gender and melancholic structure

A recent paper by Kris Trujillo on “queer melancholia” observes the centrality in queer theory of grief as a generative and subversive force, arguing for an understanding of queer theorizing as a practice of both endless mourning and “interminable devotion:”

It is the posthumousness of literary studies that queer theory inherits. In other words, the elegiac mode of queer theory catalyzed by the AIDS pandemic sets up a melancholic mourning whose object of loss is simultaneously the dead and the very project of queer theory. […] The precarity of life is intimately entangled with the precarity of theory, which is to say that the devotion to the dead is inseparable from the devotion to queer theory. In the end, the convergence of the elegiac mode and large-scale grief caused by the AIDS pandemic set the norms whereby the posthumousness of queer theory is constantly affirmed – the rituals of queer melancholia. But this melancholia is not defeatist.¹

Trujillo affirms the apparently unsecular emphasis on “ritual” in queer theory; avowing these qualities, one assumes, is what makes a “non-defeatist” melancholia thinkable, since theory on this telling “risk[s] stultification for the possibility of engendering resistance whose effects are not guaranteed or foreseen from the start.”² What does it mean for melancholia not to be “defeatist?” If mourning were terminable, would queer theory still have a purpose?

Focusing as he does on the first issue of GLQ, an important case for Trujillo is Judith Butler’s now-classic essay “Critically Queer.”³ In that essay, Butler describes queer grief as a work which “render[s] the ungrievable grievable:”⁴ since heterosexuality is, in a sense, itself fundamentally melancholic insofar as it proceeds on the “unconscious disavowal of homosexual desire,” gay melancholia, on Trujillo’s reading, “seems to name a state of depression over the way that preempted grief for homosexual desire transforms into a cultural resistance to mourning queer death.”⁵ What interests Butler in the original essay, though, is not only this depressive repetition, but also the question of “resignifiability,” that is, the way that performances of gender like drag – by merit of being performances of performances – might in the process of reproducing certain roles also shake out into view some of the ways in which those roles are threatened or subject to change by merit of their own uncertainties. Queer performativity for Butler “allegorizes” the “heterosexual matrix,” and in doing so it reminds us that what it allegorizes is itself an allegory, a fiction. “Resignifiability” comes to us as a surprising upswing in the course of the reiteration of “highly invested terms”: “For if to identify as a woman is not necessarily to desire a man; and if to desire a woman does not necessarily signal the constituting presence of a masculine identification, whatever that is, then the heterosexual matrix proves to be an imaginary logic that insistently issues forth its own unmanageability.”⁶ Queer mourning, one supposes, does something similar by performing the work of grief that society refuses to.

But does Butler’s attention to performativity’s capacity for resignifiability still make it “melancholic?” If the assumption of (“cisheterosexual”) gender happens upon a necessarily melancholic structure of disavowals, then I think it’s fair to ask whether queer and trans identifications and modes of enjoyment are also conceivable by this version of queer theory except melancholically, as modes of enjoyment that refuse to let go of “lost objects” of “normal” heterosexual development. We may also ask what it means for “queer melancholia” to “risk stultification for the possibility of engendering resistance.”⁷ At what point does performative repetition stultify, and why would it? On these points, it may be worth recalling that much of Butler’s interest in the questions of resignifiability and melancholy gender comes out of her engagement with the work of Sigmund Freud, especially his revised account of melancholia in the The Ego and the Id.

from pathology to structure

When Karl Abraham first wrote about melancholia, he had initially understood it in terms of sexual frustration and disappointment: the unconscious latches itself onto some person and doggedly refuses to let go. With the 1917 essay “Mourning and Melancholia,” though, Freud had begun to notice that the problem of melancholia hinged on questions of identification: “In mourning it is the world which has become poor and empty,” he observed, “in melancholia it is the ego itself.”⁸ Here, melancholia already appears as a pathology distinct from mourning specifically in the melancholic’s identification with the lost object. This identification is ridden through with ambivalence: because their identification with their loved object also includes its faults and injustices, the melancholic’s investment in their object demands of them that they perform a kind of balancing act between love and hate, directing violent aggression towards their own ego all the more intensely for how much they love the object that they’ve unconsciously incorporated.

In 1923’s The Ego and the Id, Freud relegates this ambivalence between object-investment and identification to a much earlier stage in the subject’s development than he had previously. While for the young child in the oral stage, “object-cathexes and identification are no doubt indistinguishable from each other,” one consequence of the division he’s now begun to describe between the id and the ego is that as the latter develops, the ego’s identification with their loved object may become the precondition for the id’s letting go of it. By the 1920s, Freud’s topography of the human psyche is defined by division and conflict: the dogged refusal to let go of the object is now identified as the property of a specific agency that he identified as das Es (latinized as the “id” in Strachey’s Standard Edition), which “feels erotic trends as needs,” putting the still young and “feeble” ego [Ich] in the position of having to choose between acquiescing to the id’s demands or repressing them.⁹

While in the earlier work the melancholic’s identification with their lost object appeared as a pathology that results from the inability or refusal to mourn an object which has been lost, in Freud’s “mature” theory the melancholic mode of surviving loss becomes much more fundamental to the establishment of the subject’s character. The function of the developing ego is to take on the role of substituting itself for the lost object in order to appease the “id”:

When it happens that a person has to give up a sexual object, there quite often ensues an alteration of his ego which can only be described as as a setting up of the object inside the ego, as it occurs in melancholia; the exact nature of this substitution is as yet unknown to us. It may be that this introjection, which is a kind of regression to the mechanism of the oral phase, the ego makes it easier for the object to be given up or renders that process possible. It may be that this identification is sole condition under which the id can give up its objects. At any rate the process, especially in the early phases of development, is a very frequent one, and it makes it possible to suppose that the character of the ego is a precipitate of abandoned object-cathexes and that it contains the history of those object-choices.¹⁰

An important shift has occurred between the Freud of the metapsychological papers and now. The earlier account of melancholia is more concerned with the discernment of melancholia’s pathology as it distinguishes itself from grief and mourning. Now, however, melancholia has become a much more foundational subjective structure, a precondition for the development of the ego, and one may well ask if in the process the ego itself has become an “object” to which we find ourselves stubbornly and pathologically tethered.

What this shift also happens alongside is a more profound Oedipalization of psychoanalysis. Freud notes that the outcome of the Oedipal conflict – wherein the subject identifies with either the mother or the father – is somewhat surprising given the melancholic theory of subjectivity outlined above, as the assumption of a gender does not apparently occur by way of “introduc[ing] the abandoned object into the ego.”¹¹ It does occur, though: however, it’s “easier to observe in girls than in boys,” as girls will quite often respond to the relinquishing of their father as a love object by identifying more strongly with the masculine aspects of their own latent bisexuality. Curiously, it’s in such scenes where bisexuality becomes most troublesome, though it should be noted that bisexuality is no longer the object-indifferent polymorphous perversity of the Three Essays but is instead understood as the determinative ground of the Oedipal narrative. Since, as a generalizable rubric, that narrative isn’t alone sufficient to provide anything other than the terms of identification, how the child occupies those terms and ultimately identifies as either a boy or a girl is determined by “the relative strength” of their “masculine and feminine sexual dispositions.”¹²

The extent to which those “dispositions” are themselves determined by the Oedipus complex or somehow precede it is left unclear, but, as Freud tells it, while the Oedipus complex provides the terms and narrative structures for the assumption of sex, it doesn’t from the outset determine how the subject and their individual circumstances will find themselves caught up within those terms. To use his own example, it’s for instance entirely possible for a boy to simply pass through the complex as if they were a (“heterosexual”) girl and vice versa. This underdetermined quality even makes Freud question, for a moment, whether the Oedipus complex is ultimately relevant at all in the determination of a subject’s sex: “It may even be that the ambivalence displayed in the relations to the parents should be attributed entirely to bisexuality and that it is not, as I have represented above, developed out of identification in consequence of rivalry.” Nevertheless, at least “where neurotics are concerned,” it’s safe to assume its presence in the subject’s history.¹³

It’s on the basis of this late formulation of Freud’s that Butler reads Freudian theory as a theory of “melancholy gender,” noting that Freud’s account provides an emergent account of gender identification that presupposes the preservation of the same gender which it disavows. On Butler’s reading, the masculine and feminine positions of the “heterosexual matrix” supposed by Freud’s account of sexual difference maps onto his account of melancholia insofar as heterosexuality requires a repudiation of same-sex desire and opposite-sex identification vis-à-vis a melancholic incorporation: “it appears that the loss of homosexual objects and aims (not simply this person of the same gender, but any person of that same gender) will be foreclosed from the start.”¹⁴ The ego now appears as a graveyard of queer identifications, formed by and also conserving its own disavowals.

However, since our disavowals are sustained by love, part of what afflicts the melancholic is their own interest in sustaining it, and the resistance to completing mourning can be attributed to the fact that we can’t bring ourselves to let go of our loved objects. It’s this same slipperiness, perhaps, that can also explain the resistance to mourning itself, to the denial and affective suppression of the depressive position itself. But to mourn, in Freud’s terms, would mean to think one’s own splitness, to undermine the certainty against which knowledge and identification are measured: it would mean moving beyond the stultifying melancholia that accompanies the subject being stuck on its lost objects by recognizing and properly grieving those objects. This problematic is of central importance to the work of Melanie Klein, for whom the depressive position forms a kind of affective reference point for the subject that dialectically provides the material for which reparation can be made. Klein’s work merits some attention, since, like Butler, her work establishes a theory of gender difference that begins from this same moment in Freud. Klein’s work maintains a sharper distinction between mourning and melancholia, however, and the fact that she, like Butler, strongly associates the Freudian ego with gender formation has consequences that deserve some scrutiny.

love and pacification

In her 1963 paper “On the Sense of Loneliness,” her last, Klein’s primary concern is the question of “integration.” On this, Klein’s thought is generally divided into three periods. In her early work, Klein takes an interest in the young child’s process of integrating their internal images of the parents into a mature superego. Following this period is the discovery of the “depressive position,” and, with it, the investigation into the ways in which, following the early integration of “good” and “bad” objects, the splitting of such objects becomes progressively more aligned with reality as the child learns to reconcile themself with ambivalence. In her later work, Klein’s work with adult schizophrenics has brought her attention to the integration of the ego and the ways in which “[i]ntegration depends on love impulses predominating over destructive impulses.”¹⁵ This interest in the reparative capacity of love is something which emerges very early in her career – such as in the famous essay on symbol formation,¹⁶ in which her attention to the death driven aspects of subjectivity begins with the observation that the schizophrenic child’s “flat affect” can be attributed to an overly strong superego, and that the child’s guilt and suppression of his own destructive impulses correlates with an inability to form happy attachments.

For Klein, integration is the central “developmental task” for the subject, but this doesn’t mean that she thinks that there is any sense in which a subject is ever fully “cured” or that splitness simply goes away.¹⁷ That some of the more understated and quotidian affects like loneliness speak to both to the ever-postponed terminability and necessity of “integration” is what makes them of such importance to both Klein’s theoretical and clinical work. As she observes in the essay on loneliness,

Full and permanent integration is never possible for some polarity between the life and death instincts always persists and remains the deepest source of conflict. Since full integration is never achieved, complete understanding and acceptance of one’s own emotions, phantasies and anxieties is not possible and this continues as an important factor in loneliness.¹⁸

Loneliness testifies to its own unrequitedness, representing a longing for a state of non-contradiction in which difference doesn’t impossibilize reciprocity between our inner and outer worlds. Its longing is all the crueler for its resemblance to nostalgia, as its glance looks back beyond the conservative stasis sought by the drive and into an originating fantasy of wholeness that we know we ought to know better than to believe in. The “inner sense of being alone regardless of external circumstances, of feeling lonely even when among friends or receiving love” – is ultimately a “yearning for an understanding without words,” that is, “for the earliest relation with the mother.” Klein calls it “ubiquitous.”¹⁹ Loneliness marks a disjunction between feeling and unconscious knowledge, it testifies to the way our fantasies imprint themselves on our day-to-day reality despite ourselves.

I think it’s this sensitivity to affect that makes Klein’s at times crudely allegorical and apparently dualistic interest in the life and death “instincts” a bit deceptive. While loneliness testifies to a melancholic foundation that grounds the subject’s ego in a kind of nostalgic longing, this longing isn’t made out to be foolish on account of its unrequitedness – there’s a sense in which it’s necessary, since it also enables the capacity for love and enjoyment. Love in this sense isn’t simply the victory of one instinct over another but the ongoing work that must accompany the rediscovery and reparation of the subject’s desire. It’s this “nostalgia” and longing for the mother’s breast that enables “enjoyment” in the first place:

A happy relation to the first object and a successful internalization of it means that love can be given and received. As a result the infant can experience enjoyment not only at times of feeding but also in response to the mother’s presence and affection. […] Moreover, there is a close link between enjoyment and the feeling of understanding and being understood. At the moment of enjoyment anxiety is assuaged and the closeness to the mother and trust in her are uppermost. […] Enjoyment is always bound up with gratitude; if this gratitude is deeply felt it includes the wish to return goodness received and thus the basis of generosity.²⁰

It’s on this point that Klein moves beyond Freud’s accounts of projection and melancholia – which privilege the projection or introjection of the destructive impulses of the “death instinct” – to the insistence that, at the same time, there exists the “urge of the life instinct to find a good object in the external world.”²¹ As in Freud, this finding is really always a refinding, and the fact that desire is structured by a melancholic relation to its loved object means that the melancholic subject can discover within themselves the means to mourn and repair their own attachments through love.

Klein’s understanding of mourning and melancholia may be read dialectically insofar as love functions as the means for overcoming the dualism of the “instincts.” As it does for the philosopher Gillian Rose, love for Klein provides a kind of “third” or “middle” term insofar as it “arises out of misrecognition of desire, of work, of my and of your self-relation mediated by the self-relation of the other.”²² It’s a “work” that is independent of its object, but which is also made meaningful in relation to that object. It’s in this sense that the Kleinian object (which refers to the same “thing” that Lacan refers to when he speaks about the Freudian Ding), begins to resemble something like Hegel’s sense of the modern law insofar as the “urge toward integration” that is propelled by love supposes that this “integration” imply a “full mutual recognition” that is both necessary and only able to “be approached phenomenologically, […] by expounding its dualistic reductions.”²³ Something of this can be seen in Klein’s understanding of the ego. There are times in Klein when the ego appears as something that one only catches glimpses of within the flux of introjection and projection – troubling the neat opposition between the “inner” and “outer worlds” that are often spoken of in object relations theory, such an ego appears only as movement, never able to be spoken of in terms of a discrete “object” or point on a grid.

Nonetheless, the ego remains something whose “integration” Klein is keenly invested in. The securing of a “good object” in childhood serves as a lifelong counterweight to the death-driven parts of subjectivity in the libidinal balancing act of integration. Crucially, when the subject projects and introjects “goodness” and “badness” of the world, these processes

are not predominantly related to fragmented parts of the personality but to more coherent parts of the self. This implies that the ego is not exposed to a fatal weakening by dispersal and for this reason is more capable of repeatedly undoing splitting and achieving integration and synthesis in its relation to objects.²⁴

The “object” isn’t “external” to the ego, and the “ego” isn’t an object at all but the “thing” that the subject keeps re-finding, it is, itself, that which the subject continually falls towards and away from in a “comedy” of misrecognition through which it is propelled by desire. Importantly, though, the ego survives its misrecognitions: within the flux of introjected and projected objects, as it moves through the world it manages to find a center of gravity, however precarious. As is the case for Rose, the Kleinian subject isn’t simply doomed to their misrecognitions and caught forever in projected delusions but is, in fact, able to form some sort rapport with the Real. The tenor of this process is comic in the Hegelian sense, insofar as part of what the approach towards integration entails is the development of an awareness of the fact that our objects are in fact subjects – other “egos” or “split” subjects implicated by their own self-relations.²⁵

What useful in Klein’s attention to affect is its sensitivity to the toll this inability to mourn has on the melancholic subject themself: melancholia is in a sense interminable, but it always contains the seeds of its own transition into the reparative, into mourning what has been lost so as to prepare the groundwork for new attachments and desires. It’s in light of this sharper distinction between mourning and melancholia that a notion of “queer melancholia” as a kind of political practice in itself appears a bit strange. For even if the psychoanalytic subject’s desire is oriented around the continued refinding of its object, around a kind of procession from and return to that object and between depression and reparation, the shape of this movement isn’t strictly circular: the subject’s orientation towards their object is enabling of other horizons of desire rather than simply a ritualistic rehearsal of “devotion” to that object. Whether such a movement is ultimately “secular” is less of interest to me than is the question of what sorts of new attachments and desires are both made available and foreclosed when Klein allows this allegory of ego and object to provide the terms for her understanding of sexual difference, and what it would mean for queer and trans subjects if the performance of our identifications can only ever be conceived “melancholically.”

One point Jacques Lacan would later criticize Klein’s theory of the “combined parent” and her emphasis on the mother as the site for all of the terms of the Oedipal complex – of both the “good” and the “bad breast” that provide the reference point for the child’s early experiences of splitting – is that rather than doing the apparently feminist work of filling in the gaps of Freud’s account and its inability to provide a coherent theory of femininity, it instead entrenches just the “heterosexual matrix” that, later, queer theorists like Eve Sedgwick and Judith Butler would come to criticize in Freud.²⁶ For Klein, alongside the observation of the Oedipal conflict in the infant’s biting and scratching at the mother’s breast is the extremely early observation of penis envy and primary femininity that psychically locates a melancholic structure of sexual difference prior to the development of the ego.

The outcome of this line of thought is an even more rigidly “binary” account of bisexuality than can be found in Freud at his most Oedipal. What Klein’s interpretation of psychic bisexuality moves towards is an account in which sexual difference becomes another refraction of the libidinal balancing act of the life and death instincts, according to which the acknowledgement and working through of the “transgender” aspects of one’s own subjectivity ultimately serves to reconcile a subject with a sex that precedes them. Such is the case with a male patient Klein describes to elucidate this theory of bisexuality:

In order to illustrate the difficulties of this particular aspect of integration and its relation to loneliness, I shall quote the dream of a male patient. A little girl was playing with a lioness and holding out a hoop for her to jump through, but on the other side of the hoop was a precipice. The lioness obeyed and was killed in the process. At the same time, a little boy was killing a snake. The patient himself recognized, since similar material had come up previously, that the little girl stood for his feminine part and the little boy for his masculine part. The lioness had a strong link with myself in the transference, of which I shall only give one instance. The little girl had a cat with her and this led to associations with my cat, which often stood for me. It was extremely painful to the patient to become aware that, being in competition with my femininity, he wanted to destroy me, and in the past, his mother. The recognition that one part of himself wanted to kill the loved lioness-analyst, which would thus deprive him of his good object, led to a feeling not only of misery and guilt but also of loneliness in the transference. It was also very distressing for him to recognize that the competition with his father led him to destroy the father’s potency and penis, represented by the snake.²⁷

The degree to which the subject’s latent bisexuality and unconscious have been completely saturated with Oedipal signification is quite striking: rather than an unruly and polymorphously perverse unconscious, we find the dream so saturated with signification that it expresses multiple Oedipus complexes at once. If the violence towards the snake/phallus appears somewhat as an afterthought in this account, though, it’s because for Klein the more fundamental problem is that the patient, being male, hasn’t found it within himself to properly mourn “his difficulty over the feminine position,” and the unbearable fact that he unconsciously wishes to destroy his own “feminine part.”²⁸ Here, reparation comes on the back of a recognition whose function is to pacify the unruly and pathologically non-normative identifications that constitute sexuation. Rather than the polymorphously perverse, underdetermined, non-procreative sexuality of the Three Essays, bisexuality is now legible, captured by a collection of readily interpretable signifiers whose allegorical referents can be found in a narrative which has been quietly pushed towards being a condition of the “normal.”

beyond melancholia

The problem with this melancholic understanding of gender, at least when it comes to thinking non-normative and non-Oedipal modes of enjoyment, is that within its terms a subject cannot both repair and continue to identify with their “lost objects” in a way that is conducive to flourishing. It’s worth asking, then, what a theory of reparation and mourning with respect to gender might look like that doesn’t presuppose a model of identification according to which the repair of our egos depends on the working-through of our perverse desires and identifications in order to better abolish them. Any explanation of our “aberrations” that seeks to explain our present and future desires and identifications solely by way of appeal to its foretelling by our “lost objects” may not be sufficient for such an endeavor. I would suggest that trans life complicates the attempt to define queerness in melancholic terms, as it provides countless examples of subjects who find creative ways to negotiate gender’s ambivalence — the ways it occassions both suffering and pleasure, as well as the ways gender can be worked into a kind of supplement through which melancholic stultification might be overcome.

cited