Socialism: Utopian and Melancholic?

According to Freud, melancholia is a process by which love for an object is denied or foreclosed, where that denial and foreclosure persist internally, in the subject of that denial. A loved object whose existence is disavowed becomes, in effect, a part of the subject. The process is distinguished from mourning precisely in the fact that its object is nowhere to be found; instead of grief for the person lost, there is an almost ritualized self-abasement, guilt without shame. According to Freud, what begins as “a mental constellation of revolt … has then by a certain process, passed over into the crushed state of melancholia” (Freud 586).

Judith Butler argues that the elementary function of melancholia in subject-formation has determinate consequences at every level of the socio-linguistic, and therefore political, field. The performativity of discourse, as it appears in Bodies That Matter, sets a real limit on the political agency of the subject in relation to social power. While it has been misread in criticisms of Gender Trouble as a capacity of the gendered subject to choose his/her gender like a garment (Bodies x), performativity is not the expression of a human will in language. Discursive effects are not objects fixed by subjects, but vectors of social power, phenomena which confound conventional cause-effect thinking. Bodies are materialized along these vectors, as the sediment of the historicity of norms, but bodies are far from being stable objects. Their form of materiality is never complete, is always grounded in a partial disavowal of the body's materializable desires.

The vicissitudes of materiality play out in the wider social and political field. Any political identity-claim is produced by the foreclosure of another bodily materiality that would threaten it; an alien, immaterial materiality, its shadow. But this threat to identity is not only a “something” that is external to it, but is also precisely the impossibility of the attempt