Author: logocentric

precarious life ch. 3 to be human

When the very human status of those who are imprisoned is called into question, it is a sign that we have made use of a certain parochial frame for understanding the human, and failed to expand our conception of human rights to include those whose values may well test the limits of our own …

If we assume that everyone who is human goes to war like us, and that this is part of what makes them recognizably human, or that the violence we commit is violence that falls within the realm of the recognizably human, but the violence that others commit is unrecognizable as human activity, then we make use of a limited and limiting cultural frame to understand what it is to be human. This is no reason to dismiss the term “human,” but only a reason to ask how it works, what it forecloses, and what it sometimes opens up. To be human implies many things, one of which is that we are the kinds of beings who must live in a world where clashes of value do and will occur, and that these clashes are a sign of what a human community is. How we handle those conflicts will also be a sign of our humanness, one that is importantly, in the making. Whether or not we continue to enforce a universal conception of human rights at moments of outrage and incomprehension, precisely when we think that others have taken themselves ot of the human community as we know it, is a test of our very humanity.

We make a mistake, therefore, if we take a single definition of the human, or a single model of rationality, to be the defining feature of the human, and then extrapolate from that established understanding of the human to all of its various cultural forms.

That direction will lead us to wonder whether some humans who do not exemplify reason and violence in the way defined by our definition are still human, or whether they are unique (Hastert), or really bad people (Cheney) presenting us with a limit case of the human, one in relation to which we have so far failed.

To come up against what functions, for some, as a limit case of the human is a challenge to rethink the human. And the task to rethink the human is part of the democratic trajectory of an evolving human rights jurisprudence.

It should not be surprising to find that there are racial and ethnic frames by which the recognizably human is currently constituted. One critical operation of any democratic culture is to contest these frames, to allow a set of dissonant and overlapping frames to come into view, to take up the challenges of cultural translation, especially those that emerge when we find ourselves living in proximity with those whose beliefs and values challenge our own at very fundamental levels. More crucially, it is not that “we” have a common idea of what is human, for Americans are constituted by many traditions, including Islam in various forms, so any radically democratic self-understanding will have to come to terms with the heterogeneity of human values. This is not a relativism that undermines universal claims; it is the condition by which a concrete and expansive conception of the human will be articulated, the way in which parochial and implicitly racially and religiously bound conceptions of human will be made to yield to a wider conception of how we consider who we are as a global community.

We do not yet understand all these ways, and in this sense human rights law has yet to understand the full meaning of the human. It is, we might say, an ongoing task of human rights to reconceive the human when it finds that its putative universality does not have universal reach (Precarious: 89-91).

The question of who will be treated humanely presupposes that we have first settled the question of who does and does not count as a human. And this is where the debate about Western civilization and Islam is not merely or only an academic debate, a misbegotten pursuit of Orientalism by the likes of Bernard Lewis and Samuel Huntington who regularly produce monolithic accounts of the East, contrasting the values of Islam with the values of Western civilization. In this sense, civilization is a term that works against an expansive conception of the human, one that has no place in a internationalism that takes the universality of rights seriously. The term and the practice of civilization work to produce the human differentially by offering a culturally limited norm for what the human is supposed to be.

It is not just that some humans are treated as humans, and others are dehumanized; it is rather that dehumanization becomes the condition for the production of the human to the extent that a “Western” civilization defines itself over and against a population understood as, by definition, illegitimate, if not dubiously human (91).

A spurious notion of civilization proves the measure by which the human is defined at the same time that field of would-be humans, the spectrally human, the deconstituted, are maintained and detained, made to live and die within the extra-human and extra-juridical sphere of life.

precarious life ch. 3 indefinite detention

In the name of a security alert and national emergency, the law is effectively suspended in both its national and international forms. And with the suspension of law comes a new exercise of state sovereignty, one that not only takes place outside the law, but through an elaboration of administrative bureaucracies in which officials now not only decide who will be tried, and who will be detained, but also have ultimate say over whether someone may be detained indefinitely or not. With the publication of the new regulations, the US gov’t holds that a number of detainees at Guantanamo will not be given trials at all, but detained indefinitely. What sort of legal innovation is the notion of indefinite detention? (51)

  • And what does it say about the contemporary formation and extension of state power?

Indefinite detention not only carries implications for when and where law will be suspended but for determining the limit and scope of legal jurisdiction itself. Both of these, in turn, carry implications for the extension and self-justificatory procedures of state-sovereignty (Precarious 51).

I would like to suggest that the current configuration of state power, in relation both to the management of populations (the hallmark of governmentality) and the exercise of sovereignty in the acts that suspend and limit the jurisdiction of law itself, are reconfigured in terms of the new war prison (53).

I hope to show how procedures of governmentality, which are irreducible to law, are invoked to extend and fortify forms of sovereignty that are equally irreducible to law. Neither is necessarily grounded in law, and neither deploys legal tactics exclusively in the the field of their respective operations. The suspension of the rule of law allows for the convergence of governmentality and sovereignty; sovereignty is exercised in the act of suspension, but also in the self-allocation of legal prerogative; governmentality denotes an operation of administration power that is extra-legal, even as it can and does return to law as a field of tactical operations. The state is neither identified with the acts of sovereignty nor with the field of governmentality, and yet both act in the name of the state. Law itself is either suspended, or regarded as an instrument that the state may use in the service of constraining and monitoring a given population; the state is not subject to the rule of law, but law can be suspended or deployed tactically and partially to suit the requirements of a state that seeks more and more to allocate sovereign power to its executive and administrative powers. The law is suspended in the name of the “sovereignty” of the nation, where “sovereignty” denotes the task of any state to preserve and protect its own territoriality. By this act of suspending the law, the state is further disarticulated into a set of administrative powers that are, to some extent, outside the apparatus of the state itself; and the forms of sovereignty resurrected in its midst markthe persistence of forms of sovereign political power for the executive that precede the emergence of the state in its modern form (Precarious, 55-56).

It is of course, tempting to say that something called the “state”, imagined as a powerful unity, makes use of the field of governmentality to reintroduce and reinstate its own forms of sovereignty. This description doubtless misdescribes the situation, however, since governmentality designates a field of political power in which tactics and aims have become diffuse, and in which political power fails to take on a unitary and causal form. But my point is that precisely because our historical situation is marked by governmentality, and this implies, to a certain degree, a loss of sovereignty, that loss is compensated though the resurgence of sovereignty within the field of governmentality. Petty sovereigns abound, reigning in the midst of bureaucratic army institutions mobilized by aims and tactics of power they do not inaugurate or fully control. And yet such figures are delegated with the power to render unilateral decisions, accountable to no law and without any legitimate authority. The resurrected sovereignty is thus not the sovereignty of unified power under the conditions of legitimacy, the form of power that guarantees the representative status of political institutions. It is, rather, a lawless a prerogatory power, a “rogue” power par excellence (Precarious, 56).

The state in this sense, then, augments its own power in at least two ways. In the context of military tribunals … The executive branch in tandem with its military administration not only decides whether or not a detainee wills tand trial, but appoints the tribunal, reviews teh process, and maintains final say over matters of guilt, innocence, and punishment, i ncluding the death penalty. .. The decision to detain someone indefinitely is not made by executive review, but by a set of administrators who are given broad policy guidelines within which to act. Neither the decision to detain nor the decision to activate the military tribunal is grounded in law (58).

The one who makes this decision assumes a lawless and yet fully effective form of power with the consequence not only of depriving an incarcerated human being of the possibility of a trial, in clear defiance of international law, but of investing the governmental bureaucrat with an extraordinary power over life and death. Those who decide on whether someone will be detained, and continue to be detained, are government officials, not elected ones, and not members of the judiciary. They are, rather, part of the apparatus of governmentality; their decision, the power they wield to “deem” someone dangerous and constitute them effectively as such, is a sovereign power, a ghostly and forceful resurgence of sovereignty in the midst of governmentality (59).

My own view is that a contemporary version of sovereignty, animated by an aggressive nostaligia that seeks to do away with the separation of powers, is produced at the moment of this withdrawal, and we have to consider the act of suspending the law as a performative one which brings a contemporary configuration of sovereignty into being, or, more precisely, reanimates a spectral sovereignty within the field of governmentality. The states produces, through the act of withdrawal, a law that is no law, a court that is no court, a process that is no process (62).

Sovereignty consists now in the variable application, contortion, and suspension of the law; it is, in its current form, a relation to law: exploitative, instrumental, disdainful, preemptory, arbitrary (83).

One might conclude with a strong argument that gov’t policy ought to follow established law. And in a way, that is part of what I am calling for. But there is also a problem with the law, since it leaves open the possibility of its own retraction,and, in the case of the Geneva Convention, extends “universal” rights only to those imprisoned combatants who belong to “recognizable” nation-states, but not to all people. Recognizable nation-states are those that are already signatories to the convention itself. This means that stateless peoples or those who belong to states that are emergent or “rogue” or generally unrecognized lack all protections. The Geneva Convention is, in part, a civilizational discourse, and it nowhere asserts an entitlement to protection against degradation and violence and rights to a fair trial as universal rights. Other international covenants surely do, and many human rights organizations have argued that the GC can and ought to be read to apply universally. The notion of “universality” embeddd in that document (GC) is restrictive in its reach: it counts as subjects worthy of protection only those who belong already to nation-states recognizable within its terms. … By clearly privileging those prisoners from wars between recognizable states, it leaves the stateless unprotected, and it leaves those from non-recognized polities without recourse to its entitlements (87).

Precarious pt 2.

Who counts as human? Whose lives count as lives? And finally, What makes for a grievable life? Despite our differences in location and history, my guess is that it is possible to appeal to a “we,” for all of us have some notion of what it is to have lost somebody. Loss has made a tenuous “we” of us all.

To be ec-static; means, literally, to be outside oneself, and thus can have several meanings: to be transported beyond oneself by a passion, but also to be beside oneself with rage or grief. I think that if I can still address a “we,” or include myself within its terms, I am speaking to those of us who are living in certain ways beside ourselves, whether in sexual passion, or emotional grief, or political rage (Precarious: 24).

I am arguing, if I am “arguing” at all, that we have an interesting political predicament; most of the time when we hear about “rights,” we understand them as pertaining to individuals. When we argue for protection against discrimination, we argue as a group or a class. And in that language and in that context, we have to present ourselves as bounded beings — distinct, recognizable, delineated, subjects before the law, a community defined by some shared features. Indeed, we must be able to use that language to secure legal protections and entitlements. But perhaps we make a mistake if we take the definitions of who we are, legally, to be adequate descriptions of what we are about. Although this language may well establish our legitimacy within a legal framework ensconced in liberal versions of human ontology, it does not do justice to passion and grief and rage, all of which tear us from ourselves, bind us to others, transport us, undo us, implicate us in lives that are not are [sic] own, irreversibly, if not fatally (Precarious: 24-25).

Precarious Life pt 1

Our fear of understanding a point of view belies a deeper fear that we shall be taken up by it, find it is contagious, become infected in a morally perilous way by the thinking of the presumed enemy.

Thus we can say, and ought to, that US imperialism is a necessary condition for the attacks on the United States, that these attacks would be impossible without the horizon of imperialism within which they occur. But to understand how US imperialism figures here, we have to understand not only how it is experienced by those who understand themselves as its victims, but how it enters into their own formation as acting and deliberating subjects (Butler, Precarious 2004: 11).

What effect did the killing of an estimated 200,000 Iraqi citizens, including tens of thousands of children, and the subsequent starvation of Muslim populations, predicted by Concern, a hunger relief organization, to reach six million by the year’s end, have on Muslim views of the United States? Is a Muslim life as valuable as legibly First World lives? Are the Palestinians yet accorded the status of “human” in US policy and press coverage? Will those hundreds of thousands of Muslim lives lost in the last decades of strife ever receive the equivalent to the paragraph-long obituaries in the New York Times that seek to humanize — often through nationalist and familial framing devices — those Americans who have been violently killed? Is our capacity to mourn in global dimensions foreclosed precisely by the failure to conceive of Muslim and Arab lives as lives (12).

Those who commit acts of violence are surely responsible for them; they are not dupes or mechanisms of an impersonal social force, but agents with responsibility. On the other hand, these individuals are formed, and we would be making a mistake if we reduced their actions to purely self-generated acts of will or symptoms of individual pathology or “evil.” Both the discourse of individualism and of moralism (understood as the moment in which morality exhausts itself in public acts of denunciation) assume that the individual is the first link in a causal chain that forms the meaning of accountability. But to take the self-generated acts of the individual as our point of departure in moral reasoning is precisely to foreclose the possibility of questioning what kind of world gives rise to such individuals. And what is this process of “giving rise”? What social conditions help to form the very ways that choice and deliberation proceed? Where and how can such subject formations be contravened? How is it that radical violence becomes an option, comes to appear as the only viable option for some, under some global conditions? Against what conditions of violation do they respond? And with what resources?

To ask these questions is not to say that the conditions are at fault rather than the individual. It is, rather, to rethink the relation between conditions and acts. Our acts are not self-generated, but conditioned. We are at once acted upon and acting, and our “responsibility” lies in the juncture between the two. What can I do with the conditions that form me? What do they constrain me to do? What can I do to transform them? Being acted up on is not fully continuous with acting, and in this way the forces that act upon us are not finally responsible for what we do. In a certain way, and paradoxically, our responsibility is heightened once we have been subjected to the violence of others. We are acted upon, violently, and it appears that our capacity to set our own course at such instances is fully undermined. Only once we have suffered that violence are we compelled ethically, to ask how we will respond to violent injury. What role will we assume in the historical relay of violence, who will we become in the response, and will we be furthering or impeding violence by virtue of the response that we make? To respond to violence with violence may well seem “justified,” but is it finally a responsible solution? Similarly, moralistic denunciation provides immediate gratification, and even has the effect of temporarily cleansing the speaker of all proximity to guilt through the act of self-righteous denunciation itself. But is this the same as responsibility, understood as taking stock of our world, and participating in its social transformation in such a way that non-violent, cooperative, egalitarian international relations remain the guiding ideal (Precarious: 16-17).

Antigone pt. 3 promiscuous obedience

Butler, Judith. Antigone’s Claim. 2000 (Wellek lectures given in 1998). New York: Columbia University Press.

—The mother of Oedipus is his wife. Antigone’s father is her brother, since they share a mother in Jocasta.

Her brothers are her nephews, sons of her brother-father, Oedipus. As Butler notes

The terms of kinship become irreversibly equivocal. Is this part of her tragedy? Does this equivocation of kinship lead to fatality?

Antigone is caught within a web of relations that produce no coherent position within kinship. She is not, strictly speaking outside kinship or, indeed, unintelligible. her situation can be understood, but only with a certain amount of horror (Butler, Antigone’s Claim. 2000: 57)

The Curse of Kinship

And to the extent that the symbolic reiterates a “structural” necessity of kinship, does it relay or perform the curse of kinship itself? In other words, does the structuralist law report on the curse that is upon kinship or does it deliver that curse? Is structuralist kinship the curse that is upon contemporary critical theory as it tries to approach the question of sexual normativity, sociality, and the status of law? And moreover, if we are seized by this inheritance, is there a way to transmit that curse in aberrant form, exposing its fragility and fracture in the repetition and reinstitution of its terms?

Is this breaking from the law that takes place in the reinstituting of the law the condition for articulating a future kinship that exceeds structuralist totality, a poststructuralism of kinship?

From the presumption that one cannot —or ought not to— choose one’s closest family members as one’s lovers and marital partners, it does not follow that the bonds of kinship that ARE possible assume any particular form (66)

Antigone ch. 3

JB. “Promiscuous Obedience” (1998) The Judith Butler Reader 2003, pp. 278-301. originally appeared as Chapter 3 in Antigone’s Claim: Kinship Between Life and Death. 2000 (This blog post was originally published Jan 23/09)

Is structuralist kinship the curse that is upon contemporary critical theory as it tries to approach the question of sexual normativity, sociality, and the status of law? And, moreover, if we are seized by this inheritance, is there a way to transmit that curse in aberrant form, exposing its fragility and fracture in the repetition and reinstitution of its terms? Is this breaking from the law that takes place in the reinstituting of the law the condition for articulating a future kinship that exceeds structuralist totality, a poststructuralism of kinship.

Incest taboo: prohibit sexual exchange among kin relations or rather, to establish kin relations precisely on the basis of those taboos.

The Antigonean revision of psychoanalytic theory might put into question the assumption that the incest taboo legitimates and normalizes kinship based in biological reproduction and the heterosexualization of the family (286).

From the presumption that one cannot — or ought not to — choose one’s closest family members as one’s lovers and marital partners, it does not follow that the bonds of kinship that are possible assume any particular form (286).

Tada: Now here is what drives me nuts about JB, trying to disentangle phrases like the following, yet I know, this is also her absolute, impeccable genius:

To the extent that the incest taboo contains its infraction within itself, it does not simply prohibit incest but rather sustains and cultivates incest as a necessary specter of social dissolution, a specter without which social bonds cannot emerge … one that works precisely through proliferating through displacement the very crime that it bars. The taboo, and its threatening figuration of incest, delineates lines of kinship that harbor incest as their ownmost possibility, establishing “aberration” at the heart of the norm. Indeed, my question is whether it can also become the basis for a socially survivable aberration of kinship in which the norms that govern legitimate and illegitimate modes of kin association might be more radically redrawn (286) (Antigone’s Claim: 67).

[…] other forms of social life, inadvertent possibilities produced by the prohibition that come to undermine the conclusion that an invariant social organization of sexuality follows of necessity from the prohibitive law. What happens when the perverse or the impossible emerges in the language of the law and makes its claim precisely there in the sphere of legitimate kinship that depends on its exclusion or pathologization?

For a woman who is a single mother and has her child without a man, is the father still there, a spectral “position” or “place” that remains unfilled, or is there no such “place” or “position”? Is the father absent, or does this child have no father, no position, and no inhabitant. Is this a loss, which assumes the unfulfilled norm, or is it another configuration of primary attachment whose primary loss is not to have a language in which to articulate its terms? And when there are two men or two women who parent, are we to assume that some primary division of gendered roles organizes their psychic places within the scene, so that the empirical contingency of two same gendered parents is nevertheless straightened out by the presocial psychic place of the Mother and Father into which they enter? Does it make sense on these occasions to insist that there are symbolic positions of Mother and Father that every psyche must accept regardless of the social form that kinship takes? Or is that a way of reinstating a heterosexual organization of parenting at the psychic level that can accommodate all manner of gender variation at the social level? Here it seems that the very division between the psychic or symbolic, on the one hand, and the social, on the other, occasions this preemptory normalization of the social field (288) (AC: 69)

The question, however, is whether the incest taboo has also been mobilized to establish certain forms of kinship as the only intelligible and livable ones (288).

Consider the horror of incest, the moral revulsion it compels in some, is not that far afield from the same horror and revulsion felt toward lesbian and gay sex, and is not unrelated to the intense moral condemnation of voluntary single parenting, or gay parenting, or parenting arrangements with more than two adults involved (practices that can be used as evidence to support a claim to remove a child from the custody of the parent in several states in the United States).

These various modes in which the oedipal mandate fails to produce normative family all risk entering into the metonymy of that moralized sexual horror that is perhaps most fundamentally associated with incest (289).

What in her [Antigone’s] act is fatal for heterosexuality in its normative sense? And to what other ways of organizing sexuality might a consideration of that fatality give rise? (290)

In the 1970s socialist feminists sought to make use of the unwaveringly social analysis of kinship to show that there is no ultimate basis for normative heterosexual monogamous family structure in nature, and we might now add that it has no similar basis in language (290).

Lacanian Formalists: insist on fundamental notions of sexual difference, which are based on rules that prohibit and regulate sexual exchange, rules we can break only to find ourselves ordered by them anew.

The subsequent turn to Lacan seemed to be a turn away from a highly constructivist and malleable account of social law informing matters of sexual regulation to one that posits a presocial law, what Juliet Mitchell once called a “primordial law” (something she no longer does), the law of the Father, which sets limits upon the the variability of social forms and which in its most conservative form, mandates an exogamic, heterosexual conclusion to the oedipal drama. That this constraint is understood to be beyond social alteration, indeed, to constitute the condition and limit of all social alterations, indicates something of the theological status it has assumed. And though this position often is quick to claim that although there is a normative conclusion for the oedipal drama, the norm cannot exist without perversion, and only through perversion can the norm be established. We are all supposed to be satisfied with this apparently generous gesture by which the perverse is announced to be essential to the norm. The problem as I see it is that the perverse remains entombed precisely there, as the essential and negative feature of the norm, and the relation between the two remains static, giving way to no rearticulation of the norm itself (Butler, AC: 75).

[…] Antigone, who concludes the oedipal drama, fails to produce heterosexual closure for that drama, and that this may intimate the direction for a psychoanalytic theory that takes Antigone as its point of departure. Certainly, she does not achieve another sexuality, one that is NOT heterosexuality, but she does seem to deinstitute heterosexuality by refusing to do what is necessary to stay alive for Haemon, by refusing to become a mother and a wife, by scandalizing the public with her wavering gender, by embracing death as her bridal chamber and identifying her tomb as a “deep dug home”. If the love toward which she moves as she moves toward death is a love for her brother and thus, ambiguously, her father, it is also a love that can only be consummated by its obliteration, which is no consummation at all.

When the incest taboo works in this sense to foreclose a love that is not incestuous, what is produced is a shadowy realm of love, a love that persists in spite of its foreclosure in an ontologically suspended mode. What emerges is a melancholia that attends living and loving outside the livable and outside the field of love, where the lack of institutional sanction forces language into perpetual catachresis, showing not only how a term can continue to signify outside its conventional constraints but also how that shadowy form of signification takes its toll on a life by depriving it of its sense of ontological certainty and durability within a publicly constitute political sphere (294).

To accept those norms as coextensive with cultural intelligibility is to accept a doctrine that becomes the very instrument by which this melancholia is produced and reproduced at a cultural level. And it is overcome, in part, precisely through the repeated scandal by which the unspeakable nevertheless makes itself heard through borrowing and exploiting the very terms that are meant to enforce its silence (294-5).

If she is human, then the human has entered into catachresis: we no longer know its proper usage. And to the extent that she occupies the language that can never belong to her, she functions as a chiasm [crossing over] within the vocabulary of political norms. If kinship is the precondition of the human, then Antigone is the occasion for a new field of the human, achieved through political catachresis, the one that happens when the less than human speaks as human, when gender is displaced, and kinship founders on its own founding laws (297).

Antigone ch. 2 Lacan kinship

Butler, Judith. Antigone’s Claim. 2000 (Wellek lectures given in 1998). New York: Columbia University Press.

Does Antigone’s death signal a necessary lesson about the limits of cultural intelligibility, the limits of intelligible kinship, one that restores us to our proper sense of limit and constraint? Does Antigone’s death signal the supersession of kinship by the state, the necessary subordination of the former to the latter? Or is her death precisely a limit that requires to be read as that operation of political power that forecloses what forms of kinship will be intelligible, what kinds of lives can be countenanced as living?

In Lacan, kinship, as a function of the symbolic, becomes rigorously dissociated from the sphere of the social, and yet it constitutes the structural field of intelligibility within which the social emerges. My reading of Antigone, in brief, will attempt to compel these distinctions into productive crisis.

Antigone represents neither kinship nor its radical outside but becomes the occasion for a reading of a structurally constrained notion of kinship in terms of its social iterability, the aberrant temporality of the norm (Butler, Antigone: 29).

kinship as symbolic

To recast positions of kinship as “symbolic” is precisely to posit them as preconditions of linguistic communicability and to suggest that these “positions” bear an intractability that does not apply to contingent social norms. It is, however, not enough to trace the effects of social norms on the thinking of kinship, a move that would return the discourse on kinship to a sociologism devoid of psychic significance. Norms do not unilaterally act upon the psyche; rather, they become condensed as the figure of the law to which the psyche returns.

The psychic relation to social norms can, under certain conditions, posit those norms as intractable, punitive, and eternal, but that figuration of norms already takes place within what Freud called “the culture of the death drive.”

In other words, the very description of the symbolic as intractable law takes place within a fantasy of law as insurpassable authority. In my view, Lacan at once analyzes and symptomizes this fantasy. I hope to suggest that the notion of the symbolic is limited by the description of its own transcendentalizing function, that it can acknowledge the contingency of its own structure only by disavowing the possibility of any substantial alteration in its field of operation. My suggestion will be that the relation between symbolic position and social norm needs to be rethought, and in my final chapter, I hope to show how one might reapproach the kinship-founding function of the incest taboo within psychoanalysis with a conception of a contingent social norm at work (Butler Antigone: 30).

Here I am less interested in what the taboo constrains than the forms of kinship to which it gives rise and how their legitimacy is established precisely as the normalized solutions to the oedipal crisis.

The point, then, is not to unleash incest from its constraints but to ask what forms of normative kinship are understood to proceed as structural necessities from that taboo.

sub specie aeternitatis: In its essential or universal form or nature

prounce it like this

Antigone

Butler, Judith. Antigone’s Claim. 2000 (Wellek lectures given in 1998). New York: Columbia University Press.

My view is that the distinction between symbolic and social law cannot finally hold, that not only is the symbolic itself the sedimentation of social practices but that radical alterations in kinship demand a rearticulation of the structuralist presuppositions of psychoanalysis and, hence, of contemporary gender and sexual theory (Butler, Antigone 2000: 19).

Those who disagree with me then claim, with some exasperation, “but it is the law!” but what is the status of such an utterance?

“It is the law!” becomes the utterance that performatively attributes the very force to the law that the law itself is said to exercise. “It is the law” is thus a sign of allegiance to the law, a sign of the desire for the law to be the indisputable law, a theological impulse within the theory of psychoanalysis that seeks to put out of play any criticism of the symbolic father, the law of psychoanalysis itself.

Thus the status given to the law is precisely the status given to the phallus, the symbolic place of the father, the indisputable and incontestable. The theory exposes its own tautological defense. The law beyond laws will finally put an end to the anxiety produced by a critical relation to final authority that clearly does not know when to stop: a limit to the social, the subversive, the possibility of agency and change, a limit that we cling to, symptomatically, as the final defeat of our own power. Its defenders claim that to be without such a law is pure voluntarism or radical anarchy! Or is it? And to accept such a law as a final arbiter of kinship life? Is that not to resolve by theological means the concrete dilemmas of human sexual arrangements that have no ultimate normative form? (Butler, Antigone: 21)

melancholy

(Salih 2002. p 131-3).
Like Gender Trouble, Bodies That Matter, and Excitable Speech, The Psychic Life of Power argues that prohibition and repression are constitutive of identity, and Butler specifies that what is being repressed is not just desire in general but homosexual desire (or homosexual cathexis) in particular. As in Gender Trouble, Butler asserts that gender is not a given but a process, masculinity and femininity are ‘accomplishments’, while heterosexuality is an ‘achievement’ (PLP: 132, 135). Now Butler asks how these processes, accomplishments and achievements come about, at what cost to the subject and to other subjects who may be oppressed and negated in the process.

In order to achieve a coherent heterosexual identity something has to be given up and, as before, what is relinquished is the primary homosexual cathexis that characterizes the pre-oedipal id (see Chapter 2, pp. 54– 6). Prohibition, repudiation and loss form the basis of heterosexual ego formation, and both heterosexuals and homosexuals live in a heterosexual culture of gender melancholy where the loss of primary homosexual attachments may not be grieved (PLP: 139). Grief is not just a metaphor in Psychic and Butler draws out the parallels between Freud’s descriptions of psychic loss in ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ and a contemporary heterosexual culture in which lost homosexual attachments may only be mourned with difficulty (PLP: 138). Butler regards this cultural inability as symptomatic of the lack of a public forum and language with which to mourn ‘the seemingly endless number of deaths’ from ‘the ravages of AIDS’ (PLP: 138). Although this is a poignant argument, the elision of metaphorical and real mourning might be taken to imply that the heterosexual subject is aware of what she or he has ‘lost’ but is unable or unwilling to acknowledge and declare it. All the same, Butler is developing one of Gender Trouble’s most powerful contentions – that heterosexuality emerges from a repudiated homosexuality that is preserved in the very structure of that repudiation. Abjected homosexual cathexes do not simply disappear, and both Excitable Speech and earlier chapters of The Psychic Life of Power have prepared the ground for Butler’s assertion that repudiation and prohibition actually require homosexuality in order to constitute themselves. Far from obliterating homosexuality, it is sustained by the very structures that prohibit it. ‘[H]omosexuality is not abolished but preserved, though preserved precisely in the prohibition on homosexuality’, Butler insists (PLP: 142). [R]enunciation requires the very homosexuality that it condemns, not as its external object, but as its own most treasured source of sustenance. The act of renouncing homosexuality thus paradoxically strengthens homosexuality, but it strengthens homosexuality precisely as the power of renunciation. (PLP: 143) Butler’s situating of homosexuality at the heart of a homophobic and ‘homosexually panicked’ culture is of obvious political significance, as what is considered abject and unacceptable is posited as the source of heterosexual identity (although of course Butler does not formulate the idea in terms of ‘sources’). Gender identity is ‘acquired’ through the repudiation of homosexual attachments, and the abjected same-sex object of desire is installed in the ego as a melancholic identification, so that I can only be a woman to the extent that I have desired a woman, and I can only be a man to the extent that I have desired a man. Because heterosexual identity is founded on prohibited desire for members of the same sex, to desire a member of the same sex as an adult is to ‘panic’ gender or, in other words, to place an apparently coherent and stable heterosexual identity at risk by revealing that it is in fact far from stable or coherent (PLP: 136). The heterosexual subject’s homosexual desire is sublimated rather than destroyed, while disavowal and repudiation structure the ‘performance’ of gender. Performative gender was discussed in Chapter 3, and in Psychic Butler seems to conflate performativity, performance and psychotherapy as she argues that what is ‘acted out’ in these ‘gender performances’ is the unresolved grief of repudiated homosexuality (PLP: 146). As in Gender Trouble and Bodies That Matter, Butler focuses on ‘cross-gendered identification’, or drag, as a paradigm for thinking about homosexuality, since drag is an allegory of heterosexual melancholy in which the (male) drag performer takes on the feminine gender he has repudiated as a possible object of love. Extending this paradigm to gender identity in general, Butler asserts that ‘the “truest” lesbian melancholic is the strictly straight woman, and the “truest” gay male melancholic is the strictly straight man’ (PLP: 146– 7). In other words, heightened or exaggerated ‘straight’ identity is symptomatic of repudiated homosexual desire in a culture of heterosexual melancholy, where repudiated desires ‘return’ as what Butler calls ‘hyperbolic identifications’ (PLP: 147). The homosexual melancholic may be characterized by a different kind of loss, this time not a psychic one, but the real loss of people who have died from Aids and who remain ungrieved in a heterosexist, anti-gay culture that does not permit the mourning of these deaths. Homosexual identities may also be founded on a refused heterosexual cathexis that resembles heterosexual melancholia, but, although Butler asserts the political promise of what she calls ‘gay melancholia’ (PLP: 147), she also argues that refused heterosexual cathexis may leave heterosexuality intact by missing the opportunity to expose its weaknesses and fissures (PLP: 148). Butler accordingly affirms the political potential of acknowledging melancholy and loss by giving up all claims to ontological coherence and embracing, rather than repudiating, sexed and gendered ‘alterity’

(Salih 2002. p 133-4)
AFFIRMATIVE MELANCHOLIA

Previous chapters have emphasized the importance of melancholia to Butler’s theories, and the idea is similarly central to Psychic, where it is argued that melancholia initiates representation as well as constituting a means of representation in itself. Without loss and the resulting melancholia there would be no need for the metaphorical description of the ego in psychoanalytic theory, since it is melancholia that both necessitates and facilitates that description. Moreover, melancholia and, for that matter, the ego, are tropes that are rendered in topographical terms – in other words, the metaphors used by psychoanalysts to represent the ego and melancholia are spatial. The most prominent among these tropes is that of the the ego turning against itself, and Butler argues that the turn precipitated by loss and the ensuing melancholia are constitutive of an an ego that does not exist prior to the turn (PLP: 171).

It is loss that necessitates the description of the psychic ‘landscape’, since, if the ego were not ‘impaired’ in this way, there would be no need for psychoanalytic theory and its metaphorical renditions of psychic life.

Melancholia initiates psychic life and, by exceeding the power structures in which subjects are formed, it presents the possibility for subversion and agency. At least part of this ‘excess’ is ontological, since the melancholic subject is neither self-identical nor singular. In ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ the ego takes itself as an object and directs its violent anger against itself, an action that has characterized the accounts of the ego Butler has discussed. Now Butler argues that melancholia is cultivated by the state and internalized by citizens who are not aware of their relationship to an authority that conceals itself. And yet, even though it would seem that melancholia is an effect of power, there are ways of deploying the subject’s self-violence and constitutive melancholia to subversive ends.

‘Bhabha argues that melancholia is not a form of passivity, but a form of revolt that takes place through repetition and metonymy’, Butler states, referring to the postcolonial critic Homi Bhabha. Following Bhabha’s insight she asserts that aggressive melancholia can be ‘marshalled’ in the service of mourning and of life by killing off the critical agency or superego and turning the ego’s ‘turned back’ aggression outwards (PLP: 190– 1). There are forms of melancholia that do not involve the violent self-beratement described by Hegel, Nietzsche and so on, and Butler argues that acknowledging the trace of loss that inaugurates the subject’s emergence will lead to its psychic survival.

Following Derrida, Butler insists that recognizing one’s constitutive melancholia will involve accepting one’s Otherness, since melancholia is a process in which the other is installed as an identification in the ego (PLP: 195– 6). The notion of ontological autonomy must therefore be given up as a fiction. ‘To claim life . . . is to contest the righteous psyche, not by an act of will, but by submission to a sociality and linguistic life that makes such acts possible, one that exceeds the bounds of the ego and its “autonomy”’, writes Butler; ‘to persist in one’s being means to be given over from the start to social terms that are never fully one’s own’ (PLP: 197).

This echoes Butler’s contention in Excitable Speech that the subject is constituted by interpellatives it did not choose, and in the concluding pages of Psychic Butler reiterates her point that interpellation works by failing, since it never fully constitutes the subject it ‘hails’. All the same, the subject’s relationship to interpellation and power remains ambivalent, since the ‘call’ of the law brings the subject into being by subjecting it. The ambivalent Self marked by loss is tenuous at best, but agency lies in giving up any claim to coherence or self-identity by submitting to interpellation and subversively misrecognizing the terms by which we are hailed. Such refusals and misrecognitions take place within the power structures that subject and control us, and this might lead us to question how far submission is a means of agency and whether it is possible to recognize it as such. Butler has returned to these questions in recent discussions of mourning, melancholia and the ontological risks of self-incoherence in her two lectures, ‘What Is Critique?’ and Antigone’s Claim, along with the co-authored book Contingency, Hegemony, Universality.

SUMMARY
In The Psychic Life of Power Butler deploys psychoanalytic, Foucauldian and Althusserian theoretical paradigms (among others) to discuss the subject’s relation to power. The subject is passionately attached to the law that both subjects and constitutes it, and it exists in an ambivalent relation to power structures that it desires rather than not desiring at all. Butler criticizes Foucault for leaving the psyche out of his accounts of power, the soul and the body, and she asserts that there is potential for subversive excess in a psyche that is never fully determined by the laws that subject it. Furthermore, the interpellative ‘calls’ of the law described by Althusser need not be sovereign or effective, and Butler discerns further potential for subversion in the failure of these performatives. If it is acknowledged, melancholia itself may be the occasion for affirmation and subversion and, although Butler once again characterizes sexed/gendered identities as arising from primary loss or foreclosure, she argues that acknowledging the trace of the Other is the only way the subject will become anything at all. Agency lies in giving up any claim to self coherence, while risking one’s ontological status may constitute a means of successful revolt (Salih 2002. p 135).

(Salih 2002. p 131-4).

Resistance psyche

This line of causation is important, since, if the subject were merely the effect of power, it would be hard to see how it could subvert existing power structures. Butler insists on the subject’s agency as ‘the assumption of a purpose unintended by power, one that could not have been derived logically or historically, that operates in a relation of contingency and reversal to the power that makes it possible, to which it nevertheless belongs’ (PLP: 15). The subject’s relationship to power is ambivalent: it depends on power for its existence, and yet it also wields power in unexpected, potentially subversive ways. We will return to ambivalence and agency in due course (Salih 2002. p 121).

The ‘possibility of resistance’ is crucial to Butler’s account of the subject, and she asks how Foucault can account for the psychic resistance to power if the psyche/soul as he formulates it is no more than an imprisoning effect. Conversely, by training a Foucauldian lens on psychoanalytic theory, Butler raises the question as to whether psychic resistance is an effect of power, a discursive production rather than a means of undermining power. Resistance takes place within discourse or the law, but what Butler calls a ‘psychic remainder’ – the element of the psyche that is ‘left over’, so to speak, when discursive operations have done their work – signifies the limits of normalization even while it is also clear that the unconscious does not escape the power relations by which it is structured. Butler also raises the question of what she calls ‘the problem of bodies in Foucault’. If the soul is the prison of the body as Foucault claims it is, then does this mean that a pre-existing body is acted upon by disciplinary structures? In her early article, ‘Foucault and the Paradox of Bodily Inscriptions’, Butler sets out the following ‘paradox’ in Foucault’s theorizations of bodies and discourses: although Foucault asserts that bodies are discursively constructed, his descriptions of the mechanisms of legal inscription seem to presuppose that they pre-exist the law (FPBI: 603). Departing from (or perhaps developing) this paradox in Psychic, Butler argues that body and soul are discursive formations that emerge simultaneously through the sublimation of body into soul. ‘Sublimation’ is a psychoanalytic term describing the transformation or diversion of sexual drives into ‘cultural’ or ‘moral’ activities, and Butler uses it to describe the process whereby the body is subordinated and partly destroyed as what she calls ‘the dissociated Self’ emerges. (This definition of sublimation is taken from Wright 1992: 416– 17.) However, Butler argues that the sublimation of body into soul or psyche leaves behind a ‘bodily remainder’, which exceeds the processes of normalization and survives as what Butler calls ‘a kind of constitutive loss’ (PLP: 92). ‘The body is not a site on which a construction takes place’, Butler argues; ‘it is a destruction on the occasion of which a subject is formed’ (PLP: 92). Once again we and ourselves in the realm of Butlerian paradox, but this is an elaboration of the paradox that is central to Psychic: the subject comes into being when her body is acted upon and destroyed (presumably by discourse?), which means that this is a productive destruction or, perhaps, a sublation or Aufhebung, since both the body and the psyche are simultaneously formed and destroyed within discursive structures. The contrast between psychoanalytic and Foucauldian formulations of the subject should be clear: whereas in the former the psyche and possibly also the body, are sites of excess and possible resistance, for Foucault all resistance takes place within the terms of the law – indeed, resistance is an effect of the law. ‘[R]esistance appears as the effect of power’, Butler writes, paraphrasing Foucault, ‘as a part of power, its self-subversion’ (PLP: 93). Even so, within the Foucauldian model of myriad and pervasive power structures, the law may be subversively reiterated and repeated in order to destabilize existing norms, and Butler asks how and in what direction it is possible to work the power relations by which subjects are worked (PLP: 100). Since the Foucauldian subject is always in the process of construction, these processes are vulnerable to repetition, and, by implication, subversion, yet Butler notes the risk of renormalization within this model of identity, and she wonders how resistance may be derived from discourse itself (PLP: 93, 94). Once again reading Foucauldian theory through a psychoanalytic lens, Butler argues that, whereas Foucault claims that psychoanalysis sees the law as separate from desire, there can be no desire without the law that produces and sustains it. We have returned to the Freudian notion of libidinally-invested law and a prohibition that is in itself a form of desire, so that, rather than claiming that the unconscious is located outside power structures, Butler argues that power itself possesses an unconscious that provides the conditions for radical reiteration. It is because the injurious terms of the law by which subjects are socially constituted are vulnerable to repetition and reiteration that subjects accept and occupy these terms. ‘Called by an injurious name, I come into social being and because I have a certain inevitable attachment to my existence, because a certain narcissism takes hold of any term that confers existence, I am led to embrace the terms that injure me because they constitute me socially’, Butler asserts (PLP: 104). The operations of name-calling, or interpellation, and the passionate pursuit of the law complement Butler’s Foucauldian and psychoanalytic formulations, and they will be considered in the next section (Salih 2002. p 126-8).

whereas Butler argues that power simultaneously acts on and activates the subject by naming it. ‘To the extent that naming is an address, there is an addressee prior to the address’, Butler argues, ‘but given that the address is a name which creates what it names, there appears to be no “Peter” without the name “Peter” ’ (PLP: 111). Again, this might sound paradoxical, but in fact Butler’s formulation is structurally identical to her previous reversals of cause and effect in Gender Trouble, Bodies That Matter and Excitable Speech where, as you will recall, there is no doer behind the deed but the ‘doing’ itself is everything. As in her previous discussions of interpellation, Butler casts doubt on who or what exactly is interpellated by a law that confers social identity in subjection, and she also questions the performative efficacy of the law. The call of the law is not a divine performative, since there are ways of turning around that indicate what Butler calls ‘a willingness not to be – a critical desubjectivation – in order to expose the law as less powerful than it seems’ (PLP: 130). Anticipating her essay, ‘What Is Critique?’,

which also insists on the subversive potential of giving up the claim to a coherent identity, Butler asks how it is possible to understand the desire to be as a constitutive desire, and how laws exploit subjects that allow themselves to be subordinated in order to take up their positions in society. Rather than obediently responding to the terms by which one is interpellated, a more ethical and subversive mode of being is, paradoxically, failing to be by not recognizing oneself in the call of the law (PLP: 131).

The subject cannot ‘be’ in any coherent sense anyway, since we know from Butler’s previous accounts that it is haunted by its abjected and socially unacceptable desires. Indeed, like Gender Trouble and Bodies That Matter, Psychic continues to insist on the melancholia of gendered and sexed identities that will always and inevitably exceed the terms by which they are socially constituted (Salih 2002. p 130).

resignifications

(Salih 2002. p 114).
… can a single speaker wrest a term such as ‘lesbian’ from its prior contexts in order to make it signify in unexpectedly ‘innocent’ ways? If there is no doer behind the deed, then what sort of an agent will effect such a recontextualization, and must resignifications be recognized as such? Furthermore, if resignifications take place within discourse and the law, then how do we know that they are not themselves the products of the law? (Salih 2002. p 114).

If there is no prior subject, no doer behind the deed, then who or what is it that effects the kind of linguistic and semantic reallocations that Butler exemplifies in the interview quoted above? Would it be possible for me as a ‘subject-effect’ to make the autonomous and unilateral decision that ‘lesbian’ is now an affirmative term, particularly if my interlocutor is not in agreement with me? It is entirely possible that the ‘kid’ left her or his brief encounter with Butler with an unaltered view of the term ‘lesbian’ and those who identify as lesbians, and it could be argued that how we judge the efficacy of Butler’s appropriative strategy depends at least in part on the kid’s response. In that case, it would seem that, even if contexts are not binding, semantic consensus is still important in the successful redeployment of performatives.

We may accept with Derrida and Butler that sign and referent are not intrinsically connected, but in spite of this arbitrary link it is still not clear how it is possible to rematch signs with alternative referents. Just as Austin’s man on the waterfront cannot come along and name a ship Mr Stalin once it has been named something else, speakers cannot single-handedly alter the meaning of signs.

If Butler uses the term ‘lesbian’ in one way, and the Berkeley kid still understands it in another, what exactly has been achieved? According to Butler’s own reading of Althusser, the Berkeley kid might continue to ‘call’ Butler a lesbian in a way that is wounding and insulting, and even though Butler may not choose to recognize herself in the interpellation, the call of the kid will still have the performative force to subject and subjectivate Butler (Salih. 2002. p 115).

Excitable Speech does not provide a clear idea of how interpellatives may be replayed or their meanings altered. Butler accepts that words cannot be metaphorically purified of their historicity, even though she celebrates what she calls ‘the vulnerability of sullied terms to unexpected innocence’. However, she gives little sense of exactly how sullied terms may be made ‘innocent’ again, and indeed she herself seems reluctant to deploy such terms in Excitable Speech: whereas the word ‘queer’ has been widely appropriated so that in many contexts it is no longer a term of abuse, there is a question mark over ‘nigger’, which is still a verbal insult when used in certain contexts by certain speakers. Butler’s reluctance to resignify this term (which is used only once in Excitable Speech) may be symptomatic of her hesitation as to whether words do wound and her uncertainty as to how radical resignifications are effected. In that case, it would be possible to describe Excitable Speech itself as a failed performative since ultimately it does not enact the theory it describes. A further question, already raised, is whether we want to effect the appropriations and resignifications Butler advocates, since these acts, which might look subversive on the surface, may be no more than the effects of power. Why should we retain or remain attached to the terms that subordinate us, and how will it be possible to distinguish subversive repetitions from repetitions that merely strengthen existing power structures? The question of the subject’s attachment to subjection is the focus of The Psychic Life of Power, published in the same year as Excitable Speech, in which Butler returns to the issues of subjection, subjectivation and self-subjection in response to the call of the law (Salih 2002. p 116).

Does language enact what it names? Do words wound? Is threatening someone or talking about hitting them the same as actually doing so? Should representing sex or talking about sex/sexuality be construed as ‘sexual conduct’? Who decides whether representations are ‘obscene’ or ‘pornographic’, and should such representations be censored? These are some of the questions posed in Excitable Speech, where once again Foucault, Althusser, Austin and Derrida provide the theoretical frameworks for Butler’s analyses of language and the subject. In Gender Trouble and Bodies That Matter the subject was characterized as a performative entity, but in Excitable Speech Butler argues that language is not necessarily (or indeed ever) an effective performative; in other words, it does not always enact what it names. Moreover, if we accept that the subject comes after rather than before the deed (an argument put forward in Gender Trouble and Bodies and reiterated here), then it will be difficult to ascertain who or what to prosecute in cases of hate speech or ‘obscenity’/‘pornography’. Butler is also concerned by the extent to which legal institutions are implicated in producing and circulating the ‘violent’/‘obscene’/‘pornographic’ representations they apparently aim to censor. If we accept Nietzsche’s formulation that there is no doer behind the deed, it may be difficult to see what agent or subject will bring about the semantic and linguistic changes Butler describes as necessary to the linguistic future of certain marginalized or oppressed communities. Furthermore, the idea that sullied terms are vulnerable to innocence is paradoxical, and Butler herself concedes that prior histories are significant in determining the meaning of signs. It is also not always clear as to why sullied terms should be appropriated, since such a practice may engage the subject in acts of self-subjection that effectively strengthen discourse and the law: self-subjection and the subject’s attachment to the law are dealt with in The Psychic Life of Power (Salih 2002. p 117).