Drink Responsibly: On Morality and Perversion

Drawing on psychoanalytic theory, and specifically the work of French psychoanalyst Jean Laplanche (1924–2012), Judith Butler challenges the popular Nietzschean account of how responsibility originates by offering a counterhistory of subject formation. I take up the book’s reformulation of the process through which responsibility develops in order to assess its underlying psychological assumptions. I argue that whereas Butler interprets the scene of infant-adult address in terms of relationality, empathy, and responsiveness, my own reading suggests that this interpretation risks obscuring the signal importance of “seduction” in Laplanche’s thought and, in doing so, misses the powerful dynamics of sexuality in the formation of consciousness.