CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2012
| Author | Rivers, James Zachary |
|---|---|
| Title | Subjectivity Without Return: Reparatively Weaving Self(s) and Other(s) on the Same Side |
| Summary | This thesis explores the masculine assumptions within some strands of poststructural theories of subjectivity. Through a feminist poststructuralist lens, I attempt to understand, address, and tinker with phallogocentrism as it exists in everyday language, philosophy, and human relationality. Hélène Cixous’ concept of the Empire of the Selfsame – the masculine “history of phallocentrism, history of propriation” – guides my sexual difference theoretical framework, which connects appropriation, control, return, unity, retention and propriety to the masculine whereas depropriation, diffusion, divisibility, and collectivity connect to the feminine ([1975] 1986, 79). Beginning with a critique of Judith Butler’s Freudian informed early works on melancholic subjectivation, I argue that its internalizing and assimilating (incorporation and and introjection) relationship to alterity indicates a masculine subtext. Rather than this interiorizing subjectivity, I conceptualize a labial subjectivity, as inspired by Derrida and Cixous’ joint work Veils ([1998] 2001), to theorize a subjectivity of the lips – the non-boundary between self and other through which relationality emerges, which does not ingest its surroundings but weaves the surroundings and itself, outside and inside, simultaneously. Finally, I place Cixous and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick in conversation through a literary analysis in order to connect the Selfsame with Sedgwick’s paranoid position and labial subjectivity with the reparative position. The striking affinity between Sedgwick and Cixous facilitates a view of subjectivity no longer indebted to masculine tropes of interiority and binarization, but predicated upon non-coercive and de-propriating openness to alterity. |
| Supervisor | Supervisor: Timár, Eszter; Second Reader: Loutfi, Anna |
| Department | Gender Studies MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2012/rivers_james.pdf |
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