Response+8 

If one of the things that theory claims to know today is that it is distance from biology or science that allows the possibility of difference and change (i.e., the possibility of politics), then Sedgwick and Franks put such confidence into doubt. They dispute the naturalized critical tendency that would force an orderly distinction between Tomkin’s innate affect system and his rich phenomenology. Once mobilized, such a distinction can only serve a number of suspect critical ends: to ascertain the extent to which phenomenology can be rescued from scientism, or the extent to which phenomenology has emerged despite scientism, or the extent to which phenomenology has been compromised by its juxtaposition with science. Betraying a zealous but disavowed moralism against the miscegenation between science and its other, reading such as these tend to deliver to deliver tired rearticulations of anti essentialist, anti biology, antiscientific axiom, and thus promote a kind of interpretive eugenics that breeds out the bastard children of any liaison with biology or scientific systems (Wilson 3-4)

These maneuvers with Freudian theory are indicative of a more widespread imperative to force a disjunction (or enforce a hierarchy) between science and criticism, between biology and politics the end effect of which has been to cripple our critical abilities and thereby blunt the cogency, force, and political efficacy of the readings that we produce (Wilson 4)

Neurological plausibility has been a major component in the marketing of connectionism. Neuroscience has lent an air of contemporaneity to connectionist computation 9hybridity being the identifying mark of science at this fin de siecle). And its organic realism provides a rejoinder to the artificiality of conventional computational theory (Wilson 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. The idea of the arm, for example, has become associated with a large “quota of affect,” and this prevents it from being involved in any associative links with other ideas or organs. It has become ideationally sequestered (lost to consciousness) under the weight of this quota of affect. The arm is liberated from its paralysis only when this affective burden is removed, and the idea of the arm becomes accessible again to “conscious associations and impulses” (Wilson 2004 67).

Taking the eating-disordered body as its case in point, this paper argues that biological data are indispensable to feminism’s conceptual and political efficacy. The exclusion of biological data from feminist accounts of eating disorders has narrowed their explanatory power, and has bequeathed to feminism models of embodiment that cannot engage easily with the contemporary life sciences. This paper argues that what anatomy (specifically, the gut) can know, in hysterical and nonhysterical states is perhaps the most vital lesson to emerge from the eating disorder epidemic (Wilson 2004, 70)

In the Rat Man case history, Freud comments on the “leap from a mental process to a somatic innervations” that is emblematic of conversion hysteria, but he claims that this leap “can never be fully comprehensible to us.” (Wilson 2004, 71).

After all, these are not faulty perceptions or hallucinations on the patient behalf; a material transformation really has been effected. The increased capacity in hysteria for the fabrication of lumps in the throat or a child out of the contents of the stomach or a penis out of rectal contents suggests that an aptitude for con- dentations, displacement, connotation, repetition or identification cannot be contained to the ideational realm (dreams, parapraxes, and so forth); capacities are also part of the nature of the body’s organs, vessels, and nerve fibers. The aid given by the musculature of the intestines is not that of passive substrate awaiting the animating influence of the unconscious but, rather, that of an interested broker of psychosomatic events. (Wilson 2004 73)

This body’s neurotically inclined, symbolically guided, and analyzable. Ferenczi describes a second organization of psyche and soma wherein primordial psychic powers emerge after normal psychic structures have been violently destroyed by trauma (the organism begins to think”). Here organic substance is intrinsically, primitively psychic (“impelled by motives”); psychological organization has regressed to a state where (as in the phylogenetic and ontogenetic past) it is not possible to distinguish matter from motive or deliberation. (Wilson 2004, 75).

Clearly, hysteria comprehends more about the body than just what is given by perceptual and tactile data (which, in effect, limits hysteria’s reach to the surface of the body); hysteria also enacts some knowledge of the biological unconscious—the ontogenetic and phylogenetic impulses that motivate the body’s substrata. (Wilson 2004, 78).

Here, standard anatomical texts help orient us to the primal nature of the throat’s substrate. Gray’s Anatomy describes the faces as “the aperture by which the mouth communicates with the pharynx.” The pharynx connects at the upper end with the mouth, nasal passages, and ears and at its lower end with the esophagus. Moreover, the pharyngeal area is “the embryological source of several important structures in vertebrates. (Wilson 2004, 80) Amphimixis is not a secondary perversion of flat biological substrate; it is the very means by which these organs are able to function naturally at all. This anal-urethral admixture spills over into the copulative act, such that the genitals (for Ferenczi, at this moment, the penis) acquire their natural function (ejaculation) through amphimixic relations to the bladder and bowel…(Wilson 2004, 81).

The gut is sometimes angry, sometimes depressed, sometimes acutely self destructive; under the stress of severe dieting, these inclinations come to dominate the gut’s responsively 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, origin, primary) is important. I am not arguing that organs are indistinguishable from one another, or that psyche and soma the same thing. Rather, I am claiming that there is no a priori, fundamental demarcation between these entities (Wilson 2004, 84).

The efficacy of antidepressant medications in the treatment of bulimia can best be explained in a conceptual field where the relations between head and gut; between thinking and eating; among serotonin, appetite, and mood; among disgust and antiperistalsis and the esophagus; among anger and hunger and loneliness and the stomach are more than juxtapositions or utilitarian relations of otherwise disjunctive realms. Feminist theory is very well positioned to generate just these kinds of conceptual models—if only it could be in a more open and generative relation to biological data, if only it could allow a less antagonistic, a more amphimixic relation between itself and the life sciences. In alliance with the biological sciences, feminism could build conceptual schemata about the body that are astute both politically and biologically—schemata in which it is possible to imagine that in cases of severe and chronic bulimia, the capacity for organic thought saturates the more familiar ideational, cognitive, unconscious, and cerebral mechanisms (Wilson 2004 85-86)

If power is no longer constrained by models of sovereignty, if it emanates from any number of “centers,” how are we to find the origin and cause of that act of power by which injury is done? (Butler 78)

Foucault writes…Foucault is right…writes Foucault

But what kind of speech is attributed to the citizens in such a view, and how does such an account draw the line between performativity that is hate speech and the performativity that is the linguistic condition of citizenship? If hates speech is a kind of speech that no citizen ought to exercise, then how might its power be specified, if it can be? And how are both the proper speech of citizens and the improper hate speech of citizens to be distinguished from et a third level of performative power, hat which belongs to the state? (Butler 81).

Pornography almost always works through inversions of various sorts, but these inversions have a life and power that exceeds the domain of the pornographic. (Bulter 83).

…the antipornography stance opposes the state of disarray into which the utterance has apparently fallen: the utterance risks meaning in ways that are not intended or never intended; it becomes a sexualized act, evidencing itself as a seduction… rather than as truth-based” (Butler 86).

The notion of "consensus" presupposed by either of the first two views proves to be a prelapsarian contention, one which short-cirucits the necessarily difficult task of forging a universal consensus from various location of culture, to borrow Homi Bhabha's title and phrase, and the difficult practice of translation among the various languages in which universality makes it varied and contending appearances. (Butler 91)

The discursive occasion for a prohibition - renunciation, interdiction, confession- become precisely the new incitement of sexuality an incitement to discourse as well. that discourse itself proliferates as the replied enunciation of the prohibitive laws suggests that its productive power depends upon its break with an originating context and intention, and that it recirculation is not within the control of any given subject. (94).

"Law...redirected against racism" (98)...!....

We begin to see how the state produces and reproduces hate speech, find it in the homosexual utterance of identity and desire, in the graphic representation of sexuality, of sexual and bodily fluids, in the various graphic representation of sexuality, of sexuality and bodily fluids, in the various graphic efforts to repeat and overcome the forces of sexual shame and racial degradation. (Butler 201)