Week+11

The important conceptual point for Freud is that in hysteria the “material substratum” (i.e., cortex) is undamaged, but ideas about the body have undergone some kind of alteration.
 * Gut Feminism **

[…]

This model of hysteria, and Freud’s emerging preference for psychogenic etiologies over biological ones,3 has been enormously influential on feminist accounts of embodiment. The idea that psychic or cultural conflicts could become somatic events was one of the central organizing principles of feminist work on the body in the 1980s and 1990s. This model allowed feminists to think of bodily transformation ideationally and symbolically, without reference to biological constraints. That is, to think about the body as if anatomy did not exist. This essay begins with the conviction that this dissociation of ideation and biology (and the concomitant distaste for explanation via the biological) is deeply problematic. (68-69)

What this approach does not pay attention to, however, is the role played by biology //that is not damaged//; that is, how the everyday, minute-by-minute, routine action of biological systems (e.g., surges of bio- chemicals; metabolic activity; synaptic communication; muscular contractions) might be caught up in, and contributing to, hysterical symptomology. Put another way, in discounting an etiology based in biological damage, Freud minimizes the involvement that biology in general might have in the provocation, maintenance, and treatment of conversion symptoms. Or at least many of us have been happy to read him in this way. I am interested in interrogating the intellectual corollaries that his model seems to have engendered for the contemporary feminist scene—that the most compel- ling analytic registers for thinking about the body are symbolic, cultural, ideational, or social rather than biological, and that political or intellectual alliances with the biological sciences are dangerous and retrograde. It is my concern that we have come to be astute about the body while being ignorant about anatomy and that feminism’s relations to biological data have tended to be skeptical or indifferent rather than speculative, engaged, fascinated, surprised, enthusiastic, amused, or astonished. Most troublingly, it seems that the very sophistication of feminist accounts of embodiment has been brokered through a repudiation of biological data. Too often, it is only when anatomy or physiology or bio- chemistry are removed from the analytic scene (or, in what amounts to much the same gesture, these domains are considered to be too reductive to be analytically interesting) that it has been possible to generate a recognizably feminist account of the body. (69-70) The gut is sometimes angry, some- times depressed, sometimes acutely self-destructive; under the stress of severe dieting, these inclinations come to dominate the gut’s responsivity to the world. At these moments any radical distinction between stomach and mood, between vomiting and rage is artificial. Here, a clear indication of what is meant by radical (pertaining to the root: foundational, essential, originary, primary) is important. I am not arguing that organs are indistinguishable from one another, or that psyche and soma are the same thing. Rather, I am claiming that there is no a priori, fundamental demarcation between these entities.

[…]

The logic of interaction, addition, or supplementarity presumes that the entities at stake are already, radically detached. I am arguing that antidepressants alleviate bulimia because there is no radical (originary) distinction between biology and mood. Mood is not added onto the gut, secondarily, disrupting its proper function; rather, temper, like digestion, is one of the events to which enteric substrata are naturally (originally) inclined. (84-85)

To claim that the universal has not yet been articulated is to insist that the “not yet” is proper to an understanding of the universal itself: that which remains “unrealized” by the universal constitutes it essentially. The universal begins to become articulated precisely through challenges to its //existing// formulation, and this challenge emerges from those who are not covered by it, who have no entitlement to occupy the place of the “who,” but who, nevertheless, demand that the universal as such ought to be inclusive of them. The excluded, in this sense, constitute the contingent limit of universalization…. If existing and accepted conventions of universality //constrain// the domain of the speakable, this constraint produces the speakable, marking a border of demarcation between the speakable and the unspeakable. (90)
 * Excitable Speech **