agency – Page 6 – objet (a)

mills hate speech is not illocutionary

Butler argues against the characterization of hate speech as illocutionary, doing what it says in the saying of it, evident in the work of Catharine Mackinnon, Rae Langton and Mari Matsuda among others.

It is, she claims, necessary to understand such speech as perlocutionary and thus maintain a distinction between speech and conduct. On the basis of this theoretical explication, Butler makes the political claim that state power should not be extended to include legal regulation of pornography, and further, that the state cannot be relied upon for protection against hate speech. In fact, the appropriate response to hate speech for Butler is the adoption of a strategy of the misappropriation of hateful appellations and the restaging of them within different contexts in such a way that these terms necessarily take on different meanings. In other words, the best response to hate speech is more speech (264).

Butler’s characterization of the state is posed in opposition to the portrayal of the state as a neutral arbiter of civil conflict that theorists who call for legal regulation tend to rely on and this corrective is surely important. But there is a sense in which Butler’s characterization of the state runs the risk of reproducing the logic of the argument she opposes (265-266).

The point that is elided here, then, is that a priori designations of state intervention as reactionary, neutral, or even necessary, miss the vagaries of the state’s position within relations of power and political contestation.

Insofar as this is true, Butler’s position on the state is distinctly un- Foucauldian, despite her commitment to his critique of understanding power as sovereign and centralized in the state. This divergence is further evinced by her suggestion that her concern is ‘‘not only with the protection of civil liberties against the incursions of the state, but with the discursive power given over to the state through the process of legal redress’’.

To put it simply, a more strictly Foucauldian intervention in the debates concerning legal regulation of speech would trace the historical problematization of speech within liberalism with the aim of bringing to light the techniques through which speech is able to be governed, the way in which it contributes to the governing of political subjects and the possible points of intervention that raise the possibility of being governed differently (266-267).

This kind of genealogical analysis seeks to bring to light the historical particularity of forms of government and rationalization that present themselves as universal, ahistorical and given. In doing so, it methodologically brackets the truth claims made by those forms of government and rationalization in order to trace the lines of force that constitute the conditions of their emergence and consolidation. Butler’s methodological approach though is a rhetorical and theoretical questioning, which while attempting to challenge the claims of liberal political institutions on the one hand, is nevertheless bound by the truth claims and problematics of liberalism.

The shift to an Austinian theoretical articulationof the relation between violence and speech, whether one sees that relation as illocutionary or perlocutionary, is, after all, still a matter of trying to establish the extent to which speech causes harm, and is thus played out on theoretical and political ground established by J. S. Mill.

My point here though is not to criticize Butler for not being more strictly Foucauldian.

– My point is to highlight the way in which her work diverges from this theoretical and political lineage against those critics who elide the differences between Butler and Foucault as well as Butler’s own attempt to place herself within that political tradition.

See especially, Michel Foucault, ‘‘Governmentality’’, Ideology and Consciousness, 6 (1979), 5–
21; reprinted in The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, eds. G. Burchell, C. Gordon and P.
Miller (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 87–104.

For further elaboration of the relation of civil society to the state and law within a liberal rationality of government, see C. Gordon,‘‘Governmental rationality: an introduction’’ (pp. 1–52) and G. Burchell, ‘‘Peculiar interests: civil
society and governing ‘the system of natural liberties’ ’’ (pp. 119–50) in the same volume.

thiem mattering bodies

Thiem, Annika. Unbecoming Subjects: Judith Butler, Moral Philosophy and Critical Responsibility. New York: Fordham UP, 2008.

Understanding the self as produced around the body in relation to social norms and becoming the principle of the body’s subjection challenges moral philosophy to reconsider the notions of the self or self-concept.

Instead of seeking in the self a narrative, an integrated truth of a person, it becomes possible to draw on the notion of the self to understand how stories and histories produce the self through and in relation to the formation of the body.

The self reconsidered as an effect of the bodily effects of subjection to social norms is not, then, a repository of a person’s authenticity or an authentic self-expression of one’s body.

Rather, the self comes to join social norms in bringing about the body as a certain kind of body, and the self becomes the very mediation and agent of normalization.

This does not mean that narratives are inherently oppressive or nothing but perfidious instruments of social regulation, yet they are also not radically other than social norms and cannot offer an authenticity of the self as recourse to oppose social norms. (33).

… one intricacy of Butler’s account of subject formation lies in its critique of accounts that attempt to secure a prediscursive reality for the bodily subject. Butler’s critique brings together Derrida’s arguments on signification and materiality and Foucault’s analytics of power relations and discourses.

This juxtaposition allows her to offer an account of the political and social relevance of thinking materiality as not independent of signification. Matter comes to matter not prior to social norms and relations of power but as social practices and institutions render matter intelligible. Drawing on Foucault’s analytics of power, Butler offers these “social conditions” as mechanisms of normalization.

The challenge that her accounts poses regarding the bodily subject is that bodies, bodily reality, or “facticity” cannot be invoked as providing some sort of more original freedom, a point of departure prior to social norms to launch a critique of social normalization (36-37).

performativity

Ziarek, Ewa Ponowska. “From Euthanasia to the Other of Reason: Performativity and the Deconstruction of Sexual Difference” in Derrida and Feminism. eds. Feder, Ellen K. et al. New York: Routledge. 1997, 115-140.

What is the nature of such performative identification? Performativity for Butler, as for Derrida, consist neither in voluntary decisions of the self nor in involuntary acts governed by the law that is external to them. To avoid impasses of social constructivism that sees the subject as merely an effect of social conditions, Butler stresses the fact that the reiteration of the norm (code) constitutes not only the subject but also the meaning of the symbolic law. Not a simple cause of the subject, the law itself is produced by the repetition of subjective approximations in time. Because it does not have a fixed form apart from its approximations through subjective acts, the law, despite its compulsory force, is marked by the “infelicities” and the infidelities characteristic of performative utterances. The repetition of acts understood as the citation of the law stabilizes the form of the law, and, at the same time, produces a “dissonance” and inconsistency within it. Indissociable from “irruptive violence,” reiteration sustains and undercuts both the permanence of the law and the identity of the subject: “the law is no longer given in a fixed form .. but is produced through citation as that which proceeds and exceeds the mortal approximations enacted by the subject.” (Butler Bodies, 14) For Butler, like for Derrida, the possibility of failure and impurity afflicting the repetition of sexual norms is not only an unfortunate predicament or “trauma”, but also a positive condition of possibility. By opening the possibility of intervention and redescription of sexual norms, reiteration not only stresses the historicity of the law but also open an “incalcuable” future, no longer submitted to its jurisdiction.

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).

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).

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

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).