Rothenberg, Molly Anne. The Excessive Subject. Cambridge UK: Polity Press, 2010. Print.
The theorizing of an excess that sticks to and flows from all signification (whether in speech or in bodily gesture) is the hallmark of a psychoanalytic approach. The excess is inescapable, irremediable, and unsymbolizable: in Lacanian parlance it subsists in the register of the Real (106).
🙂 Rothenberg continually hammers Butler over the fact that Butler totally misunderstands the nature of this excess. Butler’s excess is taken up in a bodily way and read off transparently, as if meaning was transparent. For R. this excess is irresolvibly non-transparent, beguiling even. “(Butler) uses the trappings and terminology of psychoanalysis but spectacularly fails to appreciate precisely what distinguishes psychoanalysis from Foucaultianism — the theorization of the dimension of excess inherent in every speech act. This failure inflects her version of subject formation: in disavowing the extimate cause, Butler leaves herself with no way to theorize the subject as a site of excess, as a Möbius subject” (107).