Identities of Ambivalence: Judith Thompson's Perfect Pie‪.‬

This paper examines Judith Thompson's Perfect Pie, using Judith Butler's discussion of subjectivity in The Psychic Life of Power. According to Butler, stability as a subject necessitates a simultaneous recognition and denial of subjugation to power, but this stability is also constantly threatened by desire which promises to destabilize the subject. Desire is therefore thwarted in order to guarantee the subject's existence. As Butler points out, the process of subject formation resembles melancholia: the subject is never fully able to disengage from the discursive and psychic means by which it is constituted. Thompson, in both the script and in her directorial choices in the Tarragon 2000 production of Perfect Pie, writes large the subordination of the subject and also demonstrates its links to binary oppositions. Thompson highlights the excessive nature of the subject by foregrounding the binary oppositions which govern the psychic and social worlds and by then confounding them, demonstrating the Derridean notion of the trace of the other within the self. In her destabilizing of these binaries, and in her orchestration of narrative, Thompson emphasizes identity as a site of ambivalence in which binaries are relinquished and difference accommodated.