Gender trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity

establishment suggests strong parallels, if not an ultimate identification,
with the analysand that she describes in the article. Jacqueline Rose, in Feminine Sexuality, eds. Mitchell and Rose, p. 85.
27. Jacqueline Rose, “Introduction-II” in Feminine Sexuality, eds. Mitchell and
Rose, p. 44.
28. Ibid, p. 55.
29. Rose criticizes the work of Moustapha Safouan in particular for failing to understand the incommensurability of the symbolic and the real. See his La sexualité féminine dans la doctrine freudienne (Paris: Éditions de
Seuil, 1976). I am indebted to Elizabeth Weed for discussing the anti- developmental impetus in Lacan with me. See Friedrich Nietzsche, First Essay in The Genealogy of Morals, trans.
Walter Kaufmann (New York Vintage, 1969), for his analysis of slave- morality. Here as elsewhere in his writing, Nietzsche argues that God is created by the will-to-power as a self-debasing act and that the recovery of the will-to-power from this construct of self-subjection is possible through a reclaiming of the very creative powers that produced the thought of God and, paradoxically, of human powerlessness. Foucault’s
Discipline and Punish is clearly based on On the Genealogy of Morals, most clearly the Second Essay as well as Nietzsche’s Daybreak. His distinction between productive and juridical power is also clearly rooted in
Nietzsche’s analysis of the self-subjection of the will. In Foucault’s terms,
the construction of the juridical law is the effect of productive power,
but one in which productive power institutes its own concealment and subordination. Foucault’s critique of Lacan (see History of Sexuality,Volume
I, An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley New York:Vintage, 1980], p. and the repressive hypothesis generally centers on the overdetermined status of the juridical law. Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman, pp. 66–73.
32. See Julia Kristeva Desire in Language:A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art,
ed. Leon Roudiez, trans. Thomas Gora, Alice Jardine, and Leon S.
Roudiez (New York Columbia University Press, 1980); Soleil noir:
Dépression et mélancolie (Paris: Gallimard, 1987), translated as Black Sun:
Depression and Melancholia, trans Leon Roudiez (New York Columbia
University Press, 1989). Kristeva’s reading of melancholy in this latter text is based in part on the writings of Melanie Klein. Melancholy is the
Gender Trouble
206

matricidal impulse turned against the female subject and hence is linked with the problem of masochism. Kristeva appears to accept the notion of primary aggression in this text and to differentiate the sexes according to the primary object of aggression and the manner in which they refuse to commit the murders they most profoundly want to commit. The masculine position is thus understood as an externally directed sadism, whereas the feminine is an internally directed masochism. For Kristeva, melancholy is a voluptuous sadness that seems tied to the sublimated production of art. The highest form of that sublimation seems to center on the suffering that is its origin. As a result, Kristeva ends the book, abruptly and a bit polemically, extolling the great works of modernism that articulate the tragic structure of human action and condemning the postmodern effort to affirm, rather than to suffer, contemporary fragmentations of the psyche. Fora discussion of the role of melancholy in “Motherhood
According to Bellini see chapter 3, section i, of this text, The Body
Politics of Julia Kristeva.”
33. See Freud, The Ego and the Super-Ego (Ego-Ideal),” The Ego and the Id,
trans. Joan Riviere, ed. James Strachey (New York Norton, 1960, originally published in 1923), for Freud’s discussion of mourning and melancholia and their relation to ego and character formation as well as his discussion of alternative resolutions to the Oedipal conflict. I am grateful to Paul
Schwaber for suggesting this chapter tome. Citations of Mourning and
Melancholia” refer to Sigmund Freud, General Psychological Theory, ed. Philip
Rieff, (New York MacMillan, 1976), and will appear hereafter in the text. For an interesting discussion of identification see Richard Wollheim’s
“Identification and Imagination The Inner Structure of a Psychic
Mechanism,” in Freud: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Richard Wollheim
(Garden City Anchor Press, 1974), pp. 172–195.
35. Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok take exception to this conflation of mourning and melancholia. See note 39 below. Fora psychoanalytic theory that argues in favor of a distinction between the superego as a punishing mechanism and the ego-ideal (as an idealization that serves a narcissistic wish, a distinction that Freud clearly does not make in The Ego and the Id, one might want to consult Janine
Chasseguet-Smirgell, The Ego-Ideal, A Psychological Essay on the Malady of

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