The deiform psyche and the psychic life of power: freedom and subjection in Judith Butler and Gregory of Nyssa

This paper brings Judith Butler’s work on freedom and subjection into conversation with Gregory of Nyssa’s belief in the autexousia—self-determination—of the human psyche (soul). Both thinkers are deeply committed to human liberation. Both offer critiques of the discursive practices by which structures of domination are naturalised—in Gregory’s case, chiefly in his condemnation of slavery. Moreover, both consider ‘male and female’ binary sex to present a particular affront to human freedom and flourishing, with Gregory anticipating the eventual eschatological transcendence of sexual difference. This paper advances a Butlerian reading of Gregory’s writing on freedom, while suggesting that his theology offers an apophatic route through the aporias in Butler’s poststructuralist account of subjectivity. I suggest that Gregory provides a view of the human psyche, imprinted with the freedom of the divine, that resists being reduced to the human subject, which (as Butler recognises) is constituted by power.