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IMPURE: BEING FOREIGN MATTER
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DOCTORAL DISSERTATION IN PHILOSOPHY
PRESENTED TO THE EUROPEAN
GRADUATE SCHOOL IN SAAS-FEE,
SWITZERLAND
2021
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RECEIVED WITH HIGH HONOURS (MAGNA CUM LAUDE)
SUPERVISOR: CATHERINE MALABOU
MUSE: JUDITH BUTLER
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IMPURE
First edition 2021
PREMISE
The examination of the phrase: “the body is a foreign being that contradicts the unity of the self” through the lens of the impure, or the condition of being shaped by foreign matter, by a strangeness disquieted by desire.
DEFINITION
Impure as being foreign matter. As contamination, intoxication, contraction, negation. As that being attached-detached, bound-unbound. Impure as the foreign that voids and illuminates: the body. That finitude stained by disavowal, by substitutability.
Impure as being foreign matter. As contamination, intoxication, contraction, negation. As that being attached-detached, bound-unbound. Impure as the foreign that voids and illuminates: the body. That finitude stained by disavowal, by substitutability.
ABSTRACT
Impure began as the question of Palestine, the Holy Land, a hole in purity. A promise with ever shifting borders. A “placeholder” where something is happening while it has never happened: the reversibility of reality and fiction, god and violence, justice and the money shot. When does being a body become an act of war, something be sacrificed quietly, diplomatically? Catherine Malabou and Judith Butler’s text titled You Be My Body for Me: Body, Shape, and Plasticity in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit begins with the body as a question. Butler begins by ventriloquizing the Lord’s imperative to the Bondsman: you be my body for me, but do not let me know that the body you are is my body. The text engages with the question of bodily disavowal, substitution and plasticity in the Lordship and Bondage section of the Phenomenology, informing the notion of the impure as that of being shaped by foreign matter, as that of being foreign matter. Impure looks at consciousness as the process of shaping the body through the bound unbound problematic. What is it to disavow one’s body, “to render it other as an effect of autonomy”? At the offset of Lordship and Bondage, the slave does not yet realize that his “autonomy is the dissimulated effect of the master,” argues Butler. He does not see that he is the master’s disavowed body. That his body is but a substitution, producing him as a surrogate, as a dissimulation, and his autonomy as the “credible effect of this dissimulation.” For it is still the master’s body that is ventriloquized through his. “Ventriloquism, the presence of one’s voice in the other’s body, the conquest of one’s own self as an act of robbery of the other’s identity—is precisely what is at stake in Lordship and Bondage,” claims Malabou, suggesting we read these terms as “conceptual names for detachment and attachment,” that is to say, as power relations subjected to the experience of freedom. According to Hegel, consciousness cannot come to be without an other, without exposure to itself as other. For the body or self “that transforms itself does not coincide with itself, it becomes alien to its own body, to its own “I,” to a sovereignty that coincides with its exception. To an opening to servility as its condition of becoming. To a body or remembrance that “restores possibility to the past, making what happened incomplete and completing what never was," disarming and reassembling continuity. Impure as the acceptance of oneself as other, as extinguishable, as a “holding onto nothing.” As a “foreign being that contradicts the unity of the self.”
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Impure as:
THE BODY
ESSENCE / WOMAN
ISRAEL-PALESTINE
VIOLENCE & NON-VIOLENCE
ANIMALITY
STRUCTURE
As = Substitutability
Impure is structured as a series of substitutions composing scenes of “self-making.” Where one text redoubles, translates or ventriloquizes another into another form of consciousness. Meaning begins “where presence is not pure presence but where presence comes apart (se disjoint) in order to be itself as such, [an] as that presupposes the distancing, spacing, and division of presence.” ( Jean-Luc Nancy )
SYNOPSIS
The book follows five threads ONE: The question of the body, plasticity and the bound-unbound problematic in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit as seen through Malabou and Butler’s You be My Body for Me. A redoubling of this text via the color gray, and Jean-Luc Nancy’s The It and the I. TWO: The question of difference, essence and woman as it pertains to being and being a woman as thought by Malabou alongside Hegel, Irigaray, Butler, Levinas, Sartre, Nietzsche and Derrida. THREE: The question of Israel-Palestine conceived of as identities shaped by negation as seen through Butler, Nancy, Genet, plus historical and fictional accounts. FOUR: The question of indifference, state, statelessness, violence and non-violence as thought by Butler, Said, Arendt and Malabou. FIVE: The question of animality, waste and sovereignty as seen through Bataille.
CONTENTS
CONTENTS
THE BODY
Without Inwardness, Without Externality
On Malabou and Butler’s You Be My Body For Me: Body, Shape, and Plasticity in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit
Strangeness And A Contracted Light
A redoubling of you be my body for me through the color gray, a neutral non-color color
The It and the I
On Jean-luc Nancy’s Corpus
ESSENCE / WOMAN
Shaped by Negation
On Malabou's Post-Gender Theory and the Feminine
The Feminine, Neither Undetermined nor Asexual
On Malabou's Changing Difference
ISRAEL / PALESTINE
A Scattered Light: On State and Statelessness
On Judith Butler’s Parting Ways: Is Judaism Zionism? or, Arendt and the Critique of the Nation-State
Estrangement: Deriving Political Principles from Negated and Scattered Existence
( section break )
Palestine: Be My Body For Me
On exile state and dross
Culture, Foreign Wars and Artificial Borders
The West and Wahhabism as promised land
Deliberately Untimely
On exile, Said and Judith Butler’s Parting Ways: What shall we do without Exile?
Two Contrasting Births
On Jean Genet’s Prisoner of Love and The Palestinians
Se Disjoint
On Jean-luc Nancy’s Being Singular-Plural
Swollen Fig.
Palestine and the absent image
( fiction )
VIOLENCE & NON-VIOLENCE
Violence, Translation and The Occluded
On Butler's Distinguishing Between Violence and Non-Violence
Subjects of Indifference
On Malabou's Emotional Life in a Neurobiological Age
War Comes Home
( fiction )
ANIMALITY
An Exteriority Within
Waste, eroticism and sovereignty in Bataille’s The Accursed Share
BIBLIOGRAPHY