Logic(s) of subjection: Butler’s symptomatic reading of Hegel and Lacan on the symbolic

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to present you the way by which, in the construction of her theory of gender and subjection, Judith Butler maintained as crucial references of “critical support”, the works of Hegel and J. Lacan and their respective placements of Sittlichkeit2 and symbolic. We must acknowledge first that in Butler’s work the predominant effort is mainly concerned with an attempt to plea against a universal model of subjection or resistance3, throughout her different books she never ceases to affirm that any logic of subjection and emancipation, in order to avoid the risk of misappropriation, must be conceived as historical and culturally variable. However, I sustain that there is a certain sense in which we can talk about logic (in the singular) in Butler’s work; such meaning is to be found related to the experience of melancholia. In this experience we can locate the origin of the trouble consisting loosely on the discontinuity and contingent coupling between the imaginary (in which we can circumscribe the relation of oneself with its own body) and the level of social interaction (functioning according to symbolic efficacy) which entails the inevitability of gender ascriptions. Before proceed I must prevent the reader -given its relevance to the understanding of individuation in Hegel and Lacan- that in this paper I will not address with the required attention, a topic that despite some controversy in academic debates, constituted a groundbreaking reading of classical tragedy and its conception of the feminine. I’m referring to Butler’s critique of the indicative interpretations of Sophocles’ play Antigone by both Hegel and Lacan. In the following section I begin with a brief excursus over the presences of both authors in some of Butler’s main theses concerning ontogenesis and gender ascription. Although circumscribed to Butler’s work, this trail will display some theoretical affinities between the German philosopher and the French regenerator of psychoanalysis.