Campbell, Kirsten. “The Plague of the Subject: Subjects, Politics, and the Power of Psychic Life” in Butler Matters: Judith Butler’s Impact on Feminist and Queer Studies. eds. Sönser Breen, Margaret and Warren J. Blumenfeld. Hampshire: Ashgate Publishing Ltd. 2005, (81-94).
– operation of power and the formation of subjectivity
– a theory of subjection requires a theory of the psyche
– the psychic formation of subjectivity
Butler ties the psychoanalytic concept of foreclosure to ‘the Foucauldian notion of a regulatory ideal’, hence linking the psychoanalytic account of the psyche to Foucault’s theory of the regulatory workings of power (Psychic 25) (83).
– Heterosexual identity is thus constituted through a repudiation of homosexual desire and hence through the irresolvable loss o the homosexual object. That ‘ungrieved and ungrievable loss’ produces the melancholia of heterosexual identity (Psychic 138) (84).
– Because heterosexual identity disavows homosexual attachment, it cannot be acknowledged and hence cannot be named and so cannot be mourned.
– Instead of claiming that there is one repressive and normative ‘law’ as in psychoanalysis, Butler understands the normative constraints upon psychic production as an effect of networks of regulatory norms. These normative and regulating discourses produce the subject and generate desire (86).
Psychoanalysis provides a supplementary theory of the subject, which addresses a gap in Foucault’s work concerning a theory of the formation of subjectivity. Butler does not provide a psychoanalytic reading of Foucault that challenges, disrupts, or contests that theory. Rather, Butler seeks to address what she perceives as a ‘missing’ dimension to Foucault’s work — a theory of the constitution of the subject — by supplementing Foucault with a psychoanalytic theory of the subject (86).