Butler, Judith. The Psychic Life of Power. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1997.
According to the logic of conscience, which fully constrains Althusser, the subject’s existence cannot be linguistically guaranteed without passionate attachment to the law. This complicity at once conditions and limits the viability of a critical interrogation of the law. One cannot criticize too far the terms by which one’s existence is secured.
But if the discursive possibilities for existence exceed the reprimand voiced by the law, would that not lessen the need to confirm one’s guilt and embark on a path of conscientiousness as a way to gain a purchase on identity? What are the conditions under which our very sense of linguistic survival depends upon our willingness to turn back upon ourselves, that is, in which attaining recognizable being requires self-negation, requires existing as a self-negating being in order to attain and preserve a status as “being” at all?
In a Nietzschean vein, such a slave morality may be predicted upon the sober calculation that it is better to “be” enslaved in such a way than not to “be” at all. But the terms that constrain the option to being versus not being “call for” another kind of response. Under what condition does a law monopolize the terms of existence in so thorough a way? Or is this a theological fantasy of the law?
Is there a possibility of being elsewhere or otherwise, without denying our complicity in the law that we oppose? Such a possibility would require a different kind of turn, one that, enabled by the law, turns away from the law, resisting its lure of identity, an agency that outruns and counters the conditions of its emergence. Such a turn demands a willingness not to be — a critical desubjectivation —in order to expose the law as less powerful than it seems. What forms might linguistic survival take in this desubjectivized domain. How would one know one’s existence? Through what terms would it be recognized and recognizable?
How are we to understand the desire to be as a constitutive desire? How is such a desire exploited not only by a law in the singular, but by laws of various kinds such that we yield to subordination in order to maintain some sense of social “being”? (129-130)