Campbell Reading

P1: Vendor/Gay P2: FLF

International Journal of Sexuality and Gender Studies [ijsg] PH008-290580 December 28, 2000 19:7 Style file version Nov. 19th, 1999

International Journal of Sexuality and Gender Studies, Vol. 6, Nos. 1/2, 2001

Theory

The Plague of the Subject: Psychoanalysisand Judith Butler’s Psychic Life of Power

Kirsten Campbell1,2

In her bookThe Psychic Life of Power, Judith Butler explores the relation betweenpower and subjectivity.The Psychic Life of Powerpresents a political accountof the formation of the subject. For Butler, psychoanalysis is a crucial theoreticaltool for providing such an account of the subject. This essay considers Butler’sFoucauldian rereading of psychoanalytic theory through an analysis of her theoryof the formation of the subject. In particular, the essay examines Butler’s appro-priation of psychoanalysis for her theory of subjectivity. The author argues thatwhile Butler’s theorising of “the psychic life of power” represents an importantlinking of Foucauldian and psychoanalytic theories, nevertheless, her use of psy-choanalysis does not fully engage with the complexity of its theory of the subjectnor with the implications of that theory for her political project.

KEY WORDS: Judith Butler; psychoanalysis; Michel Foucault; subjectivity; feminist theory.

Judith Butler is best known as a political thinker, an inaugural figure in queertheory and a Foucauldian theorist of gender. Yet her book,The Psychic Life ofPower(1997), fits uneasily within this political and theoretical trajectory. Manydiscussions of Butler’s work either ignore, or alternatively mistakenly characterise,Psychic Lifeas her most “psychoanalytic” and least Foucauldian theory.3 PsychicLife should not be ignored or dismissed, however, as a psychoanalytic aberration.Rather,Psychic Lifepresents a set of engagements that are integral to Butler’s polit-ical and theoretical project.Psychic Lifeoffers an important articulation of Butler’sproject of providing a political account of subjectivity. It presents a compelling ar-gument for the importance of this project for contemporary theory by insisting that

1Department of Sociology, Goldsmiths College, University of London, London, United Kingdom.2Correspondence should be directed to Kirsten Campbell, Department of Sociology, GoldsmithsCollege, University of London, London, United Kingdom; e-mail: [email protected].

3See, for example, the collection edited by V. Bell.Performativity and Belonging. (1999). Lois McNay’spiece, “Subject, Psyche and Agency: The Work of Judith Butler” in this collection is a notableexception.

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contemporary political thought needs to reconsider its emphasis upon a politics ofidentity, and instead should engage with the politics of the subjective performanceof power. Central to this argument is Butler’s development of her theory of the for-mation of the subject. Butler sketches such a theory in her previous work,GenderTrouble(1990) andBodies That Matter(1993). However, she does not provide anelaborated theory of the constitution of the subject untilPsychic Life.

THE PROBLEM OF THE SUBJECT

Psychic Lifeopens with Foucault’s injunction that “[w]e should try to graspsubjection in its material instance as a constitution of subjects” (1997, p. 1). ThisFoucauldian problematic of how power constitutes subjects framesPsychic Life.For Butler, the subject is a material instance of power, for “if conditions of powerare to persist, they must be reiterated; the subject is precisely the site of suchreiteration” (1997, p. 16). Power thereby forms, and is performed by, the subject.For this reason, Butler argues that “for power to act, theremustbe a subject”(1997, p. 203). In order to understand the operation of power, it is also necessary tounderstand its subjective performance. A theory of the constitution of subjectivity istherefore integral to a theory of power, because it is not possible to theorise powerwithout also theorising the subject. The central theoretical problem ofPsychicLife is how to understand the relationship between the operation of power and theformation of subjectivity.

Butler argues that this problematic requires an examination of the relationshipbetween the “process of becoming subordinated by power” and “the process ofbecoming a subject” (1997, p. 2). Butler contends that to understand the formationof the subject of power, it is necessary to understand these processes of subjection.If subjection constitutes the subject, however, then “an account of subjection, itseems, must be traced in the turns of psychic life” (1997, p. 18). In this way, itbecomes necessary to consider the question: “what is the psychic form that powertakes?” (1997, p. 2).

While Butler begins with a statement of her Foucauldian problematic, sheargues nevertheless that Foucault himself does not answer this theoretical question.Butler identifies three conceptual weaknesses in Foucault’s account of power andsubjectivity. First, he fails to “elaborate on the specific mechanisms of how thesubject is formed in submission.” Second, he fails to engage with the “domain of thepsyche.” Third, he fails to explore “power in this double valence of subordinatingand producing” (1997, p. 2). While acknowledging that “Foucault is notoriouslytaciturn on the topic of the psyche,” Butler argues that a theory of subjectionrequires a theory of the psyche (1997, p. 18). She contends that Foucault doesnot adequately address the question of subjection because he does not have anadequate theory of the psychic formation of subjectivity. Butler’s argument is notthat Foucault lacks a theory of the subject. Rather, she argues that he fails to



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theorise the constitution of the subject. With this crucial omission, Foucault failsto explain the psychic form that power takes.

Where, then, is an account of the psychic life of power to be found? Butlerclaims, “one cannot account for subjectivation, and in particular, becoming theprinciple of one’s own subjection, without recourse to a psychoanalytic accountof the formative or generative effects of restriction or prohibition” (1997, p. 87).To theorise subjection requires a psychoanalytic theory of the constitution of thesubject.

BUTLER’S THEORY OF THE SUBJECT

In The Psychic Life of Power, Butler develops her own theory of the formationof the subject, drawing primarily on the psychoanalytic work of Freud and Lacan.This theory is presented in three parts: first, the theory of the infantile passionateattachments; second, the theory of the normative regulation of those attachments;and third, the concomitant formation of the melancholic subject.

Passionate Attachments

Butler begins with the proposition that the infant has passionate attachmentsto its “earliest objects of love—parents, guardians, siblings,” who are objects of theinfant’s libidinal investments (1997, p. 8). Because of its prematurity, however, theinfant is also dependent upon those who care for it for its physical and emotionalsurvival. Butler clearly draws upon the psychoanalytic idea that the child is bornunable to care for itself, and, therefore, has a dependent attachment to others.Butler argues that because of this dependency, power always structures the rela-tionship between infant and parent. The child exists in a relation of submissionto its parents precisely because of its dependence upon them. The child’s primarypassionate attachments are to those upon whom it is dependent, and are thus struc-tured as a relation of domination and submission. For this reason, Butler arguesthat the formation of the primary attachments of the subject occurs in relationsof subordination and therefore subjection. From the beginning, we are formed in,and attached to, relations of power (1997, p. 7).

Foreclosed Attachments

In her first discussion of primary “passionate” attachments, Butler suggeststhat the structure of the infant’s subjection to power forms the subject. She situatesher subsequent discussions of passionate attachments, however, within the “nor-mative” formation of gendered identity. Butler compares the notion of passionateattachment to the Freudian conception of the drive, arguing that the concept of



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attachment always implies “attachmentto an object” (1997, p. 108). Followingpsychoanalytic theory, Butler contends that these attachments are structured byan internalised prohibition on the drive (1997, p. 22). These internalised prohibi-tions are regulative norms that direct libidinal attachments. For Butler, “foreclo-sure” is the psychic mechanism that “structures the forms which any attachmentmay assume” (1997, p. 24). Butler takes up the psychoanalytic distinction be-tween the disavowal of an attachment (the repression of an attachment) and theforeclosure of an attachment (the radical repudiation of an attachment) in herargument that foreclosure structures primary attachments by delineating certainobjects as permissible aims of the drive and radically barring other objects. Fore-closure thus functions as the mechanism that regulates how attachments fix toobjects.

In this account, Butler ties the psychoanalytic concept of foreclosure to “theFoucauldian notion of a regulatory ideal,” hence linking the psychoanalytic ac-count of the psyche to Foucault’s theory of the regulatory workings of power(1997, p. 25).4 Butler reconceives foreclosure “as an ideal according to whichcertain forms of love become possible, and others, impossible” (1997, p. 25).Foreclosure thus functions as an ideal that permits certain forms of attachment butnot others, and so functions as an internalised social sanction upon object choice.For Butler, the regulatory ideal is that of heterosexuality, and the attachment thatis foreclosed is a “homosexual” same-sex object choice. The foundational prohi-bition that forms the subject is thus not the bar against incestuous oedipal desirethat underpins classical psychoanalysis, for that desire is already heterosexual andhence based upon the preclusion of a homosexual desire. Rather, the foundationalprohibition bars homosexual attachments to same-sex objects (1997, p. 135). Ev-ery heterosexual identity is founded upon a primary and foundational prohibitionupon homosexual attachments.

The Melancholic Subject

Using the Freudian theory of melancholia (1984a), Butler argues that thisheterosexual identity of the feminine and the masculine always has melancholicstructure because of its formation through the foreclosure of homosexual attach-ment. Butler argues that this loss of the homosexual object founds the formationof femininity and masculinity. Heterosexual identity is thus constituted through arepudiation of homosexual desire and hence through the irresolvable loss of the ho-mosexual object. That “ungrieved and ungrievable loss” produces the melancholiaof heterosexual identity (1997, p. 138). Because heterosexual identity disavowshomosexual attachment, it cannot be acknowledged and hence cannot be named

4The key Foucauldian texts that Butler draws upon for her account of the regulatory workings of powerare:Power/Knowledge(1980),Discipline and Punish(1977) andThe History of Sexuality, Volume 1(1978) and Volume 2 (1985).




and so cannot be mourned. For this reason, Butler understands “‘masculinity’ and‘femininity’ as formed and consolidated through identifications which are in partcomposed of disavowed grief” (1997, p. 139). She argues that “[w]hat ensues isa culture of gender melancholy in which masculinity and femininity emerge astraces of an ungrieved and ungrievable love; indeed, where masculinity and fem-ininity within the heterosexual matrix are strengthened through the repudiationswhich they perform” (1997, p. 140).

Butler’s theory of the subject offers a political account of the formation ofsubjectivity. That account is political because of its queer feminist critique of therelation between power and the production of “normative” heterosexual identityand the psychic and social cost of that formation. It is also political, however, inits description of the production of identity itself. In the final chapter ofThe Psy-chic Life of Power, Butler argues that the ego’s “I” of identity reproduces a psychictopography formed by power. This account does not claim that power acts unilater-ally on the subject, such that power is internalised in the psyche. Rather, the psycheis itself an effect of power, because it is an effect of the regulatory, disciplinary, andnormative operation of power. For Butler, power “effects a melancholia that repro-duces power as the psychic voice of judgement addressed to (turned upon) oneself,thus modelling reflexivity on subjection” (1997, p. 198). In this way, Butler offersa critique of the foundation of identity in power.

“BETWEEN FREUD AND FOUCAULT”

In Psychic Life, Butler (1997) acknowledges that “I am in part moving to-ward a psychoanalytic criticism of Foucault” (p. 87). Her theory of the melancholicsubject, however, should not be characterised as a “turn” to psychoanalysis.ThePsychic Life of Powerrepresents neither Butler’s first nor her most sympatheticengagement with psychoanalysis. Rather, psychoanalysis informs her account ofgendered identity inGender Trouble(1990) andBodies that Matter(1993). Inthese earlier books, Butler outlines her argument concerning melancholic hetero-sexual identity, which she subsequently develops inPsychic Life(1997). WhileButler provides a compelling feminist and Foucauldian critique of psychoanaly-sis, nevertheless, her critique is also a productive reading of the problems withinpsychoanalytic theory rather than a refusal of psychoanalysis.

Despite its psychoanalytic engagements,The Psychic Life of Powershouldnot be read as a repudiation of Foucauldian theory. As in her earlier work, Butler’sengagement with psychoanalysis is framed by a commitment to Foucault’s theoryof the historical production of the subject and to the Foucauldian problematic oftheorising the relation between power and the formation of subjectivity. Butlersituates her work against neither Freud nor Foucault but between them. She arguesthat to understand the relation between power and subjectivity necessarily “requiresthinking the theory of power together with a theory of psyche” (1997, p. 2). Butler



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locates her work at the intersection of these theories of power and the psyche,between Foucauldian and psychoanalytic thinking.

To “offer a critical account of psychic subjection in terms of the regulatoryand productive effects of power” (1997, p. 19), Butler provides a Foucauldianrereading of psychoanalysis. In her rereading, Butler develops the argument previ-ously presented inSubjects of Desire(1987),Gender Trouble(1990), andBodiesThat Matter(1993), namely, that the psychoanalytic postulation of a psychic “law”needs to be reconsidered in terms of the Foucauldian theory of power. InPsychicLife, Butler returns to Foucault’s critique of psychoanalysis as a juridical and re-pressive practice that continually reproduces the subject and its desires in terms ofthe operation of power. In her previous works, Butler argued that the Freudian andLacanian formulations of that psychic law are repressive and juridical—hence thenecessity for a Foucauldian theory of the productivity of power. InPsychic Life,however, her position is more ambivalent. Butler “disputes the Foucauldian notionthat psychoanalysis presumes the exteriority of the law to desire, for it maintainsthat there is no desire without the law that forms and sustains the very desire it pro-hibits” (1997, p. 103). Rather, “one cannot account for subjectivation. . .withouta psychoanalytic account of the formative or generative effects of restriction orprohibition” (1997, p. 87).5 Instead of claiming that there is one repressive and nor-mative “law” as in psychoanalysis, Butler understands the normative constraintsupon psychic production as an effect of networks of regulatory norms. Thesenormative and regulating discourses produce the subject and generate desire.

While Butler situates her account of the psychic life of power at the intersec-tion between Foucauldian and psychoanalytic theory, Foucault and Freud addressdifferent theoretical problems for her account. Her work is not situatedbetweenthese theories because she deploys them for different purposes. For Butler, the prob-lematic is Foucauldian and requires a theory of the operation of power. Foucaultprovides a theory of sociality and its production in power, whereas psychoanalysisprovides a theory of the subject. Butler’s theory presents a Foucauldian theoryof power and a psychoanalytic theory of the subject. Psychoanalysis provides asupplementary theory of the subject, which addresses a gap in Foucault’s workconcerning a theory of the formation of subjectivity. Butler does not provide apsychoanalytic reading of Foucault that challenges, disrupts, or contests that the-ory. Rather, Butler seeks to address what she perceives as a “missing” dimensionto Foucault’s work—a theory of the constitution of the subject—by supplementingFoucault with a psychoanalytic theory of the subject.

This theoretical strategy repeats much earlier formulations of the relation-ship between social theory and psychoanalysis. Within psychoanalytic Marxism,notably the theorists associated with the Frankfurt school, Marxism provides a

5Butler’s term “subjectivation” is a translation of the French,assujetissment, meaning subjection orsubjugation (1997, p. 11). The Foucauldian concept of subjectivation—the process of becoming asubject and becoming subordinated to power—is central to Butler’sPsychic Life(1997, p. 16).




theory of the social, and psychoanalysis provides a supplementary theory of thesubject. Similarly, in certain strands of psychoanalytic feminist theory, the notionof patriarchy provides a theory of social relations, and psychoanalysis providesan account of the formation of subjectivity. These formulations of the relation-ship between social theory and psychoanalysis posit psychoanalytic theory as anecessary but nevertheless supplementary theory of the subject. Psychoanalysisis necessary because the social theory in question lacks an adequate account ofthe subject. Butler reproduces this relation to psychoanalytic theory in her useof psychoanalysis as a theory of the subject that supplements Foucault’s theory ofsocial power.

Although these earlier traditions in social theory perceive psychoanalysis asnecessary, nevertheless it is also perceived as inadequate. The failure of psycho-analysis occurs in the field of the political. Psychoanalysis is characterised as eitherlacking or as refusing a political analysis of the social. An obvious example of thischaracterisation of psychoanalysis can be seen in earlier feminist engagementswith psychoanalytic theory. These critiques argue that if psychoanalysis is to bedeployed as a theory of the subject, then it must undergo political critique andbe reworked in relation to a critical and contestatory politics. Butler reproducesthis critique of psychoanalysis, because she argues that psychoanalysis in and ofitself cannot provide apolitical account of the constitution of the subject. In thisway, Butler also posits psychoanalysis as necessary for her project, but she alsorecognises its inadequacies.

Butler engages in a theoretical strategy that both appropriates, and providesa critique of, psychoanalysis. This strategy effects a series of theoretical displace-ments from Foucault, to psychoanalysis, to Butler’s own theory. Butler’s prob-lematic is Foucauldian, not psychoanalytic. She appropriates psychoanalysis tothat problematic, as she does not adopt psychoanalytic theory in its entirety, butrather reworks certain elements of Freudian and Lacanian theory in relation to aFoucauldian theory of power. Butler does not situate herself within psychoanalysisbecause she requires a political account of the subject, which psychoanalysis doesnot provide. For this reason, Butler develops her own theory of the subject, whichfunctions as a political supplement to the psychoanalytic theory that she appropri-ates. It is precisely her supplementary use of psychoanalysis, however, and in turnthe supplementary nature of her own political account of the subject that resultsin certain theoretical problems that are not worked through within her theory ofsubjection.

THE PLAGUE OF PSYCHOANALYSIS

Butler’s theory of subjection rests on three key ideas, which draw upon psy-choanalysis. First, the concept of the infant’s libidinal attachment to its parents;second, the idea of foreclosure; and third, the notion of the psychic subject. While



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Butler appropriates these psychoanalytic concepts to her account of psychic sub-jection, however, it is psychoanalysis that most troubles her theoretical desires.

The Subject of the Real

Butler provides an account of the fundamental passionate attachments ofthe child to understand the psychic effects of the operation of power upon theproduction of the subject (1997, pp. 6–7). For Butler, that account is necessarilypsychoanalytic. Butler’s theory, however, does not address the psychic relationsof the child and parent, but rather addresses their empirically “real” relations. Forexample, while Butler draws on Lacan’s idea of the prematurity of the infant,she does not consider the infant’s phantasmic relation to its specular others, nor itsimagined relation to itself. Butler offers only the most attenuated description of thechild’s relationship to its “earliest objects of love” (1997, p. 8). She characterises“parents, guardians, siblings” as empirical beings, which are undifferentiated intheir psychical and social relation to the child. It is as if the psychical world ofthe child does not exist, so that those who care for it, and other members of itsfamily, are simply empirical objects. For Butler, the relation between the carerand the child is always a real relation of power, which is not inflected throughphantasmic object relations, nor the complexities of identification, nor troubled bythe vicissitudes of sexuality. Butler does not address the psychic life of the infant,and hence fails to provide a psychoanalytic account of the relation of the child toits parental objects. For example, what psychic form do these objects take for thechild? How does the child psychically constitute these objects? Butler privilegesthe seeming empirical reality of the infantile experience but does not address thepsychical reality of these passionate attachments.

A consequence of this refusal of psychic reality is that Butler fails to pro-vide a psychoanalytic theory of the relationship between the child and its “fam-ily” because such a theory entails engaging with the complex attachments anddisattachments—real, imagined, and symbolic—that form that relationship. Butlersuggests that the relationship between the child and “the earliest objects of itslove” is a “natural” and given fact of human existence (1997, p. 7). “This situa-tion of primary dependence” is ontological in that it is a necessary condition of“being” (1997, p. 7). The child “must attach in order to persist in and of itself”(1997, p. 8).

By contrast, psychoanalysis argues that this relationship isconstitutedinthe sense that it is psychically and socially produced. Despite her claim to pro-vide a psychoanalytic theory of passionate attachments, Butler fails to consider thecomplex psychical and social constitution of the parents as objects of passionateattachments. With this omission, Butler’s theory of passionate attachment departsfrom psychoanalysis, and becomes instead a seemingly empirical and naturalisticaccount of the infantile subject.




The Foreclosure of the Subject

Butler conceives foreclosure as a regulatory ideal that forms the normativeheterosexual subject. She attributes this notion of a fundamental “order of pro-hibition” to Freud’s distinction between “repression and foreclosure, suggestingthat a repressed desire might have once lived apart from its prohibition, but thatforeclosed desire is rigorously barred, constituting the subject through a kind ofpre-emptive loss” (1997, p. 23). As Laplanche and Pontalis (1973) point out, how-ever, the concept of foreclosure is Lacanian, not Freudian. While Freud (1962)uses the concepts of “repudiation” or “disavowal” to describe the ego’s refusal ofan incompatible idea together with its affect, Lacan (1991) develops these ideasas a theory of foreclosure. Butler clearly uses foreclosure in the Lacanian sense ofa foundational psychic exclusion that cannot be represented within the subject’ssymbolic economy. This deployment of Lacan in the name of Freud allows Butlerto evade certain theoretical difficulties posed by Lacanian theory to her conceptionof foreclosure.

Unlike Freud’s concept of disavowal, Lacan’s theory of foreclosure concernsa basic fault in the operation of the paternal metaphor and, hence, in the productionof the sexed subject. For Lacan (1977), foreclosure denotes the primordial expul-sion of the fundamental signifier, the phallic signifier, from the subject’s symbolicuniverse. Foreclosure, then, involves a failure of the production of sexed subjectiv-ity. By contrast, Butler uses foreclosure to indicate both heterosexual norms (theregulatory ideal) and the regulatory mechanism of installation of those norms (theregulation of attachments). In this way, Butler ascribes to foreclosure the success-ful constitution of heterosexual identity, while for Lacan it indicates a failure of thesuccessful “normative” production of sexed subjectivity. For Freud (1979) too, theconcept of disavowal indicates a disruption in the constitution of the subject, forit is a psychotic defensive mechanism. In psychoanalytic theory, foreclosure indi-cates a fundamental disruption in the formation of the subject, whereas in Butler’stheory, the concept is reread as the mechanism of the production of normative (andcoherent) subjects.

For Lacan, foreclosure is a defensive mechanism, which is situated in theregister of the symbolic and, hence, in the register of sexual difference. Butler’saccount implies, however, that the prohibition against the homosexual object ispre-oedipal, because it is prior to the constitution of the subject. This prohibition,however,cannot bepre-oedipal. If it is pre-oedipal, then it must be prior to sexualdifference. If the prohibition is prior to sexual difference, then the object that isprohibited cannot be a homosexual object, because a homosexual object is definedby sexual difference. The definition of a same-sex object relies upon a notionof sexual difference because such a concept would be meaningless without analready established distinction between the sexes. In order for Butler’s prohibitionto operate against desire for same-sex objects, those objects must already be definedby sexual difference and, hence, the prohibition described by Butler must be an



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oedipal prohibition in the register of sexual difference. By failing to recognise thisproblem, Butler’s account fails to provide a coherent theory of the formation ofheterosexual identity.

Curiously, and perhaps more importantly for Butler’s own theoretical andpolitical project, her conception of foreclosure does not provide a theory of theformation ofhomosexualidentity and desire. Rather, Butler’s use of foreclosureprecludes homosexual identity and desire. If there is a fundamental prohibitionagainst an attachment to same-sex objects, then homosexual desire is always pre-cluded and, thus, cannot exist. Indeed, Butler argues that to desire against thisregulatory prohibition is to enter the realm of abjection and psychosis—and so tobe outside the domain of social intelligibility. If Butler is to provide an accountof the formation of homosexual identity, then she must also provide an accountof the failure of the fundamental prohibition—which she does not. Butler’s the-ory does not explain how it is possible to become anything other than normativeheterosexual subjects—precisely the theoretical and political failure for which shecriticises Foucault (Butler, 1997). Ironically, Butler fails to provide an account ofthe constitution of homosexual desire within heterosexist norms because she doesnot properly engage with the insistence of psychoanalysis that such norms alwaysfail, that normative identity is never fully established, and that the subject is notcoherent. In the psychoanalytic account, the subject is never fully (and never canbe) interpellated by social norms. For psychoanalysis, the “normative” oedipalsubject is a neurotic subject.

This critical examination of Butler’s conception of foreclosure should not bemistaken for an argument that Butler is a poor reader of Freud and Lacan, andthat, therefore, her theory has fundamental flaws. Rather, this analysis of Butler’sconcept of foreclosure reveals the theoretical inconsistencies and problematic im-plications of her theory. The reinscription of the psychoanalytic conception offoreclosure shows the limitations of Butler’s psychoanalytic theory.

The Subject of the Unconscious

If Butler’s account of the formation of the subject is inadequate, both in termsof her political and theoretical projects, so too her theory of the subject itself isproblematic. Butler describes the subject as “that viable and intelligible being”that is instituted by “the normative demand.” Butler argues that this “being” is aneffect of “the discursive demand to inhabit a coherent identity, to become a coher-ent subject” (1997, p. 86). For Butler, the subject and identity are the same, forshe conceives the subject as the individual’s imagined self, the seemingly coher-ent identity that the subject misrecognises as its being. This conceptual collapsebetween identity and subjectivity recurs throughoutPsychic Lifebecause Butlerdefines the subject as the conscious self. Butler argues that “it is important todistinguish between the notion of the psyche, which includes the notion of the




unconscious, and that of the subject, whose formation is conditioned by the exclu-sion of the unconscious” (1997, p. 206). According to this definition, the subjectis that which is other to the unconscious. The psychic agency that refuses the un-conscious is the conscious mind; and, therefore, the subject as Butler conceives itcan only be the conscious self.

Butler’s theory of the formation of the subject is in fact a theory of theformation of identity, because it theorises the constitution of the conscious ego ofthe “I” of the self. It is not a theory of the psychoanalytic subject, which is thesubject of the unconscious. Indeed, Butler does not address the unconscious in hertheory of the formation of the melancholic subject. She limits her discussion of theunconscious to a consideration of the concept of the psychic resistance to power,which she argues should not be conflated with political resistance (1997, p. 98).While Butler indicates that she understands the psyche as that which exceeds thenormative demands of the social, and hence as that which includes an unconscious,this unconscious is not theorised in relation to her theory of the formation ofidentity. For example, Butler describes the psyche in terms of the ego and thesuper-ego (1997, p. 86). It is not clear, however, how this psyche includes a notionof the unconscious, as Butler does not discuss the id. Similarly, Butler’s theoryof the melancholic subject is primarily concerned not with the workings of theunconscious, but with those psychic operations of the ego and super-ego as agenciesof the reflexive conscious self. For example, Butler characterises the “psychicinstruments” of power as “the declaration of guilt, the judgement of worthlessness,the verdicts of reality,” which are conscious operations of the super-ego and theego (1997, p. 197).

In this way, Butler mistakenly reduces the subject to its conscious ego, failingto distinguish between the conscious ego that forms the “I” of identity and theunconscious of the subject. Lacan (1977) argues that the subject cannot be reducedto the first person “I” of consciousness. For Lacan, the confusion of subject andidentity is a misrecognition of the ego as self, and the self as the subject, in adefensive operation that repudiates the unconscious. Without such a conceptualdistinction, an account of the subject simply theorises the subject of consciousness,not the psychoanalytic subject of the unconscious.

It appears that for this reason, Freud, and not Lacan, is the primary theoret-ical source of Butler’s theory of the subject. Butler appropriates Freud’s (1984b)metapsychology of the ego and the super-ego, without referring to the third psychicagency: the id. In contrast, Lacan’s return to Freud is predicated upon the uncon-scious, deploying his earlier schema of the division between conscious and uncon-scious. Although Lacan’s work clearly informs much of Butler’s theory, she rarelydiscusses his theory of the subject inThe Psychic Life of Power. Instead, Butler’sexplicit discussions of Lacan most often address his conception of the symbolic pa-ternal law. Lacan’s absent presence may be a result of the difficulty of appropriatinghis theory of the subject without engaging with the problem of the unconscious.



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The irony of the characterisation ofThe Psychic Life of Poweras Butler’s mostpsychoanalytic work is that Butler’s theory of the subject is not psychoanalytic.It is not psychoanalytic precisely because it is not framed by the psychoanalyticproblematic of that which is other to consciousness: the unconscious. The uncon-scious remains the unthought in Butler’s theory, functioning as an aporia withinthat theory. Butler’s failure to engage with the psychoanalytic problematic pro-duces an aporia within her theory of the subject, preventing her from workingthrough her own theoretical and political project.

The Subject of Philosophy

In 1999, Butler characterised her theoretical project as being fundamentallyconcerned with two questions: “What is the relation between desire and recogni-tion, and how is it that the constitution of the subject entails a radical and consti-tutive relation to alterity” (p. xiv). Butler argues that “in a sense, all of my workremains within the orbit of a certain set of Hegelian questions” (1999, p. xiv).These Hegelian questions frameThe Psychic Life of Power(1997). InThe PsychicLife of Power, Butler first articulates the problem of the constitution of the sub-ject through Hegel, then rereads Hegel on the unhappy consciousness, and endswith a discussion of melancholia as the reproduction of power in its modelling ofreflexivity—one’s relation to oneself—on subjection.

Lacan (1977) argues that the Hegelian model of the “being conscious ofself, the fully conscious self” produces a subject that is founded in the consciousand secured by consciousness (p. 296). Because this subject takes up a defensiveposition against its unconscious other, it cannot know itself in its refusal of theunconscious. In that position, the subject projects consciousness and self as aunified identity. That unity of identity enables the subject to claim mastery andpresence of self. In this position, the subject is substantiated as a conscious selfthat is transparent, certain, and foundational. This is a subject in the traditionalphilosophical sense of a conscious self. Lacan (1991) argues that the subject foundsphilosophical discourse. In his later work,L’envers de la psychanalyse, Lacan(1991) contends that philosophy founds its knowing upon a conscious self, an “I”that believes that what it perceives of itself represents its true self, that it canknow itself and, hence, that it can master itself (p. 71). Philosophical knowledgecontinually reproduces this transcendental and illusory conscious self (p. 70). ForLacan, philosophy is a discourse of mastery.

In Subjects of Desire, Butler (1987) considers the implications of Lacan’scritique of Hegelian philosophy. She briefly, but suggestively, discusses the impli-cations of Lacan’s critique of Hegel for philosophical thinking. Butler argues that:

Inasmuch as philosophy savours the postulation of a self-adequate subject, philosophicaldiscourse purports to say all that it means, and never to mean more than it actually says.The psychoanalytic deconstruction of philosophy would, then, consist in listening to the




lacks and gaps in philosophical discourse, and theorising on that basis what kind of defenceagainst desire the philosophical project seems to be (1987, pp. 196–197).

Considered in these terms, Butler’s theory of the subject inThe Psychic Life ofPowerreproduces philosophical discourse. It postulates the self-adequate subjectof philosophy, a conscious self that is transparent, certain, and foundational. Hertheory continually performs this subject, reiterating this transcendental and illusoryconscious self of identity. If that theory is read symptomatically, this philosoph-ical discourse of the conscious subject repudiates the unconscious. It repeats thephilosophical defence against its unconscious other.

Butler’s missed encounter with the psychoanalytic unconscious traps her the-ory of the subject within the philosophical discourse of the conscious self. Thefundamental psychoanalytic distinction between the conscious and the uncon-scious reveals “reason’s inability to come outside of itself, to enclose and knowitself from the outside: the inadequation of the subject and its other” (Grosz, 1993,p. 189).Psychic Lifecontinually repeats, and is haunted by, the impossible task ofunderstanding the “being conscious of self, the fully conscious self.” The aporiaof the unconscious in Butler’s theory of the subject prevents her from theorisingthe psychic life of power.

Psychic Lifearticulates an extremely important political and theoretical prob-lematic for contemporary theory. Politically, it provides a critical account of theformation of identity in power. Theoretically, it deploys both Foucault and Freudto produce this critical account, opening the possibility of a powerful intersectionof Foucauldian and psychoanalytic theory. Butler’s repetition of philosophicaldiscourse, and her failure to undertake a psychoanalytic discourse, however, pre-vents her from developing this important theoretical and political project. Instead,like the return of the repressed, that project continually suffers the plague of the(repressed) unconscious. In order to understand the psychic life of power, it isnecessary to reconsider the problematic relationship between the political subjectof Foucault and the unconscious subject of Freud.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I am grateful to Parveen Adams, David Bausor, Steve Cross, and Kate Nashfor their insightful comments on this paper.

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