Again Rothenberg casts Butler’s theory as promoting a subject that is intentional, volitional and when this subject speaks, is transparent, perhaps even self-identical. In other words, R. is criticizing Butler that in Butler’s haste to show how agency happens, especially the agency of the excluded, the marginalized, she theorizes a liberal rational actor.
… arguing that the political act of appropriating the “unspeakable” can lead to the political inclusion of dispossessed or marginalized people. Here she explicitly proposes that the subject can access the realm excluded by foreclosure by “speaking impossibly” or by “redrawing the distinction” … From her perspective, the politically motivated subject has to take the “risk” of accessing this realm, even at the cost of being seen as something other than a subject (109).
Butler’s argument is nothing less than the claim that the subject can transform the very conditions of (its own and others’) subject formation through special speech acts that control their own reception. What has been excluded can be included …(109)