Moya Lloyd. Judith Butler: From Norms to Politics Polity 2007.
While thinkers prior to Hegel had examined the nature of desire, few, as Allan Megill notes, had thought that there might be ‘a constitutive relation between desire and subjectivity”, as Hegel did, and it is this constitutive relation that both interested his French critics and continues to interest Butler. Hegel’s Phenomenology, as stated, examines the way in which desire and self-consciousness emerge side by side (15).
ek-static subject, a subject outside itself, or to put it differently, a subject that is not self-identical. … it is the idea of ek-static subjectivity, derived, however loosely, from Hegel, continues to inspire Butler’s work to date, although the form it takes is one increasingly informed, in large part by psychoanalysis. For this reason, far from the comic subject of desire she attributes to Hegel, Butler’s subject is a melancholic figure (16).
… the subject is an ek-static subject; one that is always outside —or other to— itself. It is this understanding of the subject and its relation to the other … that underpins, amongst other things, Butler’s examination of the differential values placed on disparate lives and deaths; her treatment of what counts as a liveable life, her exploration of the constitutive role of mourning in the production of the psyche; and her discussion of the precariousness of all life (18).
heteronormativity: institutions, modes of understanding, norms and discourss that treat heterosexuality as naural to humanity