Butler's theory of psychic formation plays on the trope of 'the turn' throughout numerous writers' works on identity, power, conscience, interpellation, etc., and the general idea seems to be that interiority always requires a turning-in-on or turning-back-on or a turning-back-of-power of/from a 'self' that actually isn't one before the convolutions of these turns.

Meanwhile, Jalal Toufic writes, in his treatise on undeath 'Undying Love, or Love Dies,' that one of the primary conditions of undeath, in the labyrinthine or Hadean underworld, is to have every turn overturned by an over-turn. To pluck some examples from his reworking of the Orpheus myth: when Orpheus, confronted by a crowd of shades with their backs to him, calls Eurydice's name, she doesn't answer - not because she doesn't turn, but because her turn is overturned by an over-turn; Pluto advises Orpheus not to look back at Eurydice until he's in the lifeworld, but, paranoid that he's being tricked into leading the wrong woman, Orpheus turns to look at her only to have his turn overturned by an over-turn; when he loses her a second time and she's re-descending into Hades, Orpheus calls after her only for her turns to be overturned by over-turns, etc., etc., etc.

(I think the other metaphor he uses, not in this book but elsewhere, is that scene in movies, usually a nightmare sequence, where a man sees the back of a woman's head and, violently turning her around by her shoulders, is confronted only with the back of her head, or else cycles around her endlessly only to ditto [for instance this happens to Homer, after eating a hallucinogenic chili pepper, in that episode where Johnny Cash is his spirit guide]).

What interests me is that the undead failure of turning is at times an interpellative failure (Eurydice cannot answer to her name because the turn is overturned by an over-turn)* and at times a failure of power (Homer turns Marge bodily around by her shoulders but still can't access her face), and I wonder whether all the other species of interiority that Butler is interested in, which, remember, all hinge on some crucial and convoluted 'turn,' would be uniformly overturned by an over-turn in the state of undeath.* At least superficially, this connection could turn out to be very sexy, since Butler and Freud associate the site of turning with 'a gathering-place for the death instincts' (188) (e.g. a lint tray...of DEATH), and undeath would certainly seem to be at least superficially associated with that.

*The Butlerian response to this may just be that she still turns 'internally' (would Derrida write this 'inturnally'?) even if her external turns are overturned.

*Note that in his book 'Vampires,' Toufic makes it clear that he reads all sorts of consonances between undeath and schizophrenia, so any Harawayan or D+G-ian call to arms like 'Become Undead! Overturn by over-turns!' obviously shouldn't be read as an injunction to suicide. Rather, when thinking about whether and how undeath could provide a positive metaphoric role model for 'overturning by over-turns' those psychoconstitutive turns that seem oppressive to us, we might consider in some way the various things that D+G had to say about schizophrenia (which they [and the class] were interested in for similarly 'subversive' or 'liberatory' reasons).

Does this seem interesting to anyone else? Failing the kind of 'embrace of the Real' that Zizek/Lacan write about (wherein we 'go through' the social fantasy and are suspended over a whistling void of terror - which may or may not be what fullblown undeath or schizophrenia feels like), could we think about, following Haraway, 'elective undeaths'? That is, ways of overturning by over-turns some of the less desirable Butlerian turns, deploying sort of local undeaths, without thereby being 'fully undead' or 'subjectively dissolved' in the strong Lacanian/Zizekian sense? And are these possibilities already inherent in Butler without the added confusion of variously yoked-together postmodern metaphors ('Be an undead Lacanian Real cyborg rhizome!')?

--Guattari Hero