Abstract
The paper argues that the meaning of subjectivity is controversial, even within psychoanalysis. While all schools of psychoanalysis agree that the unconscious creates a subjectivity that is divided, there is great disagreement over what divides the subject, particularly what divides it against itself. The paper examines two controversies that bear on the relation of subjectivity and subjection. The author argues that a psycho-social theory of subjectivity has to account for the effects of the social without succumbing to the reductionism of social determinism, and has to account for the idiosyncrasies of human subjectivity without removing subjectivity from its social and historical context. The author roots one relation between subjectivity, subjection, and resistance in what she calls “normative unconscious processes”: unconscious collusions with normative demands to split off and project such human attributes as dependency, emotion, and assertion. Subjects comply with such demands in order to be recognized as “properly” gendered, raced, classed, and sexed subjects, but relational repetition compulsions often express simultaneous resistance to and collusion with oppressive norms.
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Notes
Note that in mainstream psychoanalytic theories, neither historical nor cultural factors much matter in the constitution of what is essential to psychoanalytic subjectivity. Primary are oedipal issues (sexual difference and generational difference) and pre-oedipal issues (annihilation anxiety, separation, and individuation) that, to a greater or lesser degree, are figured as independent of environmental factors. Thus, much of what I will be talking about as constitutive of subjectivity would be considered in classical and other mainstream theories as either epiphenomena, as the accidents of fate, or as preconscious material.
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Layton, L. What Divides the Subject? Psychoanalytic Reflections on Subjectivity, Subjection and Resistance. Subjectivity 22, 60–72 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1057/sub.2008.3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/sub.2008.3