Subjective dispossession and objet a: a critique of Judith Butler's relational ontology from a Lacanian perspective

"The purpose of this dissertation is to stake out the possible terrain of a post-identity politics. It begins with the work of Judith Butler who in Gender Trouble claims for the performative subject no ""ontological status apart from the various acts which constitute its reality."" I trace her notion of the ek-static subject through to a consideration of Antigone as a prototype of what I call a deconstituted subject. However Butler does not follow to the end her insistence on a radical subjective 'unravelling' and thus her relational ontology stalls on the rocks of what Lacanians call the Symbolic. I then turn primarily to Jacques Lacan's Four Discourses and the work of Slavoj Zizek to investigate further the nature of subjective deconstitution as a post-ego political form of subjectivity and explore a possible way of its incitement or emergence through an understanding of objet a in the discourse of the Analyst."