Category: foreclosure

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).