White, Stephen K. Sustaining Affirmation: The Strengths of Weak Ontology in Political Theory. New Jersey: Princeton UP, 2000.
Weak Ontologies don not proceed by categorical positings of, say, human nature or telos, accompanied by a crystalline conviction of the truth of that positing. Rather, what they offer are figurations of human being in terms of certain existential realities, most notably language, mortality or finitude, natality, and the articulation of “sources of the self.” These figurations are accounts of what it is to be a certain sort of creature:
1. one entangled in language
2. one with a consciousness that it will die: finitude
3. one that, despite its entanglement and limitedness, has the capacity for radical newness: natality
4. one that gives definition to itself against some ultimate background or “source,” to which we find ourselves already attached, and which evokes something like awe, wonder, or reverence.
Melancholia, Mourning
Both Freud explained were reactions to the trauma of the loss of an object of love or desire. Mourning is, in short, thehealthy resolution of this situation; the person comes to accept the loss and go on with his/her life. Melancholia, on the contrary, is Freud’s description of a syndrome of symptoms associated with a failure to accept the loss. In stead of giving up the object, the person internalizes it in such a way that the ego becomes a substitute for that object. And yet, since theego is ultimately an unsatisfying substitute, it becomes not just the site of love but also hate and aggression. Above all, it is this “ambivalence that distinguishes melancholia.”
Performativity
words, acts, gestures, and desire produce the effect of an internal core or substance, but produce this on the surface of the body, through the play of signifying absences that suggest, but never reveal, the organizing principle of idenity as a cause. Such acts, gestures, enactments, generally construed, are performative in the sense that the essence or identity that they otherwise purport to express are fabrications manufactured and sustained through corporeal signs and other discursive means. That the gendered body is performative suggests that it has no ontological status apart from the various acts which constitute its reality. Gender Trouble 136