#copjec

When you encounter the gaze of the Other, you meet not a seeing eye but a blind one. The gaze is not clear or penetrating, not filled with knowledge or recognition; it is clouded over and turned back on itself, absorbed in its own enjoyment. The horrible truth … is that the gaze does not see you. … You are on your own; the gaze of the Other is not confirming, it will not validate you.

Political opposition to bio-power must take the form, therefore, not of liberating suppressed sexual identities but of liberating oneself from them, freeing oneself from classification by their categories.

through the veils and dark spots, the obscurity in the depths of my mind, this truth speaks, for this obscurity has its roots not only in my mind but also in what is beyond it: the other, the body.

One scarcely needs to add that the opposition male/ female is the best-known example of this, for in this supposed opposition the female term has often been shown to have the value only of a minor exception, one that is easily absorbed by the unmarked, male term that stands in for both. What was new or unique to bio-politics, then, was the invention of something called sex, which permitted life to be sublated by history. Prior to this, blood, consanguinity, had played a major role in the machinations of power, but with the invention of the sexual mirage hereditary allegiances and consanguine loyalties tended to be downplayed – if not completely eliminated. The species being promoted by bio-power and the globalized economy of capital came to depend on a more individualized notion of the subject, one less encumbered by the older order of hereditary allegiances. The invention of sex, Foucault is saying, aided the construction of a completely individualized notion of the subject, one which caused the realist universal – that in the subject which is more than the subject – to disappear. Or: bio-power issues in the era of the multiple rather than the divided subject.

you are mistaken if you think that 1 + 1 will give you the 2 of sex.

The Freudian concept of over-determination blurted this fact out but this, too, fell on deaf ears, which heard in the over only a surfeit: that is, that the causes of our actions are never unique but always multiple. What ought to have been clear from Freud’s exposition is that over-determination cannot be adequately approached except as acknowledgment of the subject’s under-determination. 

The uncontestable value of this book [Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble] lies in the way it deftly shakes off all the remaining bits of sleepy dogmatism that continue to attach themselves to our thinking about sexual identity.

This subject, radically unknowable, radically incalculable, is the only guarantee we have against racism.