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Title: Against Articulation
Author: Ausonia Calabrese
Date: March 12, 2020
Language: en
Topics: gender nihilism, individualism, mysticism
Source: Retrieved on 3/14/2020 from https://anarchistnews.org/content/against-articulation-declining-gender-and-refusing-all-identity

Ausonia Calabrese

Against Articulation

Refusal is a liminal concept: it is the lack of action. Refusal is not

passive: that which is passive shrinks back and reacts, refusal stays

silent. Refusal is not active: it is still like death.

Within the milieu created by the greatly-widened discourse on gender,

there exist ever finer and finer-grains of identity. Gender, it seems,

has blossomed out into a million novel forms. This is partly good, for

it dissolves a much more restrictive, vitriolic system within its virgin

multiplicities. However, it is clear this system reproduces the very

same structures of power that plague the gender binary. Bodies are still

evaluated as "feminine" and "masculine," actors still as "passive" and

"active." New binaries have emerged: "cis" as opposed to "trans,"

"queer" now opposed to "straight." In other times, in other places,

these terms held no meaning. All such binaries represent developments of

the Western system of gender. All such binaries oppress the liminal.

All solid identity categories are susceptible to the same flaw: they

inevitably fail. The logic of the Individual and its Identity, when

faced with the failure or breakdown of meaning inside an atomized social

subject, constructs a finer grain of identity in response. Thus, in the

reification of identity, the power structures of race, gender, and

sexuality become reproduced on deeper and deeper scales. There is no

label in existence broad enough in its distinction to completely

encompass one's experience. We may tend towards identities with finer

and finer grains, but inevitably, this fails to reach us. In Living in

the End Times, Zizek writes:

A subject tries to articulate ("express") itself in a signifying chain,

this articulation fails, and by means of and through this failure, the

subject emerges...In a love letter, the very failure of the writer to

formulate his declaration in a clear and effective manner—his

vacillations, the letter's fragmentary nature, and so on—can in

themselves be proof (perhaps are the necessary and only reliable proof)

that the professed love is authentic: here, the very failure to deliver

the message properly is the sign of its authenticity.

The failure of labels to reach the subject is the ultimate sign of one's

authenticity as being ungraspable by language. Thus, the refusal of

identity is an integral part of the process of becoming Unique, freed

from the grasp of language and symbolic thought altogether, that is,

being itself: union with the One, with the Real beyond being and

essence.

True gender nihilism cannot be the affirmation of gender nor its

abolition. Rather: its refusal. The gender nihilist refuses to

articulate gender, indeed, all identity. But the gender nihilist also

refuses to articulate the negation of gender, indeed, the negation of

all identity.

Refusal to articulate is not simply negation, but the negation of the

negation. Earlier critiques of identity espoused under the mantle of

"anti-identity anarchism" fail in one crucial aspect: they position the

critic in an active role. One who is "anti-identity" is pointing away

from pre-existing categories. This act of "pointing away" is itself an

articulation, which replaces the primary element with its negation, or

more properly, the affirmation of its negation. There is a fine line

here between refusal to articulate identity and the negation of

identity. In the negation of identity, the negative aspect is affirmed.

One who proclaims themselves to be nonbinary, for example, affirms that

they exist outside of the gender binary. One who refuses to articulate

gender, on the contrary, remains in total silence. One is neither

affirmed to be inside, nor outside, the gender binary. The very concept

of gender is treated as something entirely alien and without meaning.

This same affirmation-of-the-negation is present in the milieu of

antifascism and postleftism -- both such categories are dependent on

that which they are opposed to for their existence, therefore they have

no existence of their own. Not phantoms, but parasites. Gender

abolitionists, like antifascists and postleftists, chain themselves to

their enemy, tying their fates. I will not further speak of milieus: one

can refuse gender or they can take it. For my part, I refuse.