Response to Lynne Layton's: “The Doer behind the Deed Tensions and Intersections between Butler's Vision of Performativity and Relational Psychoanalysis” (Vol.  2, No. 2, 1997)

Lynne Layton's very interesting essay offers a careful and comprehensive review of some of my writings on the topic of gender and psychoanalysis, and I found that I was able to learn from the essay and to appreciate its provocative suggestions, even as I am not fully sure how best to answer some of its queries.

There are a number of significant claims made in the essay, and I will try to distinguish among the most salient ones. First, Layton wonders what the relation between my work and relational psychoanalysis has been and can be, and she suggests that I have in the last seven years moved closer to a relational perspective. Although the notion of gender performativity in Gender Trouble is, in her view, not a psychoanalytic view, the subsequent reformulations that affirm a primary splitting or disavowal in the performance of gender move my theory into a psychoanalytic register. She suggests, however, that it remains unclear whether or not I can offer a motivational theory for my account of subject formation, and whether I can affirm an internal psychic world. One