This temporal gap between usages produces the possibility of a reversal of signification, but also opens the way for an inauguration of signifying possibilities that exceed those to which the term has been previously bound. (Psychic 94)
The Foucaultian subject is never fully constituted in subjection, then; it is repeatedly constituted in subjection, and it is in the possibility of a repetition that repeats against its origin that subjection might be understood to draw its inadvertently enabling power. 94
How does the process of subjectivation, the disciplinary production of the subject, break down, if it does, in both Foucaultian and psychoanalytic theory? Whence does that failure emerge, and where are its consequences? (Psychic 1997, 95)
🙂 Butler then looks at Althusser
Policeman in street: “Hey you there!” The scene is clearly a disciplinary one; the policeman’s call is an effort to bring someone back in line … As Althusser himself insists, the peformative effort of naming can only attempt to bring its addressee into being; there is always the risk of a certain misrecognition … The one who is hailed may fail to hear, misread the call, turn the other way, answer to another name, insist on not being addressed in that way. … The name is called, and I am sure it is my name, but it isn’t. The name is called, and I am sure that a name is being called, my name, but it is in someone’s incomprehensible speech, or worse, it is someone coughing, or worse a radiator which for a moment approximates a human voice.
Consider the force of this dynamic of interpellation and misrecognition when the name is not a proper name but a social category, and hence a signifier capable of being interpreted in a number of divergent and conflictual ways. To be hailed as a “woman” or “Jew” or “queer” or “Black” or “Chicana” may be heard or interpreted as an affirmation or an insult, depending on the context in which the hailing occurs … If that name is called, there is more often than not some hesitation about whether or how to respond, for what is at stake is whether the temporary totalization performed by the name is politically enabling or paralyzing, whether the foreclosure, indeed the violence, of the totalizing reduction of identity performed by that particular hailing is politically strategic or regressive or, if paralyzing and regresive, also enabling in some way. (96)
… In this sense disciplinary discourse does not unilaterally constitute a subject in Foucault, or rather, if it does, it simultaneously constitutes the condition for the subject’s de-constitution . What is brought into being through the performative effect of the interpellating demand is much more than a “subject,” for the “subject” created is not for that reason fixed in place: it becomes the occasion for a further making.
Indeed, I would add, a subject only remains a subject through a reiteration or rearticulation of itself as a subject, and this dependency of the subject on repetition for coherence may constitute that subject’s incoherence, its incomplete character. This repetition or, better, iterability thus becomes the non-place of subversion, the possibility of a re-embodying of the subjectivating norm that can redirect its normativity. (99)