melancholia – Page 2

lloyd melancholia

Lloyd, Moya. Judith Butler: From Norms to Politics. Cambridge MA: Polity Press, 2007.

Mourning: takes place when an object (such as a loved one, an ideal or a country) is lost. In such cases, the libido (mental energy) that was once invested in that object gradually detaches from it and is cathected onto (invested in) another object. The subject thus comes to terms with its loss and is able to form a new emotional attachment —to fall in love for instance. At this point, ‘the ego becomes free and uninhibited again’ and the work of mourning is completed.

Melancholia: The individual in this case is unable to get over its loss in the usual way. Instead it incorporates the lost object into its ego. It identifies with it, taking on certain of its characteristics. As a consequence, ‘a new structure of identity’ is created in which certain qualities of the lost other are permanently internalized in the ego. Diana Fuss captures this process nicely when she notes that ‘by incorporating, the spectral remains of the dearly departed love-object, the subject vampiristically comes to life’. Where mourning is the ‘normal’ reaction to loss, melancholia is a pathological response (since the melancholic subject is unable to accept its loss).

“the character of the ego is a precipitate of abandoned object-cathexes and … it contains the history of those object-choices.” To rephrase, the ego is formed melancholically. It is an effect of its identifications. It is this idea that Butler takes over and applies to the question of gender identity.

When Butler talks about the gender identity being structured melancholically she writes that ‘the process of internalizing and sustaining lost loves is crucial to the formation of the ego “and its object-choice”‘ (Gender T. 74 cited in Lloyd 84). It is not only the ego that is formed melancholically, it is also the subject’s sexual orientation — their object choice. That is, whether they choose an object (person) of the opposite sex to or of the same sex as themselves.

According to Butler, when the child reaches the Oedipal phase, they have already been ‘subjected to prohibitions which “dispose” them in distinct sexual directions’ (GT 82, Lloyd 84). They have already acquired heterosexual desires, albeit incestuous ones.

The fact that at the resolution of the Oedipal phase the boy identifies with his father, following the logic of melancholia, must mean that he has lost his father as an object of desire and has not been able to let go of —or grieve— that loss. Ego formation, after all, requires the internalization of —or identification with— the lost object. Similarly the fact that the girl identifies ultimately with her mother must again mean that she has lost her as a love object and has been unable to grieve that loss.

In both cases the lost desire for the parent of the same sex is installed melancholically in the ego. Heterosexual desire is bought at the price of denying —or, in psychoanalytic language, disavowing or foreclosing (what we might think of as negating or repressing)— prior homosexual desire. Heterosexuality thus has a melancholic structure. (85)

When Freud tells the story of the Oedipus complex he narrates it in terms of the taboo against incest, a taboo which he, like Lévi-Strauss … saw as foundational to culture and society. When Butler re-tells the story, she does so in order to uncover what is hidden in Freud’s narrative: that the Oedipus complex relies upon a prior taboo against homosexuality.

The psychoanalytic story of desire, as told by Freud, is thus incomplete: it does not, perhaps cannot, tell of the loss of same-sex desire that exists prior to the Oedipal scene where the incestuous heterosexual love object is renounced and where the subject is initiated into both their sexual identity and the moral order (85).

lloyd oedipal

Lloyd, Moya. Judith Butler: From Norms to Politics. Cambridge MA: Polity Press, 2007.

According to Lévi-Strauss there is a universal law that regulates the exchange of women in all kinship systems: this is the incest taboo, which ensures that women are exchanged between clans of men not related by blood. The incest taboo is crucial in two ways

1. it generates a non-incestuous heterosexuality

2. the taboo represents the crucial step in the transition from nature to culture. It inaugurates society. … the taboo leads to compulsory heterosexuality. How?

It divides the universe of sexual choice into categories of permitted and prohibited sexual partners and it presupposes a prior less articulate taboo on homosexuality. Incest taboo = invariant transcultural symbolic law

Because Rubin believes all humans are sexually polymorphous, she adheres to an idea of ‘sexuality “before the law”‘ rather than as Butler would have it, sexuality as an effect of the law (81).

… it is clear that much of the conceptual apparatus Butler deploys in her own analysis of Lévi-Strauss, Freud and Lacan is borrowed from Rubin’s earlier text: her assumption of a prior prohibition on homosexuality, an understanding of heterosexuality as compulsory and a concern with the intractability of symbolic law (81).

In Freud’s estimation, all infants experience incestuous desires for their parents. How these desires are resolved determines not only the subject’s future sexual orientation but also how its ego and superego (conscience) develop.

Key to Freud’s account, according to Butler, is the idea of primary bisexuality. Freud assumes, that is, that all babies are born with both feminine and masculine dispositions… A masculine disposition, he suggests, is expressed in the child’s desire for its mother, while a feminine disposition is expressed in the child’s desire for its father. The sex of the child in question is irrelevant.

For Butler this can mean only one thing. Freud understands primary bisexuality heteronormatively: as ‘the coincidence of two heterosexual desires within a single psyche’ (Butler Gender Trouble 77 cited in Lloyd 83).

Why is Freud unable to imagine the possibility of pre-oedipal homosexuality? Butler’s supposition (echoing Rubin) is that the reason for this is that the Oedipus complex, and thus Freud’s theory of psycho-sexual development, presumes a prior prohibition on homosexuality.

In order to expose this prior prohibition, Butler set about demonstrating that far from masculinity and femininity being dispositions that naturally inhere in persons, they are, in fact, effects of identification.

Identification refers to the process whereby the individual acquires its identity, or aspects thereof, from someone (or something) else. One of the ways in which this occurs is through … introjection.

Introjection: is when the subject takes into its ego —into him or herself— objects from the outside world in order to preserve them. Introjection is a response to loss.

lloyd on butler psychic subjectivity

loyd, Moya. “Towards a cultural politics of vulnerability” Judith Butler’s Precarious Politics. eds. Terrell Carver and Samuel Chambers, New York: Routledge, 2008.

Butler’s articulation of a pychoanalytically informed theory of subjectivity. There are 3 elements to this theory.

1. But begins by considering primary human dependency. Her argument is very simple: in infancy all subjects develop a ‘passionate attachment’ to those on whom they depend for life: If ‘the child is to persist in a psychic and social sense’, Butler notes, “there must be dependency and the formation of attachment: there is no possibility of not loving, where love is bound up with the requirements for life’ (Butler Psychic 8). Out of a ‘desire to survive’ subjects are perpetually willing to submit to their own subordination.

2. She highlights the role of foreclosure in the formation of the subject, specifically the foreclosure of certain kinds of passionate attachment or ‘impossible’ loves. ‘If the subject is produced through foreclosure’, she notes, ‘then the subject is produced by a condition from which it is, by definition, separated and differentiated’. Far from being an autonomous subject, the psychic subject is thus a dependent subject, a subject that is produced in subordination and whose continued subordination is essential to its continued existence. While primary attachments are essential to the survival of the child, if the subject is to emerge fully then they must ultimately be disavowed. [Primary attachments are attachments that the subject ‘can never afford fully to see’] That is, the subject must disavow its dependency on the Other in order to become a subject (even though the impossible loves that it disavows continue to haunt it, threatening it with its own unravelling). And so, some aspects of who we ‘are’ are pre-conscious: they are both unknown and unknowable to us.

3. Finally Butler returns to the topic of melancholia. Here, here given her concern with the formation of conscience and guilt she deploys the idea to demonstrate how the subject’s capacity for reflexivity is an effect of the foreclosure and installation of the other within its ego (Lloyd, Norms 98)

It is at this point in her argument that Butler sets out to reveal just exactly how power impinges on psychic formation. Where Freudian theory focuses on the psychic, Foucauldian theory concentrates on the social or political, Butler’s aim is to weave the two together.

She wants to challenge the idea that the unconscious is unaffected by the power relations that structure society. Her goal is thus to advance a ‘critical account of psychic subjection in terms of the regulatory and productive effects of power.’ (psychic 19)

Butler has already shown in Gender Trouble and elsewhere how the subject depends ofr its existence on the operations of particular regulatory norms. Here interest in Psychic Life is to demonstrate how the subject internalizes these norms. This is where melancholia fits.

Melancholia is the way that the internal world of the psyche is produced; it determines both its interiority and exteriority and the boundary between social and psychic. According to Butler, it operates in this way because the psychic sphere is, in fact, organized according to the prevailing ‘norms of social regulation.’ (psychic 171, Lloyd Norms 100). Because it is configured by social norm, the topography of the psyche is, thus, configured according to the operations of power. (Lloyd Norms 100)

stephen white interpellation

White, Stephen K. Sustaining Affirmation: The Strengths of Weak Ontology in Political Theory. New Jersey: Princeton UP, 2000.

Don’t just think in terms of isolated scenes. Imagine rther a lifetime of being hailed into discourse, beginning with the doctor who announces: “It’s a girl!” Keeping in mind the earlier analysis of gender as performative, Butler would have us reconstrue this familiar speech act as the beginning of a lifelong chain of “girling” utterances that enact certain scripts as normal and others as abnormal. With this expansion of the temporal horizon and application of the notion of performativity, the relatively sovereign subjectivity of the passerby begins to dissolve. It is replaced by the image of a subjectiviy produced or constituted by the insistent, interpellating “demand” of “discursive power”. (82)

The policeman who hails the person in the street is enabled to make that call through the force of reiterated convention. This is one of the speech acts that police perform, and the temporality of the act exceeds the time of the utterance in question. In a sense, the police cite the convention of hailing, participate in an utterance that is indifferent to the one who speaks it. The act “works” in part because of the citational dimension of the speech act, the historicity of convention that exceeds and enables the moment of its enunciation. (Butler Excite 33 cited in White 82)

Thus it is the reiterating function of language that is primarily carrying and reproducing dominant norms and crating the effect of sovereign, disengaged subjects by the continual process of calling them into social existence. We are, in short,“interpellated kinds of beings” continually being called into linguistic life, being “given over to social terms that are never fully [our] own.”

Butler’s ontology is one in which the basic “things” are persistent forces or processes. We must be careful not to imagine these as having qualities of subjectivy. Thus, power is not an anonymous subject that initiates discrete acts of constitution or construction. There is rather only “a process of reiteration by which both ‘subjects’ and ‘acts’ come to appear at all. There is no power that acts, only a reiterated acting that is power in its persistence. (83)

But none of this … implies a notion that subjexts are dopes of discursive power. Reiterating is always potentially open to resignifying in ways that may contest the smooth reproduction of the dominant terms of discourse. Butler has described this subversive potential as “power’s own possibility of being reworked.”

What is not yet clear in Butler’s account is why or how this imperfection mightever be taken advantage of intentionally by an actor (83).

Thinking power together with a theory of the psyche

Why does the passerby turn to answer the policeman? Power “hails,” but why does one submit to its call?

The violence of the prohibition, the frustrated desire, self-beratement, self-denial, desire turns back upon itself in the form of a will in the service of the regulating regime, that is of terms not one’s own. There is an investment of erotic libidinal energy in this turning back, in this prohibitive activity of the emergent entity of conscience. The conscience can never be an adequate site for thinking critical agency, since it is, in its very constitution, in complicity with the violent appropriation of desire by power.

Campbell critique sexual d Ziarek Outside

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).

Foreclosure: Freud never uses the term “foreclosure”, he used “repression” and “disavowal” to describe the ego’s refusal of an incompatible idea together with its affect. Instead she uses Lacan’s use of foreclosure as “A foundational psychic exclusion that cannot be represented within the subject’s symbolic economy”. This deployment of Lacan in the name of Freud allows Butler to evade certain theoretical difficulties posed by Lacanian theory to her conception of foreclosure.

Butler’s account implies that the prohibition against the homosexual object is pre-oedipal, because it is prior to the constitution of the subject. This prohibition, however, CANNOT be pre-oedipal. If it is pre-oedipal, then it must be prior to sexual difference. If the prohibition is prior to sexual difference, then the object that is prohibited cannot be a homosexual object, because a homosexual object is defined by sexual difference. The definition of a same-sex object relies upon a notion of sexual difference because such a concept would be meaningless without an already established distinction between the sexes. In order for Butler’s prohibition to operate against desire for same-sex objects, those objects must already be defined by sexual difference and, so, the prohibition described by Butler must be an oedipal prohibition in the register of sexual difference. The failure to address this problem of sexual difference entails that there is a lack of coherence in this theory of the formation of heterosexual identity (89).

Ziarek, Ewa Ponowska. “From Euthanasia to the Other of Reason: Performativity and the Deconstruction of Sexual Difference” in Derrida and Feminism. eds. Feder, Ellen K. et al. New York: Routledge. 1997, 115-140.

In Butler’s interpretation, what is thus foreclosed from the symbolic is not the prediscursive “empty” kernel but those possibilities of signification that threaten the purity and permanence of the law instituting sexual difference. With such a concept of the outside, Butler articulates the main task of her inquiry iin a very diffferent way from Žižek’s. She does not intend to affirm the exclusion of the Real as a guarantee of social contingency but questions the stability and ahistorical character of this exclusion.

“How might those ostensibly constitutive exclusions be rendered less permanent, more dynamic? How might the excluded return, not as psychosis or the figure of the psychotic within politics, but as that which has been rendered mute, foreclosed from the domain of political signification?” (Butler Bodies 189).

By rethinking the historicity and contingency of the law as the sedimentation of subjective approximations through time, Butler can argue that the mechanisms of exclusion are also, … historical workings of specific modalities of discourse and power. … the “constitutive outside” is an inevitable effect of any identity claims, including the claims of queer identities, but the forms of these exclusions are neither invariant nor ahistorical. Undercutting the political neutrality and ahistorical permanence of “the constitutive outside,” Butler’s emphasis on the historicity of exclusion removes the threat of psychosis associated with it and opens the borders of intelligibility to political contestation (Ziarek 130).

Butler’s relationship to Hegel

Moya Lloyd. Judith Butler: From Norms to Politics Polity 2007.

While thinkers prior to Hegel had examined the nature of desire, few, as Allan Megill notes, had thought that there might be ‘a constitutive relation between desire and subjectivity”, as Hegel did, and it is this constitutive relation that both interested his French critics and continues to interest Butler. Hegel’s Phenomenology, as stated, examines the way in which desire and self-consciousness emerge side by side (15).

ek-static subject, a subject outside itself, or to put it differently, a subject that is not self-identical. … it is the idea of ek-static subjectivity, derived, however loosely, from Hegel, continues to inspire Butler’s work to date, although the form it takes is one increasingly informed, in large part by psychoanalysis. For this reason, far from the comic subject of desire she attributes to Hegel, Butler’s subject is a melancholic figure (16).

… the subject is an ek-static subject; one that is always outside —or other to— itself. It is this understanding of the subject and its relation to the other … that underpins, amongst other things, Butler’s examination of the differential values placed on disparate lives and deaths; her treatment of what counts as a liveable life, her exploration of the constitutive role of mourning in the production of the psyche; and her discussion of the precariousness of all life (18).

heteronormativity: institutions, modes of understanding, norms and discourss that treat heterosexuality as naural to humanity

melancholy

(Salih 2002. p 131-3).
Like Gender Trouble, Bodies That Matter, and Excitable Speech, The Psychic Life of Power argues that prohibition and repression are constitutive of identity, and Butler specifies that what is being repressed is not just desire in general but homosexual desire (or homosexual cathexis) in particular. As in Gender Trouble, Butler asserts that gender is not a given but a process, masculinity and femininity are ‘accomplishments’, while heterosexuality is an ‘achievement’ (PLP: 132, 135). Now Butler asks how these processes, accomplishments and achievements come about, at what cost to the subject and to other subjects who may be oppressed and negated in the process.

In order to achieve a coherent heterosexual identity something has to be given up and, as before, what is relinquished is the primary homosexual cathexis that characterizes the pre-oedipal id (see Chapter 2, pp. 54– 6). Prohibition, repudiation and loss form the basis of heterosexual ego formation, and both heterosexuals and homosexuals live in a heterosexual culture of gender melancholy where the loss of primary homosexual attachments may not be grieved (PLP: 139). Grief is not just a metaphor in Psychic and Butler draws out the parallels between Freud’s descriptions of psychic loss in ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ and a contemporary heterosexual culture in which lost homosexual attachments may only be mourned with difficulty (PLP: 138). Butler regards this cultural inability as symptomatic of the lack of a public forum and language with which to mourn ‘the seemingly endless number of deaths’ from ‘the ravages of AIDS’ (PLP: 138). Although this is a poignant argument, the elision of metaphorical and real mourning might be taken to imply that the heterosexual subject is aware of what she or he has ‘lost’ but is unable or unwilling to acknowledge and declare it. All the same, Butler is developing one of Gender Trouble’s most powerful contentions – that heterosexuality emerges from a repudiated homosexuality that is preserved in the very structure of that repudiation. Abjected homosexual cathexes do not simply disappear, and both Excitable Speech and earlier chapters of The Psychic Life of Power have prepared the ground for Butler’s assertion that repudiation and prohibition actually require homosexuality in order to constitute themselves. Far from obliterating homosexuality, it is sustained by the very structures that prohibit it. ‘[H]omosexuality is not abolished but preserved, though preserved precisely in the prohibition on homosexuality’, Butler insists (PLP: 142). [R]enunciation requires the very homosexuality that it condemns, not as its external object, but as its own most treasured source of sustenance. The act of renouncing homosexuality thus paradoxically strengthens homosexuality, but it strengthens homosexuality precisely as the power of renunciation. (PLP: 143) Butler’s situating of homosexuality at the heart of a homophobic and ‘homosexually panicked’ culture is of obvious political significance, as what is considered abject and unacceptable is posited as the source of heterosexual identity (although of course Butler does not formulate the idea in terms of ‘sources’). Gender identity is ‘acquired’ through the repudiation of homosexual attachments, and the abjected same-sex object of desire is installed in the ego as a melancholic identification, so that I can only be a woman to the extent that I have desired a woman, and I can only be a man to the extent that I have desired a man. Because heterosexual identity is founded on prohibited desire for members of the same sex, to desire a member of the same sex as an adult is to ‘panic’ gender or, in other words, to place an apparently coherent and stable heterosexual identity at risk by revealing that it is in fact far from stable or coherent (PLP: 136). The heterosexual subject’s homosexual desire is sublimated rather than destroyed, while disavowal and repudiation structure the ‘performance’ of gender. Performative gender was discussed in Chapter 3, and in Psychic Butler seems to conflate performativity, performance and psychotherapy as she argues that what is ‘acted out’ in these ‘gender performances’ is the unresolved grief of repudiated homosexuality (PLP: 146). As in Gender Trouble and Bodies That Matter, Butler focuses on ‘cross-gendered identification’, or drag, as a paradigm for thinking about homosexuality, since drag is an allegory of heterosexual melancholy in which the (male) drag performer takes on the feminine gender he has repudiated as a possible object of love. Extending this paradigm to gender identity in general, Butler asserts that ‘the “truest” lesbian melancholic is the strictly straight woman, and the “truest” gay male melancholic is the strictly straight man’ (PLP: 146– 7). In other words, heightened or exaggerated ‘straight’ identity is symptomatic of repudiated homosexual desire in a culture of heterosexual melancholy, where repudiated desires ‘return’ as what Butler calls ‘hyperbolic identifications’ (PLP: 147). The homosexual melancholic may be characterized by a different kind of loss, this time not a psychic one, but the real loss of people who have died from Aids and who remain ungrieved in a heterosexist, anti-gay culture that does not permit the mourning of these deaths. Homosexual identities may also be founded on a refused heterosexual cathexis that resembles heterosexual melancholia, but, although Butler asserts the political promise of what she calls ‘gay melancholia’ (PLP: 147), she also argues that refused heterosexual cathexis may leave heterosexuality intact by missing the opportunity to expose its weaknesses and fissures (PLP: 148). Butler accordingly affirms the political potential of acknowledging melancholy and loss by giving up all claims to ontological coherence and embracing, rather than repudiating, sexed and gendered ‘alterity’

(Salih 2002. p 133-4)
AFFIRMATIVE MELANCHOLIA

Previous chapters have emphasized the importance of melancholia to Butler’s theories, and the idea is similarly central to Psychic, where it is argued that melancholia initiates representation as well as constituting a means of representation in itself. Without loss and the resulting melancholia there would be no need for the metaphorical description of the ego in psychoanalytic theory, since it is melancholia that both necessitates and facilitates that description. Moreover, melancholia and, for that matter, the ego, are tropes that are rendered in topographical terms – in other words, the metaphors used by psychoanalysts to represent the ego and melancholia are spatial. The most prominent among these tropes is that of the the ego turning against itself, and Butler argues that the turn precipitated by loss and the ensuing melancholia are constitutive of an an ego that does not exist prior to the turn (PLP: 171).

It is loss that necessitates the description of the psychic ‘landscape’, since, if the ego were not ‘impaired’ in this way, there would be no need for psychoanalytic theory and its metaphorical renditions of psychic life.

Melancholia initiates psychic life and, by exceeding the power structures in which subjects are formed, it presents the possibility for subversion and agency. At least part of this ‘excess’ is ontological, since the melancholic subject is neither self-identical nor singular. In ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ the ego takes itself as an object and directs its violent anger against itself, an action that has characterized the accounts of the ego Butler has discussed. Now Butler argues that melancholia is cultivated by the state and internalized by citizens who are not aware of their relationship to an authority that conceals itself. And yet, even though it would seem that melancholia is an effect of power, there are ways of deploying the subject’s self-violence and constitutive melancholia to subversive ends.

‘Bhabha argues that melancholia is not a form of passivity, but a form of revolt that takes place through repetition and metonymy’, Butler states, referring to the postcolonial critic Homi Bhabha. Following Bhabha’s insight she asserts that aggressive melancholia can be ‘marshalled’ in the service of mourning and of life by killing off the critical agency or superego and turning the ego’s ‘turned back’ aggression outwards (PLP: 190– 1). There are forms of melancholia that do not involve the violent self-beratement described by Hegel, Nietzsche and so on, and Butler argues that acknowledging the trace of loss that inaugurates the subject’s emergence will lead to its psychic survival.

Following Derrida, Butler insists that recognizing one’s constitutive melancholia will involve accepting one’s Otherness, since melancholia is a process in which the other is installed as an identification in the ego (PLP: 195– 6). The notion of ontological autonomy must therefore be given up as a fiction. ‘To claim life . . . is to contest the righteous psyche, not by an act of will, but by submission to a sociality and linguistic life that makes such acts possible, one that exceeds the bounds of the ego and its “autonomy”’, writes Butler; ‘to persist in one’s being means to be given over from the start to social terms that are never fully one’s own’ (PLP: 197).

This echoes Butler’s contention in Excitable Speech that the subject is constituted by interpellatives it did not choose, and in the concluding pages of Psychic Butler reiterates her point that interpellation works by failing, since it never fully constitutes the subject it ‘hails’. All the same, the subject’s relationship to interpellation and power remains ambivalent, since the ‘call’ of the law brings the subject into being by subjecting it. The ambivalent Self marked by loss is tenuous at best, but agency lies in giving up any claim to coherence or self-identity by submitting to interpellation and subversively misrecognizing the terms by which we are hailed. Such refusals and misrecognitions take place within the power structures that subject and control us, and this might lead us to question how far submission is a means of agency and whether it is possible to recognize it as such. Butler has returned to these questions in recent discussions of mourning, melancholia and the ontological risks of self-incoherence in her two lectures, ‘What Is Critique?’ and Antigone’s Claim, along with the co-authored book Contingency, Hegemony, Universality.

SUMMARY
In The Psychic Life of Power Butler deploys psychoanalytic, Foucauldian and Althusserian theoretical paradigms (among others) to discuss the subject’s relation to power. The subject is passionately attached to the law that both subjects and constitutes it, and it exists in an ambivalent relation to power structures that it desires rather than not desiring at all. Butler criticizes Foucault for leaving the psyche out of his accounts of power, the soul and the body, and she asserts that there is potential for subversive excess in a psyche that is never fully determined by the laws that subject it. Furthermore, the interpellative ‘calls’ of the law described by Althusser need not be sovereign or effective, and Butler discerns further potential for subversion in the failure of these performatives. If it is acknowledged, melancholia itself may be the occasion for affirmation and subversion and, although Butler once again characterizes sexed/gendered identities as arising from primary loss or foreclosure, she argues that acknowledging the trace of the Other is the only way the subject will become anything at all. Agency lies in giving up any claim to self coherence, while risking one’s ontological status may constitute a means of successful revolt (Salih 2002. p 135).

(Salih 2002. p 131-4).

Melancholia part 1 of 2

Salih, Sara. Judith Butler. Routledge, 2002. p 53

In ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ Freud distinguishes between mourning, which is the reaction to a real loss, usually the death of a loved one, and melancholia. Since the melancholic does not always know what he or she has lost and is in fact sometimes unaware of having ‘lost’ anything at all, Freud regards it as a pathological condition resembling depression. He argues that, instead of ‘getting over’ and accepting the loss, the melancholic response is to take the lost object into the ego by identifying with it.

Identification is a concept that is central to Freud’s theories of the structuring of the mind into ego, superego and id and, as you might expect, denotes the process and effects of identifying with others, often as a response to loss.

Introjection is the process whereby the subject takes objects from the outside world into itself and preserves them in the ego, and is closely related to identification. In fact, identification takes place through introjection as an object is metaphorically ‘installed’ in the ego, and Butler will argue that introjection is not the only way in which identification takes place.

In The Ego and the Id Freud no longer regards melancholia as a pathology or mental illness, but he now describes all ego formation as a melancholic structure. Freud claims that in the process of ego-formation a child’s primary object-cathexes are transformed into an identification, a formulation that is not as complicated as it might sound once you have deciphered the Freudian terminology. Initially the infant desires one or other of its parents (these are its primary object-cathexes), but the taboo against incest means that these desires have to be given up. Like the melancholic who takes the lost object into heror himself and thereby preserves it, the ego introjects the lost object (the desired parent) and preserves it as an identification. ‘[A]n object which was lost has been set up again inside the ego – that is . . . an object-cathexis has been replaced by an identification’, Freud writes (1923: 367). The ego is therefore a repository of all the desires it has had to give up, or as Freud puts it, ‘the character of the ego is a precipitate of abandoned object-cathexes and . . . it contains the history of those object-choices’ (1923: 368).

Salih, Sara. Judith Butler.
Florence, KY, USA: Routledge, 2002. p 53.

Mourning: the response to a real loss.

Melancholia: the response to an imagined loss. Object-cathexis: the desire for an object; in this case, one’s mother or father.

Identification: the process by which one comes to identify with someone or something; in this context, the object that has been lost. Identifications take place through introjection or incorporation.

Introjection: the process whereby objects from the outside world are taken into and preserved in the ego.

Incorporation: Dispositions: the process whereby objects are preserved on the surface of the body (Freud does not discuss incorporation in ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ or The Ego and the Id). whether, from birth onwards, you desire members of the same or the opposite sex.

Salih, Sara. Judith Butler.Routledge, 2002. p 54.

If your primary desire is for your mother, you will introject the figure of your mother and establish an identification with her; conversely, if your primary desire is for your father, you will substitute your impermissible object-cathexis for an identification with him. Freud is not sure what determines the primary object-cathexis – i.e. why the infant desires one parent rather than the other – but he gets around this problem by attributing the direction of the infant’s desire to what he calls dispositions.

By ‘disposition’ he appears to mean the infant’s innate desire for a member of the opposite or the same sex, but Freud expresses some hesitation on this subject in his description of the development of the ‘little girl’. Freud writes that, after relinquishing her father as a primary love-object, the girl ‘will bring her masculinity into prominence and identify with her father (that is, with the object that has been lost) instead of with her mother. This will clearly depend on whether the masculinity in her disposition – whatever that may consist in – is strong enough [i.e. to identify with her father]’ (1923: 372). It would seem that object-cathexes are the result of primary dispositions, i.e. whether one is innately ‘masculine’ or ‘feminine’ to start with, and, as you might expect by now, Butler refutes Freud’s somewhat tentative postulation of innate sexual ‘dispositions’.

Salih, Sara. Judith Butler.
Florence, KY, USA: Routledge, 2002. p 54.

Melancholic Heterosexuality

Now let us look at what Butler does with Freud. Butler is interested in the ‘dispositions’ Freud glosses over somewhat hastily, but, rather than accepting that they are innate, she wants to know how ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ dispositions can be traced to an identification, and where those identifications take place. In fact, Butler asserts that dispositions are the effects of identifications with the parent of the same/ opposite sex rather than the causes of those identifications; in other words, desire does not come first. ‘What are these primary dispositions on which Freud himself apparently founders?’ she asks, noting the ‘hyphenated doubt’ (‘– whatever that may consist in –’) with which he interrupts his assertion (GT: 60). While Freud describes ego formation as a melancholic structure because the infant is forced to give up its desire for its parents in response to the taboo against incest, Butler argues that the taboo against incest is preceded by the taboo against homosexuality (although curiously, she does not specify her source here) (GT: 63). This seems to imply that the child’s primary desire is always for the parent of the same sex – after all, why do you need a taboo if there is nothing to prohibit? – and although Butler argues that the law produces the desire it subsequently prohibits, she is still unspecific as to why one desire is produced and repressed before another. ‘Although Freud does not explicitly argue in its favour, it would appear that the taboo against homosexuality must precede the heterosexual incest taboo’, writes Butler (GT: 64) and, although she reiterates this assertion several times in this section, the qualifiers she introduces here (‘Although Freud’, ‘it would appear’) resemble the ‘hyphenated doubt’ that she notes in Freud’s description of dispositions. All the same, the assertion that the taboo against homosexuality precedes the incest taboo is crucial to Butler’s argument that gender and sex identities are formed in response to prohibition. Rather than regarding gender or sex as innate, Butler asserts that ‘gender identity appears primarily to be the internalization of a prohibition that proves to be formative of identity’ (GT: 63). Since the ‘prohibition’ to which Butler refers is the taboo against homosexuality, it is clear that for Butler all gender identity is founded on a primary, forbidden homosexual cathexis or desire. If melancholia is the response to real or imagined loss, and if heterosexual gender identity is formed on the basis of the primary loss of the same-sexed object of desire, it follows that heterosexual gender identity is melancholic. Butler’s Foucauldian appropriation of Freud’s theories of mourning, melancholia and ego formation and her argument that heterosexuality is founded on primary homosexual desire constitute one of Gender Trouble’s most important achievements and, since the theory of melancholic gender identities and identifications underscores so much of her subsequent work, I will quote Butler at length here by way of summary:

If feminine and masculine dispositions are the result of the effective internalization of [the taboo against homosexuality], and if the melancholic answer to the loss of the same-sexed object is to incorporate and, indeed, to become that object through the construction of the ego-ideal, then gender identity appears primarily to be the internalization of a prohibition that proves to be formative of identity.

Further, this identity is constructed and maintained by the consistent application of this taboo, not only in the stylization of the body in compliance with discrete categories of sex but in the production and ‘disposition’ of sexual desire . . . dispositions are not the primary sexual facts of the psyche, but produced effects of a law imposed by culture and by the complicitous and transvaluating acts of the ego ideal (Judith Butler. Gender Trouble 63-4, cited in Salih, 56).

melancholy heterosexuality

Salih, Sara. Judith Butler. Routledge, 2002. p 56.

MELANCHOLY HETEROSEXUALITY

The case study of the ‘little girl’ could be summarized as follows:

‘little girl’s’ desire for her mother → incest taboo → ‘little girl’s’ melancholia→identification with mother through incorporation → ‘little girl’s’ disavowed homosexual desire → femininity→melancholic heterosexuality

MELANCHOLY GENDER

The loss of a love object results in melancholy and an identification with that object. According to Butler, the taboo against homosexuality precedes the taboo against incest, which means that homosexual desire is prohibited from the outset. Whereas it is possible to grieve the consequences of the incest taboo in a heterosexual culture, the taboo against homosexuality cannot be grieved and so the response to the taboo against homosexuality is melancholia rather than mourning (GT: 69). The melancholic identification with same-sexed parent is incorporated, i.e. preserved on the surface of the body, so that, far from being ‘natural’ or a given, like gender, sex is a process, something one assumes through identification and incorporation. The melancholy heterosexual subject will ‘bear’ her or his forbidden same-sex desire on the surface of the body, so that physical ‘ultra-femininity’ and ‘ultra-masculinity’ denote the subject’s relinquished desire for an object of the same sex. This means that you ‘are’ what you have desired, and that the desires you have been prevented from expressing are symptomatized on the body and in your behaviour. All sexuality and gender identities are melancholic, but Butler points out that, since there is not the same sanction against acknowledging heterosexual desire in a heterosexual culture, homosexual and heterosexual melancholia are not identical (Salih, Sara. 2002. p 58).

Salih, Sara. Judith Butler. Routledge, 2002. p 56.

INCORPORATION

By referring to ‘the stylization of the body’ and ‘the production and “disposition” of sexual desire’ in the section I have just quoted, Butler introduces the idea that sex, as much as gender, is a result of the taboo against homosexuality. So far she has argued that the taboo against homosexuality triggers the melancholic response described by Freud in ‘Mourning and Melancholia’, in other words, an identification with the parent of the same sex. Butler talks of this identification in terms of ‘internalization’, implying that, as in Freud’s descriptions, the lost object is introjected and set up in the ego as an identification . Now, departing from Freud, who does not talk about incorporation in ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ or The Ego and the Id, Butler asks where melancholic identification takes place, and she concludes that identifications are incorporated, i.e. preserved on the surface of the body (GT: 67).

Here Butler follows Abraham and Torok, who argue that, whereas mourning leads to the introjection of the lost object, melancholia results in its incorporation. ‘When we consider gender identity as a melancholic structure, it makes sense to choose “incorporation” as the manner by which that identification is accomplished’, Butler writes; ‘[G]ender identity would be established through a refusal of loss that encrypts itself in the body . . . incorporation literalizes the loss on or in the body and so appears as the facticity of the body, the means by which the body comes to bear “sex” as its literal truth’ (GT: 68). It is not just the ego that is the receptacle for object-cathexes that have had to be abandoned, but the body itself is a sort of ‘tomb’ (note the word ‘encrypts’) in which, however, these lost desires are far from ‘buried’ since they are preserved on the surface of the body and thus constitute one’s sex and gender identities. Butler formulates the ontological equation in the following way: ‘If the heterosexual denial of homosexuality results in melancholia and if melancholia operates through incorporation, then the disavowed homosexual love is preserved through the cultivation of an oppositionally defined gender identity’ (GT: 69). Or, more bluntly put, you are what you have desired (and are no longer permitted to desire). All stable gender identities are ‘melancholic’, founded on a prohibited primary desire that is written on the body and, as Butler asserts, rigid gender boundaries conceal the loss of an original, unacknowledged and unresolved love (GT: 63). It is not just straight people who suffer from melancholy gender (if ‘suffer’ is the right verb: Butler calls melancholy heterosexuality a ‘syndrome’, which does seem to hint that there is something pathological about it (GT: 71)). Butler accepts that ‘a homosexual for whom heterosexual desire is unthinkable’ will maintain his or her heterosexual desire through the melancholic incorporation of that desire, but she points out that, since there is not the same cultural sanction against acknowledging heterosexuality, heterosexual and homosexual melancholia are not really equivalent (GT: 70). Like gender, the body conceals its genealogy and presents itself as a ‘natural fact’ or a given, whereas, by arguing that relinquished desire is ‘encrypted’ on the body, Butler asserts that the body is the effect of desire rather than its cause. The body is an imagined structure which is the consequence or the product of desire: ‘the phantasmatic nature of desire reveals the body not as its ground or cause, but as its occasion and its object’, she writes; ‘The strategy of desire is in part the transfiguration of the desiring body itself’ (GT: 71). The idea that desire ‘transfigures’ the body is complex, but for the purposes of this discussion it is enough to note that Butler is not positing a body that is stable, fixed and ‘merely matter’, but one that is constructed and contoured by discourse and the law. Butler returns to the question of the body in the third chapter of Gender Trouble, ‘Subversive Bodily Acts’, where she considers both sex and gender as ‘enactments’ that operate performatively to establish the appearance of bodily fixity. If both gender and sex are ‘enactments’ rather than givens, then it will be possible to enact them in unexpected, potentially subversive ways. Before she goes on to discuss performativity and parody, Butler considers the subversive potential of the law.

gender

Sara Salih. Judith ButlerRoutledge 2002.

What Butler means is that gender is an act or a sequence of acts that is always and inevitably occurring, since it is impossible to exist as a social agent outside the terms of gender (GT: 5 cited in Salih 47).

Butler argues that sex and gender are discursively constructed and that there is no such position of implied freedom beyond discourse. Culturally constructed sexuality cannot be repudiated, so that the subject is left with the question of how to acknowledge and ‘do’ the construction it is already in (GT: 31). Gender Trouble will describe how genders and sexes are currently ‘done’ within the heterosexual matrix, while elaborating on how it is possible to ‘do’ those constructions differently (Salih, 48).

‘gender is not a noun[but it] proves to be performative, that is, constituting the identity it is purported to be. In this sense, gender is always a doing, though not a doing by a subject who might be said to preexist the deed’ (GT: 25 Salih, 50).

Reading structuralist and psychoanalytic accounts of gender, identity and the law through a Foucauldian lens Butler

gives what she calls ‘a discursive account of the cultural production of gender’; in other words, she works from the premise that gender is a discursive construct, something that is produced, and not a ‘natural fact’;
and characterizes the law as multiple, proliferating and potentially self-subverting as opposed to the singular, prohibitive and rigidly repressive law posited by other theorists (for example, Lacan) (Salih, Sara. Judith Butler: 51).

‘There is no gender identity behind the expressions of gender; that identity is performatively constituted by the very “expressions” that are said to be its results’ (GT: 25 cited in Salih 63).

‘That the gendered body is performative suggests that it has no ontological status apart from the various acts which constitute its reality’, she writes (GT: 136; my emphasis).

Once again we return to the notion that there is no doer behind the deed, no volitional agent that knowingly ‘does’ its gender, since the gendered body is inseparable from the acts that constitute it. All the same, in the account of parody and drag that follows this description it does at times sound as though there is an actor or a ‘doer’ behind the deed, and Butler later admits that in Gender Trouble she ‘waffled’ between describing gender in terms of linguistic performativity and characterizing it as straightforward theatre. Her theories are clarified in Bodies That Matter where Butler emphasizes the Derridean and Austinian underpinnings of performativity that are as yet only implicit in Gender Trouble (Salih. 2002. p 65).

Gender does not happen once and for all when we are born, but is a sequence of repeated acts that harden into the appearance of something that’s been there all along. If gender is ‘a regulated process of repetition’ taking place in language, then it will be possible to repeat one’s gender differently, as drag artists do (and you might also recall my wardrobe analogy – the ripped clothes and the sequins representing my attempts to ‘do’ my gender in subversive and unexpected ways). As I argued previously, you cannot go out and acquire a whole new gender wardrobe for yourself, since, as Butler puts it, ‘[t]here is only a taking up of the tools where they lie, where the very “taking up” is enabled by the tool lying there’ (GT: 145). So you have to make do with the ‘tools’, or in my example, the ‘clothes’ that you already have, radically modifying them in ways which will reveal the ‘unnatural’ nature of gender. There are two problems with this formulation: one is that the manner of taking up the tool will be determined as well as enabled by the tool itself – in other words, subversion and agency are conditioned, if not determined, by discourses that cannot be evaded. This leads to the second problem, which is that, if subversion itself is conditioned and constrained by discourse, then how can we tell that it is subversion at all? What is the difference between subversive parody and the sort of ‘ordinary’ parody that Butler claims everyone is unwittingly engaged in anyway. All gender is parodic, but Butler warns that ‘[p]arody by itself is not subversive’ and she poses the important question as to which performances effect the various destabilizations of gender and sex she describes, and where those performances take place (GT: 139). There are some forms of drag that are definitely not subversive, but serve only to reinforce existing heterosexual power structures – in Bodies, Butler cites Dustin Hoffman’s performance in Tootsie as an example of what she calls ‘high het entertainment’ (see Chapter 3, this volume), and we might also add the more recent film Mrs Doubtfire in which Robin Williams gives a cross-dressed performance as a nanny. Neither of these drag performances are subversive, since they serve to reinforce existing distinctions between ‘male’ and ‘female’, ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’, ‘gay’ and ‘straight’.

Butler’s claim on the penultimate page of Gender Trouble that ‘[t]he task is not whether to repeat, but how to repeat, or, indeed to repeat and, through a radical proliferation of gender, to displace the very gender norms that enable the repetition itself’ (GT: 148) presents a similar problem: she has already asserted that to describe identity as an effect is not to imply that identity is ‘fatally determined’ or ‘fully artificial and arbitrary’, and yet at times it sounds as though the subject she describes is in fact trapped within a discourse it has no power to evade or to alter. In which case, ‘how to repeat’ will already be determined in advance, and what looks like agency is merely yet another effect of the law disguised as something different. All the same, this is certainly not a view Butler expresses, and she seems optimistic about the possibilities of denaturalizing, proliferating and unfixing identities in order to reveal the constructed nature of heterosexuality. A proliferation of identities will reveal the ontological possibilities that are currently restricted by foundationalist models of identity (i.e. those theories which assume that identity is simply there and fixed and final). This is not, then, ‘the death of the subject’, or if it is, it is the theoretical death of an old, fixed subject, and the birth of a new, constructed one characterized by subversive possibility and agency. ‘Construction is not opposed to agency; it is the necessary scene of agency’, Butler affirms (GT: 147; see also CF: 15), and this leads her to refute another assumption popular among critics who are hostile to so-called ‘postmodern’ formulations of identity: ‘[t]he deconstruction of identity is not the deconstruction of politics; rather, it establishes as political the very terms through which identity is articulated’ (GT: 148) (Salih.2002. p 67).

Gender Trouble calls the category of the subject into question as Butler engages in a genealogical critique that analyzes the conditions of the subject’s emergence within discourse. Butler deploys psychoanalytic, Foucauldian and feminist theories in her discussions of homosexuality and heterosexuality and their mutual construction within the law. Heterosexual identities are constructed in relation to their abjected homosexual ‘Other’, but melancholic heterosexuals are haunted by the trace of this ‘Other’ which is never finally or fully abjected. This means that identities are by no means as straight, straightforward or singular as they appear and may be subversively worked against the grain in order to reveal the unstable, resignifiable nature of all gender identities. Some of these subversive practices are outlined in Gender Trouble and are analyzed further in her next book, Bodies That Matter (Salih 2002. p 71)

Butler Interview 2000

From “Changing the Subject”, J. Butler interview that originally appeared in JAC 20:4 (2000), pp. 731-65, reprinted in The Judith Butler Reader ed. Sara Salih. Blackwell 2003. pp. 325-356.

Question: In The Psychic Life of Power, you try to open a space for agency that avoids the liberal humanist concept of self and that finds in subordination and subjection the very conditions for agency. Would you explain this apparent paradox for readers not yet familiar with your work?

Butler: […] When Lacan came along, for instance, and said that the subject is produced on the condition of a foreclosure, he meant, quite clearly, that there would always be a lack of self-understanding for any subject; that there would be no way to recover one’s origins or to understand oneself fully; that one would be, to the extent that one is a subject, always at a distance from oneself, from one’s origin, from one’s history; that some part of that origin, some part of that history, some part of that sexuality would always be at a radical distance. And it would have to be, because the foreclosure of the past, and the foreclosure of whatever we’re talking about when we talk about what is prior to foreclosure, is the condition of the formation of the subject itself. So, I come into being on the condition that I am radically unknowing about my origins, and that unknowingness is the condition of my coming into being—and it afflicts me. And if I seek to undo that, I also lose myself as a subject; I become undone, and I become psychotic as a result.

A formulation like that surely limits our sense of self-knowing, and it also means that when we do things or when we act intentionally, we are always in some sense motivated by an unconscious that is not fully available to us. I can say, “I will this; I do this; I want this,” but it may be that the effects of my doing are quite different from what I intend, and it’s at that moment that I realize that I am also driven by something that is prior to and separate from this conscious and intentional “I.”

In some ways, that was great for a lot of people because they thought, “Oh, look, we no longer have the mastery of the ego; we no longer believe that the self is supreme or sovereign. The self is in its origin split. The self is always to some extent unknowing. Its action is always governed by aims that exceed its intentions.” So there seemed to be an important limiting of the notion of the ego, the notion of individualism, the notion of a subject who was master of his—usually his—destiny. And instead we started to see that the subject might be subject to things other than itself: to drives, to an unconscious, to effects of a language. The latter was very important to Lacan: the subject is born into a network of language and uses language but is also used by it; it speaks language,but language speaks it. Lacanian thought involved a kind of humility and de-centering of the subject that many people prized because it seemed also to release the subject from the hold of its own mastery and to give it over to a world of desire and language that was bigger than itself. It gets connected to others in a very profound way through that de-centering.

Of course, the critique of this notion emerged on political grounds, and it questioned whether we haven’t undone agency altogether. Can I ever say that I will do X and Y and truly do them and keep my word and be effective in the world and have my signature attached to my deed? I think that I have always been a little bit caught between an American political context and a French intellectual one, and I’ve sought to negotiate the relation between them.

I would oppose the notion that my agency is nothing but a mockery of agency. I don’t go that far. And I also don’t think that the foreclosures that produce the subject are fixed in time in the way that most Lacanians do. They really understand foreclosure as a kind of founding moment. My sense is that it is always the case that the subject is produced through certain kinds of foreclosure-certain things become impossible for it; certain things become irrecoverable-and that this makes for the possibility of a temporarily coherent subject who can act. But I also want to say that its action can very often take up the foreclosure itself; it can renew the meaning and the effect of foreclosure.

For instance, many people are inaugurated as subjects through the foreclosure of homosexuality; when homosexuality returns as a possibility, it returns precisely as the possibility of the unraveling of the subject itself: “I would not be I if I were a homosexual. I don’t know who I would be. I would be undone by that possibility. Therefore, I cannot come in close proximity to that which threatens to undo me fundamentally.” Miscegenation is another moment-it’s when you suddenly realize that a white subject assumes that its whiteness is absolutely essential to its capacity to be a subject at all: “If I must be in this kind of proximity to a person of color, I will become undone in some radical way.” We see forms of segregation and phobic forms of organizing social reality that keep the fiction of those subjects intact. Now, I think it’s possible sometimes to undergo an undoing, to submit to an undoing by virtue of what spectrally threatens the subject, in order to reinstate the subject on a new and different ground.

What have I done? Well, I’ve taken the psychoanalytic notion of foreclosure, and I’ve made it specifically social. Also, instead of seeing that notion as a founding act, I see it as a temporally renewable structure-and as temporally renewable, subject to a logic of iteration, which produces the possibility of its alteration. So, I both render social and temporalize the Lacanian doctrine of foreclosure in a way that most Lacanians don’t like —not all, but most. I am also trying to say that while we are constituted socially in limited ways and through certain kinds of limitations, exclusions and foreclosures, we are not constituted for all time in that way; it is possible to undergo an alteration of the subject that permits new possibilities that would have been thought psychotic or “too dangerous” in an earlier phase of life.

So, in answer to the question “How is it that subordination and subjection are the very conditions for agency?” the short answer is that

I am clearly born into a world in which certain limitations become the possibility of my subjecthood, but those limitations are not there as structurally static features of my self. They are subject to a renewal, and I perform (mainly unconsciously or implicitly) that renewal in the repeated acts of my person. Even though my agency is conditioned by those limitations, my agency can also thematize and alter those limitations to some degree. This doesn’t mean that I will get over limitation — there is always a limitation; there is always going to be a foreclosure of some kind or another — but I think that the whole scene has to be understood as more dynamic than it generally is.

conscience Nietzsche foreclose

Freud and Nietzsche offer differing accounts of subject formation that rely on the productivity of the norm. Both account for the fabrication of conscience as the effect of an internalized prohibition (thereby establishing “prohibition” as not only privative but productive).

In Freud and Nietzsche, a prohibition on action or expression is said to turn “the drive” back on itself, fabricating an internal sphere, the condition for self-inspection and reflexivity. The drive turning back on itself becomes the precipitating condition of subject formation, a primary longing in recoil that is traced in Hegel’s view of the unhappy consciousness as well. Whether the doubling back upon itself is performed by primary longings, desire, or derives, it produces in each instance a psychic habit of self-beratement, one that is consolidated over time as conscience.

Conscience is the means by which a subject becomes an object for itself, reflecting on itself, establishing itself as reflective and reflexive. The “I” is not simply one who thinks about him- or herself; it is defined by this capacity for reflective self-relation or reflexivity. For Nietzsche reflexivity is a consequence of conscience; self-knowing follows from self-punishment. (Thus one never “knows” oneself prior to the recoil of desire in question.)

In order to curb desire, one makes of oneself an object for reflection; in the course of producing one’s own alterity, one becomes established as a reflexive being, one who can take oneself as an object. Reflexivity becomes the means by which desire is regularly transmuted into the circuit of self-reflection. The doubling back of desire that culminates in reflexivity produces, however, another order of desire: the desire for that very circuit, for reflexivity and, ultimately, for subjection. 22

Foreclosed Desire

The foreclosure of homosexuality appears to be foundational to a certain heterosexual version of the subject. 23

Freud distinguishes between repression and foreclosure, suggesting that a repressed desire might once have lived apart from its prohibition, but that foreclosed desire is rigorously barred, constituting the subject through a certain kind of preemptive loss. Elsewhere I have suggested [See chap. 5 of Psychic Life] that the foreclosure of homosexuality appears to be foundational to a certain heterosexual version of the subject. The formula “I have never loved” someone of similar gender and “I have never lost” any such person predicates the “I” on the “never-never” of that love and loss. Indeed, the ontological accomplishment of heterosexual “being” is traced to this double negation, which forms its constitutive melancholia, an emphatic and irreversible loss that forms the tenuous basis of that “being.”

Significantly Freud identifies heightened conscience and self-beratement as one sign of melancholia, the condition of uncompleted grief. 23

The foreclosure of certain forms of love suggests that the melancholia that grounds the subject (and hence always threatens to unsettle and disrupt that ground) signals an incomplete and irresolvable grief. Unowned and incomplete, melancholia is the limit to the subject’s sense of pouvoir, its sense of what it can accomplish and, in that sense, its power. Melancholia rifts the subject, marking a limit to what it can accommodate. Because the subject does not, cannot, reflect on that loss, that loss marks the limit of reflexivity, that which exceeds ( and conditions) its circuitry. Understood as foreclosure, that loss inaugurates the subject and threatens it with dissolution (23).