I have been reading Judith Butler reading Althusser, Freud, Lacan, Dolar, Foucault, Irigaray, Wittig, and who knows who else, as she constructs her lyrical understanding of how we become subjects, of how subjection works, of how we are made socially intelligible through submission.

A policeman says "hey, you!" and we turn, God calls our name and we answer, someone calls us a heterosexual woman and we act like one. Butler points out that there are two related affects at work when we turn, answer, act: passion and guilt (or desire and conscience or love and melancholy). We continuously desire recognition as subjects--we are addicted to continuing to be, passionately attached to existence. Such is our desire to be a subject in relation to an other that we turn, answer, act, even though those calls imply we are criminals, sinners, or not already properly a heterosexual woman. (Just recognize me!) We accept the reprimand in exchange for social existence. When, in turn, we still desire the prohibited, the sinful, the being-masculine or the loving-femining (all the more because it has been prohibited), we turn that desire towards the self as guilt and conscience, so that we can continue to be a you, a name, a woman. The repudiation of our desire is then not grieved, the loss of our love object never fully mourned, and we are all melancholics.

At the same time, as we repudiate or foreclose or preempt our desire, our desire persists. Thus, when we are called you, a name, a woman, we are called so in a way that never fully accounts for our passion, which is continually produced by prohibitions and limitations themselves. We are an excess of existence in relation to our identities, our subjections, and continually made incoherent by inexhaustible desire that exceeds discourse.