Daniel G Butler
Biographic Data
| ID | 1718688 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Daniel G Butler |
| GIVEN NAMES | Daniel G |
| FAMILY NAME | Butler |
| SIGNATURE | BUTLER D G |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of California, Santa Cruz |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 12 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 6 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 12 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2019 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 1 |
Say Anything: Noise, Tenderness, and the Rift Between the Saying and the Said
This article reflects on fraught clinical encounters in which saying something, even anything seems to matter more than what is said. In such moments, my tender voice is like atopic noise – or sound out of place – that alienates me and my patient because it augurs an existence beyond the devitalizing object worlds to which we have become inured. I think of such worlds as the product of early deprivation and of the perilous historical conjuncture …
Touching, Saying, Being: A Cairn of Colorful Stones
In this reply, I invoke Morganthaler’s metaphor of a colorful stone to appreciate the cairn of ideas that my discussants have helped me build. In addition to responding to each discussant, I elaborate on the saying’s phenomenology by contemplating three ideas: one, how the saying may relate to touching rather than transforming thought; two, what it means when someone states that they have more say in their life; and three, the psyche-somatic forc…
When What Preserves Tears Me Apart: The Lytic, the Therapeutic, the Impossible
Blackout
I pray for the light to take meGod knows the morning won’t wake meI dream in diazepamLet me leave without a soundI swear to God, no kiddingThis might be life but this ain’t livingI only think of th
Feverish Nonknowledge, or Intuition at the Boiling Point
This discussion situates Shapiro and Marks-Tarlow’s (this issue) embrace of natural science within the third industrial (or hyperindustrial) revolution in which information eclipses knowledge. Knowledge has its limits and thus begets excess or what I call feverish nonknowledge, whereas information is thought to be limitless and is tied to the wholeness that Shapiro and Marks-Tarlow associate with Bohm’s implicate order. Such wholeness rests on a …
Uncreated Gender and Interpsychic Overkill
Amir’s dialectic of continuous and emergent gender is reviewed. Uncreated gender is posited as the excess of that dialectic. Male pronouns are questioned for a patient who lacks a gendered self through which to claim those pronouns as their own. Interpsychic overkill is defined as a process in which psychoanalytic epistemologies overkill a patient who is already psychopolitically deadened
The public and the privative: Honig’s Public things and the politics of the psychoanalytic setting
This article turns to psychoanalytic theories of the setting in an effort to build on Bonnie Honig’s concept of ‘public things’. A privative (and not just private) dimension to public things is posited. The privative is defined as a violence that emanates from an unrepresentable thing in the setting. Like transitional objects, settings manage the privative’s violence, but the thing thwarts these attempts at management. The public is thought to be…
A Child is Being Caged: Resignation Syndrome and the Psychopolitics of Petrification
Uppgivenhetssyndrom, or resignation syndrome (RS), is a disorder that until recently was thought to affect the children of refugees in Sweden alone. The heuristic of psychopolitics is used to theorize RS as a form of abjection (Bataille, Kristeva) and petrification (Fanon, Marriott), and the movement from petrification to petrification in hallucinosis (Fanon, Bion) is delineated: first these children are petrified by persecutory and culturally sp…
Setting (on) Fire: Reply to Discussions
The author begins by turning to a recent confrontation with four men who chanted homophobic slurs in his neighborhood. He uses this experience to state some of his ideas regarding violence and the setting. Visceral belonging is considered a problem insofar as it is tethered to a setting that constitutively excludes Blackness and queerness in structurally precise ways. Intervention into the setting is theorized as a temporal movement, and the fire…
Like a Half-Crushed Worm”: Affliction, Negative Capability, and Apophatic Aesthetics in the Work of Nuclear Death
This paper turns to Arizona-based band Nuclear Death (1985-2000) as a case of apophatic aesthetics in extreme metal. Amador Vega’s “apophatic aesthetics” offers a framework for theorizing formlessness as preamble to form’s emergence. Emergent forms of “love” and “justice” in Nuclear Death’s work are discussed in reference to Michele Toscan’s biographical sketch of the band. Invoking the concepts of affliction and negative capability, and their re…
Riding Instincts, Even to Die
This paper develops the concept of riding instincts, even to die through a queer reading of Winnicott’s “Primary Maternal Preoccupation.” Primary preoccupation narrates the ongoing establishment of what Winnicott calls “instinctual life.” Turning to queer social history and a clinical case, a relational-structural similarity between pederasty and primary preoccupation is proposed, and the concept of pederastic enactments is used to capture the fr…
Racialized Bodies and the Violence of the Setting
Turning to object relations psychoanalysis and Black critical theory, I argue that the violence of racialization works in and through clinical and national settings. The setting is theorized in terms of its phantasmatic and phantomatic dimensions: The former refers to phantasies that ensnare certain bodies in a mythologized past, while the latter refers to the irreducibly material histories that those phantasies fail to ensnare (i.e., the phantom…
Racialized Bodies and the Violence of the Setting
Turning to object relations psychoanalysis and Black critical theory, I argue that the violence of racialization works in and through clinical and national settings. The setting is theorized in terms of its phantasmatic and phantomatic dimensions: The former refers to phantasies that ensnare certain bodies in a mythologized past, while the latter refers to the irreducibly material histories that those phantasies fail to ensnare (i.e., the phantom…
When What Preserves Tears Me Apart: The Lytic, the Therapeutic, the Impossible
Riding Instincts, Even to Die
This paper develops the concept of riding instincts, even to die through a queer reading of Winnicott’s “Primary Maternal Preoccupation.” Primary preoccupation narrates the ongoing establishment of what Winnicott calls “instinctual life.” Turning to queer social history and a clinical case, a relational-structural similarity between pederasty and primary preoccupation is proposed, and the concept of pederastic enactments is used to capture the fr…
Setting (on) Fire: Reply to Discussions
The author begins by turning to a recent confrontation with four men who chanted homophobic slurs in his neighborhood. He uses this experience to state some of his ideas regarding violence and the setting. Visceral belonging is considered a problem insofar as it is tethered to a setting that constitutively excludes Blackness and queerness in structurally precise ways. Intervention into the setting is theorized as a temporal movement, and the fire…
Like a Half-Crushed Worm”: Affliction, Negative Capability, and Apophatic Aesthetics in the Work of Nuclear Death
This paper turns to Arizona-based band Nuclear Death (1985-2000) as a case of apophatic aesthetics in extreme metal. Amador Vega’s “apophatic aesthetics” offers a framework for theorizing formlessness as preamble to form’s emergence. Emergent forms of “love” and “justice” in Nuclear Death’s work are discussed in reference to Michele Toscan’s biographical sketch of the band. Invoking the concepts of affliction and negative capability, and their re…
Riding Instincts, Even to Die
This paper develops the concept of riding instincts, even to die through a queer reading of Winnicott’s “Primary Maternal Preoccupation.” Primary preoccupation narrates the ongoing establishment of what Winnicott calls “instinctual life.” Turning to queer social history and a clinical case, a relational-structural similarity between pederasty and primary preoccupation is proposed, and the concept of pederastic enactments is used to capture the fr…
Racialized Bodies and the Violence of the Setting
Turning to object relations psychoanalysis and Black critical theory, I argue that the violence of racialization works in and through clinical and national settings. The setting is theorized in terms of its phantasmatic and phantomatic dimensions: The former refers to phantasies that ensnare certain bodies in a mythologized past, while the latter refers to the irreducibly material histories that those phantasies fail to ensnare (i.e., the phantom…
The public and the privative: Honig’s Public things and the politics of the psychoanalytic setting
This article turns to psychoanalytic theories of the setting in an effort to build on Bonnie Honig’s concept of ‘public things’. A privative (and not just private) dimension to public things is posited. The privative is defined as a violence that emanates from an unrepresentable thing in the setting. Like transitional objects, settings manage the privative’s violence, but the thing thwarts these attempts at management. The public is thought to be…
A Child is Being Caged: Resignation Syndrome and the Psychopolitics of Petrification
Uppgivenhetssyndrom, or resignation syndrome (RS), is a disorder that until recently was thought to affect the children of refugees in Sweden alone. The heuristic of psychopolitics is used to theorize RS as a form of abjection (Bataille, Kristeva) and petrification (Fanon, Marriott), and the movement from petrification to petrification in hallucinosis (Fanon, Bion) is delineated: first these children are petrified by persecutory and culturally sp…
Feverish Nonknowledge, or Intuition at the Boiling Point
This discussion situates Shapiro and Marks-Tarlow’s (this issue) embrace of natural science within the third industrial (or hyperindustrial) revolution in which information eclipses knowledge. Knowledge has its limits and thus begets excess or what I call feverish nonknowledge, whereas information is thought to be limitless and is tied to the wholeness that Shapiro and Marks-Tarlow associate with Bohm’s implicate order. Such wholeness rests on a …
Uncreated Gender and Interpsychic Overkill
Amir’s dialectic of continuous and emergent gender is reviewed. Uncreated gender is posited as the excess of that dialectic. Male pronouns are questioned for a patient who lacks a gendered self through which to claim those pronouns as their own. Interpsychic overkill is defined as a process in which psychoanalytic epistemologies overkill a patient who is already psychopolitically deadened
Blackout
I pray for the light to take meGod knows the morning won’t wake meI dream in diazepamLet me leave without a soundI swear to God, no kiddingThis might be life but this ain’t livingI only think of th
When What Preserves Tears Me Apart: The Lytic, the Therapeutic, the Impossible
Say Anything: Noise, Tenderness, and the Rift Between the Saying and the Said
This article reflects on fraught clinical encounters in which saying something, even anything seems to matter more than what is said. In such moments, my tender voice is like atopic noise – or sound out of place – that alienates me and my patient because it augurs an existence beyond the devitalizing object worlds to which we have become inured. I think of such worlds as the product of early deprivation and of the perilous historical conjuncture …
Touching, Saying, Being: A Cairn of Colorful Stones
In this reply, I invoke Morganthaler’s metaphor of a colorful stone to appreciate the cairn of ideas that my discussants have helped me build. In addition to responding to each discussant, I elaborate on the saying’s phenomenology by contemplating three ideas: one, how the saying may relate to touching rather than transforming thought; two, what it means when someone states that they have more say in their life; and three, the psyche-somatic forc…
Psychology (9 works) · Psychoanalysis (8 works) · Philosophy (6 works) · Sociology (5 works) · Posthumanist Ethics and Activism (4 works) · Epistemology (3 works) · Psychotherapy Techniques and Applications (3 works) · Aesthetics (2 works) · Contemporary Literature and Criticism (2 works) · Gender Studies (2 works)