Gender Disgussed

Works Cited

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Notes

• 1) Jospin's affirmation was very favorably received in the National Assembly (as well as by the RPR's Jean-Louis Debré, showing that this assessment transcended party lines).
• 2) Cf. also the work of Henry Rousso, for instance La hantise du passé.
• 3) In this context Henry Rousso speaks of "the myth of resistancialism" (Vichy 20-21).
• 4) With regard to Sartre, Judith Butler writes: "Women are not only represented falsely within the Sartrian frame of signifying subject and signified Other, but the falsity of the signification points out the entire structure of representation as inadequate." Butler understands gender as "a relation among socially constituted subjects in specificable contexts. This relational or contextual point of view suggests that what the person 'is,' and, indeed, what "gender 'is,' is always relative to the constructed relations in which it is determined. As a shifting and contextual phenomenon, gender does not denote a substantive being, but a relative point of convergence among culturally and historically specific sets of relations" (Trouble 10).
• 5) Cf. Butler, "For a Careful Reading": "It might be clarifying [. . .] to consider that whereas every subject is formed through a process of differentiation, and that the process of becoming differentiated is a necessary condition of the formation of the 'I' as a bounded and distinct kind of being, that there are better and worse forms of differentiation, and that the worse kinds tend to abject and degrade those from whom the 'I' is distinguished [. . .]. That an 'I' is differentiated from another does not mean that the other must become structurally homologous to the 'I' in order to enter into community with that 'I.' At the level of political community, what is classed for is the difficult work of cultural translation in which difference is honored without (a) assimilating difference to identity or (b) making difference an unthinkable fetish of alterity" (139-40).
• 6) I am using the term "projection" in quotation marks, because, as Theweleit (94-95) points out, it is indeed problematic when used in reference to the subjects of his analysis, the protofascist Freikorps members.
• 7) As Carroll (152) points out, "Sartre was certainly not alone among political theorists of the left in characterizing the fascist as a 'failed male' or homosexual. Theodor Adorno, in a section of Minima Moralia [. . .] [w]ritten in 1944 and entitled 'Tough Baby,' made the sweeping claim that 'totalitarianism and homosexuality belong together.'" See also Andrew Hewitt's excellent chapter, "The Frankfurt School and the Political Pathology of Homosexuality," in his Political Inversions. Theweleit takes up — and for a long and disturbing time goes along with the conflation of homosexuality and fascism, in order eventually to prove it wrong.
• 8) One notable exception is Gilbert Joseph's Une si douce occupation.
• 9) The stone imagery is also used in Sartre's Le sursis (The Reprieve). Cf. Les chemins de la liberté II: Le sursis 285, and Réflexions sur la question juive 21.
• 10) Cf. Léni in Les séquestrés d'Altona, Estelle or Inès in Huis clos, Jessica in Les mains sales, Lizzie in La putain respectueuse and Catherine in Le diable et le bon dieu.
• 11) She says to Orestes, for instance: "Tu étais mon frère, le chef de notre famille, tu devais me protéger; mais tu m'as plongée dans le sang, je suis rouge comme un boeuf écorché; toutes les mouches sont après moi, les voraces, et mon coeur est une ruche horrible" (Les mouches 280).
• 12) Cf. Kristeva: "Loathing an item of food, a piece of filth, waste, or dung. The spasms and vomiting that protect me. The repugnance, the retching that thrusts me to the side and turns me away from defilement, sewage, and muck [. . .]. Food loathing is perhaps the most elementary and most archaic form of abjection [. . .]. I experience a gagging sensation and, still farther down, spasms in the stomach, the belly [. . .] nausea makes me balk at that milk cream, separates me from the mother and father who proffer it. 'I' want none of that element, sign of their desire; 'I' do not want to listen, 'I' do not assimilate it, 'I' expel it. But since the food is not an 'other' for 'me,' who am only in their desire, I expel myself out, I abject myself within the same motion through which 'I' claim to establish myself [. . .]. [T]hat trifle turns me inside out, guts sprawling; it is thus that they see that 'I' am in the process of becoming an other at the expense of my own death. During that course in which 'I' become, I give birth to myself amid the violence of sobs, of vomit" (2-3).
• 13) When Orestes is bothered by the flies, the pedagogue chases them, saying: "Allons, paix! paix! pas d'effusions!" (Les mouches 107).
• 14) Cf. also the images of rats and lepra (Les mouches 244).
• 15) Ronald Aronson also points out that "L'être et le Néant bears the traces of [Heidegger's] Being and Time on virtually every page" (94). Contrary to Heidegger, Sartre stresses the primacy of the thing; the in-itself is prior to consciousness.
• 16) Sartre's term is obviously a translation of Hegel's An-und-für-sich.
• 17) Cf. again the animal imagery ("ses ventouses" [suction cups], "il [le visqueux] s'accroche comme une sangsue;" L'être 701).