Butler, Judith. “Competing Universalities” The Judith Butler Reader. 2003. page 263.
This essay is also in Contingency, Hegemony, Universality
In the Kantian vein, “transcendental” can mean: the condition without which nothing can appear. But it can also mean: the regulatory and constitutive conditions of the appearance of any given object. The latter sense is the one in which the condition is not external to the object it occasions, but is its constitutive condition and the principle of its development and appearance. The transcendental thus offers the criterial conditions that constrain the emergence of the thematizable. And if this transcendental field is not considered to have a historicity — that is, not considered to be a shifting episteme which might be altered and revised over time — it is unclear to me what place it can fruitfully have or an account of hegemony that seeks to sustain and promote a more radically democratic formulation of sex and sexual difference. 263
Psychoanalysis enters Foucauldian analysis precisely at the point where one wishes to understand the phantasmatic dimension of social norms. 264
Thus unconscious is also an ongoing psychic condition in which norms are registered in both normalizing and non-normalizing ways, the postulated site of their foritification, their undoing and their perversion, the