{"id":1798,"date":"2009-01-30T18:12:04","date_gmt":"2009-01-30T23:12:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/?p=1798"},"modified":"2009-05-27T10:16:42","modified_gmt":"2009-05-27T15:16:42","slug":"resistance-psyche","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/2009\/01\/30\/resistance-psyche\/","title":{"rendered":"Resistance psyche"},"content":{"rendered":"

This line of causation is important, since, if the subject were merely the effect of power, it would be hard to see how it could subvert existing power structures. Butler insists on the subject\u2019s agency as \u2018the assumption of a purpose unintended by power, one that could not have been derived logically or historically, that operates in a relation of contingency and reversal to the power that makes it possible, to which it nevertheless belongs\u2019<\/strong> (PLP: 15). The subject\u2019s relationship to power is ambivalent: it depends on power for its existence, and yet it also wields power in unexpected, potentially subversive ways. We will return to ambivalence and agency in due course (Salih 2002. p 121).<\/p>\n

The \u2018possibility of resistance\u2019 is crucial to Butler\u2019s account of the subject, and she asks how Foucault can account for the psychic resistance to power if the psyche\/soul as he formulates it is no more than an imprisoning effect. Conversely, by training a Foucauldian lens on psychoanalytic theory, Butler raises the question as to whether psychic resistance is an effect of power, a discursive production rather than a means of undermining power. Resistance takes place within discourse or the law, but what Butler calls a \u2018psychic remainder\u2019 \u2013 the element of the psyche that is \u2018left over\u2019, so to speak, when discursive operations have done their work \u2013 signifies the limits of normalization even while it is also clear that the unconscious does not escape the power relations by which it is structured. Butler also raises the question of what she calls \u2018the problem of bodies in Foucault\u2019. If the soul is the prison of the body as Foucault claims it is, then does this mean that a pre-existing body is acted upon by disciplinary structures? In her early article, \u2018Foucault and the Paradox of Bodily Inscriptions\u2019, Butler sets out the following \u2018paradox\u2019 in Foucault\u2019s theorizations of bodies and discourses: although Foucault asserts that bodies are discursively constructed, his descriptions of the mechanisms of legal inscription seem to presuppose that they pre-exist the law (FPBI: 603). Departing from (or perhaps developing) this paradox in Psychic, Butler argues that body and soul are discursive formations that emerge simultaneously through the sublimation of body into soul. \u2018Sublimation\u2019 is a psychoanalytic term describing the transformation or diversion of sexual drives into \u2018cultural\u2019 or \u2018moral\u2019 activities, and Butler uses it to describe the process whereby the body is subordinated and partly destroyed as what she calls \u2018the dissociated Self\u2019 emerges. (This definition of sublimation is taken from Wright 1992: 416\u2013 17.) However, Butler argues that the sublimation of body into soul or psyche leaves behind a \u2018bodily remainder\u2019, which exceeds the processes of normalization and survives as what Butler calls \u2018a kind of constitutive loss\u2019 (PLP: 92). \u2018The body is not a site on which a construction takes place\u2019, Butler argues; \u2018it is a destruction on the occasion of which a subject is formed\u2019 (PLP: 92). Once again we and ourselves in the realm of Butlerian paradox, but this is an elaboration of the paradox that is central to Psychic: the subject comes into being when her body is acted upon and destroyed (presumably by discourse?), which means that this is a productive destruction or, perhaps, a sublation or Aufhebung, since both the body and the psyche are simultaneously formed and destroyed within discursive structures. The contrast between psychoanalytic and Foucauldian formulations of the subject should be clear: whereas in the former the psyche and possibly also the body, are sites of excess and possible resistance, for Foucault all resistance takes place within the terms of the law \u2013 indeed, resistance is an effect of the law. \u2018[R]esistance appears as the effect of power\u2019, Butler writes, paraphrasing Foucault, \u2018as a part of power, its self-subversion\u2019 (PLP: 93). Even so, within the Foucauldian model of myriad and pervasive power structures, the law may be subversively reiterated and repeated in order to destabilize existing norms, and Butler asks how and in what direction it is possible to work the power relations by which subjects are worked (PLP: 100). Since the Foucauldian subject is always in the process of construction, these processes are vulnerable to repetition, and, by implication, subversion, yet Butler notes the risk of renormalization within this model of identity, and she wonders how resistance may be derived from discourse itself (PLP: 93, 94). Once again reading Foucauldian theory through a psychoanalytic lens, Butler argues that, whereas Foucault claims that psychoanalysis sees the law as separate from desire, there can be no desire without the law that produces and sustains it. We have returned to the Freudian notion of libidinally-invested law and a prohibition that is in itself a form of desire, so that, rather than claiming that the unconscious is located outside power structures, Butler argues that power itself possesses an unconscious that provides the conditions for radical reiteration. It is because the injurious terms of the law by which subjects are socially constituted are vulnerable to repetition and reiteration that subjects accept and occupy these terms.<\/strong> \u2018Called by an injurious name, I come into social being and because I have a certain inevitable attachment to my existence, because a certain narcissism takes hold of any term that confers existence, I am led to embrace the terms that injure me because they constitute me socially\u2019, Butler asserts (PLP: 104). The operations of name-calling, or interpellation, and the passionate pursuit of the law complement Butler\u2019s Foucauldian and psychoanalytic formulations, and they will be considered in the next section (Salih 2002. p 126-8).<\/p>\n

whereas Butler argues that power simultaneously acts on and activates the subject by naming it. \u2018To the extent that naming is an address, there is an addressee prior to the address\u2019, Butler argues, \u2018but given that the address is a name which creates what it names, there appears to be no \u201cPeter\u201d without the name \u201cPeter\u201d \u2019 (PLP: 111). Again, this might sound paradoxical, but in fact Butler\u2019s formulation is structurally identical to her previous reversals of cause and effect in Gender Trouble, Bodies That Matter and Excitable Speech where, as you will recall, there is no doer behind the deed but the \u2018doing\u2019 itself is everything<\/strong>. As in her previous discussions of interpellation, Butler casts doubt on who or what exactly is interpellated by a law that confers social identity in subjection, and she also questions the performative efficacy of the law. The call of the law is not a divine performative, since there are ways of turning around that indicate what Butler calls \u2018a willingness not to be \u2013 a critical desubjectivation \u2013 in order to expose the law as less powerful than it seems\u2019 (PLP: 130). Anticipating her essay, \u2018What Is Critique?\u2019,<\/p>\n

which also insists on the subversive potential of giving up the claim to a coherent identity<\/strong>, Butler asks how it is possible to understand the desire to be as a constitutive desire, and how laws exploit subjects that allow themselves to be subordinated in order to take up their positions in society. Rather than obediently responding to the terms by which one is interpellated, a more ethical and subversive mode of being is, paradoxically, failing to be by not recognizing oneself in the call of the law (PLP: 131).<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The subject cannot \u2018be\u2019 in any coherent sense anyway, since we know from Butler\u2019s previous accounts that it is haunted by its abjected and socially unacceptable desires. Indeed, like Gender Trouble<\/span> and Bodies That Matter<\/span>, Psychic<\/span> continues to insist on the melancholia of gendered and sexed identities that will always and inevitably exceed the terms by which they are socially constituted (Salih 2002. p 130).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This line of causation is important, since, if the subject were merely the effect of power, it would be hard to see how it could subvert existing power structures. Butler insists on the subject\u2019s agency as \u2018the assumption of a purpose unintended by power, one that could not have been derived logically or historically, that … Continue reading “Resistance psyche”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[83,78,32,89,97,90,15],"tags":[109],"class_list":["post-1798","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-agency","category-butler","category-foucault","category-power","category-psyche","category-resistance","category-subjectivity","tag-whoa"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1798","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1798"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1798\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3339,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1798\/revisions\/3339"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1798"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1798"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1798"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}