other is related to the world of language and Law, underlying both. Indeed, the Other is the symbolic order, or the condition of language’s existence beyond any specific subject.
Law for Lacan, however, was not legislation, codes, cases, and the like. Instead, Law denotes the underlying rules that order social relations. So, then, understanding the Other as radical alteriority means understanding Law as something incomplete, abstract and distant from social relations even as it is ever-present and constitutive of those social relations. The Other is incomplete, which suggests that societal organization and mores are always incomplete, and that representations in the symbolic order are then also always incomplete (We all know language is slippery!). That is, society is constructed on unmentioned, unspeakable, and perhaps unknowable notions of otherness. Now to the critical race, queer and trans, feminist, and class critical scholars reading this, that’s not surprising. Indeed, otherness seems a defining characteristic particularly for marginalized communities, but also for majoritarian communities that are affected by language and Law no matter how much they resist, critique, or decry them.
Dussel’s invocation of castration suggestions a critique of otherness in history or perhaps as history. This otherness marks the inability of history to be complete, accurate, honest, or even supportive of non-Occidental interests. Transmodernity addresses the Other, but cannot solve for it. A positive reading of Lacan would argue that while we might be able to do better in terms of the other, the subject position of non-dominance, we are never able to get at the Other, because the Other is never simply subject. The castration of history, for Dussel, is a much larger problem than the absence of cultures or the active denial of their importance. Rather, a Lacanian reading of Dussel suggests that history is unable to adequately account for racial discrimination, cultural appropriation, and multiculturalism. History always fails. In out transmodern moment then we are faced with the reality of history’s castration and desperately desiring it, desiring in the Lacanian sense of desiring the unattenable Other. That’s the first way to think about Lacanian desire. In the second sense of Lacanian desire, the desire for the thing the Other lacks, namely wholeness, the desire for the Other is a desire for wholeness, which is why law (little “l”), justice, equality, diversity and other concepts fail. Because law and history are structured by language and the Other is constitutive of language, law and history will always be incomplete.
Coming back to Dussel, the castration of history marks, I think and I urge, a time of opportunity. We can both recognize, in the positon of analyst, and unmask our desire, as well as recognize our role as analysand and that we cannot escape our desire. History is a blessing and a curse.
Then, in order to resist otherness, to resist desiring wholeness, we must reorient ourselves to a critical stance toward the world. The transmodern moment requires all our psychic vigor to do the best we can with the Other. If we are to resist police violence, we must recognize our castration as the precondition for hundreds of years of anti-blackness. We must also recognize that if we desire wholeness, if we resort to calls for peace, justice, and equality, we lose the force of particularized struggles to the slow ebb and flow of grandiose visions.
Resistance is empowered in our transmodern moment, and legal scholars have a unique role to play as interlocutors to law and Law.
References
Dussel, E. (2002). Word-System and “Trans”-Modernity. Nepantla: Views from the South, 3, 221-244.
Žižek, S. (2016). Is God dead, unconscious, evil, impotent, stupid … or just a counterfactual?. International Journal of Žižek Studies, 10, 1-31.
Nick J. Sciullo, J.D., Ph.D, is an Assistant Professor of Communication and Rhetorical Studies and Director of Debate and Forensics at Illinois College