CCarvalho - Logic(s) of subjection. Butler's symptomatic reading of Hegel and Lacan on the symbolic (2008). (original) (raw)

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 Sittlichkeit 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 resistance 3 , 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.