Precarious Attachments: A Critical Reading of Judith Butler’s The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection (1997)

Abstract

Grounded in a close reading of Judith Butler’s The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection (1997), this essay offers a critical intervention into her notion of “passionate attachment” and the a-priori, ontological assumptions that underwrite it. Instead of treating an infant’s relation to its earliest objects of attachment as empirically demonstrable, Butler provides little explicit warrant for this premise, thereby introducing a latent transcendental tension into the theory. The later discussion of “melancholy,” furthermore, does not so much extend the logic of attachment as expose a generative structure of negation that sits uneasily alongside the affirmative logic of attachment. By tracing the double movement and turning-points of attachment and melancholy in subject formation, I clarify the subtle moments within Butler’s argument and explore critical pathways for re-thinking agency inside the triadic structure of power–attachment–melancholy/anger.