logocentric – Page 107

laclau on sexual d and hegemony

Laclau, Ernesto. “Identity and Hegemony: The Role of Universality in the Constitution of Political Logics.” Contingency, Hegemony, Universality. JB, EL and SZ. New York: Verso, 2000. 44-89.

It is precisely because I fully appreciate the potentialities of the notion of ‘parodic performances’ for a theory of hegemony, that I find some of Butler’s questions rather perplexing. She asks: “If sexual difference is “real” in the Lacanian sense, does that mean that it has no place in hegemonic struggles?’ I would argue that exactly BECAUSE sexual difference is real and not symbolic, because it is not necessarily linked to any aprioristic pattern of symbolic positions, that the way is open to the kind of historicist variation that Butler asserts — and that a hegemonic game becomes possible. The same goes for some of Butler’s other questions: ‘Does a logic that invariably results in aporias produce a kind of stasis that is inimical to the project of hegemony?’ If there were no aporia, there would be no possibility of hegemony, for a necessary logic inimical to hegemonic variations would impose itself, entirely unchallenged. We have here the same mutually subverting relationship between necessity and impossibility to which we have been referring from the beginning (note 39, 88).

If the representation was total — if the representative moment was entirely transparent to what it represents — the ‘concept’ would have an unchallenged primacy over the ‘name’ (in Saussurean terms: the signified would entirely subordinate to itself the order of the signifier). But in that case there would be no hegemony, for its very requisite, which is the production of tendentially empty signifiers, would not obtain. In order to have hegemony we need the sectorial aims of a group to operate as the name for a universality transcending them — this is the synecdoche constitutive of the hegemonic link. But if the name (the signifier) is so attached to the concept (signified) that no displacement in the relation between the two is possible, we cannot have any hegemonic rearticulation. The idea of a totally emancipated and transparent society, from which all tropological movement between its constitutive parts would have been elmininated, involves the end of all hegemonic relation (and also, as we will see later, of all democratic politics).

universality

Butler, Judith. “Restaging the Universal: Hegemony and the Limits of Formalism.” Contingency, Hegemony, Universality. JB, EL and SZ. New York: Verso, 2000. 11-43.

A recent resurgence of Anglo-feminism in the academy has sought to restate the importance of making universal claims about the conditions and rights of women (Okin, Nussbaum) without regard to the prevailing norms in local cultures, and without taking up the task of cultural translation. This effort to override the problem that local cultures pose for international feminism does not understand the parochial character of its own norms, and does not consider the way in which feminism works in full complicity with US colonial aims in imposing its norms of civility through an effacement and a decimation of local Second and Third World cultures. Of course, translation by itself can also working full complicity with the logic of colonial expansion, when translation becomes the instrument through which dominant values are transposed into the language of the subordinated, and the subordinated run the risk of coming to know and understand them as tokens of their “liberation” (35).

The universal announces, as it were, its ‘non-place’, its fundamentally temporal modality, precisely when challenges to its EXISTING formulation emerge from those who are not covered by it, who have no entitlement to occupy the place of the ‘who’, but nevertheless demand that the universal as such ought to be inclusive of them. At stake here is the exclusionary function of certain NORMS of universality which, in a way, transcend the cultural locations from which they emerge. Although they often appear as transcultural or formal criteria by which existing cultural conventions are to be judged, they are precisely cultural conventions which have, through a process of abstraction, come to appear as post-conventional principles. The task, then, is to refer these formal conceptions of universality back to the contaminating trace of their ‘content’, to eschew the form/content distinction as it furthers that ideological obfuscation, and to consider the cultural form that this struggle over the meaning and scope of norms takes (39).

When one has no right to speak under the auspicies of the universal, and speaks none the less, laying claim to universal rights, and doing so in a way that preserves the particularity of one’s struggle, one speaks in a way that may be readily dismissed as nonsensical or impossible. When we hear about ‘lesbian and gay human rights’, or even ‘women’s human rights’, we are confronted with a strange neighbouring of the universal and the particular which neither synthesizes the two, nor keeps them apart. The nouns function adjectivally, and although they are identities and grammatical ‘substances’, they are also in the act of qualifying and being qualified by one another. Clearly, however, the ‘human’ as previously defined has not readily included lesbians, gays and women, and the current mobilization seeks to expose the conventional limitations of the human, the terms that sets the limits on the universal reach of international law. But the exclusionary character of those conventional norms of universality does not preclude further recourse to the term, although it does mean entering into that situation in which the conventional meaning becomes unconventional (or catachrestic). This does not mean that we have a priori recourse to a truer criterion of universality.

It does suggest, however, that conventional and exclusionary norms of universality can, through perverse reiterations, produce unconventional formulations of universality that expose the limited and exclusionary features of the former one at the same time that they mobilize a new set of demands (40).

status and formation of the subject

Butler, Judith. “Restaging the Universal: Hegemony and the Limits of Formalism.” Contingency, Hegemony, Universality. Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau and Slavoj Zizek. New York: Verso, 2000. 11-43.

[S]hould not the incompletion of subject-formation be linked to the democratic contestation over signifiers? Can the ahistorical recourse to the Lacanian bar be reconciled with the strategic question that hegemony poses, or does it stand as a quasi-transcendental limitation on all possible subject-formations and strategies and, hence, as fundamentally indifferent to the political field it is said to condition (12-13).

Moreover, if we accept the notion that all historical struggle is nothing other than a vain effort to displace a founding limit that is structural in status …

If hegemony denotes the historical possibilities for articulation that emerge within a given political horizon, then it will make a significant difference whether we understand that field as historically revisable and transformable, or whether it is given as a field whose integrity is secured by certain structurally identifiable limits and exclusions (13).

Power is not stable or static, but is remade at various junctures within everyday life; it constitutes our tenuous sense of common sense, and is ensconced as the prevailing epistemes of a culture. Morevover, social transformation occurs not merely by rallying mass numbers in favour of a cause, but precisely through the ways in which daily social relations are rearticulated, and new conceptual horizons opened up by anomalous or subversive practices (13).

In the Greater Logic, Hegel gives the example of the person who thinks that he might learn how to swim by learning what is required before entering the water. The person does not realize tht one learns to swim only by entering the water and practising one’s strokes in the midst of the activity itself. Hegel implicitly likens the Kantian to one who seeks to know how to swim before actually swimming, and he counters this model of a self-possessed cognition with one that gives itself over to the activity itself, a form of knowing that is given over to the world it seeks to know. Although Hegel is often dubbed a philospher of ‘mastery’, we can see here … that the ek-static disposition of the self towards its world undoes cognitive mastery. Hegel’s own persistent references to ‘losing oneself’ and ‘giving oneself over’ only confirm the point that the knowing subject cannot be understood as one who imposes ready-made categories on a pre-given world. The categories are shaped by the world it seeks to know, just as the world is not known without the prior action of those categories. And just as Hegel insists on revising serveral times his very definition of ‘universality’, so he makes plain that the categories by which the world becomes available to us are continually remade by the encounter with the world that they facilitate.

We do not remain the same, and neither do our cognitive categories, as we enter into a knowing encounter with the world. Both the knowing subject and the world are undone and redone by the act of knowledge (19-20).

Butler ontological commitments

Eliz Grosz: … you buy into ontological commitments whenever you make certain political commitments.

D Cornell: You inevitably buy into ontological commitments when you advocate programs of reform. I don’t think you can avoid it, which is why anytime you use an aesthetic idea to make sense to reason, you paradoxically try to show that what reason has made sense of is not fully adequate to its promise. I was very influenced by Reiner Schurmann in seeing the paradox in my representation of political ideals, even as aesthetic ideas. But buying into them and knowing that you buy into them and knowing that any representational device you use in this sense of aesthetic idea carries
within it that buying into them is very different from actually thinking that you are doing something more philosophical by turning gender, engendering, or sexual difference into a way of thinking about the truth of Being in a particular historical era.

JB: Indeed, I would want to know from Liz and Pheng if it’s the case that the institutionalization of one’s feminist goals involves making ontological commitments about what women are or what the feminine is and how, at the same time, the perspective of the future anterior is maintained.

Butler Sexual D

DC: I agree, but I think she [Irigaray] does this where she is not willing to challenge the divide of the human race into two sexes. The state both expresses and reinforces the truth of how we should be actualized in our sexual identities, male/female. The law so conceived inevitably closes the domain of other sexual possibilities. Judith has beautifully argued in The Psychic Life of Power that this foreclosure is achieved only at enormous psychic cost.

The forming of a subject requires an identification with the normative phantasm of “sex,” and this identification takes place through a repudiation which produces a domain of abjection, a repudiation without which the subject cannot emerge. This is a repudiation which creates the “valence of abjection,” and its status for the subject as a threatening specter. Further, the materialization of given sex will centrally concern the regulation of identificatory practices such that the identification with the abjection of sex will be persistently disavowed.

[…] JB: That’s a different question. There are a number of different ways of tracing it in Irigaray’s work. But it’s clear to me that sexual difference does not denote a simple opposition, a binary opposition. What it denotes is something like the relationship of a presumed masculine symbolic order to what it must exclude and how that same presumed masculine order requires this excluded feminine to augment and reproduce itself. And I think that what she’s given us is a quite brilliant rendition of a certain economy in which there are not two sexes: there is the sex that is one and then the feminine which is necessary for the reproduction of that masculinity but is always figured as its outside.That has been an enormously influential way of thinking. I think that there are a number questions that are raised by it, and one of them is, Is this symbolic order that we are talking about primarily or paradigmatically masculine?

P Cheah: What you have just described, i.e. sexual difference as the negative but constitutive of substratum phallogocentrism, the early Irigaray Speculum and This Sex Which Is Not One. Is the same notion of sexual difference still operative after An Ethics of Sexual Difference? It seems to me that there, Irigaray’s idea of sexual difference changes dramatically, and it is formulated as a generative interval that exists between the two sexes. She calls sexual difference a sensible transcendental. This reformulation partly is grounded in a rereading of Heidegger in which the copula of Being, that which gives Being, is rewritten as the fecundity of the couple. She argues that this interval should be affirmed as a source for the ethical transfiguration cultural and sociopolitical life. Sexual difference would then be the dimension of the new as such.

JB: What happened is that a certain heterosexual notion of ethical exchange emerged in An Ethics of Sexual Difference. Clearly there is a presumptive heterosexuality in all that reading,which allows us to go back and see some of that really aggressive early reading as part of a certain heterosexual trauma well. “Commodities among Themselves” was never truly convincing to me as a lesbian text in any case — imagining that abundance where there would be no pain associated with pleasure. [Laughs.] No, that has never been lesbianism.That’s to put lesbianism in the permanently unrealizable. So that was not, I think, a friendly text. But the intense overt heterosexuality of An Ethics of Sexual Difference and indeed of the sexuate rights discourse, which is all about mom and motherhood not at all about postfamily arrangements alternative family arrangements, not only brought to the fore a kind of presumptive heterosexuality, but actually made heterosexuality into the privileged locus of ethics, as if heterosexual relations, because they putatively crossed this alterity, which is the alterity of sexual difference, were somehow more ethical, more other-directed, narcissistic than anything else. It was, in some sense, compelling men out of what she used to call their hom(m)osexualite into this encounter with alterity, where that alterity would in fact be the feminine, and what would emerge from that exchange would be a certain kind of heterosexual love which would come to capture the domain of the ethical.

Lloyd iterability

The norms producing gender require repeating — reciting — in order to have effect. They are, in this sense, the condition of possibility for gendered subjectivity. Without their repetition, gendered subjects would not exist. It is also the fact that they must be repeated, however, that creates the space from them to be repeated differently and thus is also the condition of possibility for action. The need to repeat thus allows for citations that contort or impair the very norms they are intended to fortify. As such, gender is constitutively unstable and it is, as Butler puts it, ‘this instability [that] is the deconstituting possibility in the very process of repetition’ (BTM: 10).

Agency thus inheres in the regulatory repetition of the very norms that sustain the system —heteronormativity— that is being resisted and amended. It is because such norms are not always efficacious, that is, they do not always succeed, that they can be exploited. Such exploitation creates the possibility for, though it cannot assure the success of, subversion (65).

The merit of Butler’s revised account is that it explains more clearly why subversion is immanent and why performativity entails neither voluntarism nor determinism. In both cases, this is because of the citational structure of performativity, which means that subversion is always a form of ‘reinscription of existing contexts’.

Gender subversion involves … recontextualizing and reciting the elements constitutive of sex and gender so as to alter their meaning and significance.

Butler thus folds into her (Foucauldian) account of the regulatory effect of norms an explanation of how gender works both as a mechanism of constraint and as the locus of productive (agential) activity. In so doing, she is able to steer a course between free will and determinism, between acts and norms, and thus belatedly to refute some of the criticisms levelled at her. Moreover, this blending of Foucauldian and Derridean elements also allows her to lay the groundwork for the account of linguistic agency that she develops most fully in Excitable Speech … (Lloyd, 2007: 66).

Lloyd subversion

Ultimately, Wittig, Foucault, Lacan and Zizek are all accused of the same [Kristeva’s] error. By conceiving subversion as outside of culture, whether in teh imaginary (Lacan), the real (Zizek), pre-discursive libidinality (Wittig) or pre-discursive heterogeneous bodily pleasures (Foucault), all mask rather than illuminate the cultural operations of power, for, as Butler theorizes it, one of the ays in which discourse works is to construct an element as outside of — or prior to — culture. This element is then presented as natural or incontrovertible, when in actuality it is neither. It is an effect of discourse presented as if it were not. This raises an obvious question. If subversion cannot be located outside of culture, since the idea of the outside is the artificial construct of discourse within a specific ensemble of power relations, then were does it take place? The answer is equally obvious. Effective subversion must be immanent to culture. It must be a form of cultural subversion (Lloyd, 2007: 53).

Agency, as Butler presents it … is intimately connect with signification. Signification, according to her, refers to the process that establishes the terms of intelligibility or meaning. Signification is thus a practice. Moreover, it is a practice based on repetition. It is precisely the repetition of acts, gestures and discourses that produces the effect of an identity at the moment of action. Agency, for Butler, might be thought of, then, as an effect of signification and resignification. The possibility of producing ‘alternative domains of cultural intelligibility’, in particular non-heteronormative domains, rests on this necessity to repeat and on the potential to repeat differently. Indeed, for Butler, ‘it is only within the practices of repetitive signifying that a subversion of identity becomes possible’. It is the only way to challenge the ‘rigid codes of hierarchical binarisms’ that sustain heteronormativity (GT: 185). What, therefore, might count as a subversive repetition capable of contesting the naturalization of heterosexuality? The short answer is those ‘parodic styles’ (GT: 176), as Butler terms them, that are patently imitative; that denaturalize what they are performing by displaying explicitly the ways in which the natural is produced. These are repetitions, in other words, that openly reveal their status as performative constructions (Lloyd, 2007: 54).

Subversion is made possible by the necessity to repeat that is essential to gender performativity. Such a repetition is more likely to be subversive, according to Butler, when it exposes what is taken to be natural or authentic to a particular sex as simply an effect of the reproduction of particular norms, acts and gestures; in other words, when it compels us to question what is real. At such a time, the norms that define gender are not simply resisted; they are also (potentially) reworked. It is thus feminism’s critical undertaking, according to Butler, to identify strategies of subversive repetition’ (GT:188). They have … to identify ‘local strategies for engaging the “unnatural”‘ in order to denaturalize the heteronormative gender order (GT: 190). A subversive gender politics, for Butler, on my reading, thus consists in three inter-related phenomena:

1. agency understood as (re-)signification

2. denaturalization

3. the critical labour required to identify when and where gender norms might be challenged.

AIM: to create the space within which non-normative genders, sexes and sexualities might thrive (Lloyd, 2007: 56-7)

[Butler] develops Foucault’s insight that power relations not only limit but also enable possibilities of (political) action (GT:158). It is this argument that allows her to contend that, although there is no feature of the subject that is pre-discursive, agency still exists. The gendered subject, that is, may be constituted but it is not determined.

To be determined is to lack agency. It is to be programmed to behave in a a particular way without the space to improvise or to change that behaviour. Constitution, for Butler, is different. This is because performativity has a temporal dimension; it depends on the repetition of those acts constitutive of the subject. It is, in other words, an on-going and never-ending process grounded in ‘the compulsion to repeat’ (GT: 185). Constitution is distinguished from determination, therefore, by the need perpetually to reproduce the gestures and styles of the flesh that generate gender as an effect. Crucially, it is in this compulsion to repeat these gestures and styles that agency resides. Agency is not, therefore, a property of the subject (an innate quality it has); it is rather, an element of signification and repetition. What remains unclear at this point in Butler’s argument, however, is what it is about repetition per se that allows for variations in gender performance and thence social change. How, in other words, is it possible to navigate between norms and acts so as to subvert or transform heteronormativity: Since the account of performativity developed in Gender Trouble is clearly insufficient to answer these questions, Butler needs to amend it in some way. This is why, I suggest, she borrows the idea of iterability from Derrida (61).

Lloyd agency between constraint and freedom

The primary political aim of Gender Trouble is to make life possible for those who, within the terms of the dominant heteronormative regime, are presently unintelligibile (36).

One of the merits of the idea of becoming a gender is that it suggests that gender is not to be thought of as imposed on subjects, as it is sometimes characterized within feminism (as when authors talk of women being ‘culturally constructed’) … the concept of gender as becoming introduces the idea that gendering, in part at least, is a ‘self-reflexive process’ (SG: 36) Moreover, if it is a self-reflexive process, this means that the courses of action open to us are never entirely constrained.

The difficulty with reading ‘becoming’ entirely in this way, according to Butler, is that it might appear to suggest that the subject (the ‘I’) somehow precedes its gender and that it orchestrates entirely its own becoming as a gender. … If, as it clearly is, agency is involved in becoming a gender, then it must be a form of agency that is embodied. And this means that it is one that is always in some way constrained by the historical discourses that invest our bodies with meaning. When we endeavour to become a particular gender we aim, by and large, to approximate the historical and cultural norms that define what that gender ought to be: how it should look, walk, talk,sit, and so forth. As such, our becoming is always constrained by cultural norms, taboos, conventions and even laws. This is why those who fail to approximate the gender ideal, either deliberately or unintentionally, may be severely punished for their failure. Does this mean, however, that no alteration in the norms of gender is possible? No, it does not (39-40).

… the difficulty in producing a version of agency capable of negotiating between constraint and freedom … (40).

gender produces sex

Gender does not describe something that IS (an essence), rather it refers to a process — a series of acts. In this sense, a gendered identity is made manifest only at the moment of its enactment.

There is no being behind doing, effecting, becoming: “the doer” is merely the fiction added to the deed — the deed is everything.

Gender is thus a doing, — an activity — but not one undertaken by a subject ‘that might be said to pre-exist the deed’ (GT:33) (42)

As a consequence, there is no such thing as a natural (gendered) body; the gendered body is a construct of the acts that generate ‘its reality’ (GT: 173) (42).

Drag is important to Butler’s argument not because she conceives of it as THE practice most likely to undermine heteronormativity, but because it is A practice that sheds light on how heteronormativity naturalizes the relation between sex, gender and desire. It is significant because of if its capacity to denaturalize all three constitutive elements (sex, gender and desire) of the law of heterosexual coherence’, as well as their relations to one another (GT 175). As a practice, therefore, it can be tide back to the question of cultural intelligibility. A gendered identity, as an effect of the heterosexual matrix, is generated only through the necessary and perpetual repetition of particular acts and gestures. Precisely because gender identity relies on repetition, however, it is inherently unstable. Drag exemplifies how this instability can be exploited. It symbolizes a way of resisting prevailing gender norms such that it exposes the work of fabrication that takes place in the production of any identity — coherent or not (44).

What political possibilities are the consequence of a radical critique of the categories of identity?

Developed out of her radical reading of Beauvoir, the idea that a gendered identity is produced only as it is enacted had a profound influence on both feminist and queer thought. Although, at first sight, it might appear that the theory of performativity resembles the sociological idea of sex-role socialization (adopted by several feminists in their explorations of gender), the two are in fact, quite distinct. The reason is that they are based on different assumptions. Socialization theory assumes that a gendered identity is acquired by sexed subjects learning certain gendered practices. This means, first, that sex is seen as prior to gender, a view that Butler rejects, and, second, that logically there must be a time when sexed subjects are un-gendered — the time before they learn the gendered practices in question. For Butler, however, to be a person is always already to be gendered. The declaration at a child’s birth of its sex is a gendered (and gendering) declaration. It constitutes them as male or female. (Indeed, with advances in ultrasound, this occurs BEFORE birth now.) The theory of performativity is distinct from socialization theory in a second way, in that the latter assumes the very presupposition that performativity contests: that there is a ‘doer behind the deed’. Gender is performative, for Butler, because it exists ONLY in the acts that constitute it. Or, to put it less obliquely, a gendered identity is produced through specific bodily gestures, practices, declarations, actions and movements. A gendered identity is thus an effect of doing gender. The theory of gender performance thus permits Butler to advance an innovative theory of subjectivity (48).

Lloyd cultural intelligibility

Cultural intelligibility: refers to the production of a normative framework that conditions who can be recognized as a legitimate subject. Butler uses it in her earlier writings as a way of think about how normative ideas of sex and gender circumscribe who can be conceived of as subject. She also draws on it in her later texts (particularly Undoing Gender and Precarious Life), to demonstrate how the human is normatively produced within particular racial and cultural frames. On both occasions, Butler ties the idea of cultural intelligibility to the possibility of a liveable life (that is, a life that is recognized as having value and legitimacy). Before any individual can live a ‘liveable’ life, she argues, they have first to be recognized as a viable subject. If they cannot be recognized in this way (because they deviate somehow from the norms determining viable subjectivity), then their lives will be ‘”impossible”, illegible, unreal, and illegitimate’ (GT: viii). They simply will not matter. Any regime of cultural intelligibility thus hinges on what she calls in the 1999 preface ‘normative violence’ (GT:xx): that is, the violence that is done by certain norms in the generation of liveable lives and in the constitution of subjectivity. It is this interest in how normative violence relates to cultural intelligibility and how both relate to liveable lives that drives her politics (33).

Heterosexual matrix: generates a series of ideal relations between sex, gender and desire such that gender is said to follow naturally from sex and where desire (or sexuality) is said to follow naturally from gender. ‘Sex’ in this sense can be thought of as a natural substance that is given expression in both femininity and masculinity, AND in specific ‘modalities of desire and pleasure’ (‘GB’:259). Consistent with the grid, maleness entails masculinity, and masculinity is expressed in sexual desire for a woman, whereas femaleness entails femininity and is expressed in sexual desire for a man. Gender and desire are thus seen as aspects of sex. As such, “intelligible” genders are those which in some sense institute and maintain relations of coherence and continuity among sex, gender, sexual practice, and desire’ (GT:23). These relations of coherence and continuity are not natural; they are the effect of the constitutive and violent work of certain gender norms. A coherent —and culturally intelligible— subject, therefore, is one in whom sex, gender and desire flow in the way just described. Where however, sex, gender and desire line up in a different way … the individual in question is regarded as culturally unintelligible and, as such, as not a viable subject. In terms of the matrix, he might be thought of, that is, as ‘unnatural’ or as not a ‘proper’ man. If therefore, according to the terms of heteronormativity, to be human is to be heterosexual, then consequently anyone who is not heterosexual (be they gay, lesbian or bisexual, for instance) is not (fully) human. As non-human or less-than-human, they lack social, legal and political validity. Exposing the regulatory and fictive nature of compulsory heterosexuality is thus central to a gender politics, such as Butler’s, that seeks legitimation for non-normative sexual minorities (34-35).

Lloyd sex/gender

Moya Lloyd. Judith Butler: From Norms to Politics Polity 2008

… both Beauvoir and Irigaray maintain that sexual difference is a natural aspect of human existence

When feminists first began to theorize the sex/genderrelation, the underlying assumption was that sex was both logically and chronologically prior to gender. Culturally determined gender norms, in other words, were conceptualized as secondary to natural sex. Gender was thus what was inscribed onto sex is some way. It is the priority of the relation between sex and gender that Bulter problematizes (32).

Crucially, sex as a regulative ideal thus also operates to exclude — or pathologize — those whose anatomy does not fit its normative parameters. It might be objected that Butler’s argument in this regard is unoriginal; after all, Foucault had already put into question the idea of naturalized ‘sex’ when he demonstrated in The History of Sexuality that sex is the effect of a historically sedimented regime of sexuality and that the so-called ‘truth’ of sex that every subject is supposed to exhibit is, in fact, manufactured bya constellation of regulatory and productive discourses of sexuality …

Butler is explicitly interested in gender and its relation to sex and sexuality. In this regard, Butler is not just content to argue that sex is a gendered effect and thus to re-theorize the sex/gender relation in this way. Instead, following Wittig, amongst others, her purpose is to demonstrate how sex and gender are deployed within a particular framework, namely, that of heteronormativity (where men are opposed to women, masculinity to femininity, and heterosexuality to homosexuality).

Butler’s relationship to Hegel

Moya Lloyd. Judith Butler: From Norms to Politics Polity 2007.

While thinkers prior to Hegel had examined the nature of desire, few, as Allan Megill notes, had thought that there might be ‘a constitutive relation between desire and subjectivity”, as Hegel did, and it is this constitutive relation that both interested his French critics and continues to interest Butler. Hegel’s Phenomenology, as stated, examines the way in which desire and self-consciousness emerge side by side (15).

ek-static subject, a subject outside itself, or to put it differently, a subject that is not self-identical. … it is the idea of ek-static subjectivity, derived, however loosely, from Hegel, continues to inspire Butler’s work to date, although the form it takes is one increasingly informed, in large part by psychoanalysis. For this reason, far from the comic subject of desire she attributes to Hegel, Butler’s subject is a melancholic figure (16).

… the subject is an ek-static subject; one that is always outside —or other to— itself. It is this understanding of the subject and its relation to the other … that underpins, amongst other things, Butler’s examination of the differential values placed on disparate lives and deaths; her treatment of what counts as a liveable life, her exploration of the constitutive role of mourning in the production of the psyche; and her discussion of the precariousness of all life (18).

heteronormativity: institutions, modes of understanding, norms and discourss that treat heterosexuality as naural to humanity

precarious ch. 3 new power

This new configuration of power requires a new theoretical framework, or, at least, a revision of the models for thinking power that we already have at our disposal. The fact of extra-legal power is not new, but the mechanism by which it achieves its goals under present circumstances is singular. Indeed, it may be that this singularity consists in the way the “present circumstance” is transformed in a reality indefinitely extended into the future, controlling not only the lives of prisoners and the fate of constitutional and international law, but also the very ways in which the future may or may not be thought (92).

How then finally are we to understand this extra-legal operation of power? (92)

What we have before us now is the deployment of sovereignty as a tactic, a tactic that produces its own effectivity as its aim. Sovereignty becomes that instrument of power by which law is either used tactically or suspended, populations are monitored, detained, regulated, inspected, interrogated, rendered uniform in their actions, fully ritualized and exposed to control and regulation in their daily lives. The prison presents the managerial tactics of governmentality in an extreme mode. And whereas we expect the prison to be tied to law—to trial, to punishment, to the rights of prisoners— we see presently an effort to produce a secondary judicial system and a sphere of non-legal detention that effectively produces the prison itself as an extra-legal sphere (97).

Finally it seems important to recognize the one way of “managing” a population is to constitute them as the less than human without entitlement to rights, as the humanly unrecognizable. This is different from producing a subject who is compliant with the law; and it is different from the production of the subject who takes the norm of humanness to be its constitutive principle.

The subject who is no subject is neither alive nor dead, neither fully constituted as a subject nor fully deconstituted in death. “Managing” a population is thus not only a process through which regulatory power produces a set of subjects. It is also the process of their de-subjectivation, one with enormous political and legal consequences (98).

… I am [interested] in the place of law in the articulation of an international conception of rights and oblligations that limit and condition claims of state sovereignty … I am further interested in elaborating an account of power that will produce effective sites of intervention in the dehumanizing effects of the new war prison…. I think that a new internationalism must nevertheless strive for the rights of the stateless, and for forms of self-determination that do not resolve into capricious and cynical forms of state sovereignty. There are advantages to coneiving power in such a way that it is not centred in the nation-state, but conceived, rather, to oeprate as well through non-state institutions and discourses, since the points of intervention have proliferated, and the aim of politics is not only or merely the overthrow of the state. A broader set of tactics are opened up by the field of governmentality, including those discourses that shape and deform what we mean by “the human.”

I am in favor of self-determination as long as we understand that no “self,” including no national subject, exists apart from an international socius. A mode of self-determination for any given people, regardless of current state status, is not the same as the extra-legal exercise of sovereignty for the purposes of suspending rights at random. As a result, there can be no legitimate exercise of self-determination that is not conditioned and limited by an international conception of human rights that provides the obligatory framework for state action. I am, for instance, in favor of Palestinian self-determination, and even Palestinian statehood, but that process would have to take place supported by, and limited by, international human rights (Precarious: 98-99).

… Even the US’s call for an international coalition after those events [Sept 11] was one that presumed that the US would set the terms, lead the way, determine the criterion for membership, and lead its allies. This is a form of sovereignty that seeks to absorb and instrumentalize an international coalition, rather than submit to a self-limiting practice by virtue of its international obligations. Similarly, Palestinian self-determination will be secured as a right only if there is an international consensus that there are rights to be enforced in the face of a bloated and violent exercise of sovereign prerogative on the part of Israel. My fear is that the indefinite detainment of prisoners on Guantanamo, for whom no rights of appeal will be possible within federal courts, will become a model for the branding and management of so-called terrorists in various global sites where no rights of appeal to international rights and to international courts will be presumed. If this extension of lawless and illegitimate power takes place, we will see the resurgence of a violent and self-aggrandizing state sovereignty at the expense of any commitment to global co-operation that might suport and radically redistribute rights of recognition governing who may be treated according to standards that ought to govern the treatment of humans. We have yet to become human, it seems, and now that prospect seems even more radically imperiled, if not, for the time being, indefinitely foreclosed (100).