On Speech, Race and Melancholia An Interview with Judith Butler

The subject is constituted in discourse, and I received several criticisms and queries about that: what does it mean to be constituted as the subject only by discourse? What is the mechanism of that constitution? What do we mean when we say constitution? So I think Bodies that Matter sought to understand constitution through the notion of materialization. But then I was in a bit of a bind because I felt that the predominant Foucauldian frame that I had been using didn't give me a precise enough account of what it meant for a subject to be constituted in discourse given that a subject is only partially constituted, or is sometimes constituted in ways that can't quite be anticipated: how do I talk about the failure of subject constitution? How do I talk about its tenuousness or vulnerability? How do I talk about its unpredictability? People also wanted concrete instances ± for me to give an example of what it meant ± so it seemed to me that although the Althusserian frame relies upon this verbal address, this being hailed by another, at least it produces the possibility of a subject not answering, of a subject being constituted along certain kinds of fault lines. Althusser's work gave me a scene, as it were, with which to start to ask the question: what does it mean to appropriate the terms by which one is hailed or the discourse in which one is constituted? And sometimes in Foucault it just seems too unilateral. In Discipline and Punish, perhaps one of the places where the theory of subject constitution is too unilateral, it's clearly too unnuanced. It's as if the prisoner is simply made, it's as if somehow the prisoner is constituted almost mechanistically. The central chapters there about the body strike me as problematic because they can't accommodate a theory of the psyche, and they can't accommodate the vulnerability or the unpredict- ability of subject constitution. There's not enough give in Discipline and Punish. So I suppose that's why I was recalled to the Althusserian scene, so that I might meditate a bit about when and where the discourse through which one is constituted fails to hit its mark.