ABSTRACT
In this study, we articulate a debate between Butler, Foucault, and Laplanche to think the constitution of the subject through central categories used by these thinkers: gender, sexuality, and the sexual. First, we develop the notion of libidinal games of power, in that power games only sustain themselves with a libidinal subjective support. Then, after introducing Butler’s and Laplanche’s theories, we sought to open the way for a Laplanchean re-reading of Butler’s theory of gender performativity. Thus, we approximate performativity, as the citational repetition of a norm that has no ontological status, to the Laplanchean concepts of translational codes and enigmatic messages. As the background of this debate, we conceive the repressed truth of normative arrangements of gender as the sexual, which defies the attempts to crystalize, in a clear and distinct way, the traditional binary man-woman. From the point of view of the subject’s constitution, we conclude by pointing the possibility of thinking about less-deathly and less-rigid treatments for the drive.
Keywords:
Gender; sexuality; unconscious; performativity