Butler

It might be that…constituting relations have a certain pattern of breakage in them, that they actually constitute and break us at the same time, this makes for a tentative or more definitive form of madness to be sure. What does it mean to require what breaks you? If the dependency on those others was once a matter of survival and now continues to function psychically as a condition of survival, recalling and re-instituting that primary condition, then certain kinds of breaks will raise the question of whether the I can survive. What does it mean to be thoroughly dependent on those who subjugate you, such that throwing off those who subjugate you, imperils your life? Matters become more complex when one makes the break precisely, in order to survive – in that sense, breaking with what breaks you – in such situations the I may undergo radically conflicting responses. As a consequence of its rupture with those formative relations it will not survive. Only with such a rupture does it stand a chance to survive. The ambiguity attests to the fact that the I is not easily separated from those relations that made the I possible.

    Judith Butler