Debating Sexual Difference, Politics, and the Unconscious: With Discussant Section by Jacqueline Rose

Abstract

Juliet Mitchell: When it was first presented at the Symposium for my retirement from Cambridge in 2009, Jacqueline Rose was the discussant of Judith Butler’s paper then called “Ideologies of the Superego,” which has been developed and renamed as “Rethinking Sexual Difference and Kinship in Mitchell’s Psychoanalysis and Feminism” (2013). On the earlier occasion Rose commented: ‘I am sure… that I am not the only person in this room who might have felt at moments that the gap between these two thinkers is too vast to be bridged’ (see Rose, below). Rose perceived that, interesting as Butler’s work undoubtedly is, its interests are tangential to mine. Rose managed to make something of a bridge across the gap she had perceived but only through offering her own very interesting but different perspective—a third position. Here I argue that Butler’s interest in heteronormativity has led her to neglect what is specific to the oppression of women, which leads her to misread my argument.

The previous chapter presented Judith Butler’s address at the symposium held to mark Juliet Mitchell’s retirement from Cambridge University in 2009. The first part of this chapter presents Mitchell’s reply to Butler. Mitchell identifies misunderstandings, and debates Butler’s account of psychoanalysis and the oppression of women. The second part of this chapter presents remarks made by Jacqueline Rose, discussant at the symposium.