ABSTRACT
Throughout Butler’s work, she has maintained that the practices which constituted us as gendered subjects also provide the possibility of agency and resistance. In other words, she has tried to show that these practices are simultaneously constricting and enabling; or, as Moya Lloyd puts it, that ‘[g]ender is simultaneously a mechanism of constraint (a set of norms which define us as normal/abnormal) and a locus for productive activity’ (Lloyd 1999: 200). In The Psychic Life of Power, this ambivalence is developed in the context of a theory of subjection, in which social power and regulation are in operation in the formation of the psyche, but which also allows for the possibility of resistance. It aims to show that the very process of becoming an intelligible human being involves a process of subjection that carries within it the possibility for resistance and change, despite involving psychological structures of subjectivity. The Foucauldian point that the very power that subjects us is also the source of our resistance is thus read psychoanalytically. It is argued that the process of subjection involves the operations of power in the formation of the psyche to produce ‘passionate attachments’ to identity categories that cannot be simply disregarded, as it is through these that we come into being. Nevertheless, it is also argued that the basis of these passionate attachments – this psychic regulation – is social and historical, and therefore contingent. This allows the possibility for change and transformation. In demonstrating the role of the social in the formation of the psyche, Butler thus aims to further address the issue of resistance, agency and resignification in her account of performativity whilst simultaneously addressing the
problems of resistance that limit Lacanian and Foucauldian accounts of subject formation. She aims to theorize more effectively the Foucauldian claim that the power that produces us is not just external to us but part of us. It forms the basis of our existence and our possibilities even as it subjects us to its workings. In so doing, she is able to account for the intractability of identity categories without at the same time prohibiting the possibility of change: to render them ‘durable but not immutable’ as McNay puts it in another context.
