The Sodomitical Subjectivity of Race

Abstract

Both the ancient Israelite taboo against looking at the body of the father and God-the-Father’s “pantoptical arrangement” (Sass 1994, 156 n. 45) with Schreber links visuality to an objectifying, mastering subjectivity, elucidated, Stephen Houlgate (1993) tells us, in the work of David Levin. For Levin, vision is the “most reifying” of our “perceptual modalities,” that mode of perception which, more than any other, renders the world as objects, presumably present and ready-at-hand for our use (quoted in Houlgate 1993, 96). For Noah and Schreber, “reifying” is gendered: it implies “feminizing.” Like Sass, however, Levin focuses on the epistemological point: vision creates the illusion that what is seen is there, as it is seen. Stripped of subjectivity, what is seen can, presumably, be surveyed and mastered: “For modernity, vision has become supervision,” Thomas R. Flynn (1993, 281) asserts. For Levin, this is the “power drive inherent in vision,” the tendency of total visibility toward total control over things (Houlgate 1993). As we have seen, this tendency is gendered and racialized.

The ego forms itself around the fantasy of a totalized and mastered body. (Elizabeth Grosz 1995, 86)

[I]t is human freedom that is undermined by the look of the Other. (Martin Jay 1993, 289)

Does changing the world require ending the hegemony of vision? (David Michael Levin 1993a, 23)