Abstract
Michael Angelo Tata examines the potency of language to create identity. Through queer theory, Tata looks at the metaphysics of a key offensive term from Sapphire’s socially critical urban novel Push (1996) to reveal how the transmission of knowledge transforms the story’s protagonist, Precious Jones. The language of Push is raw and brilliantly descriptive about sex, body, rape, ravishment, nutrition, locomotion, visage, and comestibility. Among the words Sapphire uses to bring her protagonist’s precious pedagogy to light, the noun “cunt bucket” is the most critical—a word too hot for Tyler Perry and Oprah. Tata engages the term “cunt bucket” both figuratively and metaphorically, tying it to Precious’s epistemic, even Gnostic, journey. Via Julia Kristeva’s theories of the feminine receptacle in Revolution in Poetic Language, female containment can be traced back to the cosmological Platonic chora, revealing ways in which identifying Precious as storage device have both hurt and helped her. Most importantly, Plato’s reflections on the relation between container and form, place and production in his Timaeus, along with his theories of intellectual midwifery and the strange transmissivity of knowledge in his Theaetetus, all help create a model of transformation converting Precious from cold metal pail to warm and pulsing center of ideas, concepts, and rêverie. Other interpretations of the chora by Judith Butler in her schema of sexual materiality (Bodies That Matter) and Jacques Derrida in his emphasis on the non-reciprocity of dissemination also shed light on the metaphysics—even pataphysics—of the cunt bucket.
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Notes
- 1.
Wittgenstein’s word “seltsam” in books like Philosophical Investigations or Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics is generally translated as “queer” by G.E.M. Anscombe. Of course, there are no sexual connotations to the translation or to the word “seltsam” as it is used in the German language, and yet I myself find it striking that this ultra-famous homosexual philosopher whose sexuality NEVER ceases to be seltsam for his biographers and commentators should be the only one to use this word with such regularity and frequency: the proper adjective for THAT kind of queer would be the informal and pejorative Schwül. Ever investigating philosophical puzzlement in the wake of inexorability or Unerbittlichkeit, Wittgenstein is the queer Queer who regresses thought to the queerness of a philosophical confusion structurally similar to the epistemological chaos inaugurated by the inscrutable body. It is in this spirit that I use him as one way of making sense of Sapphire, for whom knowledge is also profoundly queering .
- 2.
Here, rebirth bears the metaphysical traces of correspondence, as each instance of regeneration within Platonic metempsychosis produces “an animal of a kind determined by the principle that it should resemble the kind of wickedness it displayed” (Timaeus 42c). The chain of degradation proceeds as follows: men, woman, birds, land animals, snakes, fish, and crustaceans. Later on in the dialogue, Timaeus will blame the generation of women on a hedonism I can only read as homoerotic: “Some men, once they had been incarnated, lived unmanly or immoral lives, and it’s plausible to suggest that they were reborn in their next incarnation as women. That, therefore, was when the gods invented sexual desire, a living being that they formed, though different in men and in women, and endowed with a soul” (91a-b).
- 3.
In the Kristevan schema, the two relevant psychic zones are the semiotic and the symbolic. The semiotic, marked by the chora and assimilated to the maternal body, is “a nonexpressive totality formed by the drives and their stases in a motility that is as full of movement as it is regulated” (Kristeva , Revolution 25). A-thetic, or non-positional, the chora is what must be transcended as one enters language, the space of the social-symbolic. It recurs later, via poetry and psychosis.
- 4.
In “Plato’s Pharmacy” (Dissemination), Derrida analyzes the word pharmakon and the way it pulses between “poison” and “remedy” in the dialogue Phaedrus. “Grammatological” is clearly a reference to his Of Grammatology, my point being to add chemicals and grammar to the choral mix.
- 5.
See Theatetus 149a.
- 6.
Here, I have in mind, from Willard Van Orman Quine, Word and Object, the idea of the “inscrutability of reference” within the program of radical translation he outlines, my point being that even Analytic Philosophy has something to say about what might happen with the cunt bucket in terms of both correspondence and lateral movement.
- 7.
I take the distinction between mnésis and hypomnesia from Derrida , “Plato’s Pharmacy” (Dissemination). In a nutshell, mnésis refers to the organic act of actively remembering, while hypomnesia results when one externalizes an inactive memory by erecting a monument—for example, a Cancer Survivor’s Park, or if we turn to grammatology, writing itself, which covers over absences insisting on being remembered. In mnésis, memory is organic, intimate, warm and pulsing with life; in hypomnesia, however, memory is inorganic, alien, and cold as a categorical imperative.
- 8.
The paradox of giving that which one is not in possession of is not lost on Derrida , who begins his Given Time with a reference to the Lacanian donative paradox: “Lacan says of love: it gives what it does not have, a phenomenon whose variations are ordered by the Écrits according to the final and transcendental modality of the woman inasmuch as she is, supposedly, deprived of the phallus” (2).
- 9.
Sapphire’s Black Wings & Blind Angels contains further brutal examples of the Machine Gun aesthetic I identify in Push.
- 10.
“Nothic” refers to the nothos, or bastard son, who interrupts proper generation and filiation/ekgonos. I take it from the bastard logic according to which the chora is apprehended in the first place by Timaeus, who can do no more than provide a “likely” or plausible (eidos logos) cosmogonic report to Socrates, Critias, and Hermocrates (Timaeus 52b).
- 11.
“We’ll have to be content if we come up with statements that are as plausible as anyone else’s, and we should bear in mind the fact that I and all of you, the speaker and his judges, are no more than human, which means that on these matters we ought to accept the likely account and not demand more than that” (Timaeus 29c-d).
- 12.
Precious reads from her own file, pilfered from Ms Weiss, to her friend and fellow student, the “Harlem Butch” Jermaine: “‘The teacher, Ms Rain, places great emphasis on writing and reading books. Little work is done with computers or the variety of multiple choice pre-G.E.D. and G.E.D. workbooks available at low cost to JPTA programs’” (Sapphire , Push 119).
- 13.
The traditional reductions of Husserlian phenomenology as presented in his Ideas are: (1) eidetic, (2) transcendental, (3) phenomenological. I add a semiotic reduction to the series in light of Kristeva’s desire for phenomenology to de-transcendentalize the I, which is more of a provisional structure than something fixed and permanent, something continually negotiating its relation to loss and absence.
- 14.
See Barry Glassner, “Monster Moms: On the Art of Misdirection.”
- 15.
Abjection does not arise as a concept in Kristeva’s Revolution in Poetic Language, arriving eight years later in her Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Still, the stage is clearly set in her analysis of rejection (as typified by Freud’s Rat Man), expulsion, disavowal (as typified by the Wolf Man ) and denial (dénégation), waiting only for a special name to be given to the fundamental negativity central to the hygiene of selfhood.
- 16.
“I hear kids at school. Boy say I’m laffing ugly. He say, ‘Claireece is so ugly she laffing ugly.’ His fren’ say, ‘No, that fat bitch is crying ugly.’ Laff laff” (Sapphire, Push 12).
- 17.
“They made the liver dense, smooth, bright, and sweet (but with some bitterness), so that it would act as a mirror for thoughts stemming from intellect, just as a mirror receives impressions and gives back images to look at” (Timaeus 71b). As such, the liver communicates via reflection, a kind of visual isthmus allowing the basest instincts to be subjected to rational control via photoelectric telepoesis.
- 18.
“I’m not suggesting that anything in your speech was less than excellent—how could anyone in their right mind presume to do so?—but I do want to try to show that what remains to be said is actually more difficult, and therefore calls for more leniency” (Critias 107b).
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Tata, M.A. (2018). Work This Cunt Bucket: Knowledge, Love, and De-containment in Sapphire’s Push . In: McNeil, E., Wermers, J., Lunn, J. (eds) Mapping Queer Space(s) of Praxis and Pedagogy. Queer Studies and Education. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-64623-7_8
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