Changes

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:

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).