Psychoanalysis and Its Resistances in Michel Foucault's "The History of Sexuality": Lessons

for Anthropology
Author(s): P. Steven Sangren
Source: Ethos, Vol. 32, No. 1 (Mar., 2004), pp. 110-122
Published by: Wiley on behalf of the American Anthropological Association
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 Psychoanalysis and ts Resistances
in Michel Foucault's The History of
Sexuality: Lessons for Anthropology

P. STEVEN SANGREN

ABSTRACT This article argues that Foucault's influential The

History of Sexuality, Volume 1 embodies a tension between an
explicit theory of the discursive production of "the subject" and
an implicit resistance to the reality of this same revelation. This
tension is shown to parallel the organization of desire under-
stood in psychoanalytic terms-that is to say, desire is an emer-
gent effect linked to our resistances to the social worlds that
produce us. Consequently, despite The History of Sexuality's an-
tipathy to psychoanalysis, its most redeeming interpretation
may be a psychoanalytic one. Anthropological interest in the
"cultural construction" of personhood, emotions, and similar
categories bears important affinities to Foucault's discursive
productivity. Consequently, the concept of culture manifest in
such notions requires incorporating desire's resistances. More-
over, complicating our understanding of culture in these terms
facilitates understanding both human commonalities and the
character of cultural differences.

nthropologists who draw inspiration from psychoanalytic tra-

ditions (and I number myself among them) are compelled to
address the discipline's pervasive skepticism with respect to
"psychologizing" culture. Obeyesekere's disputation of Leach's
distinction between "public" and "private" symbols epito-
mizes the discipline's long-standing divergence of opinion in this regard
(Leach 1958; Obeyesekere 1981).1 Voicing a widely shared skepticism,
Leach argues that "public" symbols cannot be explained with reference to
individual psychological meanings; Obeyesekere, in contrast, insists that

Ethos32(1):110-122. Copyright ?2004, American Anthropological Association.

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 The History of Sexuality * 111

culture must be conceived in terms that accommodate individual motive

and desire.2
Since the publication of Obeyesekere's argument it has become in-
creasingly clear that kindred issues transcend the disciplinary boundaries
of anthropology. In the humanities and cognate social sciences, there is a
wide-ranging, almost ubiquitous obsession revolving around the nature of
the human "subject" and how, in the context of various and relentless
attacks upon "humanism," to restore a sense of individual and collective
efficacy, power, or control-often glossed as "agency"-to social and his-
torical process. From the vantage of psychoanalysis, intellectual trends
ranging from Marxism, to structuralism, and post-structuralism seem to
share at least a penchant to diminish the role of individuals, "agents," or
"subjects" in their variously materially or symbolically conceived systems.
People or "subjects," we learn, are to be understood as ephemeral effects,
neurotic delusions, or mere reproducers of the needs or the logic of "dis-
courses," "modes of production," or even of language (langue) in the ab-
stract.3 Despite its promises to restore individual agency in a more
dialectical understanding of social process, even "practice theory"-most
prominently exemplified in the massive theoretical writings of Pierre
Bourdieu-founders in its penchant to dissolve "agency" into "habitus"-
itself an effect or product of "objective structures" (Bourdieu 1990).
In the midst of this transdisciplinary ferment, no figure looms larger
than that of Michel Foucault, and in the midst of Foucault's substantial
oeuvre, no work looms larger than does The History of Sexuality, Volume
1. Arguably, it is The History of Sexuality that constitutes the clearest
delineation of Foucault's long-developing interest in connections among
discourses, power, and "the subject." My intention here, however, is not
to assess either Foucault's contributions more generally or The History of
Sexuality, in particular, with reference to Foucault's contributions to the
theoretical, historical, or philosophical issues per se. Instead, I propose a
reading of The History of Sexuality as revealing tensions precisely in Fou-
cault's own aims-tensions that, in turn, can be turned toward illuminat-
ing anthropology's object of disciplinary identity-that is to say,
"culture"-my own object of critique.4 Although Foucault is famously and
effectively a critic of psychoanalysis, my aim, paradoxically, is to recruit
a reading of his indictment of psychoanalysis toward building an argument
for incorporating insights drawn from psychoanalysis into anthropology's
understanding of culture.

THE HISTORY OF SEXUALTY

One can distinguish two intriguing ideas regarding the nature or con-
stitution of "the subject" in Foucault's History of Sexuality. Most famously

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112 ? ETHOS

and explicitly, Foucault argues that modernity is characterized by

conviction, bordering on obsession, to the effect that there exists a "
to our (especially) sexual being that must be uncovered beneath the
fensive layers of social and psychological repression.5 Against this
ernist discourse, this scientia sexualis, Foucault insists that it is the
discourse itself-most of all its "repressive hypothesis"-that produces
rather than reveals the truth of the subject. As an anthropologist, I read
this argument as bearing important affinities to our discipline's longstand-
ing concern surrounding what is sometimes glossed as "the cultural con-
struction of the person."
Intertwined with this argument, however, one can discern another,
less explicit, notion of personhood-a notion that congeals most explicitly
around Foucault's discussions of ars erotica as an archaic procedure for
"producing the truth of sex"-an alternative to modernity's scientia
sexualis. "In the erotic art," Foucault writes,
truth is drawn from pleasure itself, understood as a practice and accumulated as expe-
rience; pleasure is not considered in relation to an absolute law of the permitted and
the forbidden, nor by reference to a criterion of utility, but first and foremost in relation
to itself; it is experienced as pleasure, evaluated in terms of its intensity, its specific
quality, its duration, its reverberations in the body and the soul. [Foucault 1970:57]

In contrast,
our civilization possesses no ars erotica. In return, it is undoubtedly the only civiliza-
tion to practice a scientia sexualis; or rather, the only civilization to have developed
over the centuries procedures for telling the truth of sex which are geared to a form of
knowledge-power strictly opposed to the art of initiations and the masterful secret: I
have in mind the confession.

What I have in mind here, however, is conveyed less in Foucault's

specific arguments than by the general tenor of his language-a diffuse but
pervasive anger directed against the consequences of the repressive hy-
pothesis conceived as a discourse. One senses (at least I do) that Foucault
intends his writings to be critical interventions in the interest of individual
freedom and that the oddly productive effects of the "repressive hypothe-
sis" (which Foucault indicts for entrapping us by promising a phony sor
of "emancipation") are themselves perverse and ought to inspire resis
tance. The possibility of a tension between these two ideas comes from th
fact that, on the one hand, "the subject" is viewed as an effect or product
of a discourse while, on the other, Foucault imagines an alternative regim
in which "pure pleasure" might be implemented for its own sake.
Of course, I am not the first to note this tension in Foucault's writ-
ing-critics range famously from Jacques Derrida and Jiirgen Habermas to
Judith Butler (Butler 1997; Derrida 1978; Habermas 1987). One might, as
I have done in the past, point it out as a logical contradiction that dimin-
ishes Foucault's legacy as a theorist of "the subject" (Sangren 1995).6

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 The History of Sexuality * 113

Instead, I shall argue that Foucault's notions regarding, let us term it, "dis-
cursive productivity" constitute an important insight into modern forms
of subjectivity. But by the same token, the resistances to this productivity
evident in the tonality of his writings can be viewed as symptomatic of
some of the limits associated with conceiving "the subject" solely in these
terms.

In brief, I believe that one can defend both Foucault's insights regar
ing discursive productivity, on the one hand, and what I take to be hi
manifest rage against the repressive hypothesis, on the other. But to do
one must also recognize the limitations of some of Foucault's more expl
theoretical claims. To this end I employ understandings of the constituti
of "the subject" inspired, broadly speaking, by psychoanalysis. The His
tory of Sexuality's antipathy to psychoanalysis, which Foucault viewed
carrying into the present the procedures of inquisitorial confession, len
a telling irony to this argument. Yet it is possible to understand cruci
insights drawn from psychoanalytic theory as providing a rationale for
dialectical or complex understanding of "the subject" as both a product
effect of discursive procedures, on the one hand, and as a producer (or
"agent") of its own discourse or intentions, on the other. Indeed, read
this way, it is possible even to discern affinities between Foucault's ow
discourse and that of psychoanalysis.

PSYCHOANALYSIS

I should be a bit more specific as to what I mean by "psychoanalysis

granting that perhaps my references may be somewhat idiosyncratic. Fi
and foremost, I understand psychoanalysis to revolve around the ontolo
of desire, its central insight being that desire emerges as an effect or pr
uct of an infant's engagement with a socially constituted world.7 The "i
fant" here can be construed as something along the lines of pure biolog
or embodied potentiality; the "socially constituted world" encompasses
that we take to be culturally or discursively constituted along with th
material or phenomenal realities complexly integrated with such co
structions. Following Levi-Strauss, via Freud and Lacan, I believe that
sire, like the incest tabu, marks the border between nature and cultur
both in evolutionary terms, and in the emergence and on-going phenom
nology of the subject or individual (Freud 1950; Lacan 1977, 1983; Levi
Strauss 1969; Rubin 1975). That is to say, unlike an "instinct" (such
breathing) that might be assumed to bypass culturally constituted con
sciousness altogether, desire is always mediated through individual exp
rience that includes cultural realities.
But in another sense, to locate desire at a border is misleading; one
can no more abstract that which is solely an effect of discourse or culture

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114 ? ETHOS

from our being than one can identify that which is solely a manifes
of our biological natures.8 The conundrum I have in mind here is s
to that Butler addresses in The Psychic Life of Power with referen
desire, resistance, and power (Butler 1997). I take one of Butler's ce
points to be that there is in the nature of our subjectivity and desire
of double-bind complexity-and that this complexity is of a form un
milable to any simple assertion of dialectical synthesis transcending
ral or essential and discursive or cultural constituents. "Desire" seems
designed both logically and existentially to resist precisely the circum
stances or realities-phenomenal and social-that produce it.
From such a general and abstract (or "lowest common denominator")
understanding of psychoanalysis, of course, one can trace crucial diver-
gences. Lacan, for example, is widely understood to have effected a "dees-
sentializing" of Freud's vision of libido from a problematic grounding in
"instincts" by focusing on the lack or "split" occasioned by the "mirror
stage" (briefly, the notion that we form an image of our self only insofar as
it is reflected back to us from the point of view of others) and the subject's
entry into language (Mitchell 1983; Rose 1983). It is probably this move
away from biology toward language that most recommends Lacan to an-
thropologists; we anthropologists are, after all, deeply invested in the no-
tion that culture can make a difference-that personhood, encompassing
even desire and gender, are cultural constructions.
But this move is not also without some costs to anthropology, two of
which come to mind: First, Lacan's employments of language derive from
general properties of symbolization that characterize language in general,
rather any than language in particular. In other words, the Lacanian vision
is unclear as to how cultural differences might impinge on the production
of persons. For anthropologists interested in what is commonly glossed as
"the cultural construction of the person," of course, this is a serious con-
cern.9
Whatever might be said about Freud's residual essentialism, his focus
on the triad of infant, mother, father as material actors-a kind of proto-
typical "social"-leaves open the possibility of imagining different kinds
of "social"-although Freud is often and fairly criticized for not having
done so. (I have in mind, for example, Malinowski's famous attempt to
define a "matrilineal complex" [1927]).10 For Lacan, in contrast, mothers
and (especially) fathers are treated more abstractly as what amount to
stand-ins or embodiments of qualities like "the other," Law, and lan-
guage-qualities, by implication, that manifest in all cultures. The prob-
lem for anthropology consequent upon Lacan's deessentializing or making
abstract the figures of the mother and father, whatever the attractions with
respect to disarticulating desire from biology, is that the same abstract
operations would seem to characterize all possible cultures.

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 The History of Sexuality ? 115

Second, as many have noted regarding structuralism and (to bring the
discussion back to Foucault) notions of "discursive productivity," under-
standing the subject primarily as an effect of language raises difficulties
surrounding what is often glossed as "agency." Is it a delusion to suppose
that people possess coherence over time as individuals possessed of
authentic intentions and motives?
In its initial appearance in this article I bracket "the subject" with
quotation marks. My intention in doing so is to index the ambiguity sur-
rounding the term. There is, of course, a vast discussion in literary studies
philosophy, and allied academic disciplines surrounding "the subject," its
various social, linguistic, and ideological determinations, and its epistemo-
logical status with respect to personhood, individuality, or agency. I
seems reasonable to suppose that this proliferation of attention is sympto
matic of wider social and cultural forces, perhaps registering (as some hav
argued) an epistemic shift toward postmodernity.11 In less historical, but
more philosophical, terms this proliferating interest also might be viewed
as a symptom of the same sort of tension that we have been discussing in
Foucault-a tension between an apprehension that even our intentions
and deepest desires are products of external social or linguistic realities,
on the one hand, and a conviction or need to believe that we are authentic
authors of our own activities-that is to say, "agents"-on the other.

DISCURSIVE PRODUCTIVITY

Allow me to employ Foucault's own eloquence to epitomize what I am

glossing as "discursive productivity." Foucault writes of confession, for ex-
ample, that
the obligation to confess is now relayed through so many different points, is so deeply
ingrained in us, that we no longer perceive it as the effect of a power that constrains
us; on the contrary, it seems to us that truth, lodged in our most secret nature, "de-
mands" only to surface; that if it fails to do so, this is because a constraint holds it in
place, the violence of a power weighs it down, and it can finally be articulated only at
the price of a kind of liberation. Confession frees, but power reduces one to silence;
truth does not belong to the order of power, but shares an original affinity with freedom:
traditional themes in philosophy, which a "political history of truth" would have to
overturn by showing that truth is not by nature free-nor error servile-but that its
production is thoroughly imbued with relations of power. The confession is an example
of this. [Foucault 1978:60]

The "truth of the subject" is thus not an autonomous or essential quality

to be discovered but is, rather, an effect or product of power's imperative
to apply its discursive tactics in uncovering it. Note, however, that the
same passage calls for a "politics" that would require "overthrowing"
power's ability to produce "truth"-which is to say, to produce "the sub-
ject." Such a call implies, it seems to me, another sort of truth of the

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116 ? ETHOS

subject-one that must come from somewhere other than "power's" abi
ity to produce it.12
But can we imagine a "truth of the subject" that would not, in som
sense, be produced by "power," "discourse," or "culture"? Anthropolog
stake in this question hinges, of course, on the conviction that cultur
plays an important role in constituting personhood, and as I noted earli
Foucault's elaborations on the productive force of discourse align with
anthropological commitment to notions of cultural construction. Cons
quently, insofar as anthropology takes culture in all of its variant and p
ticular manifestations to define human life, the answer to my rhetorica
posed question would have to be a resounding "No!" That is to say, it i
inconceivable to anthropology that a human subject could be other tha
a product of culture.
But having made such an assertion, how then does one make sense
Foucault's endorsement, here and more broadly, of resistance to w
might be construed as, in effect, the power of culture?

THE RESISTANT SUBJECT OF "PLEASURE"

Obviously, I have organized my discussion here to produce an open

ing for psychoanalysis: If psychoanalysis understands desire to be
emergent effect of precisely the confrontation between "nature" and "
ture," desire and personhood possess a complexity that cannot be unde
stood as a pure effect or product of either. Bearing this thought in mi
allow me to digress momentarily by quoting Pierre Bourdieu and Jean
Claude Passeron who describe the culture of French academia in the
1960s in the following terms:
The sometimes assiduous and methodical will to achieve full studenthood does not
presuppose unanimous recognition of an image of the ideal student, since the im
what one seeks to actualize may amount to no more than the imperative urge to
alize an image. To want to be, and to want to choose one's identity, is, first of a
refuse to be what one has not chosen to be. The first necessity that is refused or
figured is that of being rooted in a social milieu. Students generally evade the si
naming of their parents' occupation, whatever it may be. Their embarrassed s
half-truths, or declared dissociation are all ways of distancing themselves fro
unacceptable idea that such an unchosen determination could determine the ch
of someone entirely occupied in choosing what he is to be. The aspiration to creat
choose oneself does not impose a determinate behavior, but only a symbolic
behavior intended to signify that this behavior has been chosen. [Bourdieu and P
ron 1979:38]13

Bourdieu and Passeron link this characterization to an ideology of privi-

lege in the academic culture of 1960s France, and one might plausibly
argue that Foucault's implicit resistances manifest sentiments similar to
those that Bourdieu and Passeron attribute to bourgeois Parisian students.

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 The History of Sexuality * 117

(Note, for example, Foucault's interest in construing the life of the individ-
ual as a work of art.) Yet I believe that the desire to which Bourdieu and
Passeron draw our attention here transcends the particularities of French
elitist ideology. In Chinese myth, ritual, and gender, for example, I believe
one can discern a recurrent figuring of desire oriented toward similar fan-
tasies of radical, self-fashioning autonomy (Sangren 2000, n.d.). Psycho-
analysis has had much to say about such fantasies, but (I am convinced)
does not foreground them sufficiently. Without delving into this topic here,
I venture that such fantasies may organize our sexuality more than our
sexuality (in some solely biologically construed sense of the term) drives
or produces such fantasies.
Be that as it may, all of this suggests to me that Foucault's appeals to
a subjectivity purified of power's disciplining interpellations (although
they appear romantic, as Derrida argues [1998:103], and non sequitur to
the general tenor of discursive productivity) are essential to an implicit
integrity embodied in The History of Sexuality, even though they remain
external to its more explicit theorizing impulses. The implicit integrity to
which I refer might be said to model that of desire itself. That is to say, just
as Foucault seems torn between the realization that subjectivity is an ef-
fect of power (or discourse, or culture), on the one hand, and anger at this
very realization, on the other; so, too, one might say that desire is an
emergent product of our realization of our dependencies on the (especially
social) world that has produced us, on the one hand, and our resistances
to the implications of this same realization for our self-fashioning auton-
omy, on the other.14 Concretely speaking, this realization manifests (among
other loci) in the ambivalent feelings toward parents to which psycho-
analysis draws our attention.

CONCLUSION AND AFTERWORD

Where does this leave anthropology? One need not suppose, indeed
it would be a mistake to do so, that one must choose between discursive
productivity or romantic subjectivism, between biological or individualist
reductionism and hopelessly decentered subject-positionality, between
"the subject" and "agency," when it comes to understanding individuality
and desire. Our personhood, desire, or "subjectivity," in other words, is a
complex process, not so much "split" or "shifting" as simultaneously both
authentic and inauthentic, encompassing contradictory and paradoxical
tendencies, perhaps most fundamentally revolving around an existential
imperative that insists on resisting that which might define us as pure
effects or objects, a resistance put into motion by the same disciplining
constraints against whose limitations we rebel.

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118 ? ETHOS

In conclusion, I would like to comment briefly upon some impl

tions that I have left unaddressed up to this point-in particular rega
discipline, constraint, and production-terms that appeared in the t
this paper when I first proposed to write it. By juxtaposing these te
intended to suggest that Foucault's employment of terms like disc
(along with tactics, machineries, procedures, strategies, among oth
registers a negative sense of how power, the state, or culture limit
constrain us. Yet the "discursive productivity" I alluded to earlier-a
with the kindred anthropological notion of "cultural construction"-se
register something similar in more positive terms.
In this regard, Clifford Geertz eloquently conveys a point that
but dogma in our discipline when he insists that "men unmodified b
customs of particular places do not in fact exist, have never existe
most important, could not in the very nature of the case exist" (196
In the same essay, Geertz adds that "One of the most significant f
about us may finally be that we all begin with the natural equipment
a thousand kinds of life but end in the end having lived only o
(1966:45). What Geertz is driving at, of course, is that it is in our
to be culturally constructed. But, more importantly, it is in the nat
the cultural construction of our individuality that the range of hum
tential narrows as a consequence of the constructive or productive p
itself.
Unfortunately, at least in my view, anthropology seems largely con-
tent to let things rest with this truism. But here we might take some inspi-
ration from Foucault, and, even more, from psychoanalysis, both of which
suggest that what is blandly glossed in anthropology as "cultural construc-
tion" is, in reality, also disciplining (as Foucault's work demonstrates) and
entails psychic costs (as psychoanalysis reveals). And it is in the resis-
tances inspired by these costs that one expects to find not only the genesis
of desire necessary to energize social reproduction, but also the spark of
creative agency to which we might look for change.
My final thought is thus to link this reading of Foucault to a challenge
for anthropology. In my opinion the complacency surrounding notions of
cultural construction in anthropology has resulted in a discipline so fo-
cused on public representations in what amounts to a "textualizing" of
both social and psychodynamic processes, that working toward theorizing
culture in ways capable of encompassing both difference and (at some
level of abstraction) our common humanity is rare. Foucault's reading of
"modernity" as an instance of cultural specificity, on the one hand, and,
even more importantly, his own apparently resistant response to it, on the
other, suggest that resistance is intrinsic not only to desire's response to
a culturally constituted world but is also intrinsic to the genesis of desire
itself as a response to that world. In ways that vary both across cultures

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 The History of Sexuality ? 119

and in individual experience, we are-as anthropology has long insisted-

products of culture. But-as psychoanalysis insists-we resist this truth in
ways that manifest in fantasy and desire, registering how we might wish
things to be as opposed to how they are. And this fact, too, must be incor-
porate into our understanding of the avowed object of our discipline, cul-
ture.

P. STEVEN SANDGREN is Professor of Anthropology and Asian Studies, Department of Anthropology, Cor
University, McGraw Hall, Ithaca, NY 14853.

NOTES

1. This article was originally entitled, "Discipline, Constraint, Production: Implications of

the Ars Erotica/Scientia Sexualis Contrast in Foucault's History of Sexuality [Or, 'The Re-
turn of the Repressed']," prepared for conference: "Forget Foucault? A Cornell Symposium
on The History of Sexuality, March 8, 2003, Cornell University. I thank the coparticipants
and, particularly its organizer, Neil Sacamano, for providing inspiration and encouragement.
2. Among the many who have championed the relevance of psychoanalysis for anthropol-
ogy are Crapanzano 1992; Ewing 1997; Johnson and Price-Williams 1996; Paul 1982, 1989;
Spiro 1982.
3. The magnitude of academic effort defies ready summary or critique, I have found An-
derson 1983, Smith 1988, Moore 1994, and Butler 1997 to provide particularly useful over-
views.

4. My procedures here are loosely similar to Derrida's in his reading of Freud. For exa
ple, Derrida discerns in Freud "on the one side, an Enlightenment progressivism, wh
hopes for an analysis that will continue to gain ground on initial obscurity to the degree tha
it removes resistances and liberates, unbinds, emancipates, as does every analysis, and, o
the other side, a sort of fatalism or pessimism of desire that reckons with a portion of dark
ness and situates the unanalysable as its very resource" (Derrida 1998:16). Deconstructi
of course, resists any Hegelian synthesis of these tensions, a synthesis that both Freud a
anthropology, for differing reasons, are obliged to seek.
5. Critics of modernity like Foucault imagine belief in the unity of a "transcendent
subject-a belief sometimes glossed by its detractors as "humanism"-to define not on
"modernity" but also "the West." Although there is massive evidence for the pervasiven
of humanist values and assumptions in our culture, I believe that critics largely overlook
coexistence of pragmatic accommodations to the complexity or shifting nature of our "s
jectivity." By the same token, although "humanism" is regarded by its critics as a set
discursive or epistemic assumptions-assumptions viewed as problematically perpetuat
at an implicit or taken-for-granted level of discourse and action (by what Foucault wou
term "power"), it is important to note the existence of explicit philosophical defenders
modernity or "the Enlightenment project" against such criticisms. Habermas's "theory o
communicative action," for example, hypothesizes that all speech acts implicitly suppose
"subject" possessed of a "truth"; "communication" is thus premised on the notion that,
ally speaking, subjects aspire to convey aspects of this truth to other subjects. All that
structs such communication might thus be viewed as objects of political and ethical
critique-continuations of an Enlightenment project (Bernstein 1985; Habermas 1972).
6. Although professing an admiration for Foucault's work, Paul Smith's survey of phi
sophical approaches to subjectivity, for example, concludes that Foucault really has littl

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120 ? ETHOS

say on the issue of the "subject," generally shifting attention to the subject's sub
"power" (Smith 1988:168 n. 1).
7. I do not propose that desire is forged once and for all in the "mirror stage"
crisis, but instead that the confrontation between primal narcissism and the im
accommodate the "desire of the other" or "the law" is a constant in life. The mi
and accompanying Oedipal crisis might thus be viewed as modeling a sort of
process-more along the lines of Piaget's dialectics of assimilation and accomm
the production of "schemas"-as much as instituting a permanent structure of des
1962). (I write about how a more developmental approach inspired, broadly sp
Piaget's notions of accommodation and assimilation might be adapted to a psy
understanding of desire elsewhere [Sangren 1997].) Thus, the "infant" here migh
dered the "individual" where it not for the fact that a "pure" individual (that is
stripped of her/his cultural attainments and qualities) does not and cannot exist.
8. Such an assertion might find broad agreement among critical theorists inte
the philosophical problems surrounding "subjectivity." Unfortunately, this obse
often invoked to justify what I view as essentially idealist elisions of the difficul
bent upon theorizing desire. What I have in mind, broadly speaking, is the notio
all human experience is mediated by and constituted through language, therefore
language's operations suffices to provide all that can be known of the body and e
9. Anthropologists who have drawn attention to this problem include Ewing
Godelier (1999).
10. Spiro's critique of Malinowski succeeds in unraveling many of Malinows
with respect to the alleged absence of an Oedipus complex in the Trobriand islan
1982). Malinowski certainly overstated his claim to have disproved Freud; indeed
trilineal complex" owes a good deal to Freudian insights. Yet Spiro himself may ov
claim to have definitely disproved Malinowski with respect to the latter's aim to
different family arrangements and distributions of authority might open the possib
there are, in fact, cultural differences in what I would term the social production o
11. Some view this perceived change in positive terms (e.g., Baudrillard 198
1984); others are more critical (e.g., Eagleton 1990; Harvey 1989; Jameson 1984
12. It is on essentially these grounds that Derrida accuses Foucault of producin
and romantic discourse on the essence of madness and the birth of tragedy"
1998:103).
13. Note that one might make an argument paralleling that which I make here
spect to Foucault, but directed toward Bourdieu and Passeron's The Inheritors an
Bourdieu's work more generally. Everything in Bourdieu's explicit theoretical fr
points to the reproduction of the system (conceived as a synthesis of objective s
and subjective intentions) independent of any actor's intentions to do so. Yet his
anger that the system should operate in the way that he reveals conveys a hope
very revelation might succeed in changing it. Indeed, from time to time he claims t
(by delegitimizing it), but little in his theory would support such a hope.
14. Some broadly practice-oriented ethnographic investigations of exchange
procity draw attention to the classic problem of the "gift" in terms that hint at th
tension between preserving one's autonomy and engaging others in social interac
lier 1999; Munn 1986; Myers 1986; Weiner 1976).

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