As far as Judith Butler's argument on Foucault's notion of the body: I
assume you are refering to the passage in Gender Trouble where she does a
reading of F's comments on hermaphrodites. It seemed to me that Butler's
argument was quite simply unfair. She really based it on a single
essay by F. and did not extend her argument to F's major works.
In the"Psychic Life of Power" Butler makes a very different
argument against Foucault. I think that the earlier argument about F's
ahistorical conceptof the body is discreetly abandoned by Butler in favor of an argument
that really is at the heart of her own theoretical interests: to what
extentdo psychoanalytic models of sexual desire provide a means of
understanding resistence to normative heterosexuality.
In "The Psychic Life of Power"Butler reads D&P against HoS, v.1. She wants to
show that there is a contradiction between F's account of the subject as
being constituted within disciplinary power and his later discussion of
alternative sexualities developing from the very disciplinary regimes
which seek to control them. How is resistence possible from within a
disciplinary regime?
To answer this question, she goes back to Lacanian psychoanalysis
to reconsider ALthusser's notion of interpollation, which she argues gives
a better explanation of how resistence is formed in relationship to a
legal force, namely as a reaction to being called before the law.
Butler is certainly on to a problem in Foucault, one that
other psychoanalysts such as Joan Copjec have also noted: how can one
explain the existence of an interiorizedd subjectivity with its own moral
code. Foucault's account of disciplinary power in D&P is so
overwhelmingly determinist that there would seem to be no way of
explaining subjective feelings as anything but the direct effect of a
power regime. In other words, disciplinary power does not allow for or
acknowledge the possibility of a subject with autonomous feelings and a
moral conscience. Butler phrases this argument in terms of Foucault's
failure to explain "resistence" to power; Joan Copjec makes a similar
point also via a reading of Lacan, but she argues that Foucault's model
of disciplinary power would vitiate the autonomous moral conscience. To
the extent that resistence and a moral conscience are real, Butler and
Copjec are saying that Foucault has not fully accounted for subjectivity
and they both look to their readings of Lacanian psychoanalysis as an
alternative that makes up for Foucault's failings. And once they do that
they throw into question the F's denial of the repression model, and more.
The answer which F does not formulate fully, but then how could he
answer his later critics, is in devloping a more geneaological account of
disciplinary power as it acquires an history. Homosexuality as an
affirmative identity is an unintended effect of nineteenth-century
sexology. I think that f one thinks about discplinary power in more
historical terms then Butler's objections could be answered. That would
require more than further archival evidence, it would mean giving a
diachronic account of disciplinary power, i.e. a history of its changing
effects and its responses to those unintended developments.
Daniel Purdy
Columbia University