Reply to Saketopoulou's Commentary

The project of achieving mutual intelligibility of oneself with another is fragmentary and ongoing, assailed by unconscious diversions and pleasures that make erotic communication inexhaustibly strange. I suspect that Avgi Saketopoulou (this issue) has read me as having more confidence in the transparency of desire either within or between subjects than I do. For example, Saketopoulou reads me to strongly vouch that “self-respect is a concept superior to consent … in beginning to revise our thinking about sexual harassment” (p. 245). And, that I propose self-respect with a “hope to evade gender politics” or as “a move to vacate gender” (p. 247). And, that I envision self-respect as “the seamless, uninterrogated ethical epicenter of how humans should interact with one another” (p. 245). But I don't think I do, or at least, I don't think that is what I desire to express.

There are many points where Saketopoulou's approach and mine would converge with each other. Saketopoulou and I each, for example, understand that self-respect is a critical element of the project of universal human rights, and it is therefore indispensable when arguing for the equality of persons before the law. This indispensability may be historical and pragmatic, as opposed to theological or psychoanalytic, but for now it is part of the political-legal toolkit that works—when it works. Yet our confidence in self-respect is ambivalent because we each understand, as Saketopoulou says, that “subjects are noncoherent, that they are multiply split and complexly assembled, that the self is ultimately wildly discontinuous” and that “affects, thoughts, somatic states, and longings are always only partly accessible to the part of the ego from which they originate” (p. 248). And therefore Saketopoulou and I share apprehension about the compatibility of the conditions necessary for the equality of persons as citizens with the conditions necessary for spiritual thriving. We intuit that these conditions must ov