I also don’t think that the foreclosures that produce the subject are fixed in time in the way that most Lacanians do. They really understand foreclosure as a kind of founding moment. My sense is that it is always the case that the subject is produced through certain kinds of foreclosure-certain things become impossible for it; certain things become irrecoverable-and that this makes for the possibility of a temporarily coherent subject who can act. But I also want to say that its action can very often take up the foreclosure itself; it can renew the meaning and the effect of foreclosure.
For instance, many people are inaugurated as subjects through the foreclosure of homosexuality; when homosexuality returns as a possibility, it returns precisely as the possibility of the unraveling of the subject itself: “I would not be I if I were a homosexual. I don’t know who I would be. I would be undone by that possibility. Therefore, I cannot come in close proximity to that which threatens to undo me fundamentally.” Miscegenation is another moment-it’s when you suddenly realize that a white subject assumes that its whiteness is absolutely essential to its capacity to be a subject at all: “If I must be in this kind of proximity to a person of color, I will become undone in some radical way.” We see forms of segregation and phobic forms of organizing social reality that keep the fiction of those subjects intact. Now, I think it’s possible sometimes to undergo an undoing, to submit to an undoing by virtue of what spectrally threatens the subject, in order to reinstate the subject on a new and different ground. (Butler interview with Salih, 2000)