Privileging Difference

181 Pages·2002·0.58 MB·English

by  Antony Easthope

Privileging Difference
Antony Easthope
Edited by
Catherine Belsey
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Privileging Difference
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To Diane and Kate
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Privileging Difference
Antony Easthope
Edited by Catherine Belsey
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© Diane Easthope and Catherine Belsey 2002
All rights reserved.No reproduction,copy or transmission of
this publication may be made without written permission.
No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced,copied or
transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with
the provisions of the Copyright,Designs and Patents Act 1988,
or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying
issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency,90 Tottenham Court
Road,London W1T 4LP.
Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this
publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil
claims for damages.
The author has asserted his right to be identified
as the author of this work in accordance with the
Copyright,Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published 2002 by
PALGRAVE
Houndmills,Basingstoke,Hampshire RG21 6XS and
175 Fifth Avenue,New York,N.Y.10010
Companies and representatives throughout the world
PALGRAVE is the new global academic imprint of
St.Martin’s Press LLC Scholarly and Reference Division and
Palgrave Publishers Ltd (formerly Macmillan Press Ltd).
ISBN 0–333–78628–9 hardback
ISBN 0–333–78629–7 paperback
This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and
made from fully managed and sustained forest sources.
A catalogue record for this book is available
from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Easthope,Antony.
Privileging difference/Antony Easthope;edited by Catherine Belsey.
p.cm.
Includes bibliographical references (p.) and index.
Contents:Duchamp—Heath—From Marxism to difference—Said—
Bhabha—Rose—Haraway—Braidotti—Butler—Dollimore—Eagleton—
Grossberg—Zizek—The two Jakes [Lacan and Derrida].
ISBN 0-333-78628-9 — ISBN 0-333-78629-7 (pbk.)
1.Deconstruction.2.Poststructuralism. I.Belsey Catherine. II.Title.
PN98.D43 E19 2001
149—dc21 2001036985
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
11 10 09 08 07 06 05 04 03 02
Printed in Hong Kong
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C o n t e n t s
Acknowledgements vi
Foreword by Diane Easthope vii
Editor’s Preface viii
1 Duchamp 1
2 Heath 9
3 From Marxism to Difference 17
4 Said 35
5 Bhabha 52
6 Rose 62
7 Haraway 69
8 Braidotti 77
9 Butler 86
10 Dollimore 100
11 Eagleton 108
12 Grossberg 115
13 Zˇizˇek 120
14 The Two Jakes 139
15 Conclusion 157
References 159
Index 166
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A c k n o w l e d g e m e n t s
Thanks go to Gary Banham, Stuart Crehan and Kate McGowan for
reading and criticising sections. It’s difficult to measure my debt to
Catherine Belsey for innumerable chats about these matters. Nor the
immense gratitude I felt when the real came to claim me back again (as
does happen) and she agreed to tidy up what she could and see the
book through the press.
ANTONYEASTHOPE
The editor and publishers wish to thank the following for permission
to use copyright material:
Faber and Faber, for the extract from ‘Daddy’ from Collected Poemsby
Sylvia Plath. Reproduced by permission of Faber and Faber Ltd.
HarperCollins Publishers, for the extract from ‘Daddy’ from Ariel by
Sylvia Plath, copyright © Ted Hughes, 1963. Reproduced by permission
of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc.
Every effort has been made to trace the copyright holders but if any
have been inadvertently overlooked the publishers will be pleased to
make the necessary arrangement at the first opportunity.
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F o r e w o r d
On Thursday, 9 December 1999, we were waiting for the doctor to
arrive to see Antony. We were also racing to finish Privileging
Difference. I was trying to get a handwritten chapter of the book onto
the computer and checking individual words with Antony from time to
time. Our daughter Kate was transcribing a series of changes to the
final chapter at his dictation.
The doctor arrived just as we were finishing at midnight. He made it
clear that Antony could only be made more comfortable in hospital,
but Antony did not want to go. The book was finished, but he still
wanted to discuss details of the editing with Kate Belsey, who was due
to travel up to see him the next day. His father, who was eighty-seven,
was also expected to arrive by plane the next morning. However, I had
to call the doctor back at four in the morning and this time Antony
agreed to go into hospital.
Antony’s decline from then on was rapid. He refused a stronger pain-
killer drip so that his head would be clear enough for his discussion
with Kate Belsey on Saturday, but after that his only concern was to go
home to die. We were able to get him home on Monday evening, and
he died the following morning.
Privileging Difference was extremely important to him. He wrote
much of it while he was ill, sometimes sitting at the computer for short
periods to type, later writing in longhand, leaning on his elbow to do so
and then dictating onto tapes.
Antony was deeply committed to the case it makes. He would have
been very glad to see it in print.
DIANEEASTHOPE
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E d i t o r ’ s P r e f a c e
Why doesn’t a radical work remain radical? How is it that the edge of
experimentalism is so easily blunted? Why do we constantly need a
new avant-garde, as the old becomes aestheticised, recuperated?
The answer is that the subject is always impelled towards recovery of
the mastery threatened by the opening of a gap in its seamless
apprehension of the world. We ‘make sense’ of what was once so
shocking. The Lacanian imaginary, jubilant in misrecognition, affirms
that all is well, that the fixed and restricted point of view from which we
look is truly omniscient and that what we see is all there is. The
imaginary, triumphantly seizing hold of thematic meaning, occludes
the challenge to our apprehension posed by radical form.
Something similar happens to new theories. Difficult, scandalous or
impenetrable at first, they are rapidly either assimilated or superseded.
Too rapidly, Antony Easthope argues. The constant impulse of theory,
like modernist art, to make it new, the desire for each radical
intervention to surpass the last, means that we all too easily leave
behind insights that have not exhausted their capabilities. The
poststructuralist insistence on difference, rigorous in its initial
impulse, turned into an opportunity to do theory the easy way,
securing credibility by embracing variety, while bypassing the radical
questions poststructuralism initially raised. Easthope’s argument is
that an imaginary version of deconstruction, privileging difference,
has led to a celebration of the option of endless diversity, without
regard for the binary oppositions such work itself fails to deconstruct.
The privilege so easily accorded to heterogeneity depends on a silent
and undeconstructed antithesis between sameness (bad) and
difference (good), between dominance (evil) and subversion
(virtuous), and between metaphysics and deconstruction itself.
The effect is utopian, in both senses of that term: optimistic in its
commitment to radical change; hopeless, in its failure to engage with
the problems concerning textuality itself that have been so carefully
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Editor’s Preface ix
worked though in the light of psychoanalytic theory. Before we can
make an adequate analysis of the present, or seriously consider the
possibilities for the future, we need, Easthope affirms, to reckon with
three terms that are too easily ignored: the signifier, the imaginary and
the subject.
Recent theories and practices of interpretation readily revert, he
argues, to an account of thematic content, neglecting the text’s mode
of address and the position it thereby offers the reader-subject. Going
straight to the signified, confined to what the text says, such reading is
unable to recognise what the text does, its forms of reassurance, or the
surprising role of the signifier in resisting the imaginary mastery which
so soon reappears to insulate the subject against the effects of shock.
The rapid assimilation of poststructuralist theory has proved
disappointing in two main ways. On the one hand, a residual
humanism ignores the textuality of the text, which is then reread as
delivering another ‘truth’ that confirms the mastery of the reader-
subject. On the other, a celebration of difference for its own sake has,
ironically, much the same effect. Here the interpretation produced
puts on display the ingenuity of the interpreter, at the expense of the
text’s capacity to disturb. Both tendencies ignore the difficult task of
reading itself, the role of the reader’s desire in the process, and the
opportunities offered by Lacanian psychoanalysis for understanding
texts as complex performatives, now promising, now withholding, the
mastery we long for.
The book concludes with a contrast between what Easthope calls the
two Jakes, Jacques Lacan and Jacques Derrida, the one anarchic,
unpredictable, radically disrupting his own moment, the other an
attentive reader, scrupulous, brilliantly engaged with the important
issues of his society, as well as the history of philosophy. But this is not
only a contrast. Easthope analyses what is also an important
relationship and, paradoxically, given what we know of their personal
exchanges, one which need not immediately divide our allegiances.
What, he asks, is the connection between Lacan’s big Other, the order
of language and culture, constitutive for us but empty of substance,
and Derrida’s differance (with an ‘a’), relegating meaning beyond
reach? If we need Derrida for the precision with which he desires and
distrusts presence, we need Lacan’s account of the subject which seeks
and discounts imaginary mastery.
Revising the typescript for publication has been in many ways a real
exercise in nostalgia for me. Antony Easthope’s tones are clearly