Sleights of Reason

Mary Beth Mader

Description

A brilliant and original reimagining of sexuality, this book examines how concepts lend themselves to power/knowledge formations, and offers a robust synthesis of insights from Foucault and Deleuze to extend those into a proposal for a conceptual next step for imagining the structures of sexuality as eros. Many contemporary French philosophers make incidental use of the notion of a ruse. Its names are legion: 'duplicity,' 'concealment,' 'forgetting,' and 'subterfuge,' among others. This book employs Gilles Deleuze's philosophy of the concept to describe three specifically conceptual ruses, or sleights, that make up part of the conceptual support for the concept of sex. These are the sleights associated with the concepts of norm, bisexuality and development. Mary Beth Mader argues that concepts can trick us, and shows how they can effect conceptual sleights, or what she calls sleights of reason.
Preface

1. The Sleight of Reason

2. Sleights of the Norm

3. Sleights of Bisexuality

4. Sleights of Development

5. Conclusion

Notes
Bibliography
Index

Sujets

• Philosophie
• Épistémologie
• Philosophie de l'esprit
• Philosophie du langage
• Epistémologie
• Epistémologie
• Epistémologie
• Gender studies
• Philosophy

Informations

• Publié par: State University of New York Press
• Date de parution: 02 janvier 2012
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781438434339
• Langue: English

Extrait

SUNY series in Gender Theory

Tina Chanter, editor

SLEIGHTS OF REASON
Norm, Bisexuality, Development
MARY BETH MADER
S TATE U NIVERSITY OF N EW Y ORK P RESS

Published by S TATE U NIVERSITY OF N EW Y ORK P RESS , A LBANY
© 2011 State University of New York
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY www.sunypress.edu
Production, Laurie Searl Marketing, Anne M. Valentine
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Mader, Mary Beth.
Sleights of reason : norm, bisexuality, development / Mary Beth Mader.
p. cm. — (SUNY series in gender theory)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4384-3431-5 (hardcover : alk. paper)
1. Women—Sexual behavior. 2. Sex. 3. Feminism. I. Title.
HQ29.M327 2011
306.7082—dc22                                                                          2010016007
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

PREFACE
The work of many contemporary French philosophers of note makes incidental use of the notion of a ruse. Its names are legion: duplicity , concealment , forgetting , and subterfuge , among others. This book employs Gilles Deleuze's philosophy of the concept to describe three specifically conceptual ruses, or sleights, that make up part of the conceptual support for the concept of ‘sex.’ These are the sleights associated with the concepts of ‘norm,’ ‘bisexuality,’ and ‘development.’
This book aims to identify the oft-obscured workings of these three concepts and to display the subtle collaborations of their components. For these components can work together to constitute sleights. Such sleights could also be called “conceptual Jacquemarts.” In the Jacquemart, we have a single machine whose internal differentiation permits its self-reference and whose self-reference permits trickery. A first component allows that a second component carries out chiming work that it does not; it mimes a chime. Other parts of the machine actually effect the chiming. The machine as a whole refers to itself precisely through the dissimulation of the source of the chime. The machine's trickery requires self-reference. Similarly, concepts are ideal mechanisms that necessarily have the conceptual equivalent of this capacity for internal ventriloquism. This book attempts to draft the conceptual equivalents of horological technical figures for several complex conceptual Jacquemarts relating to the concept of ‘sex.’
Chapter 1 presents a general account of the sleight of reason. Chapter 2 , on sleights of the norm , scrutinizes several basic moves found in certain elementary social statistical concepts through a reading of Foucault's work on normalization and biopower. First, the conversion of discrete into continuous quantities that is effected with the statistical norm is examined so as to demonstrate the role of apparently simple tools of statistical measure in the constitution of social homogeneities. Second, an account of this conversion and similar operations is offered in terms of the concept of the ‘average’ or ‘mean’ in social statistics. Third, the existential function of these statistical orderings is sketched in an account of what is here termed “statistical panopticism.”
Chapter 3 is devoted to sleights of bisexuality . The examination focuses on two interrelated sleights found in the Freudian construal of bisexuality as the universal, coconstitution of each sex by both sexes. These are, first, the sleight of pure and impure sexes and, second, the sleight of what are termed here “microsex” and “macrosex.”
Sleights of development are the topic of chapter 4 . First, it exposes a sleight that pertains to the concept of ‘societal development’ according to which societies can be progressive or regressive. This sleight is relevant to the question of the relation between the concepts of ‘sexuality,’ ‘primitivity,’ and ‘societal evolution.’ It operates through a covert switching between two kinds of contemporaneity, temporal and normative. Second, Freud's developmental accounts of sexuation and sexuality exemplify some sleights of sexual development. The section exposes duplicities in Freud's cultural version of Ernst Haeckel's biogenetic law and examines a proleptic fallacy in Freud's teleological account of infantile eroticism in the context of his evolutionary thought.
Identification and discussion of these three kinds of sleights of reason, 1 then, occupy the bulk of this text. The book concludes with a chapter that attempts a synthesis of insights from Foucault and Deleuze to extend those, jointly, into a proposal for a conceptual next step for imagining the structures of sexuality as eros .

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
For making me fortunate, I have many people to thank. Among them are my generous current and former colleagues in the University of Memphis Philosophy Department, whose gift to me was to let me go on my merry philosophical way. You can see, and so can they, the result of that liberty now. Should it occasion any regrets, their gravity would be utterly alleviated by that rare gift of freedom. So thanks galore to my colleagues, Robert Bernasconi, Nancy Simco, Leonard Lawlor, Tom Nenon, John Tienson, and Gene James. Robert Bernasconi, in particular, has been hors catégorie as a colleague, mentor, and friend. Other colleagues have my heartfelt thanks as well: from the old days, Sara Beardsworth, David Henderson, Alan Kim, and Ron Sundstrom; from the new days, Stephan Blatti, Pleshette DeArmitt, Bill Lawson, Sarah Miller, and Kas Saghafi. No one could be more grateful to our department chair, Deborah Tollefsen, than I. From historic days, I have my teachers—my supervisor, the late Bob Solomon, Kelly Oliver, Kathy Higgins, and Doug Kellner—to thank for their unwavering support. From prehistoric days, although they had no way of knowing this, I will always treasure the examples of Kathryn Pyne Addelson, John Connelly, Murray Kiteley, and Eric Reeves, all of Smith College.
I am grateful to Dean Linda Bennett and the University of Memphis for sabbatical and travel support in the form of a professional development assignment in 2005–2006. The Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy (SPEP) has been an invaluable forum for the presentation of portions of the work of this book, and member philosophers have been uniquely enthusiastic interlocutors. Ellen Armour, Debra Berghoffen, Andrew Cutrofello, Penelope Deutscher, Laura Hengehold, Lynne Huffer, Pierre Lamarche, Noëlle McAfee, Mary Rawlinson, Peg Simons, Alison Stone, Shannon Winnubst, and Ewa Ziarek have been delightful discussants. Catherine Mills, Kelly Oliver, Diane Perpich, Fanny Söderbäck, Tony Steinbock, and Elizabeth Weed have my gratitude for their editorial interest in my work. The Société Américaine de Philosophie de Langue Française, the Society for the Study of Difference, the Foucault Circle, and the Society for the Philosophy of History kindly invited work included in this book.
The philosophical talent and curiosity of the University of Memphis Philosophy Department graduate students have been an inspiration to my own thinking. I am grateful to them all, and especially to Bryan Bannon, Gabriella Beckles, Michael Burroughs, Cheri Carr, Jon Dodds, Kristie Dotson, Nico Garréra, Peter Giannopoulos, Erinn Gilson, Kathryn Gines, Kristin Gissberg, David Gougelet, Tamara Haywood, Marda Kaiser, Stacy Keltner, Anika Mann, Donna Marcano, Valentine Moulard-Leonard, Matthew Lexow, Arsalan Memon, Ann Murphy, Maia Nahele, John Nale, Jacob Neal, Carolyn O'Mara, Camisha Russell, Kris Sealey, and Cigdem Yazici. Special thanks to Amit Sen for unflagging solidarity. Cathy Wilhelm, Connie Diffee, and the late Lisa Andrews supplied administrative support without which …
Friends have encouraged my work despite its evident menace to the time of our friendship. My deep thanks for this and for wisdom, patience, and emergency housing, to Gilberte de Poncheville and Patrick Maury. Mille mercis to dear friends in Paris for asking me the most skeptical questions. I am grateful to Roger Gathman for his generous and impossible erudition. I owe Carrie Laing Pickett a great debt for spontaneous rallying cries, philosophical curiosity, and proofreading. Many thanks for years of every kind of generous support to C. Roger Mader and Martine Mader. Thank goodness for Madeleine Mader, who always asked, and listened, about the book. Deepest personal thanks to Kyoo Eun Lee de New York .
Responsible for a whopping share of my luck is the model editor Jane Bunker, editor-in-chief of State University of New York Press. She has my inescapable gratitude for her interest in and publication of this book and my utmost respect for her leading role in the cultivation of contemporary intellectual life in the United States. Anonymous reviewers of the manuscript have my awe and thanks for their insightful recommendations and comments and for the time and attention they devoted to the text.
Were it not for the vision, care, and isotropic smarts of Tina Chanter, editor of the State University of New York Press series in Gender Theory, this book would not be. For being the grandest vector of my good fortune, thank you, Tina Chanter.
ONE
THE SLEIGHT OF REASON
What happens to a diseased truth? … Does it copulate with a lie And beget history? Is it a good mixer? Or does it sit silent at parties?
—Burns Singer, Collected Poems

“A GOOD MIXER”: FOUCAULT AND THE “FICTITIOUS UNITY OF SEX”
Thought daily encounters motive to investigate further the operative ontologies of the social category of sex. Certainly