The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection.

Hartle, Ann ; GUNN, ALBERT E.

BUTLER, Judith. The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997. 218 pp. Cloth, $39.50; paper, $14.95--This book is an attempt to bring together the theory of power and a theory of the psyche, especially, but not exclusively, the theories of Foucault and Freud. According to both Foucault and Althusser, the subject comes into being through submission to power. Yet Foucault does not address the question of the psychic form that power takes. Butler seeks to explore the perspectives from which these two theories illuminate each other. Later in the Introduction she formulates her task as twofold: to consider both "how the formation of the subject involves the regulatory formation of the psyche" (including how the discourse of power can be joined with the discourse of psychoanalysis) and "how we might make such a conception of the subject work as a notion of political agency in postliberatory times" (p. 18).

Chapter 1 provides a rereading of the section on the unhappy consciousness from Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit. Butler finds there a "reliance on a dialectical reversal by which a bodily experience, broadly construed, comes under the censor of the law only to reemerge as the sustaining affect of that law" (p. 58). This is the same kind of reliance on dialectical reversal that one finds in Freud. Chapter 2 deals with the idea of "bad conscience" in Nietzsche and Freud. Repeated self-beratement forms what comes to be called conscience. A passionate attachment to subjection is necessary for the formation of the subject. Bad conscience is, for Nietzsche, a kind of self-persecution. From Freud we learn that social regulation is complicit in the formation of the psyche. In this chapter we also learn that the logical circularity of theories of subject formation--that the subject is presupposed before it is formed--is not an insurmountable problem because, in both Freud and Nietzsche, the relationship of reflexivity is only "figured" and "this figure makes no ontological claim" (p. 69).

In Chapter 3 Butler moves toward a psychoanalytic criticism of Foucault on the grounds that a psychoanalytic account of the formative effects of prohibition is necessary for an understanding of how one can become the principle of one's own subjection. The question that she poses here concerns how we are to understand the disciplinary cultivation of an attachment to subjection. Chapter 4 deals with Althusser's theory of interpellation which posits a scene in which the subject emerges in response to being hailed by a police officer, that is, through an appropriation of guilt. Much of the discussion in this chapter focuses on the example of religious authority which provides recognition of the subject only in terms of condemnation. Butler considers the inadequacies of the interpellation theory that are pointed to by Dolar and Agamben. Dolar suggests that love might be what is missing from Althusser's theory. Agamben leads Butler to speculate that "being" may be "the potentiality that remains unexhausted by any particular interpellation" (p. 131).

Chapter 5, "Melancholy Gender/Refused Identification," is the most important chapter. Butler wants to do two things here. First, she wants "to explain the sense in which a melancholic identification is central to the process whereby the ego assumes a gendered character." Second, she wants "to explore how this analysis of the melancholic formation of gender sheds light on the predicament of living within a culture which can mourn the loss of homosexual attachment only with great difficulty" (pp. 132-3). Heterosexual identity is formed on the basis of the rejection of homosexuality. That is the loss which gives rise to melancholy. Thus, homosexual identity is always primary. Masculine gender is formed by the refusal to grieve the masculine as a possibility of love; feminine gender is formed by the exclusion of the feminine as a possible object of love, an exclusion preserved through heightened femininity. This analysis of gender formation leads to the remarkable conclusion that "the `truest' lesbian melancholic is the strictly straight woman, and the `truest' gay male melancholic is the strictly straight man" (pp. 146-7).

Chapter 5 is followed by a response by Adam Phillips, described by Butler as a clinician and cultural theorist of gender. Phillips finds Butler's notion of gender as performative "exhilarating" (p. 153). There are only two sexes, but many possible gender identities. Everyone is psychically bisexual, and heterosexual hostility to homosexuals is based on envy. After replying to Phillips's commentary, Butler takes up the topic of "Melancholy, Ambivalence, Rage" in the sixth and final chapter. Melancholia is defined as a process in which an object is lost but the attachment to it is not broken. "Thus, the ego absorbs both love and rage against the object" (p. 179). The loss of the original homosexual object cannot be declared publicly. This causes rage, generates ambivalence, and prompts public rituals of self-beratement. "The process of forming the subject is a process of rendering the terrorizing power of the state invisible--and effective--as the ideality of conscience" (p. 191).

The underlying thesis of this book is the superiority of homosexuality through the argument that homosexuality is the primordial human condition, that heterosexuals become such by rejecting their homosexuality, and that all heterosexual opposition to homosexuality is based on fear and envy. No other kind of love than sexual love is discussed. There is great deal of emphasis on the roles of guilt, self-beratement, and rage. Yet there is no openness to the possibility that guilt may be appropriate and rage unjustified. Unfortunately, this book does not get beyond self-justification to genuine self-examination.

Ann Hartle, Emory University