ebook img

Privileging Difference: Antony Easthope PDF

180 Pages·2002·0.75 MB·English
Save to my drive
Quick download
Download
Most books are stored in the elastic cloud where traffic is expensive. For this reason, we have a limit on daily download.

Preview Privileging Difference: Antony Easthope

Privileging Difference To Diane and Kate Privileging Difference Antony Easthope Edited by Catherine Belsey © Diane Easthope and Catherine Belsey 2002 All rights reserved.No reproduction,copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced,copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright,Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency,90 Tottenham Court Road,London W1T 4LP. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright,Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2002 by PALGRAVE Houndmills,Basingstoke,Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue,New York,N.Y.10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVE is the new global academic imprint of St.Martin’s Press LLC Scholarly and Reference Division and Palgrave Publishers Ltd (formerly Macmillan Press Ltd). ISBN 978-0-333-78629-1 ISBN 978-1-4039-0704-2 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-1-4039-0704-2 This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Easthope,Antony. Privileging difference/Antony Easthope;edited by Catherine Belsey. p.cm. Includes bibliographical references (p.) and index. Contents:Duchamp—Heath—From Marxism to difference—Said— Bhabha—Rose—Haraway—Braidotti—Butler—Dollimore—Eagleton— Grossberg—Zizek—The two Jakes [Lacan and Derrida]. ISBN 978-0-333-78628-4 — ISBN 978-0-333-78629-1 (pbk.) 1.Deconstruction.2.Poststructuralism. I.Belsey Catherine. II.Title. PN98.D43 E19 2001 149—dc21 2001036985 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 11 10 09 08 07 06 05 04 03 02 C o n t e n t s Acknowledgements vi Foreword by Diane Easthope vii Editor’s Preface viii 1 Duchamp 1 2 Heath 9 3 From Marxism to Difference 17 4 Said 35 5 Bhabha 52 6 Rose 62 7 Haraway 69 8 Braidotti 77 9 Butler 86 10 Dollimore 100 11 Eagleton 108 12 Grossberg 115 13 Zˇizˇek 120 14 The Two Jakes 139 15 Conclusion 157 References 159 Index 166 v A c k n o w l e d g e m e n t s Thanks go to Gary Banham, Stuart Crehan and Kate McGowan for reading and criticising sections. It’s difficult to measure my debt to Catherine Belsey for innumerable chats about these matters. Nor the immense gratitude I felt when the real came to claim me back again (as does happen) and she agreed to tidy up what she could and see the book through the press. ANTONYEASTHOPE The editor and publishers wish to thank the following for permission to use copyright material: Faber and Faber, for the extract from ‘Daddy’ from Collected Poemsby Sylvia Plath. Reproduced by permission of Faber and Faber Ltd. HarperCollins Publishers, for the extract from ‘Daddy’ from Ariel by Sylvia Plath, copyright © Ted Hughes, 1963. Reproduced by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. Every effort has been made to trace the copyright holders but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publishers will be pleased to make the necessary arrangement at the first opportunity. vi F o r e w o r d On Thursday, 9 December 1999, we were waiting for the doctor to arrive to see Antony. We were also racing to finish Privileging Difference. I was trying to get a handwritten chapter of the book onto the computer and checking individual words with Antony from time to time. Our daughter Kate was transcribing a series of changes to the final chapter at his dictation. The doctor arrived just as we were finishing at midnight. He made it clear that Antony could only be made more comfortable in hospital, but Antony did not want to go. The book was finished, but he still wanted to discuss details of the editing with Kate Belsey, who was due to travel up to see him the next day. His father, who was eighty-seven, was also expected to arrive by plane the next morning. However, I had to call the doctor back at four in the morning and this time Antony agreed to go into hospital. Antony’s decline from then on was rapid. He refused a stronger pain- killer drip so that his head would be clear enough for his discussion with Kate Belsey on Saturday, but after that his only concern was to go home to die. We were able to get him home on Monday evening, and he died the following morning. Privileging Difference was extremely important to him. He wrote much of it while he was ill, sometimes sitting at the computer for short periods to type, later writing in longhand, leaning on his elbow to do so and then dictating onto tapes. Antony was deeply committed to the case it makes. He would have been very glad to see it in print. DIANEEASTHOPE vii E d i t o r ’ s P r e f a c e Why doesn’t a radical work remain radical? How is it that the edge of experimentalism is so easily blunted? Why do we constantly need a new avant-garde, as the old becomes aestheticised, recuperated? The answer is that the subject is always impelled towards recovery of the mastery threatened by the opening of a gap in its seamless apprehension of the world. We ‘make sense’ of what was once so shocking. The Lacanian imaginary, jubilant in misrecognition, affirms that all is well, that the fixed and restricted point of view from which we look is truly omniscient and that what we see is all there is. The imaginary, triumphantly seizing hold of thematic meaning, occludes the challenge to our apprehension posed by radical form. Something similar happens to new theories. Difficult, scandalous or impenetrable at first, they are rapidly either assimilated or superseded. Too rapidly, Antony Easthope argues. The constant impulse of theory, like modernist art, to make it new, the desire for each radical intervention to surpass the last, means that we all too easily leave behind insights that have not exhausted their capabilities. The poststructuralist insistence on difference, rigorous in its initial impulse, turned into an opportunity to do theory the easy way, securing credibility by embracing variety, while bypassing the radical questions poststructuralism initially raised. Easthope’s argument is that an imaginary version of deconstruction, privileging difference, has led to a celebration of the option of endless diversity, without regard for the binary oppositions such work itself fails to deconstruct. The privilege so easily accorded to heterogeneity depends on a silent and undeconstructed antithesis between sameness (bad) and difference (good), between dominance (evil) and subversion (virtuous), and between metaphysics and deconstruction itself. The effect is utopian, in both senses of that term: optimistic in its commitment to radical change; hopeless, in its failure to engage with the problems concerning textuality itself that have been so carefully viii Editor’s Preface ix worked though in the light of psychoanalytic theory. Before we can make an adequate analysis of the present, or seriously consider the possibilities for the future, we need, Easthope affirms, to reckon with three terms that are too easily ignored: the signifier, the imaginary and the subject. Recent theories and practices of interpretation readily revert, he argues, to an account of thematic content, neglecting the text’s mode of address and the position it thereby offers the reader-subject. Going straight to the signified, confined to what the text says, such reading is unable to recognise what the text does, its forms of reassurance, or the surprising role of the signifier in resisting the imaginary mastery which so soon reappears to insulate the subject against the effects of shock. The rapid assimilation of poststructuralist theory has proved disappointing in two main ways. On the one hand, a residual humanism ignores the textuality of the text, which is then reread as delivering another ‘truth’ that confirms the mastery of the reader- subject. On the other, a celebration of difference for its own sake has, ironically, much the same effect. Here the interpretation produced puts on display the ingenuity of the interpreter, at the expense of the text’s capacity to disturb. Both tendencies ignore the difficult task of reading itself, the role of the reader’s desire in the process, and the opportunities offered by Lacanian psychoanalysis for understanding texts as complex performatives, now promising, now withholding, the mastery we long for. The book concludes with a contrast between what Easthope calls the two Jakes, Jacques Lacan and Jacques Derrida, the one anarchic, unpredictable, radically disrupting his own moment, the other an attentive reader, scrupulous, brilliantly engaged with the important issues of his society, as well as the history of philosophy. But this is not only a contrast. Easthope analyses what is also an important relationship and, paradoxically, given what we know of their personal exchanges, one which need not immediately divide our allegiances. What, he asks, is the connection between Lacan’s big Other, the order of language and culture, constitutive for us but empty of substance, and Derrida’s differance (with an ‘a’), relegating meaning beyond reach? If we need Derrida for the precision with which he desires and distrusts presence, we need Lacan’s account of the subject which seeks and discounts imaginary mastery. Revising the typescript for publication has been in many ways a real exercise in nostalgia for me. Antony Easthope’s tones are clearly

See more

The list of books you might like

Most books are stored in the elastic cloud where traffic is expensive. For this reason, we have a limit on daily download.