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, but her work has also been linked to psychoanalysis, with which she has had a fruitful dialogue. 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.