Comments on Judith Butler’s “Introduction” to “The Psychic Life of Power” (1997)

Roberto Ponce Cordero, ,

Butler is both one of the most influential and one of the most virulently criticized theoreticians of the last decades, and while her book from 1990, Gender Trouble, is still undoubtedly her most well-known one, a lot has been said about every one of her other works as well. Having read the “Introduction” to The Psychic Life of Power, now (and having read the whole book years ago – god only knows what I took from it back then, if something at all), I guess that I think you can say anything about Butler except that her project, namely the linking together of the theory of power and the theory of the psyche in order to arrive to an effective theory of subjection, is not a very ambitious one. After all, already at the text’s beginning she writes that Foucault “does not elaborate on the specific mechanisms of how the subject is formed in submission. Not only does the entire domain of the psyche remain largely unremarked in his theory, but power in this double valence of subordinating and producing remains unexplored” (p. 2). And despite the fact that she makes it explicit that she “offers no promise of a grand synthesis” of “Foucauldian and psychoanalytic orthodoxies” (p. 3), it is clear that to even put her finger on this –in her opinion– fundamental lacking of post-structuralism à la Foucault, and to try to round up its understanding of how subjects are constituted and what they constitute recurring to Freud and Lacan for help, is a daring move, and in fact one that is difficult to perform satisfactorily (no pun intended).

Butler is indeed very good at pointing out some problems of Althusser’s interpellation model (pp. 5-6), or at criticizing Foucault for being “notoriously taciturn on the topic of the psyche” (p. 18) and thus leaving the actual process of the constitution of the subject aside. Her attempts to draw on psychoanalysis, however, seem to me to be less clear and perhaps even less convincing. For instance, she proposes that the subject “emerges” with an apparently hard-wired “passionate attachment to those on whom he or she is fundamentally dependent” (p. 7), much like the child has to attach him/herself to “the earliest objects of love” in order to even be able to live or “to persist in and as itself (p. 8). On the one hand, this is almost commonsensical and allows us to accommodate both the desire for subordination and the fact that “no subject, in the course of its formation, can ever afford fully to ‘see’” its own dependency (p. 8). On the other hand, it begs the question of how exactly these attachments are constituted and how they are transferred from the nuclear family to ever larger social contexts, and most importantly, especially considering Butler’s political program against the hetero-normative matrix, of how these attachments function in relation to the creation and performance of sexual identities that are essential to the psychoanalytical understanding of the child acquiring consciousness.

Furthermore, her discussions of the terms “melancholia” and “guilt” remain superficial, to say the least, as does her use of the term “love”. This, of course, is partially due to the fact that the text we are dealing with is only the introduction to a whole book in which those terms, among others, are going to be more thoroughly studied. But I dare to say that this is only “partially” due to this fact because I think that psychoanalysis and Butler’s concept of the subject do not at all match: if I am not mistaken, she uses the term “unconscious” only once (on p. 7), and overall she seems to be utterly interested in the conscious subject and in the way agency may be possible despite the subject’s primal dependency to power, rather than in the workings of, say, the Id.

Nevertheless, this text (and surely the whole book) is worth reading, if only because Butler is downright brilliant at constantly reformulating this paradox of subjection over and over again, but not without adding important nuances in each reiteration or repetition. This, somehow paradoxically as well, makes her writing both repetitive and difficult to follow. Much more importantly, however, is that this is a strategy that quite graphically illustrates how repetition and reiteration can also be productive spaces or openings for the subject’s resistance to power through subversive performances, as Butler not only here but also elsewhere famously argues (see pp. 11-12 or 29-30, among others, for assessments of the subject’s iterability as both a sine qua non condition and a possibility of oppositional agency). To lack definite answers at the end of the day, or to criticize her for not having achieved at all the overwhelming synthesis of two knowledge systems that she did not even attempt to achieve in the first place, may be completely beside the point, then, for the constant repetition and further dissecting of Butler’s text produces all that it arguably can produce, which is even more questions and even more lightings of incertitude.

 

(Crédito de imagen de thumbnail: http://esferapublica.org/nfblog/judith-butler-sobre-los-atentados-en-paris/. Crédito de imagen de inicio de post: http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/331460.The_Psychic_Life_of_Power).

Published by Roberto Ponce Cordero

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