Category: butler

butler lacan performativity

Tuhkanen, Mikko. “Performativity and Becoming.” Cultural Critique. 72, Spring (2009): 1-35.

Footnote 26: On Lacan’s divergence from structuralism, see also Zupancic, Ethics, 29–30. While Butler tends to give undue prominence to the influence of Lévi-Strauss’s structuralist anthropology on Lacan (she repeats this in her latest work: see Undoing Gender, 45), her emphasis on the imaginary in Antigone’s Claim appears to stem from her Althusserian reading of Lacan in The Psychic Life of Power. There, too, she refers to “the unspeakable, the unsignifiable” of the symbolic order in Lacan (94), but, rather than naming this limit as the real, she, as in Antigone’s Claim, moves on to consider the imaginary. Identifying the Althusserian interpellation with Lacan’s subject formation (95), she locates the only possibility for resistance in the psychoanalytic subject’s imaginary misrecognition of the name with which the law hails her. With an imprecision that also characterizes her synthesis of the earlier and later Lacan, she writes: “For the Lacanian, then, the imaginary signifies the impossibility of the discursive—that is, symbolic—constitution of identity” (96–97; emphasis added). In this Althusserian reading of Lacan, “[t]he imaginary thwarts the efficacy of the symbolic law but cannot turn back upon the law, demanding or effecting its reformulation. In this sense, psychic resistance thwarts the law in its effects, but cannot redirect the law or its effects. Resistance is thus located in a domain that is virtually powerless to alter the law that it opposes” (98; see also 89). Here again, as in Subjects of Desire, Butler moves from the dead end she finds in Lacan to Foucault as a more productive theorist of resistance: “where Lacan restricts the notion of social power to the symbolic domain and delegates resistance to the imaginary, Foucault recasts the symbolic as relations of power and understands resistance as an effect of power” (98–99). Shepherdson complicates this reading of Lacan’s and Foucault’s differences in “History and the Real.”

page 19: The political thrust of Butler’s theory is, then, to reevaluate abjected bodies, to shape a symbolic future that would render them culturally recognized and intelligible. I think we can find a description of this Hegelian mechanism in Deleuze’s work: that of the realization of the possible. For Deleuze, who follows here Henri Bergson,

the realization of the possible refers to a materialization of as-yet nonexistent forms of life. Even if these forms do not, in Butler’s terms, “matter,” they are nevertheless prefigured as possible substitutes to, or deviations from, current forms of reality. Possibilities, then, are like a gallery of alternatives from which future reality is selected. Some possibilities are never realized, and here politics comes into existence, in the struggle over making certain possibilities available or refusing the legitimate reality of others.

For Butler, the process that grants this reality is that of recognition. Given her examples of the fag and the dyke as unrecognized, illegitimate bodies, her futurity opens as the horizon of the possible realization of alternatives that have been excluded from and by the heterosexual matrix.

page 19: But to identify the specificity and limits of Butler’s notion of becoming, we should note that, taking his cue from Bergson, Deleuze contrasts this realization of the possible (which I suggest characterizes the politics of performativity) to what he calls the actualization of the virtual. In seeing the future as so many possibilities, we imagine an emergence in which the possible, as “a phantom awaiting its hour” (Bergson, 101), is fleshed out in the process of its realization, its cominginto-being. An already existing form or ideal is given materiality; for Butler, for example, abject but nevertheless existing bodies begin to matter through the legitimizing processes of recognition. Clearly, the importance of politics that seeks to enable the full realization of lives and bodies is not to be dismissed. But quite another thing is to allow the monopolization of our understanding of futurity by this process of realization qua recognition. For Bergson, the error in thinking becoming as the realization of possibilities is that this process can imagine the future only in terms of that which has already come to be. Realization operates through a temporal loop where we retroactively posit in the past the possibilities that “will have been” realized: “the possible is only the real with the addition of an act of mind which throws its image back into the past, once it has been enacted” (100). The possible is realized as a form that, despite its insubstantiality, has been made conceptually available. It is molded according to that which is in existence. Because it is an already imaginable form, we are dealing with “preformism: the real is already preformed in the possible insofar as the real resembles the possible” (Grosz, Nick of Time, 187). According to the model of realization, where out of a plethora of possibilities some pass into existence while others are eliminated, the real resembles and is a limited version of the possible. Consequently, “[r]ealization is a process in which creativity and production have no place” (187); in it, we lose the play of “unforeseeable novelty” that, according to Bergson, only the unfolding of duration allows (Bergson, 91, 93). In thinking “possibles which would precede their own realization,” “the future is outlined in advance” (103).

Unlike the possible, what Deleuze calls the virtual is not a preformed alternative that may be realized, that may come into existence (for example, via the kind of political work that Butler advocates). Rather, it is an undifferentiated realm of potentiality that in no way predicts the actual forms of existence that it produces. As Todd May writes, the virtual can be seen “as the reservoir of difference out of which the speciWc differences that are phenomenologically accessible to us are actualized” (71).  Possible futures emerge through the processes of “resemblance and limitation” (Deleuze, Bergsonism, 97): resemblance because that which emerges is a materialization of an already existing possibility; limitation because only a certain number of the possible futures vying for existence can be realized. As opposed to the possible, “the virtual never resembles the real that it actualizes” (Grosz, “Thinking,” 27). It does not have a form, yet as an ontological realm— for Bergson, the realm of nonpsychological, nonindividual memory— it is entirely real. Its actualization takes place through “the rules . . . of difference or divergence and of creation” (Deleuze, Bergsonism, 97). [20]

Deleuze understands actualization as the potential process of radical emergence, of becoming—to borrow Bergson’s term, of creative evolution. Realization, on the other hand, is a double process of unveiling and culling: preexisting forms and models enter existence while others are eliminated (for example, in the political struggle for recognition). According to Bergson and Deleuze, the process of realization does not allow us to think duration, the dimension of becoming that undergirds their metaphysical systems. Only with the virtual can we intuit duration; reversely, it is only durée that enables the unforeseeability of the virtual’s actualization. “Duration,” as Deleuze writes, “is the virtual” (“Bergson’s Conception,” 55). Deleuze turns to Bergson as a source for articulating time as an irreducible dimension of being. For him, Bergsonian metaphysics theorizes devenir in a way that is incompatible with the Werden of Hegelian dialectics, its “false movement” (Difference, 8). Butler, too, clearly acknowledges that, as a theory of becoming, of invention and change, performativity requires and depends on time as an active dimension.

Only in duration can inaccurate repetitions introduce newness into the world.Consequently, performativity does not allow us to think forms of existence that radically diverge from what is currently available to us—forms that, unlike the gender nonconformist beings with which Butler replaces the Lacanian real, are strictly inconceivable from our present perspective.  [22]

Grosz writes:

the aim of all radical politics is the production of a future that actively transforms the dynamics of the present, and this may involve precisely an unpredictable leap into virtuality. . . . This leap into the virtual is always a leap into the unexpected, which cannot be directly planned for or anticipated, though it is clear that it can be prepared for. (Nick of Time, 186)

Grosz finds in the virtual an openness that may be useful for thinking about radical change: “perhaps the openendedness of the concept of the virtual may prove central in reinvigorating a politics embracing the future by refusing to tie it to the realization of possibilities . . . and linking it to the unpredictable, uncertain actualization of virtualities” (190). Butler’s argument about the undirectedness and divergence of performatively realized futures seems to echo this call for the unforeseeability of becoming. Yet I have suggested that her Hegelianism cannot tolerate such openness but always, despite her goal of resignifying dialectics, returns to a notion of becoming that makes accessible the possible, not the virtual. For Bergson, a constant interlocutor in Deleuze’s thinking of becoming, duration as radical becoming cannot be thought through the possible:

If this logic [of retrospection] we are accustomed to pushes the reality that springs forth in the present back into the past in the form of a possible, it is precisely because it will not admit that anything does spring up, that something is created and that time is efWcacious. It sees in a new form or quality only a rearrangement of the old—nothing absolutely new.

tuhkanen critique of butler

Tuhkanen, Mikko. “Performativity and Becoming” Cultural Critique. 72, Spring (2009): 1-35.

For example, her description of Antigone as “the limit without which the symbolic cannot be thought” or the “unthinkable within the symbolic” might seem to be referring to the real, yet she goes on to identify Antigone’s position as possibly embodying an “alternative symbolic or imaginary” (Antigone’s Claim, 40) and, immediately afterward, turns to Lacan’s second seminar to criticize his totalizing theory of the symbolic law (41–42; see also 47). Arguably, this conflation of different stages in Lacan’s work forces (or allows) her to ignore Lacan’s divergence from a structuralist understanding of a system (see also Penney, 19).

Relevant here is Shepherdson’s suggestion that “the ‘real’ can be understood as a concept that was developed in order to define in a clear way how there is always an element that ‘does not belong’ within the structure, an ‘excluded’ element which escapes the law, but which can nevertheless be approached in a precise theoretical fashion.” Consequently, “psychoanalysis is not in fact committed to the ‘law’ in the manner of classical structuralist thought” (“Intimate Alterity,” paras. 13, 24).

In No Future, Lee Edelman argues that, rather than making good on its claim to conjure up from the tragic heroine’s tomb a radical challenge to the protocols of symbolic legitimation, Butler’s rendering of Antigone “returns us, instead, to familiar forms of a durable liberal humanism whose rallying cry has always been, and here remains,‘the future’” (105–6). For Edelman, such seamless domestication of the real to symbolic meaning is symptomatic of the inherent failure of futurity to be evoked in terms of anything but what he calls “reproductive futurism” (2 and passim). In the figure of the Child, politics premised on futurism “generates generational succession, temporality, and narrative sequence, not toward the end of enabling change, but, instead, of perpetuating sameness, of turning back time to assure repetition” (60). In this schema of enabling the future to unfold as a reassuringly recognizable continuation of the present, queers are “stigmatized as threatening an end to the future itself” (113). Given the unquestioned reflex of seeing “every political vision as a vision of futurity” (13), Edelman’s exhilaratingly counterintuitive argument that queer respond to its stigmatization with a kind of an answer of the real, with an embrace of its status as an embodiment of “the arbitrary, future-negating force of a brutal and mindless drive” (127), has a strong appeal. If there are reasons to resist this appeal, they must come from the fact that queer theory may not yet have come to grips with the specificity of the consequences of its paradigmatic groundings.

I would propose that, because of the Butlerian paradigm on which much of queer theory has developed, the question of becoming, of futurity’s claim on our thinking, may not yet have been adequately posed.

With Deleuze, for example, we must ask whether futurity as becoming is reducible to breeding, in the sense in which fag slang uses the term to signal the mindless, mechanic, and (in Foucault’s terms) docile reproduction of the same. Edelman writes:

“the true oppositional politics implicit in the practice of queer sexualities lies not in the liberal discourse and patient negotiation of tolerances and rights, important as these undoubtedly are to all of us still denied them, but in the capacity of queer sexualities to figure the radical dissolution of the contract, in every sense social and Symbolic, on which the future as putative assurance against the jouissance of the Real depends” (16).

While not precisely disagreeing with Edelman, I would ask whether we have quite exhausted the question of futurity before we abandon it. To do this, we may want to shift our paradigmatic perspective such that our grounding assumptions are defamiliarized and our concepts—here the question of becoming—are necessarily rethought.  Such a shift, I propose, would allow us to see that the futurity of performative politics may constitute only a partial understanding of what Deleuze, for example, sees as becoming.

foucault critique of Hegel

Butler, Judith. Subjects of Desire. 1987.  182-183

Indeed, for Foucault, domination is not a single stage in an historical narrative whose ultimate destination is decidedly beyond domination. …

For Foucault, domination is not, as it is for Hegel, an impossible or self-contradictory enterprise. On the contrary, the prohibitive or regulative law must find ways to implement itself, and the various strategies of that law’s self-implementation become the occasions for new historical configurations of force.  Regulative or prohibitive laws, what Foucault will come to call “juridical” laws, are curiously generative. They create the phenomena they are meant to control: they delimit some range of phenomena as subordinate and thereby give potential identity and mobility to what they intend to subdue.  They create inadvertent consequences, unintended results, a proliferation of repercussions precisely because there is no prior dialectical prefiguration of what form historical experience must take.

Without the assumption of prior ontological harmony, conflict can be seen to produce effects that exceed the bounds of dialectical unity and result in a multiplication of consequences.

From this perspective, conflict does not result in the restoration of metaphysical order, but becomes the condition for a complication and proliferation of historical experience, a creation of new historical forms.

This “non-place” of emergence, this conflictual moment to which produces historical innovation, must by understood as a nondialectical version of difference, not unlike the “difference” which, for Derrida, permanently ruptures the relation between sign and signified.  For both Derrida and Foucault, the Hegelian theme of relational opposition is radically challenged through a formulation of difference as a primary and irrefutable linguistic/historical constant.

The inversion of Hegel’s prioritization of identity over difference is achieved through the postulation of certain kinds of “difference” as historically invariant and insuperable. In effect, the difference whereof Foucault and Derrida speak are differences that cannot be aufgehoben into more inclusive identities.

Any effort to posit an identity, whether the identity of the linguistic signified or the identity of some historical epoch, is necessarily undermined by the difference that conditions any such positing.  Indeed, where identity is posited, difference is not aufgehoben, but concealed.  In fact, it appears safe to conclude that for both Derrida and Foucault, Aufhebung is nothing other than a strategy of concealment, not the incorporation of difference into identity, but the denial of difference for the sake of positing a fictive identity. We shall see that for Lacan the role of difference functions similarly. For both Derrida and Foucault, difference displaces the metaphysical impulse from its totalizing goal.  The Derridean moment of linguistic misfire where the conceit of referentiality debunks itself, undermines the Hegelian effort to establish sign and signified as internally related features of a unified reality.

Similarly, the Foucaultian moment of conflict seems capable of producing only ever greater complexity in its wake, proliferating opposition beyond its binary configurations into multiple and diffuse forms, thus undermining the possibility of an Hegelian synthesis of binary opposites.

It is clear that both Derrida and Foucault theorize from within the tradition of a dialectic deprived of the power of synthesis.

On the other hand, it becomes necessary to distinguish between kinds of difference, some of which are dialectical and always reinstate identity subsequent to any appearance of ontological difference and others of which are nondialectical and resist assimilation into any kind of synthetic unity. To find the latter sort of difference is to change the very meaning of the “labor of the negative,” for this “labor” consist of building relations where there seemed to be none, in the “magic power that converts the negative into being.”  Nondialectical difference would convert the negative only and always into further negativity or reveal difference itself, not as the negative, but as a qualitative permutation of Being; in effect, nondialectical difference, despite its various forms, is the labor of the negative which has lost its “magic,” a labor that does not construct a higher-order being but either deconstructs the illusions of a restorative ontological immanence and posits nondialectical difference as irreducible, or rejects the primacy of difference of any kind and offers a theory of primary metaphysical plenitude which eludes Hegelian categories and entails a defense of affirmation on nondialectical grounds.  (184)

recap

I have opened with 2 rather difficult examples of protest, the QAIA and Danish cartoon incident. Why I’ve cited these, I try to explain, though it doesn’t sound entirely that well thought out just yet. I then move to Hegel and compare the Hegel coming out of Kant with Butler’s Hegel that is more coming from Spinoza country.  This is to emphasize the intrusion of the subjective that Hegel adds to the mix.  Then things get testy.

First I mention the tension that Butler points to in the P. quoting her regarding the self-identical subject, that “it is its travels, and is every place in which it finds itself.”  So on one hand you have a subject in motion, hmm, a subject that is both in motion and at rest, when in motion this is meant to highlight it otherness to itself, that its desire is never sated, can’t be located, a particle in motion rather than at rest, on the other hand though she also points to the subject as also its place, and in Hegel’s P. this place, though temporary, nevertheless is an abode structured such that there is an homology between subject and her external environment, in other words where for the moment, substance is subject.

Butler goes further than the conventional narrative that describes at the moment of mutual recognition another self-consciousness similar to the original self-consciousness, in which they “check each other out” that is, there is recognition of the fact that they are both a self-consciousness, provoking both awe and outrage.  Butler freezes the moment before this aggression is unleashed towards the other self-consciousness, establishing a touchpoint in her reading of Hegel which she is turn return to again and again, each time she reworks this touchpoint slightly differently.  In SOD this self-consciousness is ‘taken up by the other self-consciousness’ in a moment that could be described as a self-loss on the part of the original self-consciousness.  The subject undergoing this sense of loss is for Butler, an ek-static subject, a subject ‘beside itself’ or ‘outside itself’.

For our purposes here, she returns to her Hegelian theme in 1997 in PLP but this time in a very different fashion.  Desire now doesn’t transparently lead one down the road of greater self-transparency, instead desire leads to one’s own subjection.

Heteronormativity leads to heteromelancholia. I’m not arguing that one morphs into the other, but that nevertheless, Butler emphasis on self-loss, takes a turn into a more subjective ‘interior’ psyche of the subject.  It was here she would unleash in this later work, 2 important theses: Hetero-melancholy, and the ethical self-berating of the Unhappy Consciousness.  For our purposes of our Hegelian theme in this chapter, we will take up the Butler’s reading of the Unhappy Consicousness.  Nevertheless as will become apparent Butler’s turn to psychoanalysis and Foucault led to a development of a thesis that theorized the subject less as ek-static self-loss, and now as self-berated and subjected.

In her 1997 work here in PLP, Butler was to come into heavy criticism for her uptake of Freud, particularly her critique of Lacan.  Butler changed her course from the punitivity of the self-berating subject to her post-2000 work on a subject with a different emphasis from her previous pre-2000 work.  It is most significantly Butler’s emphasis on norms and normativity.  Butler now distances is her empahsis on a punitive self-punishing subject that only comes into being via an accusation or accusatory interpellation.

Her Precarious LIfe and Frames of War, return her to her work on the ek-static subject, only this time self-loss is more robustly articulated within a normative frame, a scene of address and more emphasis is put on the work of the way in which a constitutive outside is ‘abjected’ in order to render a stable interior.  This abject is not only held up for close theoretical scrutiny by Butler, but is attributed various concrete political identities, most notably, AIDS vicitms, Palestinians and Iraqi and Afghan civilians

The fact that the unchangeable consciousness renounces and surrenders its embodied form, while, on the other hand, the particular individual consciousness gives thanks [for the gift], i.e. denies itself the satisfaction of being conscious of its independence, and assigns the essence of its action not to itself but to the beyond, through these two moments of reciprocal self-surrender of both parts, consciousness does, of course, gain a sense of its unity with the Unchangeable.  But this unity is at the same time affected with division, is again broken within itself, and from it there emerges once more the antithesis of the universal and the individual. For though consciousness renounces the show of satisfying its feeling of self, it obtains the actual satisfaction of it; for it has been desire, work, and enjoyment; as consciousness it has willed, acted, and enjoyed.

Consciousness feels itself therein as this particular individual, and does not let itself be deceived by its own seeming renunciation, for the truth of the matter is that it has not renounced itself. What has been brought about is only the double reflection into the two extremes; and the result is the renewed division into the opposed consciousness of the Unchangeable, and the consciousness of willing, performing, and enjoying, and self-renunciation itself, which confronts it; in other words, the consciousness of independent individuality in general.  (Phenmenology of Spirit para 222)

subjection alterity norms

What is it then, that is desired in subjection? Is it a simple love of the shackles, or is there a more complex scenario at work?  How is survival to be maintained if the terms by which existence is guaranteed are precisely those that demand and institute subordination?  On this understanding,

subjection is the paradoxical effect of a regime of power in which the very “conditions of existence,” the possibility of continuing as a recognizable social being, requires the formation and maintenance of the subject in subordination. 27

:)Ok, this is the formulation that says all that Butler has been working on towards and which defines her work tout court. She is quoting her favourite quote from Spinoza which is that “desire is always the desire to persist in one’s own being.”  This desire to persist in one’s own being “can be brokered only with the risky terms of social life.”  And what is this social life but and here we go:

then to persist in ones’ own being requires submitting to a world of others that is fundamentally not one’s own (a submission that does not take place at a later date, but which frames and makes possible the desire to be). Only by persisting in alterity does one persist in one’s “own” being.

Vulnerable to terms that one never made, one persists always, to some degree, through categories, names, terms, and classifications that mark a primary and inaugurative alienation in sociality. If such terms institute a primary subordination or, indeed, a primary violence, then a subject emerges against itself in order, paradoxically, to be for itself. 28

:)Now here is a great moment in Butler.  What would it mean to go beyond the simple boundaries of social existence in order to seek change?  Now get this:

What would it mean for the subject to desire something other than its continued “social existence”?  If such an existence cannot be undone without falling into some kind of death, can existence nevertheless be risked, death courted or pursued, in order to expose and open to transformation the hold of social power on the conditions of life’s persistence?  The subject is compelled to repeat the norms by which it is produced, but that repetition establishes a domain of risk, for if one fails to reinstate the norm “in the right way,” one beomes subject to further sanction, one feels the prevailing conditions of existence threatened. And yet, without a repetition that risks life —in its current organization— how might we begin to imagine the contingency of that organization,and performatively reconfigure the contours of the conditions of life?

A Critical Analysis of Subjection involves:

1) an account of the way regulatory power maintains subjects in subordination by producing and exploiting the demand for continuity, visibility, and place;

2) recognition that the subject produced as continuous, visible, and located is nevertheless haunted by an inassimilable remainder, a melancholia that marks the limits of subjectivation;

3) an account of the iterability of the subject that shows how agency may well consist in opposing and transforming the social terms by which it is spawned.  29

The analysis of subjection is always double, tracing the conditions of subject formation and tracing the turn against those conditions for the subject —and its perspective— to emerge.

Is there a way to affirm complicity as the basis of political agency, yet insist that political agency may do more than reiterate the conditions of subordination?

conclusion to asad and mahmood 4/4

Asad, Talal. Wendy Brown, Judith Butler, Saba Mahmood. Is Critique Secular? Blasphemy, Injury, and Free Speech. California: The Townsend Center for the Humanities University of California Berkeley, 2009.

So it is quite understandable that there might be a strong group of sexual progressives who maintain that freedom of expression is essential to the movement, that the lesbian, gay, bi, trans, queer, intersex movement is not possible without freedom of expression and without recourse to freedom itself as a guiding value and norm. Of course, to posit such a principle of freedom does not answer the questions of whether and how that norm is to be reconciled with other norms, nor does it tell us precisely what is meant by “freedom.”

We have to be clear about what we mean by freedom, since from the beginning freedom has been, not the same as the liberty that belongs to the individual, but something socially conditioned and socially shared. No one person is free when others are not, since freedom is achieved as a consequence of a certain social and political organization of life. The queer movement, conceived transnationally, has also sought to fight homophobia, misogyny, and racism, and it has operated as part of an alliance with struggles against discrimination and hatreds of all kinds. The emergence of a queer politics was meant to confirm the importance of battling homophobia no matter what your identity was. But it was also a signal of the importance of alliance; an attunement to minoritization in its various forms; a struggle against precarious conditions, regardless of “identity”; and a battle against racism and social exclusion.

Of course there is also a now-entrenched tension between identity-based and alliance-based sexual minority politics, and my affiliation with “queer” is meant to affirm the politics of alliance across difference. Broadly put, a strong alliance on the left requires, minimally, a commitment to combating both racism and homophobia, combating both anti-immigrant politics and various forms of misogyny and induced poverty. Why would any of us be willing to participate in an alliance that does not keep all of these forms of discrimination clearly in mind, and that does not also attend to the matters of economic justice that afflict sexual minorities, women, and racial and religious minorities as well?

So let us consider more carefully, then, how the politics of speech enters into this situation and how we might try to think about hate speech in light of a commitment to a left alliance that refuses to sacrifice one minority for another (which does not mean there may not be some serious antagonisms that remain essential to the articulation of this alliance). It is perhaps important to remember the importance of the critique of state coercion and state violence for a robust left political movement, even as we recognize that transnational economic institutions are responsible for differential poverty levels. Can we even think, though, about a politics of the speech act without noting how the state speaks, and what force it exercises when it speaks? Why is there a righteous defense of the political right to insult Muslim minorities at the same time that insults to the Dutch government, any critique of state coercion, constitutes an unacceptable assault on civilization, modernity, or reason itself? When this kind of split thinking happens, freedom of speech not only depends on protection by the state but empowers that state; this, in turn, leads to the situation in which speech against the state is effectively or implicitly censored. Hence, the freedom we think belongs to the individual is actually conferred by the state, so we misunderstand its origin and its meaning.

This is also why, if we want to develop a critical conception of freedom of speech, it will have to be one that legitimates itself outside of state power, that is able to criticize state power as part of its free expression. We have to ask whether “relying on the state” leads to the “augmentation of state power.” If Islam is figured as the religion or the name of the population who will do violence to Dutch civilizational values, then that gives the Dutch state a certain license to do violence to what seems to threaten its own values. That also logically means that “doing violence” becomes a Dutch value. We see the intensification of anti-immigrant activities, the base ideological implementation of the Civic Integration exam, the overt celebration of hateful speech of the so-called autochthonic Dutch against religious minorities as a sign of freedom itself.

The question is not whether hateful speech is part of free speech, but rather, why has freedom in certain European contexts come to define itself as the freedom to hate? What does it mean when the notion of freedom has been twisted to ratify discrimination, xenophobia, racism, and nationalism? The Dutch Civic Integration Examination was one case in point. In 2006, immigrants were required to take an examination that included the mandatory viewing of images of two gay men kissing as a way to test their “tolerance” and, hence, capacity to assimilate to Dutch liberalism.23 Do I want this test administered in my name and for my benefit? Do I want the state to take up its defense of my sexual freedom in an effort to restrict immigration on racist grounds? What happens when seeking recourse to the protective actions of the state in turn augments and fortifies the state’s own power, including its power to articulate a racist national identity? And what happens when lesbian and gay freedoms are instrumentalized to harass religious minorities or to ensure that new immigrants can be denied entry on religious, ethnic, or racial grounds? Under these circumstances, sexual progressives must become “critical” of the state that appears so enthusiastically to be supporting our freedoms. What precisely is it doing with our freedoms? And are we willing to have our claims to freedom instrumentalized for the purposes of a racist reproduction of Dutch national identity through restrictive and coercive immigration policies?

Let me make the point even more precisely, if I can. It is one thing for the state to value freedom of expression and to protect expression, but it is quite another for the state to be the agent who decides whose freedom of expression will be protected and whose will not. Under what conditions does the state decide that a minority is threatened by certain kinds of aggressive speech, and under what other conditions does the state decide that a minority must tolerate being targeted by aggressive speech as a sign that we live in a democracy that savors freedom of speech? Perhaps this is the new meaning for Dutch tolerance: you must tolerate the pain and abuse we will deal you, and that is the proof that you can “integrate” and become part of Dutch citizenship. We have to ask why the state gives free reign to racist speech at the same time that it demands respect for sexual minorities. Is the latter being played against the former? And what would happen if sexual and religious minorities refused to be pitted against each other in this way? What would happen if both of them turned against the nationalist and racist strategies of the state as a joint strategy?  If, following gay conservatives, we understand freedom as personal liberty and then base a politics on a libertarian notion of freedom, we sacrifice an important social dimension to the left understanding of freedom. If freedom belongs to the individual, then we can surely ask: which individuals are recognized as individuals?

In other words, what social forms of individuality establish the recognizability of some persons as individuals and others not? If such an individual liberty exists only to the extent that it is protected by the state, then the state exercises its prerogative to protect in some instances and to withdraw all protection in others. Let’s remember, then, that the libertarian notion of the individual corresponds to a certain version of state power and economic property, and, whereas in early versions of libertarianism the state is supposed to remain minimal (or privative) in order to maximize economic freedom, that is surely not the case in the present instance in which the state differentially protects rights depending on whether that protection suits its national aspirations, even its national self-understanding as “European,” against the new immigrant communities from North Africa, Turkey, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia.

In the context in which the state makes use of liberties in this way (differentially exercises its prerogative to protect or retract individual liberties, decides who will count as an individual whose rights are worth protecting, and who will not), we have a different situation. In such a case, “freedom of speech” presupposes that there will be no open public criticism of the state or its inconsistent and racist actions (after all, the state is the protector and the adjudicator in this scene). This means, implicitly, that only those modes of freedom of expression will be protected that in turn protect the state, unless also protected is the open criticism of the state’s racist speech. If the fortification of the state against established and new immigrant communities involves depriving them of freedom, questioning their own rights of assembly and expression, if it casts its own Muslim population as a threat to the value of freedom, then it protects one claim of freedom only through the intensification of unfreedom, through the augmentation of the state’s own coercive mechanisms. If independent filmmaking is to remain a critical practice, separate from and willing to criticize state power, then one has to analyze closely the situation in which film becomes the cultural means through which the state’s anti-immigrant practices are implemented and rationalized. The film industry then becomes the culture industry for the state, and it loses its standing as “independent” or, indeed, as “critical.” Under these conditions, we lose the independence from state authority implied in the term “independent film,” and that medium becomes a form of embedded reporting, taking on, even ratifying, the perspective of the state. As such, it becomes another visual instrument, like the cameras in Abu Ghraib, which stage and fortify the vicious embodied action of the civilizational mission, linking its propaganda against Islam with the torture and human rights violations in Iraq and Guantánamo. Of course, the right to insult and the right to produce provocative art become rights that the state defends, but when it defends those rights differentially and for specific policy purposes, those rights become suspect. If those rights are to have legitimacy, they cannot be justified through recourse to their utility in rationalizing a the deprivation of certain rights to religious practice and belief, in other words, certain rights of expression. There may be no legal way to “manage this risk,” but that is no reason why this instrumentalization should not become the focus of critical analysis and political opposition. To understand when and where the claim of free speech is robust, we have to ask, “If we point this out, and maintain a critical and public relation to this particular prerogative of state power, is our speech still protected?” If it is still protected, then free speech is an active part of democratic contestations and political struggles. If it is not, we must militate against its restriction, differential application, and instrumentalization for nondemocratic ends. If the prerequisites of a European polity (and this could be either the nation-state or the European Union) require either cultural homogeneity or a model of cultural pluralism, then, either way, the solution is figured as assimilation or integration into a set of cultural norms that are understood as internally already established, self-sufficient and self-standing. These norms are not considered changeable according to new demographic shifts, and they do not seek to respond to new populations and new claims to belonging. Indeed, if the core norms are already established, then one already knows what Dutch culture is, and one is closed to the idea that it may become something else, something different; indeed, one refuses the recognition that it already has become something different and that the change is, in fact, irreversible.

When freedom of expression comes to mean “the freedom to express an unwillingness to undergo change in light of contact with cultural difference,” then freedom of expression becomes the means through which a dogmatic and inflexible concept of culture becomes the precondition of citizenship itself. The state to which we appeal to protect the freedom of expression is the state that will close its doors to whomever it does not want to hear, whose speech is unwelcome within its borders. Within this framework, the freedom of personal expression, broadly construed, relies upon the suppression of a mobile and contestatory understanding of cultural difference. Such suppression makes clear how state violence invests in cultural homogeneity as it applies its exclusionary policies to rationalize coercive and discriminatory state policies toward Muslim immigrants. When the acts of one member of a group or some small number of members of a group are taken to be the defining actions and beliefs of the group itself, then that is not only an unjustified generalization but also racism, and it must also be opposed. Surely, there is an ongoing clash or antagonism between those who feel that their values of sexual freedom or freedom of expression are threatened by some minority religious beliefs and ways of life, but these are differences to be worked out through cohabitation and struggle, through participation in public discourse, through cultural and educational projects, allowing modes of separateness to coincide with modes of belonging (and not trying to close the fissure between the two). These are surely better strategies than appealing to a state that makes use of the defense of “freedom” to reassert its national purity—its racist conception of culture—as the precondition of reason, modernity, and civilization, and to halt all public criticism of the way it polices its borders and patrols its minority populations. A racist discourse can recast itself as the necessary groundwork of morality, reformulating its own hatred as moral virtue. Some crucial part of freedom of speech involves “speaking out,” which means, invariably, speaking out within specific scenes of address: speaking with and from and to one another. This implicit sociality in all address demands the recognition of freedom as a condition of social life, one that depends upon equality for its actualization. At stake is a rethinking of the processes of minoritization under new global conditions, asking what alliances are possible between religious, racial, and sexual minorities (when these “positions” are less identities than modes of living in relation to others and to guiding ideals). Then perhaps we can find constellations where the opposition to racism, to discrimination, to precarity, and to state violence remain the clear goals of political mobilization.

response to mahmood 3/4

Asad, Talal. Wendy Brown, Judith Butler, Saba Mahmood. Is Critique Secular? Blasphemy, Injury, and Free Speech. California: The Townsend Center for the Humanities University of California Berkeley, 2009.

she points out that within Islam, the religious subject’s relation to the representation of Muhammad constitutes a relation that is indissociable from one’s own sense of self.

The “self” at issue is not a discrete and bounded individual, but a relation to an animated image; the self has to be understood as a set of embodied and affective practices that are fundamentally bound up with certain images, icons, and imaginaries.

In Mahmood’s terms, “the power of an icon lies in its capacity to allow an individual (or a community) to find oneself in a structure that influences how one conducts oneself in this world… a form of relationality that binds the subject to an object or imaginary.” Now one might conclude that Mahmood is suggesting that blasphemy against the image of Muhammad is thus an injury to Muslim personhood, and that the law that seeks to distinguish between injurious conduct and incendiary expression misunderstands not only the ontology of personhood but also the character of the injury. The twin conceits of state neutrality with respect to religion are that (a) religion ought to be protected as a private issue and that (b) no religious beliefs should drive public law or policy. And yet, if religion becomes inextricably bound up with personhood, and injurious conduct against persons is legally proscribed, could not this new conception of the ontology of personhood mandate a change in legal reasoning and judgment? 🙂 This I think would be Butler’s preferred way forward.

Interestingly enough, Mahmood does not take this tack, but counsels against the domain of juridical redress as an appropriate and effective venue for taking up the challenge of the Danish cartoons. Instead, she uses the language of “moral injury” to distinguish the issue from the ways in which it is conceived by reigning legal vernaculars. Indeed, she is quite explicit about the policy implications of her analysis:

“[T]he future of the Muslim minority in Europe depends not so much on how the law might be expanded to accommodate their concerns as on a larger transformation of the cultural and ethical sensibilities of the majority Judeo-Christian population that undergird the law.” 🙂 Butler now is shaking her head. Get ready, she’s comin atcha!

Moreover, this turn to the cultural and ethical domain is conditioned by an argument that the law is so pervasively secular that any effort to seek redress for injury through the law would strengthen the very instrument through which secularism asserts its hegemony and defines the proper domain of religion.

If the task is to change sensibilities, we need to know how that can be done. Of course, Mahmood is right to point out that the terms of existing law ought not to constrain our understanding of the cultural and ethical dimensions of this issue. On the other hand, is it right to understand law as radically distinct from questions of sensibility?

After all, does law (civil rights law, for instance) not function on certain historical occasions to change sensibilities, to foster new parameters for equality and justice, including new sentiments, or are we being asked to understand “sensibilities” as definitionally extrajuridical? Are there not legal sensibilities at issue here?

This final call to change does not tell us in what way change might or should happen, which leads me to wonder whether we are being asked to take the foregoing analysis as precisely the kind of cultural and ethical intervention that is needed. If that is the case, several questions still emerge: do we understand the “cultural and ethical domain” to be radically distinct from law? and on what basis do ethics and culture constitute an alternative and separable domain or set of domains? Mahmood calls for “comparative dialogue” as well as a kind of “thinking” that happens in “unaccustomed ways,” but what would be the institutional venues for these activities? Though these practices are considered distinct from “political action,” are they for that reason not political strategies.

Mahmood specifies that we have to cleave judgment from description in the context of discussing religious fanaticism, presumably because our judgments tend to overwhelm our descriptions. And yet, how would we then return to the question of judgment after having made that initial separation? What form would some more fully informed judgment take? To enter into political action surely requires some kind of judgment about what is the case, and what should be the case. We have to consider whether politics is being allied with “law” or legal solution in this discussion, and what a politics might look like that did not model itself on juridical decision and action.

When Mahmood makes the decision to turn away from law and politics, does she not inadvertently overlook the possibility of a politics, including a political judgment, that might not be constrained by legal norms or practice?

Does “ethics” distinguish itself from politics as part of the effort to find an alternative to legal solutions in this matter? And does her argument now invest with neutrality the sphere of culture and ethics that has been wrested from law? Is this finally an apologia for anthropology itself? The final line invokes “the academy” as one of the few places where such tensions can be explored. Are we left, then, with academic exploration, comparative work, and dialogue as the cultural, if not culturalist, alternative to law and politics? This is a strange conclusion given how engaged with thepolitics of law the essay is, but perhaps we are meant to be persuaded that this is a domain from which we should all finally retreat. This final set of moves strikes me as curious, given that Mahmood has offered quite a few strong and well-argued political judgments throughout the essay: the pervasive secularism of European law; the misunderstanding of racialization; the widespreadignorance and hatred of Islam; the necessity to expose the secular production and deformation of religious practice. These are strong political positions. Even exposing the contradictions of secular law is clearly a strong critical move that seeks to combat a sustained and consequential hegemony within the law. Is Mahmood really operating to the side of politics and judgment?

Can she give an account of the place of politics and judgment in her own analysis, indeed, in the argument she gives about why we should work to the side of both politics and judgment?

In a final coda, Mahmood raises the question of whether “critique” can take account of its own “disciplines of subjectivity, affective attachments, and subject-object relationality.”

At this point, it seems clear that the model for thinking about the Muslim relation to the image of Muhammad sustains certain analogies with the practice of critique itself. Both seem to be embodied and affective practices, modes of subjectivity that are bound up with their objects and, hence, relational. Is this a generalized account of subjectivity or one that pertains to specific kinds of practices of the self? This is not precisely a point pursued by Mahmood, but it does raise a question about the status of critique.

In the end, she holds out for a notion of critique that relies on the suspension of the kind of closure characteristic of political action. So critique appears to be neither judgment nor action, but a certain invested, affected, way of thinking and living that is bound up with objects or, indeed, an imaginary, and this way of thinking—and what it thinks about—is not usual, not customary. Inasmuch as secularism has established the domain of the usual and customary, there can be a critique of secularism that calls that taken-for-grantedness into question. I take it that this would be part of what Mahmood would accept as “critique.”

response to asad and mahmood 2/4

Asad, Talal. Wendy Brown, Judith Butler, Saba Mahmood. Is Critique Secular? Blasphemy, Injury, and Free Speech. California: The Townsend Center for the Humanities University of California Berkeley, 2009.

Blasphemy is viewed in secular liberal society as a constraint on free speech, but why is it contextualized exclusively in this way? Is it that the normative question of whether or not we will censor drives from the start the way in which we conceptualize the phenomenon? If we were to conceptualize the phenomenon differently, would different kinds of normative issues come to the fore?

Is there an idea of the human implied by prohibitions and protections related to speech, and if so, how does this idea serve to distinguish between what is called the religious and what is called the secular?

… free speech is produced precisely through the circumscription of the public domain and its protections and, most importantly, it is presumed to belong to a subject who exercises free speech as a right.

This subject owns itself and its free speech, and it exercises speech freely as a “property” of its own personhood.  As self-owning, the subject possesses its own personhood and exercises that personhood freely; free speech is a paradigmatic example of this self-owning subject.

In this way, the claims to free speech are embedded in a certain ontology of the subject, and it is this ontology that is challenged by theological claims that assert the subject or self’s dependence on or participation in a transcendent power. The theological claim seems, on the surface, to contest the secular ontology of the subject.

And whereas Islam, according to Asad, offers no punishment for disbelief and in no way mandates belief, it opposes any efforts to coerce belief or disbelief. Belief itself is not a cognitive act, not even the “property” of a person, but part of an ongoing and embodied relation to God. So any attempt to coerce someone away from his or her belief is an effort to break a relation to a transcendence by which one is sustained. It is not, in these terms, a quarrel between beliefs or an attack on an idea, but an effort to coerce the break of a bond without which life is untenable. As Asad puts it,

“what matters, finally, is belonging to a particular way of life in which the person does not own himself.” The outrage against the cartoons articulates an objection to “something that disrupts a living relationship.”

The legal imaginary of liberal law, which protects free speech against blasphemy, makes the claim that the charge against the cartoons is blasphemy. This immediately makes the issue into one of whether or not free speech should be curtailed. On the other hand, to situate blasphemy —or in this case, isā’ah, insult, injury—in relation to way of life that is not based in self-ownership, but in an abiding and vital dispossession, changes the terms of the debate. It does not provide an immediate answer to how the question of prohibition or censorship should be legally decided, but shifts us into a mode of understanding that is not constrained by that juridical model. In other words,

to understand blasphemy as an injury to a sustaining relation is to understand that we are dealing with a different conception of subjectivity and belonging than the one implied by self-ownership. (I am tempted to say that this mode of subjectivity functions as a critique of self-ownership within secular hegemony.)

The public outcry against the cartoons is also a way of refusing and parochializing the specific property-driven ontology of the subject that has come to support the claim of free speech.

In this case, to change the framework within which we seek to understand blasphemy makes it possible to see that what is at stake is not so much a question of whether speech should be free or prohibited as a way of conceiving a mode of living outside of selfidentity and self-ownership. The cartoons are injurious not only because they fail to understand this way of life but also because they deploy the iconography of Muhammad to direct the viewer toward a repudiation of that way of life.

To claim that someone or anyone can “own” the image is to seek recourse to a framework of property that is implicitly criticized by the living relation to the icon.

So the critical question that emerges is whether ways of life that are based on dispossession in transcendence (and implicit critique of self-ownership) are legible and worthy of respect. It is then less a legal question than a broader question of the conditions of cohabitation for peoples whose fundamental conceptions of subjective life divide between those that accept established secular grounds and those at odds with secular presumptions of self-coincidence and property.

It would seem that we are being asked to understand this battle as one between, on the one hand, a presumptively secular framework tied to an ontology of the subject as self-owned and, on the other hand, a nonsecular framework that offers an ontology of the subject as dispossessed in transcendence. This explanation, however, asks us to assume that there is a certain generalized secular ontology of the subject, and that secularization has effectively succeeded in establishing that ontology within the parameters of law and politics. I have questions about whether the secular and secularization are as monolithic as this, but I will defer them in order to follow through with this argument. For if we accept that secularization is the way that religious traditions “live on” within postreligious domains, then we are not really talking about two different frameworks, secularism versus religion, but two forms of religious understanding, intertwined with one another in various modes of avowal and disavowal. Indeed, the binary framework crumbles further when we consider modes of secular criticism that take place in religious contexts (for example, the discourse ofthe current pope) as well as modes of religious reasoning that recur within secularism (for example, Protestant commitments to the distinction between public and private life that have become essential to modern liberalism).

response to asad and mahmood 1/4

Asad, Talal. Wendy Brown, Judith Butler, Saba Mahmood. Is Critique Secular? Blasphemy, Injury, and Free Speech. California: The Townsend Center for the Humanities University of California Berkeley, 2009.

The point is not simply to expand our capacities for description or to assert the plurality of frameworks, although it is doubtless a “good” to know the cultural range of moral discourses on such questions if we are to be thoughtful and knowledgeable about the world in which we live. Nor is the point to embrace a cultural relativism that would attribute equivalence to all moral claims and position oneself as an outsider to the normative issues at hand. Rather, it seems most important to ask,

what would judgment look like that took place not “within” one framework or another but which emerged at the very site of conflict, clash, divergence, overlapping?

It would seem a practice of cultural translation would be a condition of such judgment, and that what is being judged is not only the question of whether a given action is injurious but also whether, if it is, legal remedies are the best way to approach the issue, and what other ways of acknowledging and repairing injury are available.

In my view, the point is to achieve a complex and comparative understanding of various moral discourses, not only to see why we evaluate (and value) certain norms as we do, but also to evaluate those very modes of evaluation. We do not merely shift from an evaluative position to a descriptive one (though I can see why taking a descriptive tone might work to defuse polemics on all sides), but rather seek to show that every description is already committed to an evaluative framework, prior to the question of any explicit or posterior judgment. We may think that we first describe a phenomenon and then later subject it to judgment, but if the very phenomenon at issue only “exists” within certain evaluative frameworks, then norms precede description—as is surely the case when we think about the presumptive cultural and moral frameworks brought to bear on the discussions of blasphemy against Muhammad as well as those frameworks, mainly Muslim, that were not brought to bear. … secular terms should not have the power to define the meaning or effect of religious concepts. This is an important argument to make in order to combat a kind of structural injury, emblematized by events like the Danish cartoons, inflicted on religious and racial minorities (especially when religious minorities are racialized).

… the point is to try to clarify why so many Muslims were outraged, and why something other than an attack on free speech by religious populations was at issue.

… secular terms should not have the power to define the meaning or effect of religious concepts. This is an important argument to make in order to combat a kind of structural injury, emblematized by events like the Danish cartoons, inflicted on religious and racial minorities (especially when religious minorities are racialized). This last is a strong normative claim, and I want to suggest that it becomes possible to consider the injustice of this situation of hegemonic secularism only when we pass through a certain displacement of taken-for-granted modes of moral evaluation, including certain established juridical frameworks. A certain critical perspective emerges as a consequence of comparative work. An inquiry that understands that competing and converging moral discourses require a mode of cultural analysis, perhaps anthropological, affirms cultural difference as a constant point of reference in the effort to “parochialize” certain absolutist and monolithic conceptions of normativity that serve, implicitly or explicitly, forms of cultural ignorance, racism, conquest, and domination— or, as Asad puts it, the “European revulsion against Muslim immigrants and Islam.”
Asad effectively poses the question,

why is it that aggression in the name of God shocks secular liberal sensibilities, whereas the art of killing in the name of the secular nation, or democracy, does not?

He points out that this kind of discrepancy or schism may well constitute a “tension” at the heart of the modern subject. And this is a useful and persuasive argument, in my view. But clearly something more is at stake. We would not be alarmed by the kinds of comparisons made explicit in Asad’s questions if we did not ourselves undergo some moral horror or shock at the obvious inequalities demonstrated by the comparison. Asad’s questions derive their rhetorical force from a sense that it is unacceptable to respond with righteous outrage to deaths caused by those who wage war in the name of religion and with moral complacency to deaths caused by those who wage war in the name of the nation-state. There are many reasons why one might oppose various forms of death dealing, but it is only on the condition that we do, in fact, oppose violence and the differential ways it is justified that we can come to understand the normative importance of the comparative judgment that Asad’s work makes available to us.

Asad’s work not only provides new modes of description and understanding but also makes an intervention into evaluative frameworks and norms of evaluation themselves. By showing how normative dispositions (mainly secular and liberal) enter into stipulative claims (concerning objectionable violence and grievable death) that circumscribe the domain of “understanding” contemporary cultural and military conflict, Asad facilitates a critique of this parochial and consequential circumscription of operative evaluative frameworks.

Through a certain kind of comparative interrogation, one framework is interrupted by another, and thus opens up a new horizon for judgment. On the On the basis of this comparative and interruptive work, we can conclude that there is no reason to assume that justified violence, when it happens, is the sole prerogative of states, and that unjustified violence, when it happens, is the exercise of illegitimate states and insurgency movements. Such a conclusion not only has consequences for how we proceed normatively but also constitutes itself as a strong normative claim.

If Asad’s comparative questions upset us, as I think they do, that is because we become aware of the contingent conditions under which we feel shock, outrage, and moral revulsion. And since we can only make sense of why we would feel so much more horror in the face of one mode of death dealing than in the face of another through recourse to implicitly racist and civilizational schemes organizing and sustaining affect differentially, we end up feeling shocked and outraged by our lack of shock.

The posing of the comparative question, under the right conditions, induces new moral sentiments that are bound up with new moral judgments. We realize that we have already judged or evaluated the worth of certain lives over others, certain modes of death dealing over others, and that realization is at the same time a judgment, an evaluation, namely, that such differential judgments are unjustified and wrong.

For Benjamin, the principles of homogeneity, substitutability, and continuity that come to structure temporality and matter under conditions of capitalism have to be actively interrupted by the way in which the premodern erupts into the modern. Would this notion of critique not be useful to those who seek to show how the progressive conceits of secularization are confounded by animated anachronisms, fragments from the premodern that disrupt the claims of modernity, and prove central—and potentially fatal—to its operation?

As a mode of living and even a mode of subject constitution, critique is understood as a “practice” that incorporates norms into the very formation of the subject. The subject does not own itself, but is always dispossessed by the norms by which it is formed. Is this conception of no use to the critique of secular presumptions?

Even in Kant, it is important to note that critique is not precisely a judgment, but an inquiry into the conditions of possibility that make judgment possible. That inquiry is, and must be, separate from judgment itself. The Kantian position is that our ways of knowing are structured prior to the possibility of our judgment, and that these form conditions of possibility for any judgment. Kant, of course, sought to understand the universal and timeless features of cognition in his effort to articulate the preconditions of judgment, but it is surely possible to transpose a Kantian procedure onto a historical scheme, as Foucault sought to do. When that happens we can ask, how is our knowledge organized by specific historical schemes prior to any possibility of judgment, and how do our judgments rely upon those prior organizations of knowledge? If this is right, and if this constitutes a certain historical transposition of the Kantian project of “critique,” then

critique would be an inquiry into the ways that knowledge is organized prior to the specific acts of knowledge we perform, including the kinds of judgments we make.  In this sense, following Kant, critique is prior to judgment and perhaps closer to Asad’s project than would at first appear.

When we ask what historically formed schemes of evaluation condition and inform our shock and outrage over suicide bombing and our righteous coldness in the face of statesponsored violence, it seems to me that we are trying to delimit the historical conditions of possibility for affective and evaluative response. Asad and Mahmood both have tried to show how secularism functions tacitly to structure and organize our moral responses within a dominant Euro-Atlantic context, and in so doing they seem to be asking us to call into question the taken-forgranted ways that such schemes inform and move us.

Comparative work, perhaps anthropology itself, seeks to displace us from that taken-for-granted set of presumptions, ones that assume a certain process of secularization as yielding universal truths, and that therefore parochialize a very specific, sometimes lethal, tradition within the West.

It seems to me that critique designates the process of trying to delimit knowledge, indicating not so much a completed or successful action as an ongoing task to fathom and describe the various ways of organizing knowledge that are tacitly operating as the preconditions of various “acts” of knowledge. This incomplete effort to delimit and name the conditions of possibility is not itself a judgment; it is an effort to fathom, collect, and identify that upon which we depend when we claim to know anything at all. The ways to do this are various:

through tracing internal contradictions, through comparing and contrasting alternative cultural lexicons for similar concepts, through offering a historical account of how a set of culturally specific assumptions became recast as universal and postcultural.

If this is one set of critical practices, how different is “critique” from Asad’s own critical procedure, finally?

sept 7th 2006 teach-in butler lebanon israel

Concerned about the devastation currently being inflicted on the people of Lebanon and Palestine by the Israeli Military Forces and with the verylimited and biased reporting on these conflicts presented by most American media networks, we have organized a teach-in on the UC Berkeley campus in order to give students, faculty, and the Bay Area community at large achance to gain a greater understanding of these events and to participate in an open discussion on their significance for both Americans and the people of the Middle East. During the first hour of this two-hour event, four scholars with expertise in the Middle East will present short analyses of the historical and political dimensions of this conflict, focusing on the following themes: 1. The role US foreign policy has played in enabling and authorizing the Israeli bombardment; 2. The origins and historical development of Hezbollah, and the role of this movement within Lebanese social and political arenas; 3. The shifting political alignments within Israel, and their relation to the current war on Lebanon and to Israel?s role in the region more broadly; 4. The impact of Israeli military actions in Gaza and the West Bank on the lives of Palestinians and the political landscape of the Palestinian society. The second hour of the teach-in will be reserved for audience questions and comments. Confirmed speakers are UC Berkeley Professors Judith Butler (Rhetoric and Comparative Literature), Beshara Doumani (History), Charles Hirschkind (Anthropology), Saba Mahmood (Anthropology), as well as Zeina Zaatari, Program Officer for the Middle East and North Africa, The Global Fund for Women The teach-in took place in 145 Dwinelle on September 7th.