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Monday, May 22, 2006
Contra Žižek
A friend asks: “How can you talk about women as objects of sacrifice without using Žižek?”
I don’t have an answer ready to hand. Do you?
Comments
For the record, despite sounding like a loaded question, I do ask it honestly (if by proxy). My asked-to-be-anonymous friend knows of some Bataille he can use, but is curious as to how this issue is addressed in traditions with which he and I are unfamiliar. (I have a decent grounding in feminist theory, but this leans more toward the theory than the feminist side of my education, so I’m not sure my answers would be adequate. Plus, I’m not that bright. If you could help my friend out, we’d both be as enlightened as we’d be obliged. I have a feeling this intended-to-disarm-that-trappy-feeling bit will be more suggestive of a trap than the original post...well, I don’t mean it to be. I’m honestly asking [by proxy] for an alternative or two, since Žižek’s corpus doesn’t jibe with what my friend’s working on.)
In old movies and cartoons the savages just chant ‘huya-muh-muh-huya-muh-muh’ while they are toting their blond victim up to the volcano’s edge. (At least it is my impression that this is how you stage these things.)
Using my Fred von Lohmann voice, I ventriloquize:
“Pursuant to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act ("DMCA"), we are writing to provide you notice of your illegal activities and copyright infringement. Acting as an agent on behalf of A Roberts and the renowed ‘Contra’ trademark, we have recently learned that your organization, “The so-called Valve, sheesh”, is violating Prof. Roberts and “Contra“‘s copyrights. I have a good faith belief that the use of Prof. Roberts’s copyrighted material in this manner is not authorized by us, our agent, or the law.
Your conduct constitutes willful copyright infringement and unfair competition and is probably going to lead on to some splitting of infinitives at an unspecified later stage, knowing the sort of person we’re dealing with here.”
Because (says I, who knows little-to-nothing of theory and who has never heard of Žižek) that would limit the number of people who talk about women as objects of sacrifice to a very small number.
Is the purpose of such talk to limit the use of women as objects of sacrifice? If so, why would you want to set academic criteria for engaging in the discussion?
Or, by “talk” do you mean “engage in scholarly discussion”? Seems like a narrow kind of talk to me.
Or, not knowing anything about Žižek, am I on completely the wrong track? Possibly....
Zizek could work if you wanted to address the idea of women as the subjects of self-sacrifice.
I don’t know why so many people want to talk about the idea of “sacrifice” in general, though—this is just a general question, not directed toward your friend in specific. If he wants to be really contemporary, maybe he could try writing on “soldiers as objects of sacrifice,” since they give their blood for our freedom—which, if you think about it, is like dying for our sins, only better.
Depends — are we talking sacrifice to Žižek or by Žižek?
I believe Zizek discusses potlatch somewhere towards the back of The Embarrassed Gift.
Is that the passage where he compares the sacrificed woman to a chocolate laxative?
I would think your friend might consider Girard’s Violence and the Sacred. On the one hand, Girard doesn’t spend all that much time discussing gender or woman as object of sacrifice (though he raises a couple of provocative questions—see pp. 36, 139-42), but insofar as he posits the surrogate victim as both inside of and outside of community--i.e., “inside” enough to pass as a sacrificial substitute, “outside” enough not to generate reciprocal violence--one might identify woman as surrogate victim through the lens of some feminisms. Or: perhaps your friend could find feminist responses to or engagements with Girard.
Adam, suck an egg! I was here first. Pttttthb!
Tom, I’m not entirely sure why he wants this information, only that in the course of a recent conversation, he said he’d turned to Žižek’s discussion of women as objects of sacrifice. I responded, reasonably, what other theories of women as objects of sacrifices he’d consulted. To which he replied, “Bataille,” to which I replied, “And...,” to which he replied “Well if you’re so smart why don’t you tell me who I should be reading.” I excused myself, posted this, walked back into the living and announced that we’d have to wait a little while. How long?
From the time I posted to the time Rodney produced the Girard reference. Which isn’t to say that your questions aren’t productive, Tom; in a larger context, they certainly are. Pace Adam K., why certain problems become critical commonplaces fascinates me, even if I’m no more able to answer them than he is. What’s the allure of a given idea? Is it pure utility, and if so, in the service of what?
One of the things I’ve noticed as I think more about the idea of Higher Eclecticism is that there are two distinct practioners, one of whom doesn’t deserve the label. There’s the “thinker” who wants to find philosophical materials for the house he was going to build anyway; then there’s the thinker who wants to experiment with materials to see what kind of house he could build were he to employ bricks here, stone there, MDF everywhere, &c.
But I’m now guilty of derailing my own thread. Please, more on women as objects of sarcifice, thank you very much.
Scott-a bit out of my range, but my first thought was Girard. Then I thought of a friend who has a book that I think is called Law and Literature--I think of her because she was critical of a paper I gave at Birbeck that involved Zizek and sacrifice and her critique was raised from a feminist perspective. She was particularly interested in the figure of the minotaur. There are interesting questions of who does the sacrificing--so, Beloved and Medea. Then, of women who sacrifice their lives, themselves, Madame Bovary, Anna Karenina. I gather that you are more interested in theory here than literature, but this makes me think of something that has always bothered me terribly in Agamben: homo sacer seems oblivious to women as in fact the first of those who could be killed but not sacrificed.
Zizek, Bataille, and now Girard? Wow. Maybe responses to Girard by Moi and Sedgwick. Depending on how broadly you define sacrifice, Gayle Rubin, Elisabeth Bronfen, and the discussion initiated by Gail Simone.
Just a minute, Josh—you’re suggesting that in a discussion of women as objects of sacrifice, one should consult female authors? This is a paradigm shift.
You might also add Kofman to the list.
There’s a nice first-hand description of the sacrifice of a woman at a Viking funeral in Ibn Fadlan. (Alas, Michael Crichton wrote a wretched novel based on Fadlan.)