Judith Butler
'"Dangerous Crossing": Willa Cather's Masculine Names'
Bodies that Matter pp.101-121
[Summary]
Catherの"the inexplicable presence of the thing not named"を抑圧されたlesbian欲望--"the Love that dared not speak its name"--としてではなく、名付けに対する抵抗として読む。さらにいえばlesbian欲望自体をlegibilityに対する抵抗として読む（Lesbianismのillegibilityを「父の名」の名付けを受け得ないものとして解釈する）。なお、この論はMy Antonia（蛇の読みが物凄い）、"Tommy the Unsentimental"分析が主で、The Professor's House論ではない。 両作品再読後、もう一度読むとおもしろいかもしれない。特に"Tommy the Unsentimental"は資本主義とfemale sexualityを論じる際に使えそうな感じもする。PHもこの視点からもう一度論じたいし、博論でCatherを扱うというのはありといえばありかも。
☆Cather作品における"name"の曖昧性
For her reader, then, to place or affirm her with a name engages a certain violence against her texts, texts which have as one of their persistent features the destabilization of gender and sexuality through the name. At issue is how to read the name as a site of identification, a site where the dynamic of identification is at play, and to read the name as an occasion for the retheorization of cross-identification or, rather, the crossing that is, it seems, at work in every identificatory practice (101).
☆Sedgwick のPH に対する論を挙げて
●Eve Sedgwick offers a more complex reading of cross-identification in Cather's novel The Professor's House (1925), in which a homoerotic relationship between two men is quite literary contained within the narrative frame of a heterosexual family arrangement, arid almost to the point of death.
●According to Sedgwick, Cather makes two "cross-translations," one across gender and another across sexuality; Cather assumes the position of men and that of male homosexuality.
●Here Sedgwick offers us the choice between a refracted love, one which is articulated through a double-translation, and one which has the possibility of a direct and transparent visibility, what she refers to as "lesbian truths" which appear to exist prior to the possibility of their constitution in a legitimating historical discourse.
●And yet it is Sedgwick who also argues in The Epistemology of the Closet that such absences, constituting the apparatus of the closet, are not only the site of brutal suppressions, but persist in consequence of their prohibition as an array of indirections, substitutions, and textual vacillations that call for a specific kind of reading. 要再考。(102)
●The postulation of an original "truth" of lesbian sexuality which awaits its adequate historical representation presumes an ahistorical sexuality constituted and intact prior to the discourses by which it is represented. This speculation rests on a missed opportunity to read lesbian sexuality as a specific practice of dissimulation produced through the very historical vocabularies that seek to effect its erasure. The prohibition that is said to work effectively to quell the articulation of lesbian sexuality in Cather's fiction is, I would argue, precisely the occasion of its constitution and exchange. It is perhaps less that the legibility of lesbianism in Cather's text than that lesbian sexuality within the text is produced as a perpetual challenge to legibility.
●In this sense, the "refraction" that Sedgwick isolates in Cather is a sign of not only a violation of lesbianism, but the very condition and possibility of lesbianism as a refracted sexuality, constituted in translation and displacement (103).
★SedgwickのPH論の問題はやはり、explicitであること、transparentであることを正義とするところにまずある。それはある意味では、あらゆるsexualityはmodern discourse of sexuality の中に位置づけられなければならないとするのと同義である。Butlerはsexual discourseによってlegibleにされることに価値を置かないので、lesbianismを"refracted sexuality," つまりrefractionによって以外には表現され得ないものとして定置する。Catherのlesbianism自体をどう扱うかというのはとりあえず措くにしても、Butlerのこのロジックはcloset sexualityないしmelancholic sexualityを扱う時にもおそらく有効。
☆異邦人としてのAntoniaの"Name. What Name?" というpersistentな問いかけについて
●How are we to read Antonia's incessant pursuit of names which proliferate sites of linguistic dissatisfaction, as if what cannot be named or named with satisfaction exceeds every apparently satisfying act of nomination, as if Antonia, rather than a name produced and possessed by Jim Burden, becomes herself a figure for an unmasterable excess produced by the conceits of nomination, one which proliferates into an infinite hunger for names that never quite satisfy.
●who remains not quite named, exceeding and conditioning nomination in the text (107)
★ここでとてもLacanianなButler。というか実際、psychoanalysisなのだ、Butlerの論は、ほぼ常に。
☆Wilde trialについて
●Of course, it was in the prosecution of Oscar Wilde that homosexuality became associated with the unspoken and unspeakable name. The love that dare not speak its name becomes for Cather a love that proliferates names at the site of that nonspeaking, establishing a possibility for fiction as this displacement, reiterating that prohibition and at the same time working, indeed, exploiting that prohibition for the possibiliities of its repetition and subversion.
★Love that dared not speak its nameのdared notを字義通りに捉えるという可能性。これは組み込んだ方がいい？抑圧ではない。あえて語らない。
☆父の法としてのnaming
●The name thus function as a kind of prohibition, but also as an enabling occasion. Consider that the name is a token of a symbolic order, an order of social law, that which legislates viable subjects through the institution of sexual difference and compulsory heterosexuality (109).
●［ラカンをひいて］This social function of the name is always to some sxtent an effort to stabilize a set of multiple and transient imaginary identifications, those that compose for Lacan the circuit of the ego, but not yet the subject within the symbolic.
●The imaginary relation, the one constituted through narcissistic identification, is always tenuous precisely because it is an external object that is determined to be oneself; this failure to close the distance between the ego who identifies elsewhere and the elsewhere which is the defining site of that ego haunts that identification as its constitutive discord and failure. The name, as part of social pact and, indeed, a social system of signs, overrides the tenuousness of imaginary identification and confers on it a social durability and legitimacy. The instability of the ego is thus subsumed or stabilized by a symbolic function, designated of the ego is through the name.
●[the] function of the name to secure the identity of the subject over time
●The changeableness of the feminine name is essential to the permanent appearance of the patronym, indeed, to the securing of an illusory permanence through a continuing patrilineality. Moreover, the proper name can be conceived as referential and not descriptive only to the extent that the social pact which confers legitimacy on the name remains uninterrogated for its masculinism and heterosexual privilege (110).
●The name as patronym does not only beat the law, but institute the law.
●This is not unlike Tom Outland of The Professor's House, whose patrilineage is unknown and whose last name substitutes a trope of exile and excess at the site where a patronymic token of social cohesion might be expected. The appropriation and displacement of the patronym in Cather displcaes the social basis of its identity-conferring function and leaves the question of the referent open as a site of contested gendered and sexual meanings.
●The name takes the place of an absence, covers that absence, and reterritorializes that vacated position (112). →ある種のfetishとしての名
★ラカンの「父の名」をそのまま「父の名＝姓 (patronym)」として解釈すると、「名」はアイデンティティを強化する（というより作り上げる）ものとなり、その「名」はheteronormativeな制度そのものの体現となる（女の姓が変わることの意義付けとしてもおもしろい解釈）。Tomの姓の解釈はスタンダードといえばスタンダードだけれどこれは使った方がいいかもしれない。
