Male Subjectivity at the Margins

by Kaja Silverman

In Male Subjectivity at the Margins Kaja Silverman provides a feminist and psychoanalytic reading of a variety of masculinities which fall outside the phallic pale -- masculinities which defy the logic of paternal succession, and which in doing so might be said to say 'no' to power. Since the forms of male subjectivity which most centrally concern Silverman are those which occupy a psychic space which has been traditionally defined as 'feminine', this book is also an extended investigation into the category of 'femininity'.

Male Subjectivity at the Margins makes a concerted attempt to elaborate a 'libidinal politics'. It argues that desire and identification always have important political consequences and implications, enabling certain actions and alliances, and legislating against others.

Silverman engages a wide assortment of theoretical, cinematic and literary texts, ranging from Lacan's Seminar XI, Freud's essays on masochism, and Leo Bersani's 'Is the Rectum a Grave?', to the films of Fassbinder, and the writings of Proust and T.E. Lawrence.

In doing so, she thinks ideology, masochism, authorship, and the gaze, and offers an extended consideration of racial and class masquerade. Silverman reconceives what it might mean to describe a certain kind of homosexual man as 'a woman's soul enclosed in a man's body'. She also proposes a new model for historical analysis, one predicated upon Freud's theory of trauma.

Male Subjectivity at the Margins will be of interest, not only to readers concerned with issues of gender, but to film scholars, literary critics and theorists, and those working within the areas of psychoanalytic theory, gay studies, cultural studies, and postcolonialism.

Kaja Silverman is Professor of Rhetoric at the University of California at Berkeley. She is the author of The Subject of Semiotics and The Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and Cinema.

First published in 1992. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Genres: Philosophy, Theory, Feminism, Psychoanalysis, Gender Studies, Research, Nonfiction

458 pages, Paperback

First published April 22, 1992

Reviews

[Maxwell · Rating 4 out of 5]

Something I really enjoyed in this book was the way Kaja Silverman took lessons from artists. I see a lot of Lacanian authors who write analyses of literature/film, but it always feels superfluous in that they begin with a psychoanalytic theory and then pick a film that can operate as an illustration of that theory. Like adding a slideshow to a lecture, visual aids. Working in this way nothing new ever happens as the world just reconfirms what theory already told you to find there. Contrary to this Silverman sees Rainer Werner Fassbinder's films as making a unique contribution to working through "male subjectivity at the margins" and so takes up the work of translating these contributions from film to theory. She repeatedly makes this type of move, for example taking lessons from Proust to extend psychoanalytic conceptualizations of the various models of homosexuality and identification within oedipal triangles revealing alternative libidinal economies to the typical heteronormative phallic ones. So rather than making the world fit her models, she looks outside to see artist's reports and then updates theory to reflect these reports. Ironically this humbleness to find out produces much more adventurous and novel writing. Refreshing.

I'm reminded of James Baldwin in "The Artist's Struggle for Integrity:"

"I want to suggest two propositions. The first one is that the poets (by which I mean all artists) are finally the only people who know the truth about us. Soldiers don’t. Statesmen don’t. Priests don’t. Union leaders don’t. Only poets. That’s my first proposition. We know about the Oedipus complex not because of Freud but because of a poet who lived in Greece thousands of years ago. And what he said then about what it was like to be alive is still true, in spite of the fact that now we can get to Greece in something like five hours and then it would have taken I don’t know how long a time.

The second proposition is really what I want to get at tonight. And it sounds mystical, I think, in a country like ours, and at a time like this when something awful is happening to a civilization, when it ceases to produce poets, and, what is even more crucial, when it ceases in any way whatever to believe in the report that only the poets can make. Conrad told us a long time ago (I think it was in Victory, but I might be wrong about that): 'Woe to that man who does not put his trust in life.' Henry James said, 'Live, live all you can. It’s a mistake not to.' And Shakespeare said—and this is what I take to be the truth about everybody’s life all of the time—'Out of this nettle, danger, we pluck this flower, safety.' Art is here to prove, and to help one bear, the fact that all safety is an illusion. In this sense, all artists are divorced from and even necessarily opposed to any system whatever."

[Max · Rating 3 out of 5]

I found Silverman’s chapters quite difficult to grasp. Lacan is rather beautifully evoked. Everyone else feels a bit muddled. The T. E. Lawrence chapter feels misconstrued/anachronistically diagnostic.

[Marcus · Rating 5 out of 5]

one thing about silverman is she will absolutely slay a lit review

[Mills College Library]

155.332 S587m 1992