Having accepted the reasonable proposition that subjects are formed through language, she makes her theoretical missteps when she tries to figure out how to confer power on marginalized subjects by imagining that they can control the surplus attending all utterances … relying continually on a belief that somehow, the excess attending signification can be eradicated. In this persistent gesture, Butler reveals that she does not understand the subject as itself a site of excess (107).
🙂 R.’s argument is thus: Butler like Foucault, claims that power is productive and produces resistance, but Butler is aware that Foucault theory of power doesn’t leave enough for the subject, that it is too productive in fact, that discourse only produces positivity and hence no room for contingency, as R. quotes Butler, “any effort of discursive interpellation or constitution is subject to failure, haunted by contingency, to the extent that discourse invariably fails to totalize the social field (Bodies That Matter 191-192)” (108). Rothenberg likes this last quote very much. For a brief shining moment, both seem to be on the same page. That is until …
Butler uses psychoanalysis to pry open Foucaultian immanence. As R. points out, for Butler, psychoanalysis is too ahistorical, “a charge she bases on her belief that psychoanalysis presents castration as a universal form of lack (Bodies That Matter 202 quoted in R). So, in order to benefit from the psychoanalytic model of subjectification, she proposes in Excitable Speech that subjects are formed by the installation of a lack that can be historicized. … She conceives of this lack …. in terms of exclusion, an exclusion that produces a realm of “unspeakability” as the condition of the emergence and sustenance of the subject proper, but the “contents” of which are determined historically” (108). Oh oh.
🙂 Rothenberg pounces on this last gesture by Butler. Remember, the title of R’s book is The Excessive Subject. My point being that R. doesn’t have much time for a theory that presents subject formation in terms of lack.