I have opened with 2 rather difficult examples of protest, the QAIA and Danish cartoon incident. Why I’ve cited these, I try to explain, though it doesn’t sound entirely that well thought out just yet. I then move to Hegel and compare the Hegel coming out of Kant with Butler’s Hegel that is more coming from Spinoza country. This is to emphasize the intrusion of the subjective that Hegel adds to the mix. Then things get testy.
First I mention the tension that Butler points to in the P. quoting her regarding the self-identical subject, that “it is its travels, and is every place in which it finds itself.” So on one hand you have a subject in motion, hmm, a subject that is both in motion and at rest, when in motion this is meant to highlight it otherness to itself, that its desire is never sated, can’t be located, a particle in motion rather than at rest, on the other hand though she also points to the subject as also its place, and in Hegel’s P. this place, though temporary, nevertheless is an abode structured such that there is an homology between subject and her external environment, in other words where for the moment, substance is subject.
Butler goes further than the conventional narrative that describes at the moment of mutual recognition another self-consciousness similar to the original self-consciousness, in which they “check each other out” that is, there is recognition of the fact that they are both a self-consciousness, provoking both awe and outrage. Butler freezes the moment before this aggression is unleashed towards the other self-consciousness, establishing a touchpoint in her reading of Hegel which she is turn return to again and again, each time she reworks this touchpoint slightly differently. In SOD this self-consciousness is ‘taken up by the other self-consciousness’ in a moment that could be described as a self-loss on the part of the original self-consciousness. The subject undergoing this sense of loss is for Butler, an ek-static subject, a subject ‘beside itself’ or ‘outside itself’.
For our purposes here, she returns to her Hegelian theme in 1997 in PLP but this time in a very different fashion. Desire now doesn’t transparently lead one down the road of greater self-transparency, instead desire leads to one’s own subjection.
Heteronormativity leads to heteromelancholia. I’m not arguing that one morphs into the other, but that nevertheless, Butler emphasis on self-loss, takes a turn into a more subjective ‘interior’ psyche of the subject. It was here she would unleash in this later work, 2 important theses: Hetero-melancholy, and the ethical self-berating of the Unhappy Consciousness. For our purposes of our Hegelian theme in this chapter, we will take up the Butler’s reading of the Unhappy Consicousness. Nevertheless as will become apparent Butler’s turn to psychoanalysis and Foucault led to a development of a thesis that theorized the subject less as ek-static self-loss, and now as self-berated and subjected.
In her 1997 work here in PLP, Butler was to come into heavy criticism for her uptake of Freud, particularly her critique of Lacan. Butler changed her course from the punitivity of the self-berating subject to her post-2000 work on a subject with a different emphasis from her previous pre-2000 work. It is most significantly Butler’s emphasis on norms and normativity. Butler now distances is her empahsis on a punitive self-punishing subject that only comes into being via an accusation or accusatory interpellation.
Her Precarious LIfe and Frames of War, return her to her work on the ek-static subject, only this time self-loss is more robustly articulated within a normative frame, a scene of address and more emphasis is put on the work of the way in which a constitutive outside is ‘abjected’ in order to render a stable interior. This abject is not only held up for close theoretical scrutiny by Butler, but is attributed various concrete political identities, most notably, AIDS vicitms, Palestinians and Iraqi and Afghan civilians