The words of the four participants in Prismatic Heresy, all remarkably eloquent, vital people show us how this is generally true, not just for people with difficulties. This paper has been a discussion of alpha function and non-binary identity. It’s been about a general critique of binarism; or perhaps a general theory for non-binary, witnessing a area in which this self- preservative/ego/death drive can become drive, not instinct, that is, it can work and have effect as representation, as alpha function. This is because these four people, trans and non-binary, each have creative and original solutions to the aporias of gender and sexual identities, fusing (as opposed to de-fusing) life and death drives. In this way, they are representative of the strength and diversity of the trans and non-binary communities; it is this I witness.
Notes
- And subsequently in the Queer Arts Weekender, Shortwave Gallery, London, February 9th-11 th 2018.
- For Merleau-Ponty, the third is the third person, the he or she; we might also add the non-binary singular third person, ‘they’. For Ogden and Benjamin, it is a third constructed relationally in the therapeutic space; Ogden’s ‘third’ is more of a field theory and Benjamin’s ‘third’ more an attachment-theory based philosophical position. Khanna’s argument is Fanonian, constructing a postcolonial critique of psychoanalysis and a symptomatic reading of colonialism in terms of melancholia; a genealogical approach but also a witnessing. It would be interesting to unpack the relations between genealogical, Foucauldian work, with its critique of oppositions between subject and object and ‘thirdness’. I discuss Merleau- Ponty’s argument and its implication for psychoanalytic practice further in my unpublished paper Working with Psychosis, Lacan and Merleau- Ponty.
- I draw on Haraway’s material-semiotic way of working in my use and analysis of neo-Marxist geography in my first book, Social and Virtual Space, (Chernaik 2005), starting with the narrower, core argument, the critique of the Marxist opposition of base/superstructure, and moving on to the wider implications.
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