Thiem, Annika. Unbecoming Subjects: Judith Butler, Moral Philosophy and Critical Responsibility. New York: Fordham UP, 2008.
The unconscious
is not a site where what remains untranslatable is put to rest but a mechanism to deal with the traces of the overwhelming enigmatic messages that do not lead an indolent life. Subsequent addresses by others rupture the murmur of the “I” and reactivate the primary situation of having been overwhelmed, bringing back the traces of the untranslatable (157).
This reactivation of the untranslatable and of being overwhelmed is the effect of tranference, and with reactivation also comes the possibility of reworking the translation of the untranslatable excess that returns.
The unconscious and repression are important mechanisms in dealing with “too much otherness” in relation to others.
As the unconscious is “enacted” in relation to an other, the undoing of the repression brings to the fore the constitutive dispossession, disorientation, and incoherence of the “I”. I can tell stories about who I am, how I came to be where I am now, but I cannot know with certainty or give a definitive account of what made me. Key to this impossibility is that these stories came to be only through my relations to others, and in my attempting to offer a story to another other, it is precisely the presence of this other that interrupts and disorients my story by making me ask: Who am I to tell you this story? Who are you? What does this story tell you about me that I do not say? What are you thinking that you are not telling me? So the other becomes the occasion for the unraveling of myself and my assumed coherence.