No. 63 (2022): Mayo-agosto
Articles

Melancholy, Vulnerability and “Political Promise”. Political Field and Psychic Field in J. Butler

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  • Jesús González Fisac
DOI: https://doi.org/10.21555/top.v63i0.1652

Published 2022-04-18

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How to Cite

González Fisac, J. (2022). Melancholy, Vulnerability and “Political Promise”. Political Field and Psychic Field in J. Butler. Tópicos, Revista De Filosofía, (63), 389–422. https://doi.org/10.21555/top.v63i0.1652

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Abstract

J. Butler has dealt with politics and the problem of social transformation since her early works. Her interest in these topics has been linked to the phenomenology of field (the field of language, of the body, or the political field itself), but her work has also been linked to psychoanalysis, with which she has had a fruitful dialogue (especially with Freud and Lacan). In this paper, I show, firstly, that a field is marked and receives its necessary mobility from the constitutive outside. Secondly, I show that Butler makes a “à la Freud” reading of the psyche which she interprets as a field traversed by the economy of melancholy. Melancholy is not a psychic phenomenon but a structure and a fundamental event of the psyche and its formation. This event inaugurates a field marked by the ambivalence between the loss of the Other and the interpellation open to the Other, and marked by vulnerability as well, since the activity of agency and the passivity of receptivity cannot be distinguished. This indistinguishability or ambivalence is thought by Butler to be the starting point for a different way of doing politics.

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