Rothenberg, Molly Anne. The Excessive Subject. Cambridge UK: Polity Press, 2010. Print.
The theretical import of iterability precludes precisely the type of politics for which Butler has become famous. (100)
R. runs Judith Butler up against Joan Copjec. R argues that Butler has slid back to a Foucaultian “immanentist position on the reduction of subjects to their determinants.” (94) Butler adds a Althusserian interpellative twist to the proceedings, and by interpellation R. understands the subject qua subject to be product of “internalized discourse.”
She argues that Butler’s theory of subject formation revolves around the censorship of speech, that the subject comes to be through “implict and explicit norms” that govern the speech of a subject.
But R. points out, this notion directly contradicts Foucault’s concerns about the repressive hypothesis, “which abjures such a notion of the constitutive role of repression.
So, even as she (Butler) is invoking Foucault in her reference to his model of power and to his notion of the discursive constitution of subjects, she is importing a non-Foucaultian — and equally non-psychoanalytic element — into her theory, that is, the constitution of subjects by way of exclusion. (94)
R. lauds the fact that Butler recognizes the theoretical importance of the “disjuncture between utterance and meaning.” But the crucial dig occurs when R. argues that Butler correctly identifies the fantasy working in the belief that the speaker’s intention can be realized “univocally in the effect on the addressee. This relies on a phantasy of sovereign action … one that immediately does what it says”. But even having made this criticism about a sovereign speaker, “Butler goes on to garner support for this very “phantasy” in her own theory of subject formation (97).
R. cites as an example Butler’s argument for the resignificatory possibilities of the term “queer.” But R. isn’t buying this, and catches B. in a bind. “… Butler treats this “resignification” as though it can have predictable effects, re-describing the contingent contextual appropriation of the spech act as if it had all the intentionalist force of an illocutionary act, a move which is strictly precluded by the theory of iterability.”
“… iterability ceases to operate in the special case of performers who intend to appropriate the speech act for subversive purposes. Significantly, Butler reserves the power of such insurrectionary speech for those who have been the objects of injurious speech, the marginalized or abjected …”
“What Butler fails to respect in these formulations is that all signification is iterable, working by simultaneously and unpredictably repeating and breaking with prior contexts. Iterability (as she sometimes acknowledges in her more tempered moments) does not confer on the speaker the sovereign power of opening or closing contexts, legitimating or de-legitimating meanings” (99).
And finally, R. cites Butler’s use of the ‘agency’ of Rosa Parks. “For all her temperate reasoning about the impossibility of governing speech, then, Butler repeatedly returns to the more politically useful, if less theoretically valid, formulation of special performative agency.” (99)
OK enough, R. makes a strong case for viewing Butler’s appropriation of Austin-Derridean iterability as caught in contradictions.