abject – Page 3 – objet (a)

ziarek on Žižek real

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.

Butler, in the process of deconstructing sexual difference, contests nothing less than the Real itself. … The Lacanian Real, central to Copjec’s and Žižek’s reading of sexual difference, is the realm of being that is radically unsymbolizable, that remains foreclosed from the symbolic order. In this formulation, the Real constitutes a necessary outside of any symbolization — a limit to the totalization of the social or discursive filed. Like Copjec, Žižek suggests that any attempt to define the Real leads to paradoxical formulations … the Real is the starting point, the “impossible kernel” of symbolization and, at the same time, an effect of the symbolic order, an excess, or left-over of symbolization (124)

At stake in the argument about the Real is, on the one hand, a renegotiation of the relations between contingency and compulsion in social and discursive formations, and, on the other, the status of the concept of the outside of history and symbolization.

On the basis of the conceptualization of the Real as the necessary outside of the symbolic order, Žižek condemns both the universalization of the symbolic and its obverse side, its “rapid historicization,” which treats the subject merely as the effect or the actualization of its historical conditions. Both of these gestures … ignore that which is foreclosed from historicization. In order to take into account the incompleteness and contingency of the historical process, the critical accounts of history, Žižek argues, have to presuppose an empty place, an non-historical kernel, that which cannot be symbolized and yet is produced by symbolization itself (Žižek Sublime 135) (Ziarek 125).

Butler’s argument with the Real neither disputes the contingency of social formations nor denies the constitutive outside to symbolization. On the contrary, through her reading of Laclau and Mouffe, she links such contingency and incompleteness to the promise of radical democracy: “The incompleteness of every ideological formulation is central to the radical democratic project’s notion of political futurity. The subjection of every ideological formation to REarticulation … constitutes the temporal order of democracy as an incalculable future, leaving open the production of new subject-positions, new political signifiers …” (Butler, Bodies 193)

What she does contest … is the fixity of the Real (or rather, to articulate it more cautiously, the invariable failure of its inscription) and the permanent structure of its exclusion.

Even though the foreclosure of the Real “guarantees” contingency and incompleteness of all social relations, the process of this foreclosure is not marked by the contingency or historicity, and therefore is not open to redescription. We are confronted here, Butler argues, with the unchangeable production of the outside, even though the ‘production’ in question is marked by the instability of cause and effect. As Butler points out, “if we concur that every discursive formation proceeds through constituting an ‘outside’, we are not thereby committed to the invariant production of that outside as the trauma of castration (nor to the generalization of castration as the model for all historical trauma) (Butler Bodies, 205) (125).

kirby bodies materiality

Kirby, Vicki. ‘When All That Is Solid Melts Into Language” in Butler Matters: Judith Butler’s Impact on Feminist and Queer Studies. eds. Sönser Breen, Margaret and Warren J. Blumenfeld. Hampshire: Ashgate Publishing Ltd. 2005, (41-56).

The complication, however, is that to concede the existence of certain bodily facts is also to concede a certain interpretation of those facts. … If we situate this debate within feminism, then those who claim to represent real women without recourse to inverted commas will assume they have access to the truth of (the) matter, as if the compelling facts of women’s lives simply present themselves. According to this veiw, signifiying practices are the mere vehicles of such truths, having no formative input of their own (42).

Butler must rupture the bar that cuts presence from absence (lack), and language from what is considered prior to, or not language, in order to open the possibility of a revaluation of different subjects. In other words, she must engage the mode of production of these determinations, the hidden indebtedness to ‘the feminine’ whose disavowal has rendered it bankrupt. Butler explores the metaphysics of presence that opposes identity to difference as presence to absence, with the aim of refiguring difference as a generative force within whose transformational energies the sense of a fixed identity (as presence to self) is radically destabilized (47).

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.

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

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).

abjection

Indeed, it is part of Butler’s political project to seek out the limits of discursive intelligibility in Bodies, so that, as in Gender Trouble, she can draw attention to those identities and bodies that currently ‘matter’ and those that don’t. Again, as in Gender Trouble, Butler will assert that sexed identities are taken on through the violent rejection and exclusion (or ‘foreclosure’) of identities that are deemed not to matter, i.e. not to count within a heterosexual matrix which has a vested interest in preserving its own stability and coherence at the expense of ‘other’ identities (Salih 2002:76).

bikelove

gender

Sara Salih. Judith ButlerRoutledge 2002.

What Butler means is that gender is an act or a sequence of acts that is always and inevitably occurring, since it is impossible to exist as a social agent outside the terms of gender (GT: 5 cited in Salih 47).

Butler argues that sex and gender are discursively constructed and that there is no such position of implied freedom beyond discourse. Culturally constructed sexuality cannot be repudiated, so that the subject is left with the question of how to acknowledge and ‘do’ the construction it is already in (GT: 31). Gender Trouble will describe how genders and sexes are currently ‘done’ within the heterosexual matrix, while elaborating on how it is possible to ‘do’ those constructions differently (Salih, 48).

‘gender is not a noun[but it] proves to be performative, that is, constituting the identity it is purported to be. In this sense, gender is always a doing, though not a doing by a subject who might be said to preexist the deed’ (GT: 25 Salih, 50).

Reading structuralist and psychoanalytic accounts of gender, identity and the law through a Foucauldian lens Butler

gives what she calls ‘a discursive account of the cultural production of gender’; in other words, she works from the premise that gender is a discursive construct, something that is produced, and not a ‘natural fact’;
and characterizes the law as multiple, proliferating and potentially self-subverting as opposed to the singular, prohibitive and rigidly repressive law posited by other theorists (for example, Lacan) (Salih, Sara. Judith Butler: 51).

‘There is no gender identity behind the expressions of gender; that identity is performatively constituted by the very “expressions” that are said to be its results’ (GT: 25 cited in Salih 63).

‘That the gendered body is performative suggests that it has no ontological status apart from the various acts which constitute its reality’, she writes (GT: 136; my emphasis).

Once again we return to the notion that there is no doer behind the deed, no volitional agent that knowingly ‘does’ its gender, since the gendered body is inseparable from the acts that constitute it. All the same, in the account of parody and drag that follows this description it does at times sound as though there is an actor or a ‘doer’ behind the deed, and Butler later admits that in Gender Trouble she ‘waffled’ between describing gender in terms of linguistic performativity and characterizing it as straightforward theatre. Her theories are clarified in Bodies That Matter where Butler emphasizes the Derridean and Austinian underpinnings of performativity that are as yet only implicit in Gender Trouble (Salih. 2002. p 65).

Gender does not happen once and for all when we are born, but is a sequence of repeated acts that harden into the appearance of something that’s been there all along. If gender is ‘a regulated process of repetition’ taking place in language, then it will be possible to repeat one’s gender differently, as drag artists do (and you might also recall my wardrobe analogy – the ripped clothes and the sequins representing my attempts to ‘do’ my gender in subversive and unexpected ways). As I argued previously, you cannot go out and acquire a whole new gender wardrobe for yourself, since, as Butler puts it, ‘[t]here is only a taking up of the tools where they lie, where the very “taking up” is enabled by the tool lying there’ (GT: 145). So you have to make do with the ‘tools’, or in my example, the ‘clothes’ that you already have, radically modifying them in ways which will reveal the ‘unnatural’ nature of gender. There are two problems with this formulation: one is that the manner of taking up the tool will be determined as well as enabled by the tool itself – in other words, subversion and agency are conditioned, if not determined, by discourses that cannot be evaded. This leads to the second problem, which is that, if subversion itself is conditioned and constrained by discourse, then how can we tell that it is subversion at all? What is the difference between subversive parody and the sort of ‘ordinary’ parody that Butler claims everyone is unwittingly engaged in anyway. All gender is parodic, but Butler warns that ‘[p]arody by itself is not subversive’ and she poses the important question as to which performances effect the various destabilizations of gender and sex she describes, and where those performances take place (GT: 139). There are some forms of drag that are definitely not subversive, but serve only to reinforce existing heterosexual power structures – in Bodies, Butler cites Dustin Hoffman’s performance in Tootsie as an example of what she calls ‘high het entertainment’ (see Chapter 3, this volume), and we might also add the more recent film Mrs Doubtfire in which Robin Williams gives a cross-dressed performance as a nanny. Neither of these drag performances are subversive, since they serve to reinforce existing distinctions between ‘male’ and ‘female’, ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’, ‘gay’ and ‘straight’.

Butler’s claim on the penultimate page of Gender Trouble that ‘[t]he task is not whether to repeat, but how to repeat, or, indeed to repeat and, through a radical proliferation of gender, to displace the very gender norms that enable the repetition itself’ (GT: 148) presents a similar problem: she has already asserted that to describe identity as an effect is not to imply that identity is ‘fatally determined’ or ‘fully artificial and arbitrary’, and yet at times it sounds as though the subject she describes is in fact trapped within a discourse it has no power to evade or to alter. In which case, ‘how to repeat’ will already be determined in advance, and what looks like agency is merely yet another effect of the law disguised as something different. All the same, this is certainly not a view Butler expresses, and she seems optimistic about the possibilities of denaturalizing, proliferating and unfixing identities in order to reveal the constructed nature of heterosexuality. A proliferation of identities will reveal the ontological possibilities that are currently restricted by foundationalist models of identity (i.e. those theories which assume that identity is simply there and fixed and final). This is not, then, ‘the death of the subject’, or if it is, it is the theoretical death of an old, fixed subject, and the birth of a new, constructed one characterized by subversive possibility and agency. ‘Construction is not opposed to agency; it is the necessary scene of agency’, Butler affirms (GT: 147; see also CF: 15), and this leads her to refute another assumption popular among critics who are hostile to so-called ‘postmodern’ formulations of identity: ‘[t]he deconstruction of identity is not the deconstruction of politics; rather, it establishes as political the very terms through which identity is articulated’ (GT: 148) (Salih.2002. p 67).

Gender Trouble calls the category of the subject into question as Butler engages in a genealogical critique that analyzes the conditions of the subject’s emergence within discourse. Butler deploys psychoanalytic, Foucauldian and feminist theories in her discussions of homosexuality and heterosexuality and their mutual construction within the law. Heterosexual identities are constructed in relation to their abjected homosexual ‘Other’, but melancholic heterosexuals are haunted by the trace of this ‘Other’ which is never finally or fully abjected. This means that identities are by no means as straight, straightforward or singular as they appear and may be subversively worked against the grain in order to reveal the unstable, resignifiable nature of all gender identities. Some of these subversive practices are outlined in Gender Trouble and are analyzed further in her next book, Bodies That Matter (Salih 2002. p 71)

butler discourse

In sum, then, Butler’s desire to engage the structured movement of differentiation within language does not preclude the existence of an outside language that truly does exceed our perceptions and representations; it’s just that the human condition bars access to it. Accordingly, the perception and representation of this outside, despite its convincing transparency and our sense of its immediate accessibility, will always be a language effect — a cultural production. Butler’s reliance on the overarching term ‘culture’ as the explanatory category that contains this shifting process surely makes the point. In other words, language and culture and mutually implicated — indeed, some would say they are one and the same (68).

No signifier can be radically representative, for every signifier is the site of a perpetual méconnaisance; it produces the expectation of a unity, a full and final recognition that can never be achieved. Paradoxically, the failure of such signifiers … fully to describe the constituency they name is precisely what constitutes these signifiers as sites of phantasmatic investment and discursive rearticulation. It is what opens the signifier to new meanings and new possibilities for political resignification. It is this open-ended and performative function of the signifier that seems to me to be crucial to a radical democratic notion of futurity (Butler in Bodies That Matter, 191. cited in Kirby JB: Live Theory, 73).

If women and other socially abjected subjects are themselves subjected to/through these same significatory transformations then their existence and its significance must be determined within the Symbolic order. Unfortunately, Žižek’s reading of the bar as an absolute prohibition, as if the cut of castration is a definitive fact, reaffirms an ‘outside discourse’ in derelict terms of trauma and castration. Thus, by appropriating Lacan’s notion of the Real to explain this foreclosure, Žižek actually endorses the inevitability, the indisputable necessity, of this violent inheritance of abject subject formation.

In view of this, Butler’s intervention is important because it illustrates that the bar is not an absolute, fixed barrier, but a process of demarcation, an ongoing attempt to bar or draw a line that is never finished. The installation of the bar as an absolute frame achieves the effect of both discovering and repudiating that outside as inherently deficient and naturally base (Kirby, 2006: 73).

By interrogating the foundation, or what is supposedly ‘given’ as the indifferent ground of valuation, and by discovering that it is forged from the same political determinations as other significatory practices, Butler is able to dispense with the foreclosure of the Real entirely (73).

Excitable Speech

Butler, J. Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative. Routledge. 1997.

Censorship is a productive form of power: it is not merely privative, but formative as well. I propose that censorship seeks to produce subjects according to explicit and implicit norms, and that the production of the subject has everything to do with the regulation of speech. The subject’s production takes place not only through the regulation of that subject’s speech, but through the regulation of the social domain of speakable discourse. The question is not what it is I will be able to say, but what will constitute the domain of the sayable within which I begin to speak at all. To become a subject means to be subjected to a set of implicit and explicit norms that govern the kind of speech that will be legible as the speech of a subject (133).

Here the question is not whether certain kinds of speech uttered by a subject are censored, but how a certain operation of censorship determines who will be a subject depending on whether the speech of such a candidate for subjecthood obeys certain norms governing what is speakable and what is not. To move outside of the domain of speakability is to risk one’s status as a subject. To embody the norms that govern speakability in one’s speech is to consummate one’s status as a subject of speech. “Impossible speech” would be precisely the ramblings of the asocial, the rantings of the “psychotic” that the rules that govern the domain of speakability produce, and by which they are continually haunted.

what is critique

JB. “What is Critique” The Raymond Williams Lecture at Cambridge University, May 2000. published in The Judith Butler Reader 2003. Sara Salih editor.
online version

For the question, “what are we to do?” presupposes that the “we” has been formed and that it is known, that its action is possible, and the field in which it might act is delimited. But if those very formations and delimitations have normative consequences, then it will be necessary to ask after the values that set the stage for action, and this will be an important dimension of any critical inquiry into normative matters.

One does not drive to the limits for a thrill experience, or because limits are dangerous and sexy, or because it brings us into a titillating proximity with evil. One asks about the limits of ways of knowing because one has already run up against a crisis within the epistemological field in which one lives. The categories by which social life are ordered produce a certain incoherence or entire realms of unspeakability. And it is from this condition, the tear in the fabric of our epistemological web, that the practice of critique emerges, with the awareness that no discourse is adequate here or that our reigning discourses have produced an impasse.

To be critical of an authority that poses as absolute requires a critical practice that has self-transformation at its core.

In Foucault’s view, following Kant in an attenuated sense, the act of consent is a reflexive movement by which validity is attributed to or withdrawn from authority. But this reflexivity does not take place internal to a subject. For Foucault, this is an act which poses some risk, for the point will not only be to object to this or that governmental demand, but to ask about the order in which such a demand becomes legible and possible. And if what one objects to are the epistemological orderings that have established the rules of governmental validity, then saying “no” to the demand will require departing from the established grounds of its validity, marking the limit of that validity, which is something different and far more risky than finding a given demand invalid. In this difference, we might say, one begins to enter a critical relation to such orderings and the ethical precepts to which they give rise. The problem with those grounds that Foucault calls “illegitimate” is not that they are partial or self-contradictory or that they lead to hypocritical moral stands. The problem is precisely that they seek to foreclose the critical relation, that is, to extend their own power to order the entire field of moral and political judgment. They orchestrate and exhaust the field of certainty itself. How does one call into question the exhaustive hold that such rules of ordering have upon certainty without risking uncertainty, without inhabiting that place of wavering which exposes one to the charge of immorality, evil, aestheticism. The critical attitude is not moral according to the rules whose limits that very critical relation seeks to interrogate. But how else can critique do its job without risking the denunciations of those who naturalize and render hegemonic the very moral terms put into question by critique itself?

“Critique,” he writes, “will be the art of voluntary insubordination, that of reflected intractability [l’indocilité réfléchie].” If it is an “art” in his sense, then critique will not be a single act, nor will it belong exclusively to a subjective domain, for it will be the stylized relation to the demand upon it. And the style will be critical to the extent that, as style, it is not fully determined in advance, it incorporates a contingency over time that marks the limits to the ordering capacity of the field in question. So the stylization of this “will” will produce a subject who is not readily knowable under the established rubric of truth. More radically, Foucault pronounces:

“Critique would essentially insure the desubjugation [désassujetiisement] of the subject in the context [le jeu] of what we could call, in a word, the politics of truth.” (32, 39)

The politics of truth pertains to those relations of power that circumscribe in advance what will and will not count as truth, which order the world in certain regular and regulatable ways, and which we come to accept as the given field of knowledge. We can understand the salience of this point when we begin to ask: What counts as a person? What counts as a coherent gender? What qualifies as a citizen? Whose world is legitimated as real? Subjectively, we ask: Who can I become in such a world where the meanings and limits of the subject are set out in advance for me? By what norms am I constrained as I begin to ask what I may become? And what happens when I begin to become that for which there is no place within the given regime of truth? Is this not precisely what is meant by “the desubjugation of the subject in the play of…the politics of truth”(my translation)?

At stake here is the relation between the limits of ontology and epistemology, the link between the limits of what I might become and the limits of what I might risk knowing. Deriving a sense of critique from Kant, Foucault poses the question that is the question of critique itself: “Do you know up to what point you can know?” “Our liberty is at stake.” Thus, liberty emerges at the limits of what one can know, at the very moment in which the desubjugation of the subject within the politics of truth takes place, the moment where a certain questioning practice begins that takes the following form: “‘What, therefore, am I’, I who belong to this humanity, perhaps to this piece of it, at this point in time, at this instant of humanity which is subjected to the power of truth in general and truths in particular?”(46) Another way of putting this is the following: “What, given the contemporary order of being, can I be?” If, in posing this question, liberty is at stake, it may be that staking liberty has something to do with what Foucault calls virtue, with a certain risk that is put into play through thought and, indeed, through language where the contemporary ordering of being is brought to its limit.

The critic thus has a double task, to show how knowledge and power work to constitute a more or less systematic way of ordering the world with its own “conditions of acceptability of a system,” but also “to follow the breaking points which indicate its emergence.” So not only is it necessary to isolate and identify the peculiar nexus of power and knowledge that gives rise to the field of intelligible things, but also to track the way in which that field meets its breaking point, the moments of its discontinuities, the sites where it fails to constitute the intelligibility for which it stands. What this means is that one looks both for the conditions by which the object field is constituted, but also for the limits of those conditions, the moments where they point up their contingency and their transformability. In Foucault’s terms, “schematically speaking, we have perpetual mobility, essential fragility or rather the complex interplay between what replicates the same process and what transforms it.” (58)

Indeed, another way to talk about this dynamic within critique is to say that rationalization meets its limits in desubjugation. If the desubjugation of the subject emerges at the moment in which the episteme constituted through rationalization exposes its limit, then desubjugation marks precisely the fragility and transformability of the epistemics of power.

How would this particular use of fiction relate to Foucault’s notion of critique? Consider that Foucault is trying to understand the possibility of desubjugation within rationalization without assuming that there is a source for resistance that is housed in the subject or maintained in some foundational mode. Where does resistance come from? Can it be said to be the upsurge of some human freedom shackled by the powers of rationalization? If he speaks, as he does, of a will not to be governed, how are we to understand the status of that will?

[…] he has shown us that there can be no ethics, and no politics, without recourse to this singular sense of poiesis. The subject who is formed by the principles furnished by the discourse of truth is not yet the subject who endeavors to form itself. Engaged in “arts of existence,” this subject is both crafted and crafting, and the line between how it is formed, and how it becomes a kind of forming, is not easily, if ever drawn. For it is not the case that a subject is formed and then turns around and begins suddenly to form itself. On the contrary, the formation of the subject is the institution of the very reflexivity that indistinguishably assumes the burden of formation. The “indistinguishability” of this line is precisely the juncture where social norms intersect with ethical demands, and where both are produced in the context of a self-making which is never fully self-inaugurated.

We have moved quietly from the discursive notion of the subject to a more psychologically resonant notion of “self,” and it may be that for Foucault the latter term carries more agency than the former. The self forms itself, but it forms itself within a set of formative practices that are characterized as modes of subjectivations. That the range of its possible forms is delimited in advance by such modes of subjectivation does not mean that the self fails to form itself, that the self is fully formed. On the contrary, it is compelled to form itself, but to form itself within forms that are already more or less in operation and underway. Or, one might say, it is compelled to form itself within practices that are more or less in place. But if that self-forming is done in disobedience to the principles by which one is formed, then virtue becomes the practice by which the self forms itself in desubjugation, which is to say that it risks its deformation as a subject, occupying that ontologically insecure position which poses the question anew: who will be a subject here, and what will count as a life, a moment of ethical questioning which requires that we break the habits of judgment in favor of a riskier practice that seeks to yield artistry from constraint.

Butler Manifesto

Bodies That Matter 1993 pages 15-16

As a result of this reformulation of performativity:

gender performativity cannot be theorized apart from the forcible and reiterative practice of regulatory sexual regimes,
the account of agency conditioned by those very regimes of discourse/power cannot be conflated with the voluntarism or individualism, much less with consumerism, and in no way presupposes a choosing subject;
the regime of heterosexuality operates to circumscribe and contour the “materiality” of sex, and that “materiality” is formed and sustained through and as a materialization of regulatory norms that are in part those of heterosexual hegemony;
the materialization of norms requires those identificatory processes by which norms are assumed or appropriated, and these identifications precede and enable the formation of a subject, but are not, strictly speaking, performed by a subject; and
the limits of constructivism are exposed at those boundaries of bodily life where abjected or delegitimated bodies fail to count as “bodies.” If the materiality of sex is demarcated in discourse, then this demarcation will produce a domain of excluded and delegitimated “sex.” Hence, it will be as important to think about how and to what end bodies are constructed as is it will be to think about how and to what end bodies are not constructed and, further, to ask after how bodies which fail to materialize provide the necessary “outside,” if not the necessary support, for the bodies which, in materializing the norm, qualify as bodies that matter.

How, then, can one think through the matter of bodies as a kind of materialization governed by regulatory norms in order to ascertain the workings of heterosexual hegemony in the formation of what qualifies as a viable body?

How does that materialization of the norm in bodily formation produce a domain of abjected bodies, a field of deformation which, in failing to qualify as the fully human, fortifies those regulatory norms?

What challenge does the excluded and abjected realm produce to a symbolic hegemony that might force a radical rearticulation of what qualifies as bodies that matter, ways of living that count as “life,” lives worth protecting, lives worth saving, lives worth grieving?