Jay Prosser

“In the apparent periphery of a footnote, Gender Trouble cites from the second paragraph of this passage Freud's assertion, "the ego is first and foremost a bodily ego" (GT 163, n. 43). But then, in a substitution crucially significant to her conceptualization of the body as the psychic projection of a surface, Butler replaces the referent "it" in the subsequent part of the cited sentence, which in Freud clearly refers back to the ego as bodily ego ("The ego is first and foremost a bodily ego; it . . . ) , with the word (square bracketed, demoted-in my citation of Butler's note-to parenthetical) "body." Butler's recitation of the passage reads: "Freud continues the above sentence: '(the body) is not merely a surface entity, but is itself the projection of a surface' " (GT 163 n. 43; my emphasis). Butler's reading of Freud's assertion thus figures the body as interchangeable with the ego. That is, the body appears not only as a surface entity but as itself the psychic projection of a surface. Yet that it is precisely Freud's concern at this point in his essay to articulate the bodily origins of the ego, the conception of the ego as product of the body not the body as product of the ego, is underscored by the explanatory footnote added by his editor James Strachey that appeared first in the 1927 English translation of this text immediately following the above passage-a note authorized by Freud. The note reads: "I.e. the ego is ultimately derived from bodily sensations, chiefly from those springing from the surface of the body. It may thus be regarded as a mental projection of the surface of the body."30 Butler's reading therefore inverts the note's representation of the body as productive of the psyche ("the ego is derived from bodily sensations") and, through that square-bracketed substitution, conversely images the body as a psychic effect. The body itself becomes commensurable with the psychic projection of the body. Whereas Freud's original assertion maintains a distinction between the body's real surface and the body image as a mental projection of this surface (a distinction between corporeal referent and psychic signified), Butler's recitation collapses bodily surface into the psychic projection of the body, conflates corporeal materiality with imaginary projection. In so doing, it lets slip any notion of the body as a discernible referential category.”
― Jay Prosser, Second Skins