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1<br><br>
Butler's, as well as Lacan's, starting point is the old Leftist one -- how is it possible not only to resist effectively, but also to undermine and/or displace the existing socio-symbolic network - the Lacanian "big Other" - which predetermines the only space within which the subject can exist. Significantly, Butler identifies "subject" with the symbolic position occupied within this space, while she reserves the term "psyche" for the larger unity encompassing that in the individual which resists being included in the symbolic space.[2] Butler, of course, is well aware that the site of this resistance cannot be simply and directly identified as the unconscious; the existing order of Power is also supported by unconscious "passionate attachments," attachments publicly non-acknowledged by the subject:</font></p>
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The exemplary case of the unconscious "passionate attachments" which sustain Power is precisely the inherent reflective eroticization of the regulatory power-mechanisms and procedures themselves. In the performance of an obsessional ritual, one designated to keep at bay the illicit temptation, the ritual itself becomes the source of libidinal satisfaction. It is thus the "reflexivity" involved in the relationship between regulatory power and sexuality, the way the repressive regulatory procedures themselves get libidinally invested, that functions as a source of libidinal satisfaction. And it is this radical masochistic reflective turn which remains unaccounted for in the standard notion of the "internalization" of social norms into psychic prohibitions.
The second problem with the quick identification of the unconscious as the site of resistance is that, even if we concede that the unconscious is the site of resistance which forever prevents the smooth functioning of power mechanisms, that interpellation - the subject's recognition in his or her allotted symbolic place - is always ultimately incomplete, failed. "Does such resistance do anything," asks Butler, "to alter or expand the dominant injunctions or interpellations of subject formation?" (88). In short, she concludes that "this resistance establishes the incomplete character of any effort to produce a subject by disciplinary means, but it remains unable to rearticulate the dominant terms of productive power" (89).<br><br>
The first thing to take note of here is that Butler seems to conflate two radically opposed uses of the term "resistance." One is the socio-critical use - resistance to power, for instance - and the other the clinical use operative in psychoanalysis - the patient's resistance to acknowledge the unconscious truth of his symptoms, the meaning of his dreams, and so on. When Lacan determines resistance as "imaginary," he has thereby in mind the misrecognition of the symbolic network which determines us. On the other hand, for Lacan, radical rearticulation of the predominant symbolic order is altogether possible. This is what his notion of <i>point de capiton</i> - the "quilting point" or the master-signifier - is about. When a new point de capiton emerges, the socio-symbolic field is not only displaced, its very structuring principle changes. Here, one is thus tempted to turn around the opposition between Lacan and Foucault as elaborated by Butler. It is Foucault who insists on the immanence of the entire symbolic field by means of an act proper, a passage through "symbolic death." In short, it is Lacan who allows us to conceptualize the distinction between imaginary resistance -- false transgression which reasserts the symbolic status quo and even serves as a positive condition of its functioning - and the effective symbolic rearticulation via the intervention of the real of an act.<br><br>
Only at this level, assuming that we take into account the Lacanian notions of point de capiton and the act as real, does a meaningful dialogue with Butler become possible. Butler's matrix of social existence as well as Lacan's is that of a forced choice. In order to exist at all within the socio-symbolic space, one has to accept the fundamental alienation, the definition of one's existence in the terms of the "big Other." As she is quick to add, however, this should not constrain us to - what she perceives as - the Lacanian view according to which the symbolic order is a given which can only be effectively transgressed if the subject pays the price of psychic exclusion. So on the one hand we have the false imaginary resistance to the symbolic norm, and on the other, the psychotic breakdown, with the only "realistic option" being full acceptance of alienation in the symbolic order - the goal of the psychoanalytic treatment. Butler opposes to this Lacanian fixity of the symbolic the Hegelian dialectic of presupposing and positing. Not only is the symbolic order always-already presupposed as the sole milieu of the subject's social existence, but this order itself exists and is reproduced, only insofar as subjects recognize themselves in it and, via repeated performative gestures, again and again assume their places in it. This, of course, opens up the possibility of changing the symbolic contours of our socio-symbolic existence by way of its parodically displaced performative enactings. Therein resides the thrust of Butler's anti-Kantianism. She rejects the Lacanian symbolic a priori as a new version of the transcendental framework which fixes the coordinates of our existence in advance, leaving no space for the retroactive displacement of these presupposed conditions. So when in a key passage Butler asks the question:</font></p>
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The Lacanian answer to this is clear - "to desire something other than its continued 'social existence'" and thus to fall "into some kind of death," that is, to risk a gesture by means of which death is "courted or pursued," points precisely towards the way Lacan reconceptualized the Freudian death-drive as the elementary form of the ethical act. Note that the act, insofar as it is irreducible to a "speech act," relies for its performative power on the preestablished set of symbolic rules and/or norms.<br><br>
15. In a further elaboration, one should thus reread Lacan's matrix of the four discourses as three modes of coming to terms with the trauma of the analytic act. The master's semblance resides in the fact that he pretends to nominate and thus directly translate into the symbolic fidelity the dimension of the act. That is, the defining feature of the Master's gesture is to change the act into a new master-signifier. In contrast to the master, the hysteric maintains the ambiguous attitude of division towards the act, insisting on the simultaneous necessity and impossibility of its symbolization. In contrast to both of them, the perverse agent of the university discourse disavows that the re was the event of an act in the first place. By means of the chain of knowledge, he wants to reduce the consequences of the act to just another thing which can be explained away as part of the normal run of things.<br><br>
