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The Psychic Life of Power Theories in Subjection

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The Psychic Life of Power Theories in Subjection The Psychic Life of Power Theories in Subjection Judith Butler Stanford University Press Stanford, California Acknowledgments Stanford University Press This work was generously sponsored by a Humanities Re- Stanford, California search Fellowship from the University of California at Berke- © 1997 by the Board of Trustees of the ley. I am grateful to those friends and colleagues who gave Leland Stanford Junior University incisive readings of some of the chapters: Wendy Brown, Printed in the United States of America William Connolly, David Palumbo-Liu, Kaja Silverman, Anne cip data appear at the end of the book Norton, Denise Riley, and Hayden White, as well as the stu- dents who participated in "Social Subjects / Psychic States" at Berkeley. I thank Adam Phillips for his permission to reprint our exchange from Psychoanalytic Dialogues in this context. I also thank Helen Tartar for her meticulous, intelligent, and thoroughgoing editing, and Gayle Salamon for her assistance with the manuscript. Contents Introduction 1 1 Stubborn Attachment, Bodily Subjection Rereading Hegel on the Unhappy Consciousness 31 2 Circuits of Bad Conscience Nietzsche and Freud 63 3 Subjection, Resistance, Resignification Between Freud and Foucault 83 4 "Conscience Doth Make Subjects of Us All" Althusser's SuBjection io6 5 Melancholy Gender / Refused Identification 132 Keeping It Moving Commentary on Judith Butler, By Adam Phillips 151 Reply to Adam Phillips 16o 6 Psychic Inceptions Melancholy, AmBivalence, Rage 167 Notes 201 Index 217 The Psychic Life of Power Theories in Subjection Introduction We should try to grasp subjection in its material instance as a constitution of subjects. —Michel Foucault, "Two Lectures" The splitting of the subject, within which the self as present to itself is only one moment, and the charged reflexivity of that moment, is the point of purchase within the subject of its subjection. The profound and corporeal guilt with which the subject is invested as the febrile undertone of that self- consciousness, which turns out to know so little of itself, is decisive in securing the deep inner control, which has been called interpellation. —Francis Barker, The Tremulous Private Body: Essays on SuBjection Subjection . The act or fact of being subjected, as under a monarch or other sovereign or superior power; the state of being subject to, or under the dominion of another; hence gen. subordination. The condition of being subject, exposed, or liable to; liability.... Logic. The act of supplying asubjecttoa predicate. —Oxford English Dictionary s aformofpower,subJectionisparadoxical.Tobedomi- A nated by a power external to oneself is a familiar and agonizing form power takes. To find, however, that what "one" 2 Introduction Introduction 3 is, one's very formation as a subJect, is in some sense depen- project requires thinking the theory of power together with a dent upon that very power is Quite another. We are used to theory of the psyche, a task that has been eschewed by writers thinking of power as what presses on the subJect from the out- in both Foucauldian and psychoanalytic orthodoxies. Though side, as what subordinates, sets underneath, and relegates to it offers no promise of a grand synthesis, the present inQuiry a lower order. This is surely a fair description of part of what seeks to explore the provisional perspectives from which each power does. But if, following Foucault, we understand power theory illuminates the other. The project neither begins nor as forming the subJect as well, as providing the very condition ends with Freud and Foucault; the Question of subJection, of of its existence and the traJectory of its desire, then power is how the subJect is formed in subordination, preoccupies the not simply what we oppose but also, in a strong sense, what we section of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit that traces the slave's depend on for our existence and what we harbor and preserve approach to freedom and his disappointing fall into the "un- in the beings that we are. The customary model for under- happy consciousness." The master, who at first appears to standing this process goes as follows: power imposes itself on be "external" to the slave, reemerges as the slave's own con- us, and, weakened by its force, we come to internalize or ac- science. The unhappiness of the consciousness that emerges is cept its terms. What such an account fails to note, however, its own self-beratement, the effect of the transmutation of the is that the "we" who accept such terms are fundamentally master into a psychic reality. The self-mortifications that seek dependent on those terms for "our" existence. Are there not to redress the insistent corporeality of self-consciousness insti- discursive conditions for the articulation of any "we"? SubJec- tute bad conscience. This figure of consciousness turned back tion consists precisely in this fundamental dependency on a upon itself prefigures Nietzsche's account, in On the Genealogy discourse we never chose but that, paradoxically, initiates and of Morals, not only of how repression and regulation form the sustains our agency. overlapping phenomena of conscience and bad conscience, but "SubJection" signifies the process of becoming subordinated also of how the latter become essential to the formation, per- by power as well as the process of becoming a subJect. Whether sistence, and continuity of the subJect. In each case, power that by interpellation, in Althusser's sense, or by discursive pro- at first appears as external, pressed upon the subJect, pressing ductivity, in Foucault's, the subJect is initiated through a pri- the subJect into subordination, assumes a psychic form that mary submission to power. Although Foucault identifies the constitutes the subJect's self-identity. ambivalence in this formulation, he does not elaborate on the The form this power takes is relentlessly marked by a figure specific mechanisms of how the subJect is formed in submis- of turning, a turning back upon oneself or even a turning sion. Not only does the entire domain of the psyche remain on oneself. This figure operates as part of the explanation of largely unremarked in his theory, but power in this double how a subJect is produced, and so there is no subJect, strictly valence of subordinating and producing remains unexplored. speaking, who makes this turn. On the contrary, the turn ap- Thus, if submission is a condition of subJection, it makes sense pears to function as a tropological inauguration of the subJect, to ask: What is the psychic form that power takes? Such a a founding moment whose ontological status remains perma- 4 Introduction nently uncertain. Such a notion, then, appears difficult, if not Introduction 5 impossible, to incorporate into the account of subject forma- tion. What or who is said to turn, and what is the obJect of instance of this Quasi-fictive effort to give an account of how the social subJect is produced through linguistic means. Alt- such a turn? How is it that a subJect is wrought from such an husser's doctrine of interpellation clearly sets the stage for ontologically uncertain form of twisting? Perhaps with the ad- vent of this figure, we are no longer in the business of "giving Foucault's later views on the "discursive production of the subJect."Foucault,ofcourse,insiststhatthesubJectisnot"spo- an account of the formation of the subJect." We are, rather, ken" into existence and that the matrices of power and dis- confronted with the tropological presumption made by any such explanation, one that facilitates the explanation but also course that constitute the subJect are neither singular nor sov- ereign in their productive action. Yet Althusser and Foucault marks its limit. The moment we seek to determine how power agree that there is a founding subordination in the process of produces its subJect, how the subject takes in the power by which it is inaugurated, we seem to enter this tropological assujetissement. In Althusser's essay "Ideology and Ideologi- cal State Apparatuses," the subordination of the subJect takes quandary. We cannot presume a subJect who performs an in- place through language, as the effect of the authoritative voice ternalization if the formation of the subJect is in need of ex- planation. The figure to which we refer has not yet acQuired that hails the individual. In the infamous example that Althus- ser offers, a policeman hails a passerby on the street, and existence and is not part of a verifiable explanation, yet our the passerby turns and recognizes himself as the one who is reference continues to make a certain kind of sense. The para- hailed. In the exchange by which that recognition is proferred dox of subJection implies a paradox of referentiality: namely, and accepted, interpellation—the discursive production of the that we must refer to what does not yet exist. Through a figure social subJect—takes place. Significantly, Althusser does not that marks the suspension of our ontological commitments, we seek to account for how the subJect comes to be. That this offer a clue as to why that individual turns around, accepting the voice as being addressed to him or her, and accepting the figure is itself a "turn" is, rhetorically, performatively spec- tacular; "turn" translates the Greek sense of "trope." Thus the subordination and normalization effected by that voice. Why does this subject turn toward the voice of the law, and what is trope of the turn both indicates and exemplifies the tropologi- the effect of such a turn in inaugurating
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